The American scientific community is in a difficult place. I started my first job in an academic research laboratory (funded by the Energy Research and Development Administration and the National Science Foundation) in 1975, which somehow was fifty years ago when I was the youngest person in the laboratory instead of the oldest. I have seen some of the best and some of the worst of what that world has to offer, for those who do science and those who benefit from scientific research.
The current situation is unlike anything anyone has ever seen in a living memory that goes back to the early-1950s, when the National Science Foundation was established according to the far-seeing vision of Vannevar Bush. The National Institute of Health became the National Institutes of Health following his blueprint to spread scientific expertise among academic institutions, medical schools, and independent research institutions such as the Marine Biological Laboratory, Scripps Research, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. The outcomes have been astonishing. Since 1950 approximately 280 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, Physics, and Physiology or Medicine have been awarded to American scientists or scientists who worked in American institutions. [1] A Nobel Prize is not proof of the importance of the underlying science (e.g., Lobotomy, 1949) but it is a good bet.
We have discussed the importance of basic and clinical research several times over the past three years. That will not be repeated here. American science writ large had a good run for seventy-five years, albeit with some ups and downs. The question now, one that I never expected to address, is whether that run is over. My focus is necessarily on biomedical science, which has seen billions of dollars in peer-reviewed research projects cancelled for political reasons. The current attack, there is no other accurate description, on the National Science Foundation will devastate American physical sciences (physics, chemistry, earth and planetary sciences, astronomy) and non-medical biological sciences such as botany, ecology, and evolutionary biology. “Reorganization” of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, which includes the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center) and the Environmental Protection Agency will be devastating to earth and planetary sciences and industrial toxicology as human impacts on the ecosphere continue unabated (and unseen – probably the point – if dedicated scientists and their coworkers are not “on the job,” as is often said of another group of essential public servants).
Running accounts of current developments can be found in Nature and at STAT News, although much of this material is paywalled. Here we will concentrate on one object lesson, the recent announcement by the current Secretary of Health and Human that cancelled mRNA vaccines. Much of the following is based on What do mRNA vaccines, Synthroid, and pharmaceuticals have in common (according to MAHA)?, which was published at Science-Based Medicine (SBM) on August 18, 2025.
But first a word about SBM from SBM itself:
Science-Based Medicine is dedicated to evaluating medical treatments and products of interest to the public in a scientific light and promoting the highest standards and traditions of science in health care. Online information about alternative medicine is overwhelmingly credulous and uncritical, and even mainstream media and some medical schools have bought into the hype and failed to ask the hard questions.
Good science is the best and only way to determine which treatments and products are truly safe and effective. That idea is already formalized in a movement known as evidence-based medicine (EBM). EBM is a vital and positive influence on the practice of medicine, but it has limitations and problems in practice: it often overemphasizes the value of evidence from clinical trials alone, with some unintended consequences, such as taxpayer dollars spent on “more research” of questionable value. The idea of SBM is not to compete with EBM, but a call to enhance it with a broader view: to answer the question “what works?” we must give more importance to our cumulative scientific knowledge from all relevant disciplines. [2]
SBM’s authors are all medically trained and have spent years writing for the public about science and medicine, tirelessly advocating for high scientific standards in health care.
In my view, SBM should be a regular stop to find out what is going on in biomedical research and especially “Alternative Health” as defined by MAGA/MAHA. The authors at SBM are very good at describing what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his associates Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, and Vinay Prasad are up to. It seems that Dr. Prasad’s recent Loomerization was only temporary, and he is back at FDA, perhaps once again as the Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. SBM polemics are well founded and very sharp but sometimes cross a line. [3] But they also remind me more than a little of the scientists who taught me science as it should be done, both in the laboratory and the library and as a vocation: Your work is to be taken very seriously, but yourself not so much.
Getting back to mRNA vaccines, here is what RFKJr said in his announcement on X, formerly known as Twitter.
We reviewed the science, listened to the experts, and acted. BARDA (Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, the biomedical DARPA) is terminating twenty-two (22) mRNA vaccine development investments because the data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu. We’re shifting that funding toward safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate.
Most of these shots are for flu or COVID, but as the pandemic showed us mRNA vaccines don’t perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract.
Dr. David Gorski of SBM begs to differ, as does Dr. Paul Offit of the University of Pennsylvania:
One wonders which “experts” RFK Jr. listened to, given that the reaction to this decision among real vaccine experts has been uniformly negative. The reasons are obvious. First, as Dr. Offit discussed, RFK Jr. is very wrong (when he says the mRNA vaccines basically did not work).
