Dear Friends,                                                                                           killing people

The Trump regime delights in killing. They pride themselves on it. Listen to them, look at what they do, and always remember to take stock of the aftermath.

Now, think about healthcare. The point of all healthcare is to save life.

Medicaid: provision of care to low income people, often their only source of healthcare. The Republican budget bill signed into law by Trump will cut out Medicaid to over a million people (the precise numbers are easily available). Without Medicaid people will lose essential healthcare, they will suffer, they will lose capacity to work, they will die. Some of the vast number of issues here will be taken up in other posts.

Cuts to Medicaid will kill people.

USAID: USAID provided vital – life and death – aid to many of those pushed furthest to the limit of bare life. Preventing starvation, especially child starvation was one of USAID’s primary goals. Disease prevention was another. PEPFAR, begun under the George W. Bush Administration, focusing on HIV-AIDS prevention especially in Africa, was one of the most successful of all disease prevention programs. Estimates of lives saved are as high 35 million. Unfortunately, that measure of success shows what will happen now that PEPFAR has been halted. Millions will die. Trump’s flunkies, Rubio especially, have made vague statements, at least some of PEPFAR is being re-instated. There is no reason whatever to believe them. Right now, we have to assume that PEPFAR is gone.

And right now, the Trump administration has, or is in the process, of destroying large quantities of food supplies bought by USAID for famine relief in Africa. The food is right there, starving people depend on it. Gone. At the same time they are about to destroy a vast quantity of different kinds of contraceptives. These are vital to the health, and the lives, of millions of women in Africa. Gone.

The elimination of USAID is already killing people, it will kill millions more.

Health and Human Services: HHS oversees all federal agencies dedicated to, as the title says, the health of the people of the United States, and the services necessary to sustain their health and human well-being. The only governing principle of HHS is to the understanding, the development and the application of the best knowledge on human health and well-being. HHS functions through its commitment to scientific and medical research, and the application of that research. Are there serious disagreements at all levels of research and application? Of course there are? Do these disagreements sometimes take on a damaging “political” dimension? Yes. The strictly medical and scientific disagreements are necessary and valuable. The best way to deal with them is through Einstein’s imperative: make mistakes quickly. Political intervention in medical research and application? Keep the ideologues, the reactionaries, the conspiracy theorists out, and as far away as possible.

If the head of HHS is a stupid, ignorant and resentful man with no medical or scientific knowledge at all who is also a conspiracy theorist people will die, many people.

This is terrifying. We have so many real and unavoidable threats to our lives and well-being. We are struggling to control them, without much success. Now we are faced with the deliberate unleashing of diseases that had been eliminated. Yes, the human struggle against disease is always contradictory, never a complete “victory” over anything, because victory really isn’t the point. But which would you prefer: the effort, however flawed, towards knowledge, practical understanding, remedy || stupidity, ignorance, resentment all to show that medicine is a conspiracy?  

I am especially terrified about vaccines – see earlier posts – and the speed with which disease can recur in their absence. My brother, sister and I were protected by the Salk vaccine at the beginning. Would we have contracted polio without it? The chances are small. But the Salk vaccine was and is for everyone, and the lives it has saved make it another of the most successful medical programs of all time.

The current administration is endangering all aspects of HHS and its agencies. The attacks on research are another terrifying development.

HHS, at least in its upper administration, is an agency for killing people.

Love and solidarity,

            Bobby