What To Expect from Trump's Blitzkrieg on Public Health: Part Two
Pestilence, Fraud, and Decay
This is Part Two of a series on what to expect from the incoming Trump Administration. You can read Part One: America’s Descent into The Scam Economy here.
The End of Food Safety & Pediatric Public Health
The central objective of the public health authorities that Trump is appointing to the federal government is to maximize corporate profit growth via the destruction of regulatory authority and rigorous privatization, regardless of the consequences. In the childish worldview of the libertarian economist, if a factory gets a bunch of children killed by contaminating the drinking water supply with toxic industrial waste, then the only acceptable recourse is for the general public to simply stop doing business with that company. In the minds of these creeps, dead children are a worthy sacrifice - something they’ve been proudly howling since early 2020 with COVID-19 and the need for “normalcy,” no matter the cost in human lives.
We already have listeria outbreaks and a potential H5N1 pandemic event on the horizon. Under a second Trump Administration, with dishonest hack Marty Makary as head of the FDA, expect further food contamination as agricultural companies and processed food manufacturers are further emboldened to cut corners and gamble with the health of the general public for short-term, unsustainable profits. Here's a simple fact of politics: If you can't guarantee the safety of your food supply, your government has zero legitimacy. Worse yet, potential future HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has pledged to dedicated federal resources to further push "raw" milk onto public, of which H5N1 has already been detected in, and is getting children very sick.
Another critical point of failure that HHS Secretary RFK, Jr. will be targeting is pediatric vaccine mandates, (Reuters) an essential public health measure that has already saved the lives of countless American children - while RFK has gotten dozens killed. You can expect more serious pediatric disease outbreaks & needless child deaths, because pediatric hospitalizations are very profitable. When liberals like Ashish Jha, Michael Mina, and Liz Highleyman (PAI) endorse Marty Makary as head of the FDA, they are too either too incompetent or cowardly to mention Marty’s extensive vocal support of RFK Jr and his record of craven, exploitative dishonesty.
When RFK, Jr. was blaming random, unrelated pediatric deaths on the pediatric COVID-19 vaccine, Marty falsely proclaimed that Kennedy was simply pointing out the facts about a vaccine that Makary himself has personally profited from fearmongering about. Newborns and toddlers from 0-5 aren't born with "natural immunity" to COVID-19 and have one of the worst COVID-19 death rates for their age group. If RFK and his lackeys get their way, they will never have protection from COVID-19 in the form of a safe & effective vaccine - so expect more pediatric COVID-19 deaths, pediatric Long COVID, disrupted educations, and constantly sick children.
The Biden Administration's rush to an artificial "post-pandemic" fantasy failed to establish lasting infrastructure to prevent the countless, well documented harms of unmitigated COVID-19 (PAI) - a direct policy objective of anti-vax quacks. This is an unforgivable offense, especially when it comes to the tens of millions of Americans disabled by Biden's mass-infection approach to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sadly, those with Long COVID - including many who have lost their careers, finances, and homes as a result - won’t be getting much help from Trump’s handpicked crusaders, tasked with compromising the health of working Americans for profit.
The Burying of COVID-19
For the countless millions of Americans suffering from Long COVID, including an ever-growing number of children, the Trump Administration plans to staff federal public health agencies with outspoken LC denialists such as Marty Makary and Jay Bhattacharya, or narcissistic anti-vaccine cranks like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. - who masquerades as a crusader promising to "end the chronic illness epidemic" in America. Instead of a federal relief program for the countless victims of Biden's failed vax-only pandemic response, to keep them alive long enough for effective treatments and cures to be discovered and made widely available, the plan is to continue to abandon these millions into poverty and homelessness, then deploy militarized police to round these people up and disappear them into camps, where they will likely be coerced into accepting some form of what Canada calls "Medical Assistance in Dying," a program that the United Kingdom is working to adopt, (Twitter) and already has a bill in the New York state senate waiting for approval.
Over on Plague Island, the British media establishment is working overtime to "solve" their own Long COVID disability crisis by falsely proclaiming that exercise and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is the cure, based on shoddy, outright fraudulent work. Here is an extensive rebuttal from David Tuller, Senior Fellow in Public Health & Journalism for UC Berkeley. In reality, exercise/CBT has been shown to be either ineffective or actively harmful, whilst one of the most effective treatments so far has been... HIV antivirals, something that has never been used to treat "just the flu, bro.”
