Trump is talking about putting anti-vaxxers in charge of US health policy. Robert Kennedy, for instance, believes vaccines need even more testing than we currently have, a level of testing that would would make annual vaccines (like those for flu and covid) impossible. Vaccine mandates are actually issued by the states, not the federal government, but states tend to follow the lead of the CDC. Will the CDC get out of the vaccine-recommending business? Will insurance stop paying for vaccines?
I suppose we’ll know more as more appointments are announced.
Vaccines stop people from getting sick, and they save money for health insurance companies who have to pay when people get sick. If you don’t want to get a vaccine that’s your personal choice. The government shouldn’t force anyone to get a vaccine. I will continue to get them regardless of what the CDC recommends.
Having said that, smart people will take advantage of vaccines and the not-so-smart people will take their chances without them. If for some reason seasonal vaccines no longer become available that would be a shame, but humans have survived a long time without them, and we can always do that again if we need to.
To more directly answer your question, I expect the CDC will stop recommending people get vaccinated, or make it so that vaccines become rare and expensive.
I think it is completely pointless for any of us to ask any questions about our collective futures. What will happen will be Calvinball. A smidgen of it might by accident be good news to some of us sometimes briefly. Most of it will be a burden, but not a disaster. Some of it will be a disaster to some of us.
But any attempt to apply historical precedent or even logical thought about what would benefit the oligarchs soon to own us all is doomed to failure. There are times the near future is dimly visible as a rough continuation of the recent past. The next 4 or 20 years will not be those times.
All we can do is wait and watch our history unfold. They say happiness is the congruence of expectation and reality. By avoiding having any expectations whatsoever I believe we each will maximize our opportunity to survive the trials ahead. Expecting the best leads only to disappointment and expecting the worst leads only to suffering twice: once in the contemplation of your prediction, then a second time when something else, unexpected but similarly bad, actually happens.
I spent much of my working career in exactly this state when my major corporate employer was bought by a robber baron and systematically dismembered over 15 years. Then a second time when the bit of corporate flotsam I was clinging to was bought by another entity who once again treated us as a playtoy, a la cat vs mouse. Any and every attempt to predict our collective futures as employees proved harmful to the psyche of those making predictions.
This lesson is also taught in hostage survival training. And that’s about what all Americans are about to become: hostages.
YMMV of course, but that’s how I’m handling at least the near future. Ask me again in a year and I’ll update my approach.
I suspect it’ll be even blander than that, on the whole. For the vast majority of people, it probably won’t be very different overall. I mean, NO Presidential administration has been all that different from another for reasons that pertained to Presidential actions. The possible exception was George W. Bush’s presidency with all the post 9/11 stuff that kicked in.
Most of what we hear is news media stories about the Presidents and how things are going, etc… I mean, how different was Trump’s first term for most of us, outside of the constant media and comedy attention he drew?
And lots of it is stuff that doesn’t really have much to do with the actions of sitting Presidents, like say… the recessions in Reagan’s, Bush I’s, and Obama’s terms.
That’s not to say that things may not change for some people. It will, and for the the considerably worse, I fear. But for most, it’ll be same-old, same-old.
The real threat as I see it, is less that Trump’s going to directly screw people through his actions, and more that he’s going to irreparably erode our democratic norms and allow the less scrupulous in the GOP to essentially rig the system to ensure GOP dominance for the foreseeable future. Kind of like Texas writ large, where the population largely breaks down fairly evenly overall, but through voter suppression, rampant gerrymandering and various other shenanigans, don’t allow the state’s Democratic party to mount anything approaching an effective challenge to their leadership, with the possible exception of whoever’s running against Ted Cruz, and most of that’s due to just how loathsome he is, not because the system isn’t rigged in his favor. (basically SO many people hate him that we nearly overwhelm the GOP finger on the scale)
In trump’s first term there were a number of relatively sane bureaucrats holding him back from the worst excesses. They are all gone. Plus the supreme court have written him something even better than a get out of jail pass (they’ve basically taken the jail square off the board, for past and future crimes).
Believe me, I’d love to be able to say “there’s only so crazy things could get” but to be honest that’s already been broken in my view with trump’s reelection following essentially a Nuremberg rally. I (sadly) don’t see much reason to take anything off the table.
Something to be borne in mind, though, is that much of vaccine research, and the underlying development technologies such as adenovirus and mRNA delivery systems, is funded by the federal government and performed in government labs or university-associated labs with federal funding. It is unclear how much of that will go away, or whether RFK, Jr. even has the wherewithal to read a budget plan and understand what to cut, but all of those developments and support is now in question. As the vast majority of Americans have lived their lives in an era where the specter of Poliomyelitis, yellow fever, cholera, tuberculosis, typhoid, diphtheria, tetanus, et cetera, the public has no memory and little clue what life was like in the pre-vaccine and pre-antibiotic era, and thus no appreciation for the boon that these offered. We may be finding out what life is like without effective antibiotics pretty soon, and with an anti-vaxxer in charge of the health system (for as long as that lasts…I don’t give him much of a run) we may find vaccines also more difficult to get or not advancing along with threats.
But the even bigger problem is if infectious disease surveillance is undermined because that is the one tool that epidemilogists have to ward off or at least prepare for an epidemic, and we saw with the COVID-19 pandemic how ill-prepared most state health departments are to cope with epidemic-level threats, even one as comparatively tame as SARS-CoV-2. I guess we’ll be seeing if H5N1 or another epidemic threat develops severe virulence and easy human-to-human transmission.
I’m sure I’m not the only one getting really tired about hearing that because no president has really gone off the rails thus far that this one will be okay, too. We are in a fundamentally different world now with a nakedly autocratic president that hits the 14 Elements of Fascism checklist like a piano prodigy running music scales. This is a convicted felon with bottomless grievence who has vowed to persecute all enemies, real and imagined, backed by a group that has openly advertised their intentions to create a totalitarian Christian theocracy, not the “same-old, same-old”, and trying to argue that this is just the normal pendulum swinging back and forth is grotesque normalizing of extreme deviance.
I expect getting or making vaccines will be made illegal, along with many or most actually effective medical procedures in favor of “alternative” aka fake medicine.
That puts innocent people in danger. Herd immunity is a thing, this was discussed over and over in regards to COVID.