Wrong. The vaccines performed quite creditably against COVID-19. One wonders what he means by “do not perform well.” Remember, the primary function of a vaccine against a disease like COVID is not necessarily to completely (emphasis in original) prevent infection (although it’s fantastic when a vaccine can accomplish that). It’s to prevent serious infections that land people in the hospital, infections that necessitate mechanical ventilation in an ICU, infections that kill. We know from a number of studies (e.g., a CDC study in 2022) that the vaccines were highly effective in decreasing ICU admissions requiring mechanical ventilation. Even a study by someone whom we might call a COVID contrarian, Dr. John Ioannidis, that was recently published found that the vaccines saved more than 2.5 million lives.
This requires some unpacking. RFKJr’s antivax default position is a given. This is what he does and no amount of biomedical and clinical evidence that vaccines work will convince him, despite his halfhearted declarations to the contrary . But for Dr. Gorski to write that the mRNA vaccines performed “quite creditably” against COVID-19 is also a stretch. This section can only be described as revisionist in a very real sense:
It is quite true that the “the primary function of a vaccine against a disease like COVID is not necessarily to completely prevent infection (although it’s fantastic when a vaccine can accomplish that). It’s to prevent serious infections that land people in the hospital, infections that necessitate mechanical ventilation in an ICU, infections that kill.”
Yes. Although influenza viruses are different from coronaviruses such as SARS-CoV-2, this is the common understanding of annual flu vaccines. They do not necessarily prevent the disease or its transmission, but they can prevent the worst outcomes, especially in those most vulnerable to influenza, e.g., the old or unhealthy. The COVID-19 vaccines were not “sold” this way. This statement from SBM is also another way of admitting that it has been known for seventy years or more that vaccines against coronaviruses do not elicit long-term immunity in vertebrates and therefore were never likely to work as they were advertised against COVID-19.
That this was found to be true in chickens (the lethal Infectious Bronchitis Virus, IBV) is irrelevant. The pathobiology of SARS, MERS, and SARS-CoV-2 is similar in humans, too. [4] Politicians and the medical establishment, non-profit and corporate, went all-in on COVID-19 vaccines, especially those based on the “revolutionary” mRNA platform as soon as they became available. They saved lives, but they did not work as people have come to expect of diseases for devastating illnesses such as smallpox and polio, and previously common but generally less dangerous (in the Global North) diseases such as chickenpox and measles. That vaccines (e.g., Gardasil) against human papilloma virus (HPV, the primary cause of cervical cancer) are likely to be caught up in this nonsense is a tragedy of the first magnitude. The failure of COVID-19 vaccines to prevent disease and its transmission is a key to our current situation.
Moreover, it will never be known how many lives would have been saved if instead of “going for the win” using this new, and very lucrative for Big Pharma, technology, the worldwide biomedical community had truly tried to stop COVID-19 in its tracks, by immediately recognizing that this lethal virus is airborne and implementing effective mask mandates, contact tracing, quarantine, and improved ventilation and air handling in the public, built environment. Subsequent development of a transnational “warp speed” effort to identify anti-viral drugs against SARS-CoV-2 should have been the next step. The precedents were there. HIV is a completely different virus, but after 44 years there is still no vaccine. For the past thirty years antivirals have rendered HIV a manageable chronic condition for all but a few HIV/AIDS patients with access to the drug cocktail. That these drugs are not readily available the world over is another matter altogether.
It is most important that we also remember that it was not only the antivaxxers who got it wrong about COVID-19. While I was working on this post earlier this month my email produced an useful gloss on this, with a link to The Sentinel Intelligence (Jessica Wildfire):
It wasn’t just the anti-vaxxers. Plenty of mainstream “journalists” will lay the blame solely on the shoulders of RFK Jr. and his band of minions. That’s half the story. A full understanding requires nuance. As some of us know, a lot of public health officials dropped the ball big time. It’s a story worth retelling, since 90 percent of the public still doesn’t know. First off, the previous CDC did mislead the public about vaccines
For example, from this paper in The Lancet – Infectious Diseases:
Vaccine effectiveness studies have conclusively demonstrated the benefit of COVID-19 vaccines in reducing individual symptomatic and severe disease, resulting in reduced hospitalisations and intensive care unit admissions. However, the impact of vaccination on transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 needs to be elucidated. A prospective cohort study in the…regarding community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 among unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals…showed that the impact of vaccination on community transmission of circulating variants of SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be not significantly different from the impact among unvaccinated people. The scientific rationale for mandatory vaccination in the USA relies on the premise that vaccination prevents transmission to others, resulting in a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”. Yet, the demonstration of COVID-19 breakthrough infections among fully vaccinated health-care workers (HCW) in Israel…requires a reassessment of compulsory vaccination policies leading to the job dismissal of unvaccinated HCW in the USA…A recent investigation by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of an outbreak of COVID-19 in a prison in Texas showed the equal presence of infectious virus in the nasopharynx of vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. Similarly, researchers in California observed no major differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals in terms of SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in the nasopharynx, even in those with proven asymptomatic infection. Thus, the current evidence suggests that current mandatory vaccination policies might need to be reconsidered, and that vaccination status should not replace mitigation practices such as mask wearing, physical distancing, and contact-tracing investigations, even within highly vaccinated populations.