Pro-disease, anti-vax cranks such as Marty (FDA) and Jay (NIH) have profited for years by mischaracterizing SARS-CoV-2 as merely a harmless “cold” or “flu” virus that goes in one lung and out the other. As Long COVID disability continues to rise in the U.S. as a result of repeated COVID-19 infections, Jay and Marty will likely propagandize exercise & CBT (and maybe some of RFK Jr’s favorite supplements) as the cure to what ails this growing population of millions of sick Americans, instead of being mature enough to admit that they got SARS-CoV-2 dead wrong. It pays to be an incompetent and dishonest narcissist in America.
This will leave millions of Americans suffering from Long COVID to be exploited by online drug markets, (The Sick Times) which is the explicit goal of Trump’s anti public health goon squad: creating profit from unchecked pestilence.
The End of Medical Research in America
The National Institute of Health is one of the leading centers for lifesaving medical & scientific research around the world. This won't be the case for much longer, as Trump has chosen to appoint the utterly unqualified, arrogantly dishonest, and woefully incompetent "health economist" Jay Bhattacharya as head of the NIH, in a childish and pathetic display of rewarding social media loudmouths with prominent leadership roles. Roles that involve real-world responsibilities beyond ranting nonsensically in front of a camera, which is Jay's singular talent judging by his conduct across the past five years. As head of the NIH, Smilin' Jay would have executive authority to direct federal funding to medical research for the pet causes of his choice, lining the pockets of his personal favorite scam artists and social media anti-vax cranks. Meanwhile, scientists with real-world responsibility and experience making meaningful medical breakthroughs, would be left hanging out to dry, stifling scientific innovation in the American medical sphere.
Thankfully, the reputation of Stanford University would be at stake, and Smilin' Jay wouldn't be so dishonorably callous as to defraud the American taxpayer with such a craven, irresponsible scam, right? …right?!
Ah, wait. Smilin Jay's most loyal sycophant, rabid anti-vaxxer Vinay Prasad (PAI) of the University of California San Francisco, just publicly announced to anyone scrutinous enough to pay attention that this is NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya's entire plan to punish those who fail to swear fealty to the Great Barrington Declaration, brought to you by AIER and the Koch oil dynasty. From Prasad's Substack:
"Jay Bhattacharya will create a portfolio of funding to investigate the harms of lockdowns, school closures, vaccine mandates, and other unproven draconian COVID19 measures. This will create a lasting body of scholarship which will deter future public health tyrants. I myself have worked in this space, now having authored more than 25 COVID19 papers."
It's probably not wise to publicly declare the intent of you and your Twitter buddies to defraud the federal government, but if you're unfamiliar with Vinay Prasad, he has a long and extensive history of incredibly unwise behavior, destroying his professional reputation amongst medical professionals & scientists who have made real-world contributions to medical science instead of spewing endless bile on social media. Let’s break down what Prasad is really saying about Jay Bhattacharya’s agenda for the National Institute of Health:
Prasad Claim #1: “Jay Bhattacharya will create a portfolio of funding to investigate the harms of lockdowns, school closures, vaccine mandates, and other unproven draconian COVID19 measures.”
Translation: Jay Bhattacharya will direct federal taxpayer money to generate fraudulent propaganda to legitimize Bhattacharya’s unscientific, contradictory delusion that COVID-19 not only came from a lab, but that we should have been rapidly infecting hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans with it in Spring 2020. You don’t need a master’s degree to see how this would immediately fail. (PAI)
Prasad Claim #2: “This will create a lasting body of scholarship which will deter future public health tyrants.”
Translation: Bhattacharya plans to use the federal authority of the NIH to crush dissent from the overwhelming consensus of doctors, scientists, and public health experts who soundly rejected Jay’s proposal in the fall of 2020. There was a “debate,” and Jay overwhelmingly lost. So, he turned to social media conspiracy theorists and FOX News, parading himself as an oppressed & “censored” voice - a lie. (MSNBC) UCSF’s Prasad believes serial liars should be put in charge of federal agencies, as long as they agree with him.
Prasad Claim #3: “I myself have worked in this space, now having authored more than 25 COVID19 papers.”
Translation: Vinay Prasad frequently publishes nonsensical opinion-editorials masquerading as scientific papers - and constantly endorses individual scientific papers with faulty methodology, including a "gold-standard" Cochrane review of PPE (PAI) that conflated airborne & droplet transmission of viruses. The authors, his fellow travelers in “evidence-based medicine,” not only denied the airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2, but also were personally advising the British government to let COVID-19 burn through the population in the Summer of 2020.
