The purge of several high level members of the Centers for Disease control last week sent shock waves through the political establishment which were dramatic even at a time when political shock waves seem to hit every few hours or so. The ouster of the new CDC director infectious disease expert Susan Monarez, who was just confirmed by 51 Republican Senators in July, for her unwillingness to sign off on dubious new COVID vaccine recommendations and the apparently pre-determined findings of the vaccine board that Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr has packed with his quack cronies, was unexpected. That it immediately triggered the resignations of five other top scientists at the CDC in protest made it all the more astounding. Kennedy promised to shake up America’s public health agencies and he has kept that promise.
Kennedy is the world’s most famous vaccine skeptic, having spent years wallowing in the rabbit hole of dark conspiracy theories about the alleged dangers of life-saving vaccines, among other things. A card-carrying practitioner of the woo-woo wellness movement, Kennedy was a known fanatic on this issue when he and Donald Trump struck their backroom deal during the campaign to deliver his followers in exchange for a role in the new administration. Since the woo and the wingnut factions of the growing anti-vaxx movement post COVID had merged, that represented a fairly good sized chunk of voters, something Trump needed since he’d lost credibility with that crowd when he bragged about Operation Warp Speed, the project to bring the COVID vaccines to market in record time.
We knew that among his first orders of business would be to do away with vaccines. They’ve not only withdrawn approval for the new COVID shots to be given to anyone but the elderly and those who are immunocompromised, they also cut research funding for the mRNA technology which shows tremendous promise for breakthroughs in cancer and other diseases. He has promised to provide the results of a new study, apparently thrown together in the last couple of months, that will reveal the cause of autism. Considering that he recently demanded the retraction of a Danish study that found no correlation between aluminum (used in vaccines for the last hundred years) and autism, it’s fair to suspect that he has miraculously found that he was right all along and childhood vaccines are the culprit.
At the heart of Kennedy’s ideology is a belief in eugenics, something he shares with the president who has often discussed his belief in his own “good German genes” and extolled the “racehorse theory.” Kennedy has expressed his belief in eugenics by suggesting recently that people with autism are nonfunctional members of society, echoing the 1920 essay Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life which claimed that those with disabilities and the mentally ill are nothing more than “empty human husks” who “are a terrible, heavy burden upon their relatives and society as a whole.” He and TV Dr. Mehmet Oz, the director of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, have taken to declaring that “being healthy is your patriotic duty” suggesting that if you get sick or develop a disability you are a traitor — and probably don’t deserve medical care.
So, none of this is as unprecedented as we might like to believe. It was really only after World War II that America had a consensus view on the value of science and technology research. If you saw the movie Oppenheimer you may remember the character of Vannevar Bush, played by Matthew Modine, one of the bosses overseeing the Manhattan Project. He was a key advisor to presidents Roosevelt and Truman during and after the war and wrote a seminal report called Science, the Endless Frontier which was the pivotal document that shaped the way the federal government supported and funded research in the post war world. His report set the idealistic agenda that drove American achievement in science and technology and the prosperity that followed from it.
Presidents from Roosevelt onward supported that agenda. Some like Kennedy and (surprisingly) Nixon pushed it very hard. But around the 1970s, advances like environmentalism and the birth control pill challenged the business world and certain religious factions which formed an unlikely alliance against that bipartisan consensus.
20 years ago science writer Chris Mooney published a book called The Republican War on Science that revealed how they worked to discredit climate change, stem cell research, the effects on humans of smoking and pollution, the benefits of alternative energy, evolution, educational standards among other things. Right around the time that Mooney’s book was being written in 2004 more than 12,000 scientists signed a statement called Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policy Making charging the Bush administration with widespread “manipulation of the process through which science enters into its decisions.” It declared that:
- There is a well established pattern of suppression and distortion of scientific findings by high-ranking Bush administration political appointees across numerous federal agencies. These actions have consequences for human health, public safety, and community well-being.
- There is strong documentation of a wide-ranging effort to manipulate the government’s scientific advisory system to prevent the appearance of advice that might run counter to the administration’s political agenda.
- There is evidence that the administration often imposes restrictions on what government scientists can say or write about “sensitive” topics.
None of that is to say that what’s happening now isn’t all of that on steroids but you can certainly see the resemblance between them and now. The main difference is that in Bobby Kennedy’s HHS it is no longer about ideology or even business interests. It’s in service of crank conspiracy theories, woo-woo wellness influencers and weird dystopian visions of supermen doing pull-ups to demonstrate their patriotism.
So it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that the person Kennedy has named to be the new Director of the CDC is not even a physician. He’s a man named Jim O’Neill whose claim to fame is as a former health speechwriter for the Bush administration and a close association with techlord Peter Thiel. Trump tried to make him FDA Chief in his first term but was thwarted when people found out that he is known for promoting the idea that the FDA should stop doing trials for safety and efficacy and instead allow drugs to be tested by the public, which he calls “yelp for drugs.”
American leadership in the fields of science and technology is coming to an end. It was a good run, bringing many important advances and tremendous prosperity to the United States and the world. But its demise didn’t start with kooky Donald Trump or crazy Bobby Kennedy Jr. They are just the natural consequence of a concerted effort undertaken long ago by a group of people who decided that supporting reason and rationality were not in their best interest. You have to wonder if any of them saw this coming.
Salon