This is old news, but it seems to have been largely forgotten, and:
The CDC would abandon any attempt to protect the public during the winter of 2021-2022, caving to corporate pressure to ease quarantine and testing guidelines. Anthony Fauci didn’t even try to hide the real reason for the decision. It had nothing to do with science or medicine. Instead, he said, “We want to get people back to the jobs,” even if they were unwell.
The list is long and there is much more at the link, including the observation (once again) that public health got privatized (more than it had been) and Democrats also tolerated misinformation, intentionally, during the previous Administration:
The story isn’t that RFK Jr. canceled effective (but not perfect; vaccines never are) mRNA vaccines for no reason. The story is that almost nobody cares he’s doing it (a stretch), because our politicians and media have engaged in a bipartisan effort to condition public apathy (and hopelessness).
The story is that mRNA Covid vaccines fell short of their original promises (because Big Medicine and Big Pharma did not follow the settled science of coronavirus pathology when confronted with the third lethal coronavirus in less than twenty years). Instead of admitting that and funding better vaccines and treatments, our leaders decided to double down on their own brand of misinformation. They chose to follow the advice of consultants who told them to “take the win.”
It ruined countless lives.
When we lose the rest of our vaccines, we’ll know why. Anti-vaxxers found the perfect opportunity in this massive failure of public health. They manipulated it for their benefit. They used the silence on Long Covid to blame vaccines. They rode a wave of public mistrust into power. If our leaders, our friends, our coworkers, and our neighbors had done a better job, this wouldn’t have ever happened. It’s not just on the anti-vaxxers. It’s on them (us), too.
And this is where we have entered what I fear is the doom loop of American science. On the one hand we have an Administration fixated on their fetish that is “gold-standard science.” These latter day berserkers are taking Thor’s hammer, a devastating weapon and their divine instrument, to American science because they can and because their view of science is that it must be amenable to an agenda that “effectuates agency priorities.” On the other hand, members of my tribe take the view that we are absolutely blameless in this course of events, forgetting our hubris as members of Barbara Ehrenreich’s self-regarding and oblivious Professional Managerial Class (PMC). [5] We have been wrong. We lost our way as scientists and public servants, especially during the pandemic. The consequences are serious. It is a very dark time for scientists, but a dim light illuminates a path forward. Perhaps.
Notes
[1] This list is not complete. Osamu Shimomura (1928-2018) shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 with Martin Chalfie of Columbia University and Roger Tsien of the University of California–San Diego. Dr. Shimomura (PhD, Nagoya University, 1960) was Japanese but he performed his research while a research associate in the laboratory of Professor Frank H. Johnson in the Department of Biology at Princeton University and during summers at the University of Washington Marine Laboratory in Friday Harbor, Washington, where I knew him from 1979 to 1985 as a quiet, hard-working scientist. When the prize was awarded he was at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. MBL was the pioneer biological research laboratory in the United States and is now a division of the University of Chicago. Bless their largesse.
[2] A congruent view of EBM was the subject of my first contribution here in a discussion of The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the crisis of credibility in clinical research. The key to understanding any product of EBM the is question, “Whose evidence and for what purpose?” This can be statins and the so-called “natural” thyroid hormone concoction described in the first part of the SBM article at the August 18th link, and everything in between.
[3] Referring to the economist Jay Bhattacharya MD-PhD, as a “useful idiot” is unnecessary when the case is plausible that he represents a libertarian reprise, although much less severe, of Trofim Lysenko’s destruction of genetics in the Soviet Union.
[4] We discussed this recently here from a different perspective.
[5] Also recently described at length by another term (symbolic capitalists) in We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite by Musa al-Gharbi (2024).
