We’re watching government accentuate the decline of a once pretty great country.
Take health, for example.
Measles and polio were problems in my childhood. Vaccines allowed us to eliminate measles by 2000.
After months of Robert F Kennedy heading Health and Human Services, amplifying his voice fostering doubt about vaccines, we have more measles cases than we’ve seen since the early 1990s. Misinformation fosters vaccine hesitancy and decreases coverage, facilitating the spread.
When the COVID-19 pandemic came out of nowhere and changed all our lives, initial response was hampered by the first Trump Administration having jettisoned the little department that used to look for such things. Trump denied the seriousness, blamed China, and recommended absurd or dangerous remedies.
We developed effective vaccines that used messenger RNA technology, telling one’s system to create a “spike” cell that’s harmless but triggers the immune system to fight COVID-19. This sped development and facilitate alterations to fight virus adaptations. Vaccines minimized urgent care visits and hospitalizations, reduced transmission, saved lives, and were generally quite safe. Trump called this “one of the greatest scientific accomplishments in history.”
It worked.
Recently the Government ceased funding further research projects and announced that those vaccines just didn’t work.
Usually such an announcement would follow expert staff reaching the conclusion based on facts, evidence, and science.
This announcement surprised everyone. It appeared absurd. It contradicted experience. But it was announced. Pathetic efforts to explain it followed.
That’s how upside-down this administration is. We are all Alices in Wonderland. But it’s not wonderful, in its impact on human health.
It’s also disastrous for our country’s future.
Climate craziness, which the rest of the world has united to mitigate, “is a hoax.” So we won’t deal with it, or develop viable alternative energy sources and products that are green. That means that when we eventually have to buy those, we’ll buy from China, or Norway.
The mRNA vaccines, the incredible drug innovations that muted the pandemic and were hailed by Donald Trump as “a medical miracle,” “don’t work. So we’ll stop work on those. That means that whatever the next pandemic arrives, or some enemy attacks using biological warfare, we’ll be buying vaccines from someone else – if possible.
Our Education Department kind of tried to stick to historical facts and scientific conclusions, which is inconvenient when you want to say slavery wasn’t so bad, there’s not much pollution and the universe started when the bible says it did, so we’ll abolish that department, and let folks teach whatever feels good to them, or whatever their god, mullah or preacher wants ‘em to teach.
That’ll hasten our already serious decline in science skills and learning.
What’s been helping us survive that decline is lots of foreigners, some not entirely white, want to study and live here. So we’ll scare the [excrement] out of folks seeking to visit this country, particularly if they talk funny or don’t kneel to Our Leader’s image.
That’ll help.
A country can be great lots of ways: culturally, as high-quality education, an uncensored Kennedy Center, an uncensored Smithsonian, and thriving public broadcasting helped us toward; scientifically, if you believe in science; economically – though we’re rapidly falling behind other nations; or militarily, having replaced experienced experts with a clownish defense secretary who is using insecure on-line rooms for classified conferences and bankrupting the department with unprecedented numbers of friends and family needing federal security.
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[The above column appeared Sunday, 24 August, 2025, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, and on the newspaper’s website ("From a Great Nation to a Great Scare" ) and the KRWG website (under Local Viewpoints). A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). That website also contains station show archives.]
[ Space didn’t permit further details. Kennedy canceled $500 million in 22 mRNA vaccine research contracts. Although his social media announcement claimed vaccine ineffectiveness, he provided no support (and there has been none) for his view. Further, HHS staff got no advance notice, no explanation, no communication plan, nor even a simple fact sheet to prepare staffmembers to respond to questions. Even if the decision were arguably correct, that’s extremely poor management.
Meanwhile, the moment I sent in the column to the newspaper, there was breaking news about further Kennedy idiocy. Kennedy has long held, without support, that the vaccines cause autism. He wants it that way. Recently he announced a huge project to identify the causes of autism. In particular, HHS would check with numerous available sources. That shocked the federal scientist who had been doing exactly that for years. She’s been tracking whether or not, and to what extent, workers’ exposure to chemicals can cause autism in the workers’ children. Kennedy canceled that and laid off the scientist. That interrupts a valid, ongoing scientific study to determine what he says he wants to determine. Either that’s idiotic, and a terrible waste, or it’s worse than idiotic, and was done to whitewash companies from any kind of responsibilities. At best, it says, “We’ll spend a lot of money to study causes of autism – if we can get the study to implicate vaccines.”
Like your doctor saying, I’ll do a test and proved that your condition is what I think it should be. Not, “this test will determine the facts, whatever they are.” But Kennedy is not your doctor. He’s everyone’s doctor. Or would be, if he were any kind of doctor, rather than a somewhat addled lawyer. At least then he’d have taken the Hippocratic Oath, and sworn to do no harm. ]