![Vinay Prasad tweet: "Vinay Prasad tweet: "Jay [Bhattacharya] should suspend grants to [Stanford Medicine] until you overturn the faculty censure of [Scott Atlas] whose crime was being correct. "](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb793c4a-d3a8-45c1-ad33-a644f60fb7c2_1438x900.png "Vinay Prasad tweet: \"Vinay Prasad tweet: \"Jay [Bhattacharya] should suspend grants to [Stanford Medicine] until you overturn the faculty censure of [Scott Atlas] whose crime was being correct. \"")
For years, Vinay Prasad has made blatant, undeniable errors and refused to admit them when reality invalidates his irrational, unscientific opinion that COVID-19, which has killed and disabled millions worldwide, is merely a “cold.” What Vinay Prasad is declaring is that federal tax dollars will be used to personally pay him and his “colleagues” in the anti-vaccine space to produce unscientific propaganda for the purpose of justifying drowning children with every new pathogen that washes upon American shores. Prasad claims to be a physician-scientist, but his blatant conflicts of interest, unprofessional misconduct rife with an endless, multi-year stream of personal insults and baseless accusations, and obsession with endorsing nearly every anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist’s deranged fantasy, have demoted him to a raving Lysenko embarrassment. This is who Jay Bhattacharya wants to give your tax dollars to instead of credible scientists.
Outside of putting a federal stamp of approval on Vinay Prasad's morally depraved rants, Jay Bhattacharya's agenda is to re-task the National Institute of Health from producing lifesaving research on how to prevent future COVID-19 death and disability, treat the millions of Americans already suffering from disability and other chronic health issues caused by SARS-CoV-2, and prepare for future pandemic threats - to instead produce taxpayer-funded unscientific propaganda under guidance from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. - an exploitative crank with the blood of dozens on his hands already, including his wife and countless children.
Depraved libertarian creep Javier Milei of Argentina plunged his nation into chaos with a “slash-and-burn” approach to government that has over half the country living in poverty after only a year in office. Milei is now destroying Argentina's capacity for scientific research (Nature), rejecting proposals if they show signs of "communism and other deviations" that contradict the government's slash-and-burn approach to their own economic sovereignty. Multiple Trump picks have spoken positively of Milei, and Bhattacharya has made it clear he will follow this same unscientific ideological agenda, using the authority of the state to enforce the fantastical delusions of his billionaire masters at AIER & “Brownstone.” If Congress were made aware of Trump's NIH pick openly broadcasting his intent to commit negligent fraud, funded by the American taxpayer, they might be more scrutinous of the rest of the scam artists looking to be a part of the next Administration.
Comically enough, Trump's "Department of Government Efficiency" advisors Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have already made proposals to abolish the National Institute of Health in its entirety, (Twitter) leaving America in a state of medical and scientific regression that hands the century to China and the rest of the BRICS Alliance. Admittedly, it would be darkly funny if Jay Bhattacharya was fired in the opening weeks of his second ever big-boy job with real-world responsibility, after getting countless Floridians killed in 2021 whilst working for Ron DeSantis.
Sadly, it seems having a depraved fetish for getting Americans killed is a job requirement for the incoming Trump Administration.
The End of Workplace Safety in America
For decades now, libertarians and conservatives have screeched that government should be "ran like a business," suggesting that public institutions which serve the civic trust - including the facilitation of economic activity - should instead be ran like privatized, for-profit ventures. This is the delusion that Trump, Elon, and Vivek believe counts as “government efficiency,” because their priority is using federal authority to convert public taxpayer dollars into privatized profits, preferably in exchange for utterly nothing.
All the more reason that Heather McDougall, a former Amazon executive in charge of health & safety, is a top Trump pick to lead OSHA, (Twitter) the federal workplace safety authority. At Amazon, Heather got countless workers injured by making a mockery of workplace safety, as well as getting many Amazon employees and their families killed as a result of a failure to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the warehouses and workplaces of one of the wealthiest companies in America. The Biden Administration refused to lift a finger to ensure one of the wealthiest corporations in America respected the rights and dignities of American workers, allowing the judiciary to legislate from the bench and grant abusive employers such as Amazon widespread immunity from getting workers killed and disabled by COVID-19.
As head of OSHA, it's not a stretch to predict that Heather will further empower companies to injure, cripple, and kill their employees in pursuit of unsustainable, short-term profits. In the long run, this will inevitably lead to a weaker economy and a weaker dollar as Americans shoulder the unsustainable burden of risking needless, preventable injury and death as a requirement of employment. If these workers manage to survive to retirement age, well... the fun has only just begun.