As always, you are an excellent diagnostician, KLG. And as an irony, my main doctor for years was a chiro/kinesiologist, yes, “alternative,” who was also an excellent diagnostician — and my recent blood/urine work here in the Chocolate City confirms that his system of treatment was good for me. Yet I’d venture that “alternative” isn’t always “alternative.” Sometimes, it’s snake oil.
There are two threads in this essay worth pulling out: The first is that RFKJr, during his campaign and even now, is sticking his finger into an open wound in U.S. life — the constant anxiety over health, diet, health insurance, and, relatedly, one’s retirement pension. I am not sure that “science” is endangered here, so much as that politicians want to manipulate the public without offering solutions.
As you write, “Politicians and the medical establishment, non-profit and corporate, went all-in on COVID-19 vaccines, especially those based on the “revolutionary” mRNA platform as soon as they became available.”
This is neoliberal decision-making in action. Creative destruction + a seeming innovation + wild profits + concentration of power = bad outcome.
And by creating a health disaster, the biz types and hospital-admin types are now blowing up hard science.
And second:
It is hard to understand why basic research in physics, chemistry, astronomy, and meteorology is now at stake. Yet here we are: It’s like the burning and looting of the churches in the Low Countries during the Reformation. Which still isn’t understood.
Oppressive and ambitious politicians have found, as mentioned, a constituency of panic for health. This isn’t brand new: We have already witnessed the destruction of constituencies with less heft and pull in the U S of A: agriculture, the US Post Office, the passenger railways, and the public schools. We love our kidz! Sign them up for high-school ROTC! Ketchup for lunch!
Now the acolytes of neoliberalism have found something else to loot. Meanwhile, the plan seems to be that any growth in the sciences will come from the fusion of private firms like Palantir with the military. War profiteering by visionary bean counters: What could possibly go wrong?
So the Internet tells me it was your Calvinist friends that took to arson over statues of Mary, but Lutherans had their own bout with statue busters led by the Rev. Karlstadt. Luther was in hiding from the ban, and Karlstadt undertook some church redecoration in Wittenberg to which Luther took exception. Karlstadt bounced around some after splitting with Luther, and ended up Reformed in Basel with Bullinger.
If only the destruction we’re witnessing had even some connection to a Reformation of sorts. At least there might be some positive things to come out of the chaos. But alas, this is just more American Know-Nothingism and Orwellian Ignorance is Strength. If we quite testing, there will be fewer cases. If we quite measuring the temperature, we won’t know it’s hot. Let’s get rid of the storm radars (“they just use them to steer storms anyway”) and let God sort ’em out.
These fools have no idea who they’re taking on. They’ve learned nothing and forgotten everything about Katrina, even as new disaster piles on new disaster.
I think that outside of NC the media has gone completely off the rails on Covid revisionism. The left media hardly acknowledges Covid ever happened, and the right media says it was all a big fraud, Covid was never serious and the vaccines caused more harm than good.
Personally, I don’t know what’s true here. I lack the expertise and have not put in enough effort to find out. But I’m confident that painting the epidemic in purely partisan terms is not a path to truth.
The next epidemic could be in one year or in two hundred years. If it’s next year, I think that we’re less ready now than we were in 2019.
I will never forget how the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” ended the day after Joe Biden finally got the war he and his handlers wished for in Ukraine. Pretty much never heard that term again, or anything about Covid at all, in the mainstream news after Russia invaded.
Some people joked about it at the time, they said “Putin cured Covid.”
“Let’s all do magnets.”
1. Yes.
2. The Doom Loop pre-dates Covid and 2016 Trump…those two were just napalm dropa on the extant dumpster fire.
Seeing the kids (and family’s, friends’ kids) in an above median elementary system, the problem is structural ….everything from K–12 education/pedagogy/mandates to the indentured servitude of postdocs.
All hail our PRC overlords, you deserve the future … the American Hare squandered an immense endowment and lead over the pas 40 years. IMO, post-1989 Fukayama triumphial arrogrance even permeated the EDU world.
Several years before the pandemic, a local university decided that it needed to cut many academic programs, including physics, because there just wasn’t enough money. At the same time, they gave the university president a massive raise, because it was “necessary to retain top talent”.
Glenn Diesen’s latest interview with Gen. Buzhinsky (https://youtu.be/W43N7YFPflg?t=1207) touches on the latter’s experience developing “interoperability” of American and Russian anti-ballistic missile systems. “We had different physics, different mathematics, and different assumptions about the shape of the earth.” The Russian analysis concluded that interception was possible. The American analysis concluded interception was not possible. Considering how things turned out, our scientific problems apparently go much deeper than mere policial mismanagement.
