Quoted, as they say, for truth.
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.
Stranger