The End of the Social Contract in America
As we've written before, Mehmet Oz is a quack daytime television celebrity, currently being proposed as Trump's head of the CMS, with the explicit goal of privatizing Medicare & Medicaid, as well as veterans’ healthcare, for the profit of UnitedHealth, a company he owns over half a million dollars’ worth of stock in. (Twitter) Alongside Vivek, the goal is to also eliminate Social Security and raise the retirement age - and other government programs meant to give seniors some dignity when they age out of the employment market, all while the greatest increase in the homeless populations is the elderly. Privatized "Advantage" plans will fail to ensure these seniors receive the care that they need, whilst draining every last penny out of their savings and trapping them in lifelong debt. Many will end up taking their own lives as their essential medication & treatment becomes completely unaffordable. This is considered "government efficiency" and sound financial thinking to mainstream American economists. This is what a lifetime of hard work will get you in America: being driven to an undignified death by your own hands.
Another explicitly stated goal has been massive cuts to welfare programs such as food stamps (SNAP/EBT) and housing benefits, under the fraudulent claim of tackling fraud, if one bothers to entertain Ramaswamy's childish rambling long enough. What the goldfish-brained thinking of the American libertarian fails to comprehend is that some time ago, America went down the path of becoming a consumerist economy. When you run decades of extraction focused on emptying every last penny out of Americans' wallets, leaving the overwhelming majority of working America in a constant state of financial instability, they no longer have money to spend on, you guessed it, consuming. Nearly a quarter of renters in America spend 100% of their income keeping a roof over their head. Credit card, medical, and student loan debt have spiraled out of control. Nearly half of the American homeless are working. The majority of working Americans are just a few bad weeks from joining them. None of this is sustainable.
Drowning in The Scam Economy
When Trump, Vivek, and Elon propose eradicating entire federal agencies such as the National Institute of Health and Department of Education, realize that we're talking about the same childish, unserious brats that insisted America needs a "Space Force," to... militarize space, an utterly childish and frankly suicidal fantasy.
Remember in Part One, when we talked about how private defense contractors have spent decades scamming the American taxpayer, and the federal government has been happy to throw away trillions of your dollars into a bottomless pit of corporate profits? Trump and his ilk have made it clear that they have zero interest in cutting “waste” from the world’s largest defense budget, nearing a trillion dollars a year, even as they face the largest recruiting crisis in the United States military’s history. This is Trump’s vision for the entire federal government - destroying the economy, throwing millions more into poverty and deaths of despair, and taking your tax dollars, used for public services that keep Americans alive, to dump into the hands of private interests.
A Eulogy for American Public Health
All of these factors contribute to a future of pestilence & decay as public health is sacrificed for The Scam Economy. We now have a nation much more unprepared for future pandemic threats, which may include H5N1 - and certainly includes other viruses that will emerge as a side-effect of climate collapse, of which the denial of seems to be a requirement for joining the incoming Trump Administration. Former Surgeon General under the first Trump administration, Jerome Adams, correctly pointed out (Twitter) that "Republicans must understand they're gonna own any and all preventable outbreaks / harm moving forward.” Cranks like Bhattacharya and Makary will do what they do best if they’re left in charge when another pandemic emerges: lie, deflect, and blame others for their own failures, no matter how many Americans are forced to pay the ultimate price for their irresponsibility.
The Democrats' blind embrace of population-wide COVID-19 infections, forcing a false "post-pandemic" fantasy down the throats of the countless millions of Americans who put their faith in the Biden Administration to protect them, contributed a devastating electoral defeat in 2024. (PAI) You simply cannot strip away pandemic relief whilst dumping the burden of repeated COVID-19 infections upon Americans & their families, abandoning them to be bled dry by the same wealthy interests that will be making a lot of money from Trump’s war on public health.
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Pride cometh before the fall. The anti-vaccine movement may be celebrating now, but they lack the foresight to realize the obscene gamble they've just made with the nation's future. If another pandemic threat emerges under this next Trump Administration, with pestilence sycophants like RFK Jr, Marty Makary, Jay Bhattacharya, and other anti-vax cranks leading a zealous death march into embracing a new & unknown pathogen, then you should expect mass graves, crippled hospitals, and healthcare workers committing suicide from coast to coast - making the early months of COVID-19 in New York City look like a casual picnic. The economy grinds to a halt, essential services such as education cease to function, and uncoordinated chaos sends the nation past a breaking point after COVID-19 already ripped serious holes in the societal fabric of America that were never mended.
In summary, you can expect more pediatric hospitalizations & deaths, a sicker society, a declining life expectancy - and a nation exploding into poverty, with all that entails, so those who already have everything can live out fantasies of being “superior” men terrorizing & humiliating a nation of their “serfs,” in a revival of the Dark Ages in which civic democracy is discarded for a grim vision of suicidal techno-feudalism.
Mark Twain writes in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court about the brutality of the French Revolution and what came before:
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break?
Just something to keep at the front of your mind over these next few years.