”Moreover, it will never be known how many lives would have been saved if instead of “going for the win” using this new, and very lucrative for Big Pharma, technology, the worldwide biomedical community had truly tried to stop COVID-19 in its tracks, by immediately recognizing that this lethal virus is airborne and implementing effective mask mandates, contact tracing, quarantine, and improved ventilation and air handling in the public, built environment.”
That was never going to happen. Right from the start it was about saving the 2019 economy and medical establishments around the world went along with it breaking trust with their populations. All those workers had to get back to work & the kids back to school and the justification was ‘herd immunity’ even though that was not possible with a Coronavirus. A real response would have been for societies to retrofit buildings to have clean air and change building codes so that new buildings would have fresh air constantly circulating. But that cost money and resources which businesses were loath to do so they ignored all that and had a great big game of Let’s Pretend and told people the Pandemic was over so get back to work. When medical establishments in different countries told people that wearing mask was dangerous, that was when people knew that they were living in Clown World. People like RFK jr are the blowback from all this. But at least the econmy did not suffer.
This is way off my topic of course but I believe medicine has always operated on the principle of triage and seeking the least bad approach to a crisis. So economic considerations in the response to Covid were not irrelevant and especially here in America where medicine itself operates on a kind of economic triage and the famous “wallet biopsy.” There have been recent allegations that in Canada the government is encouraging euthanasia in order, presumably, to save the government the trouble of keeping the chronically ill alive.
So the notion that the deniers are somehow guilty of negligent homicide flies in the face of the difficult choices that are constantly being made in the face of nature’s inevitability. Presumably these scolds have never heard of DNR orders.
Even China wasn’t able to hold out forever and eventually capitulated to the virus
And yet their pandemic outcomes put America’s to shame nonetheless.
So has there been a study of how many people died because they were falsely led to believe that the “vaccine” would prevent infection? Also has there been a definitive answer to the question of whether “science” actually created Covid–by accident presumably–in a lab in China?
And going larger there are the questions over whether science has put humanity itself in a doom loop via nuclear armageddon or AGW.
Clearly science can’t be divorced from politics even as scientists try to salve their consciences–Nobel with his prizes or the atom bomb creators with their Doomsday clock–after the fact. It has always been a tool for good but also for ill. As you say above, ethical compromises open the door for the sceptics. Complaining about the complainers doesn’t really address the problem IMO. Trump is proving to be very bad but he had help from many who came before.
On the subject of American science and doom loops, may I suggest THE ANT MILL: How theoretical high-energy physics descended into groupthink, tribalism, and mass-production of research by Jesper Grimstrup.
It’s about physics, not medicine and public health, but I thought it an interesting read.
Science has always had some degree of tribalism, petty bickering, deviation from the spirit of open pursuit of “truth”.
See the life of (ostracized, but eventually correct) Georg Cantor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor
But, holy cow, the last 30 years….things got dialed up to 11. Likely due to social media, stress of finding funding, culture wars, etc.
I see the foreword is by Peter Woit, who was the author of another book critical of how science, specially string theory, is conducted. One of my favorite titles – Not Even Wrong. Lee Smolin also has some good stuff out about the topic – The Trouble with Physics, also about string theory, was a very good read.
“Anthony Fauci didn’t even try to hide the real reason for the [Covid back to work] decision… he said, “We want to get people back to the jobs,” even if they were unwell.” I worked in public health for several years. At the the service level you will find many true public servants; as you go up the authority/bureaucratic hierarchy you will find increasing loyalty to the 1% worldview -“go back to work!” Many public health officials who were loyal to the mission of public heath exited the profession during Covid, turning the discipline over to those who automatically served the 1%.
Was ventilation tackled in any country, say Russia or China? I pose the question not to deflect but because we understandably see these questions in a US/EU centric way. Who got it right?
The parallel that always occurs to me is sanitation and water treatment. The identification of diseases like cholera led to a lot of infrastructure investment. I don’t think anyone suggested now or then to just live with such diseases.
That’s not a bad parallel that. Not bad at all. If our Victorian ancestors had been Neoliberal, then they would have never undertaken those sanitation and water engineering works and we’d be still waiting for a “market solution.”
From last year:
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/institutional-covid-denial-has-killed
Salient points, Rev and Acacia. No one can argue about that.
