The older you get, the more you realize that it’s not fun being right. In "Modelling a 'Great Barrington' Pandemic Response," we wrote:
"The obscene fantasy that the Trump Administration had the power or authority to force hundreds of millions of Americans to embrace a brand new virus which has rapidly been killing their fellow countrymen is totally absurd."
On the horizon of a potential H5N1 pandemic, Trump is already moving to seize that authority. If you're Donald Trump, or a Trump loyalist, you have to be mature enough to admit that mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was a significant contributing factor to Trump's election loss. Of course, humans often struggle with admitting their own failures and inevitably hunt for someone to blame.
Turning Failure into Consensus
Instead of acknowledging that the COVID-19 pandemic is a complex, long-term crisis that requires an expansive response - including preventative mitigations - the conservative media sphere has long been hunting for someone to blame, producing an endless stream of propaganda pinning the struggles of the pandemic on a wide variety of suspects, like dystopian searchlights leaping erratically at any signs of movement: "lockdowners," "Covidians," Fauci, the National Institute of Health (NIH), the Chinese, teachers' unions, TikTok nurses, mad doctors casually killing patients with ventilators, and many others deemed guilty with flimsy excuses for evidence. Tragically, the Biden Administration which took over in 2021 also attempted to One Weird Trick! the COVID-19 pandemic away and paid a heavy price (PAI) after dumping the burden of the disaster onto working Americans in the fall of 2021.
In his first week in office, Trump's second term has begun with an unprecedented assault on federal public health agencies, (David Gorski, SBM) including a total blackout on public communications - crippling essential public health functions such as the CDC'S Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report, and the NIH's study sessions, which are used to distribute federal funding for medical research. This is an absolute disaster in the making and will get Americans needlessly killed by crippling our medical infrastructure. This alone should be grounds for invoking the 25th Amendment and forcibly removing the Trump Administration from power. Foolishly thinking he's getting his revenge for losing the 2020 election on the Faucis of the nation, Trump is instead laying the foundations for whoever succeeds him in 2028 to lose in spectacular fashion. As the Biden-Harris Administration also had to find out the hard way, Americans don't like being sick all the time.
Unfortunately, it will be the children of America with the heaviest price to pay for these childish antics. This isn't without precedent, however. The Biden Administration wasted a lot of energy on getting American families on board with infecting tens of millions of unvaccinated American children with SARS-CoV-2 in schools, who would go on to infect their parents, killing hundreds of thousands.
When children's developing immune systems were negatively impacted by repeated bouts with COVID-19, (PAI) liberal "experts" like Benjamin Mazer insisted that parents turn a blind eye to their child's needless suffering, peddling absurd myths like "immunity debt," (PAI) which originated in anti-vaccine circles. For weeks now, Mazer has correctly pointed out of the depravity of Trump's nominee to for Secretary of Health & Human Services, anti-vax scam artist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whilst refusing to apologize for his own role in helping launder anti-vaccine myths into the mainstream discourse. It’s shameless and indefensible.
What Mazer won't admit is that what Trump & RFK Jr. are working towards now is merely the consequences of spreading nonsense about "immunity debt" and arguing that children don't need to be protected from COVID-19. So much of public health is about preventing disease outbreaks, which keeps people out of the hospital and needing medicine. This is a great deal of unrealized profit. By gutting federal funding for public health agencies, and crippling their operations, Trump is opening up new revenue streams from people who will need medications, be hospitalized, and require long-term treatments & care as a result - generating returns on investment for his rich buddies like America's Quack Mehmet Oz, Trump's pick to lead the CMS, who is looking to privatize Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
This is supply manufacturing its own demand out of human suffering.

Who else wins big? Scam artists and snake-oil salesmen, pushing fraudulent treatments and exploitative garbage, will have a greater number of sick to take advantage of. In fact, this will only encourage more people to waste their lives trying to profit from ripping off their fellow citizen. If your goal was to make society worse, and make America a weaker, largely irrelevant nation with stifled potential, then the Maoist Third-Worldist Party Chairman Trump is off to a great start. America's new model for public health will be plugging unvaccinated children full of viruses, and preventative medicine will be branded "covidian" heresy.
A New Era for Public Health
Welcome to the era of guerilla public health. Unfortunately, that age already began under the Biden Administration, who turned a blind eye as countless Americans wound up disabled by "mild" COVID-19. Committed to their "post-pandemic" fantasy in which they got to play hero, the Biden Administration drowned tens of millions of American children in repeated SARS-CoV-2 infections, opening a litany of new medical horrors on our youth. What the Trump Administration will do is merely take this bipartisan consensus that kids don't need protection from COVID-19 to its natural end, extending this myth to all diseases under the sun.
Mainstream media outlets & liberal "experts" mocked the construction of independent public health organizations such as the People's CDC, (Death Panel) the World Health Network, and mask blocs as Biden's CDC shrugged while millions of Americans were disabled by COVID-19, often losing their careers, homes, and in many cases, driven to suicide. Under Trump, it's clear that these independent organizations are needed now more than ever.
As the Los Angeles wildfires raged, the federal, state, and local governments elected to fearmonger about “looters” & the homeless, while Mask Bloc L.A. distributed COVID-19 resources that have also been essential in keeping their communities safe from inhaling toxic wildfire smoke - something that University of California San Francisco professor Vinay Prasad has pathetically screeched is a "mental illness" (PAI) - and yet, we aren't seeing apologies from liberal pundits such as Emma Green, who smugly mocked anyone who challenged Biden’s death march towards a “normalcy” fantasy for the enjoyment of the petit-bourgeois.
In truth, this is the natural end of American "free market" economics. The government you pay taxes to abandons you in a disaster, declaring that you're only entitled to the survival you can afford. Working Americans are forced to pool what meager wages they have on purchasing their survival from wealthy corporations, as more and more of them drop into the abyss every day.
America's future, as it stands, looks much more like a grim feudalism akin to the Dark Ages than some sort of enlightened liberal democracy that the 2008 Obama campaign promised to usher in.
As we enter into the public health nightmare of a second Trump Administration, the Pandemic Accountability Index humbly asks for your support, whether that be in the form of an annual subscription or a one-time donation via Paypal. Most importantly, share the Pandemic Accountability Index with your friends, family, and local officials.