Public Health, Democracy, and the Future
Greetings friends!
I figured I’d take my head out of the oven long enough to send the monthly newsletter. Some good news on the home front: my podcast, Birthzillas, is in its 7th episode and the University of Kansas has officially offered me a book contract for my dissertation (Birthzillas and Madwives).
In the politics, health, and law realm, things are looking a little less shiny. We’re 45 days into Elon Trump’s Presidency and, as the Atlantic reminds us, it took Hitler 53 days to dismantle democracy, so we’re going to check in on some key features of our democracy and see how they’re holding up.
US is Not a Full Democracy
Ralph Nader referred to Trump’s State of the Union as a “Declaration of War on the American people,” a sentiment echoed when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addressed the American people on our government’s tariff policy. Turns out, executive orders like making English the national language are not enough to save democracy, and it looks like competitive autocracy and democratic backsliding are the order of the day. On indices of global democracy the US ranks as a “flawed democracy,” and our score on the corruption index is the worst it’s been in over a decade. Democracy actually going worse than the authors of How Democracies Die predicted, which probably makes authors Levitsky and Ziblatt both happy to not sound alarmist and horrified to be right (y’all, me, and Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park).
While there remains hope in community organizing and judicial reaction, most members of the Democrat party have offered a pitifully lame mockery of resistance making it harder to convince people that resisting is worth trying (which is why we should make having a spine a prerequisite for elected office). But with people like Musk in play and Trump’s allegiance to Putin over the US, we’re in for an uphill climb that will make Sisyphus says “that’s harsh!”
Intelligence and Global Security
Part of our biggest fight going forward is going to be rebuilding our global security infrastructure, which will probably take decades. Not only did Donald Trump call Ukrainian President Zelensky a dictator (and then forget he did that), but he and Schill-billy Vance spewed propaganda at the Ukrainian leader shortly before Trump announced he had cut off funding for Ukraine and would strip the legal protection from 240,000 Ukrainians in the US. Russia invaded Ukraine, a sovereign nation, and stole at least 19,000 Ukrainian children, committed war crimes including creating torture centers, and continues to destroy their land and kill their people, but the American President is supporting Putin anyway.
Add this to Pete Hegseth, the perennial drunkard and sexual predator now overseeing the Department of Defense, standing down US cybersecurity programs geared towards Russia, and we have a decades-long global security crisis on our hands. If Russia gets even more of our national security information than they did with Trump’s still not-punished theft of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, that is disastrous for US intelligence.
Here's the deal: we can have as many satellites as we want, but good global security means having allies and assets who are willing to work with us. If Russia gets information on US intelligence gathering, this could compromise assets, informants, and allies in China, Russia, Korea, Iran, and other places Russia is welcome and we are not. While this will make it harder to predict threats against this nation, there is also a more fundamental problem: people are going to die. And they’re going to die because they chose to help us. They thought we were good, and they’re about to get killed for it because enough Americans were hateful, lazy, or stupid enough to let Trump anywhere near the Oval Office a second time. This is going to cripple our intelligence gathering and our ability to protect ourselves and our (shrinking list of) allies.
Public Health Disasters
Of course, the bright side is we might just kill ourselves off before any of these really bad problems come to fruition (so, fingers crossed?). With outbreaks of Tuberculosis in Kansas, Measles in Texas and New Jersey, and Dysentery in Oregon, we don’t even have time to worry about bird flu.
I know everything that’s old is new again, but Dysentery is one I hoped to leave in the past. A big part of Oregon’s issue is the rise in homelessness and a lack of public toilets. Clean water is a cornerstone of public health, but with the Supreme Court deciding that EPA can’t use the Clean Water Act to make sure the water is clean, we’re about to Make Dysentery Great Again. One bright light on the horizon was Biden’s infrastructure plan which required the removal of lead pipes, but Trump is looking to overturn that.
Did you know that measles was declared eradicated in the US in 2000? Then a bunch of homicidal maniacs went on an anti-vaxxer crusade. They used the completely discredited studies by Andrew Wakefield to support their claims. Who was Wakefield? He was a gastroenterologist not an immunologist who wanted to get a patent (and make money from) a different vaccine. So, he worked with a bunch of lawyers (and failed to disclose that he got paid by them), got twelve kids who had had the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and also had medical conditions, and wrote a study about how kids who had the vaccines had medical issues. At best it would be such lousy research, I’d fail a freshman for it.
A believer in all things nonsense, like Wakefield, Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK, jr., who would be useless if he weren’t so harmful, has already been responsible for measles deaths in Samoa. His type of pro-disease nonsense has caused an outbreak of measles in Texas where at least one child has died, to the point where even Brainworm Bob is now suggesting people get the vaccine.
To round out our fun with retro diseases section, there’s tuberculosis in Kansas. Kansas Public Health Officials are working diligently to contain and mitigate the spread of TB, and hopefully money and resources from the federal government will be available to help them.
I’m not saying God is sending a plague(s), but ever since we ignored the bird that chose Bernie Sanders, things have been giving serious Book of Revelations vibes.
Conclusion
Well, I guess I remember why this used to be a weekly newsletter. Big thanks to all who stuck with this (too) long one. I’m suspiciously optimistic today because my students, who have historically not cared about politics, are starting to ask real and good questions. Enough people are starting to see the results of bad policies and worse politics, that it might cause a groundswell change. Hopefully, Musk’s desperate need for attention will finally remind the world that billionaires aren’t special and don’t have anything to offer society and we should stop letting them run the government. It would be nice if we realized that before day 53, though.