But right now I’m trying to remember the abbreviation Jessica Rose uses for adverse reactions [“unacceptablejessica”]. It might be the same one VAERS uses, but it would be even harder for me to remember that one. Just don’t remember it being “AR.”
It’s “AEs.” Not so tired on 9/1 that I couldn’t look it up.
In my opinion, KLG, you have diagnosed the real issue perfectly:
“It’s not just on the anti-vaxers. Its on them (us) to…and this is where I fear we have entered a doom loop of American science…forgetting our hubris as members of Barbara Ehrenreich’s self-regarding and oblivious Professional Managerial Class.”
We are dealing with hubris across the board. As Christopher Lasch often noted, our culture has lost any appreciation of limits and hence of accountability and responsibility.
To begin to break this kind of doom loop, now in the saddle, will take something much deeper than dramatic changes in economics, politics, or science–it may center around issues of what is not to be done–of somehow mobilizing our individual capacities for internal restraint as a check on our individual and collective hubris.
Our collective temptation to become like Gods seems to be accelerating.
Governments have traditionally asserted the power to regulate the practice of engineering and medicine. The rationale is based on protecting the public interest. AFAIK, no one needs a license to conduct science. When scientists venture into the realm of public policy that’s where things can get dicey.
I suppose bio-medicine is an interesting case as I assume many licensed practitioners are also working in science. I wonder how they view their licensure requirements?
Eisenhower’s farewell address is often quoted as regards the MIC, but his concerns about government and scientific research are ignored.
The bolded passage is depressingly accurate. There’s never a Long Covid analysis these days that isn’t jumped on by the anti-vaxers, claiming that it’s actually the result of vaccines. Because nobody wants to front up to Long Covid or admit it exists, it’s always ignored, which plays perfectly into their whole cover-up fantasy.
The revisionist history around the Covid vaccines is also infuriating. The goal was never to prevent transmission! It was always to mitigate serious illness, everyone knows that’s the most important thing! Uh, no. We listened to you. We remember the messaging. When you tell us that we didn’t hear any of that stuff that we know we heard, and do your best to rewrite history to make it so, it’s an easy step for people to conclude that you’re lying to them about other things as well.
Where are the nasal vaccines?
This piece spends a lot of time trying to illuminate matters that are already well known to anyone who has been following the COVID pandemic. While much of the PMC still tries reflexively to demonize the political right (including JFK), I think the people who deserve the most blame and who should be displaying the most humility now are the political class in the US and the Public Health community, all of whom not only did a horrible job in this particular instance, but also destroyed the credibility of their organizations for no particular reason which will doubtless do damage for generations.
The People In Charge as I will call them (PIC) totally sold out the American population during COVID in their unseeming haste to (a) shower their friends in the medical industry with money and (b) get the US population back to work despite the existence of a deadly pandemic. None of this came from the political right, and none of it was motivated by anything outside their own group. Tactics included advocating easy and cheap preventive measures (“keep six feet apart and wash your hands”), forcibly and persistently denying that the deadly virus was airborne (discrediting genuine protective measures like N95 masks and indoor air filters), and promulgating the fiction that a COVID vaccine would keep you from being infected and would keep it from spreading within the population (recall Joe Biden himself made this point over and over in public speeches). This last point set things up nicely for declaring “mission accomplished” as soon as vaccines were released to the public; it quickly became obvious that the progress of the pandemic wasn’t affected much by the existence of vaccines, making vaccines easy prey for the anti-vaxxers. Any other COVID countermeasures were quickly dropped by the PIC once the vaccines were available.
Almost everything the PIC did (and is still doing) constitutes a massive and horrific own-goal, which they are now feebly trying to blame on Trump and his band of idiots, but I think anyone in the US with half a brain will see that Trump was not the real problem here. (In fact, recall that it was Trump who commenced the Operation Warp Speed program which put a ton of money and people behind the initial vaccine development, and who also set up a program to distribute money to the population so that they could pay their rent and buy food without having to go to work. Biden attenuated or terminated most of these efforts once he took office, weirdly.)
The result was the US had the worst performance in the world with regard to the COVID pandemic, despite spending tons of money on it.
Rather than worrying about JFK, who is just doing what he does as part of the democratically elected (!) Trump administration, I think we would be better served by more and better post-mortems about how COVID was handled and how many people died as a result of PIC malpractice. The urgent need is for US institutions to regain their credibility by the time we are hit by future pandemics.
Yep.
But you meant RFK.
It’s no easy task, but a “scientific” analysis of the doom, or of the vaccine program should try to go over as many related phenomena as possible. I think in regard to the jabs adverse events should be included.