Tag Archives: WHO

The Assault On Science

Facts exist whether you acknowledge them or not.

Among Trump’s blizzard of demented, anti-American Executive orders were several that attacked science and evidence. The declaration of an energy emergency was one–no such emergency exists. Asserting that the southern border is under invasion conveniently overlooked the fact that there are far fewer immigrants there than when he left office. The airy dismissal of climate change and the withdrawal from the Paris accords are part and parcel of a diseased mind that rejects irrefutable evidence of what is currently the single largest threat to human life on the planet.

Trump’s attacks on medical science were especially breathtaking, and enormously consequential.

As Talking Points Memo put it, the new administration has “turned off the spigot of funding for a huge amount of cancer research and various other health fields and diseases, and all signs point to a cutoff that will be thorough-going and draconian.”

This comes after a similar halt to the weekly MMWR report which CDC sends to hospitals and doctors every week with information on flu, COVID and other infectious diseases.

I think we’re at the point in this where you can’t yet categorically say that this is being done for RFK Jr.-adjacent anti-research nuttery, but basically all signs point in that direction. And there is at least a temporary and disruptive halt to how health research gets funded in this country.

The American Prospect reported on the assault on NIH.

All travel has been canceled, ruining many important conferences. All agency communications have been banned until further notice, blocking a highly anticipated report on the festering avian flu outbreak that has killed millions of birds, and could cause another pandemic if it mutates to enable human-to-human transmission. Worst of all, all study sections, which are required to disburse NIH’s $40 billion in grants—supporting some 300,000 working scientists at thousands of universities—are also halted indefinitely.

Before 1933, Germany was the clear world leader in academic research and achievement, winning far more Nobel Prizes than any other country. Hitler and the Nazis blew that up in a crusade against liberalism and “Jewish science,” driving most top researchers across Europe (like Albert Einstein) to Britain or the U.S., where many of them worked on the Manhattan Project. German science never recovered fully…

All agency communications have been banned until further notice, blocking a highly anticipated report on the festering avian flu outbreak that has killed millions of birds, and could cause another pandemic if it mutates to enable human-to-human transmission. Worst of all, all study sections, which are required to disburse NIH’s $40 billion in grants—supporting some 300,000 working scientists at thousands of universities—are also halted indefinitely.

As the Prospect concludes, Trump heads up a “rising tide of vengeful, crackbrained irrationalism” that is likely to end American scientific pre-eminence.

The Week reported on the Executive Order withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization.

The problem is there is no similar organization ready to take its place. Meanwhile, global health threats continue to proliferate thanks to mass travel, rising urban populations and human encroachment on wildlife habitats. Without WHO, we leave ourselves unprepared.

Why, you might ask, has Trump withdrawn us from an organization that might protect us from (or at least alert us to) the next pandemic? Evidently, because the organization’s acceptance of medical science on matters like abortion and gender care is “woke.” (That’s the trouble with science and reality…they do tend to be “woke.”)

Trump hasn’t simply disrupted ongoing medical research–he has also censored medical information. Federal health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes for Health, have all been ordered to pause all external communications, including health advisories and scientific reports.

So–American doctors and scientists not only won’t be pursuing research into diseases and public health, We the People won’t be informed about evidence they’ve previously uncovered. If we experience another pandemic, we will once again be told to ingest bleach or a horse medication–or perhaps, given the overwhelming influence of anti-science White Christian Nationalists–we may just be told to pray the disease away.

Trump’s cuts to foreign aid included numerous assaults on global heath. He’s stopped bird flu monitoring in 49 countries; halted efforts to eradicate polio; cut off support for vaccination of 90 million women and children; halted drug supplies keeping 20 million people living with HIV alive, and services for 6.5 million children affected by HIV in 23 countries.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been recognized as central to both America’s prosperity and its geopolitical influence. As one article put it, the social and strategic benefits of owning such an immensely successful research complex are immense.

The benefits to individuals of living in a humane and fact-based world are also immense.

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How Low Can We Go?

You have probably all seen this reported, and in the global scheme of things, it’s just one more (relatively minor) national embarrassment.

But still!

The United States government opposed a U.N. resolution recommending breastfeeding.

A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the hundreds of government delegates who gathered this spring in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly.

Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes.

Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations.

American officials sought to water down the resolution by removing language that called on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” and another passage that called on policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that many experts say can have deleterious effects on young children.

And it wasn’t just a pro-forma vote. U.S. diplomats “twisted arms” and threatened supporters of the resolution. Ecuador had planned to introduce the measure; according to reports,  American officials warned Ecuador’s representatives that if they refused to drop their sponsorship of the resolution, “Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid.”

The Ecuadorean government–understandably–caved.

Health advocates scrambled to find another sponsor for the resolution, but at least a dozen countries, most of them poor nations in Africa and Latin America, backed off, citing fears of retaliation, according to officials from Uruguay, Mexico and the United States.

Speaking of threats, some American delegates evidently went so far as to suggest that the United States might cut its contribution to the World Health Organization, which uses  America’s significant contribution to fund a variety of important global medical initiatives.

In the end, the Americans’ efforts were mostly unsuccessful. It was the Russians who ultimately stepped in to introduce the measure — and the Americans did not threaten them.

It wasn’t just breastfeeding. The thuggery was extensive.

The confrontation was the latest example of the Trump administration siding with corporate interests on numerous public health and environmental issues.

In talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Americans have been pushing for languagethat would limit the ability of Canada, Mexico and the United States to put warning labels on junk food and sugary beverages, according to a draft of the proposal reviewed by The New York Times.

During the same Geneva meeting where the breast-feeding resolution was debated, the United States succeeded in removing statements supporting soda taxes from a document that advises countries grappling with soaring rates of obesity.

The Americans also sought, unsuccessfully, to thwart a W.H.O. effortaimed at helping poor countries obtain access to lifesaving medicines. Washington, supporting the pharmaceutical industry, has long resisted calls to modify patent laws as a way of increasing drug availability in the developing world, but health advocates say the Trump administration has ratcheted up its opposition to such efforts.

Words fail.

We have an administration that separates desperate families that have come to us to escape violence and (often) certain death. We put their babies in cages. Now we discover that the American government–our government– bullies health professionals who are working to save lives, in order to protect the pocketbooks of its political donors.

Permit me to modify Joseph Welch’s immortal lines : “Until this moment, I think I never really gauged the Trump team’s cruelty or recklessness… Clearly, they have no sense of decency.”

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