America Is Sliding Into the Abyss

No one wants to admit that we slip into the abyss.

Over the past six months, I have seen the harm that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Russell Vought and their various henchmen have made for American science, public health and health care. I joined colleagues to repel, and I tried to take the small victories that appeared in a legal case here or a return to a civil servant there. But following the recent budget bill, adopted by the Congress and the decisions of the Supreme Court prohibiting national injunctions and authorizing mass dismissals in federal agencies, I think we have passed the point of non-return.

It’s hard to say that. But the truth is often difficult.

I fear that we are now seeing the wholesale evisceration of all scientific agencies in the United States, as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. Add to that the evisation of each health care program for the poor, the disabled and the elderly. It will be done by budget cuts, by layoffs and attrition, while federal workers flee a government supervised by corrupt and compromise charlatans.

Some might think that the effects of this crisis will not reach them. They are wrong. Researchers who think, because they study non-controversial subjects, that they will be very good themselves: when there are few personnel to manage daily affairs at the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation, the company of the company of all Scientific research will slow down to a ramp. For private insurance, who do not see how Medicaid could affect them? Well, hospitals depend on the reimbursement of care thanks to these federal programs, and once these subsidies disappear, hospitals close or restrict services, which means that the care you need can be delayed or require you to go elsewhere to obtain it.

And in public health, God forbids us that we have another pandemic, because we close critical programs to monitor and respond to imminent threats like H5N1, while Bozos with health and social services and the advisory committee on immunization practices occupy a new chance to ordinary Americans and give the ordinary Americans a new chance. Thanks to the destructiveness of these anti-Vaxxers, we already have more measles than any time in the past 33 years. The crisis is already there.

To use the coarse military acronym, everything is fubar – pressed beyond all recognition.

In the short term, people will be injured, will fall sick and will die from all these decisions. In the long term, it will take decades to rebuild what we have now lost. Suffering will be extended between generations.

So what are we doing now?