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As the American population ages, the burden of dementia care is increasing. While the GOP congress hopes to ease that burden by cutting Medicaid funding and letting those folks die*, RFK Jr is tackling the prevention side to make sure more Americans and their loved ones suffer from this awful condition: “ Robert F. Kennedy Jr., newly confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services, is famous for critiquing what many consider settled science   and promoting conspiracy theories. “He could soon make himself known for something new: becoming the first HHS secretary to torpedo Alzheimer’s research. “Kennedy and the Trump administration are turning the clock back on decades of Alzheimer’s research by eliminating diversity in clinical trials, slashing funding for cutting-edge projects, and   firing employees   who conduct some of the most rigorous research in the world. “At his January confirmation hearings   before the US Senate Finance Committee, Kennedy attacked the ...

•  Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has   paused a multimillion-dollar contract from the Biden administration to create a new COVID-19 vaccine; •  US health officials are reevaluating a $590 million contract for bird flu shots that the Biden administration awarded to Moderna; •  A meeting of a committee that advises the FDA on vaccine policy has been canceled, the second such disruption to a federal vaccine advisory panel since RFK Jr. became secretary of HSS; • [RFK Jr]  vowed to investigate the childhood vaccine schedule   that prevents measles, polio and other dangerous diseases.   “Nothing is going to be off limits.” Elsewhere, I read yesterday that NIAID, the infectious disease institute that Tony Fauci headed, is to be broken up into three institutes, each with its own director to be appointed by the Senate and to serve five-year terms. The politization of health research continues.  https://jabberwocking.com/rfk-jr-makes-his-public-debut-as-hhs-secret...

A former mentor once explained to me why America would be better off if scientists ran the country. While technocracy isn’t inherently anti-democratic—America could simply elect scientists and engineers—the notion smacks of elitism. Of course, this country was founded on the idea of elitism. Only property-owning White men could vote. The president was appointed by the electoral college, not elected by popular vote (and still is). State legislatures appointed US Senators.  Now that the Supreme Court—an elitist body by design—has declared money to be speech, the door is open wider than ever to anti-democratic plutocracy. The leading edge of plutocracy in the third decade of the 21 st  century is turning out to be Silicon Valley technocrats who believe that technical, market-based solutions should replace democratic processes. Since markets are more efficient than government in the allocation of resources, their reasoning goes, they should allocate political power as well. That’s...

    This appears to be a new and unfamiliar use of the word “efficiency”: “ The Department of Government Efficiency run by Elon Musk last week published an initial list of 1,125 contracts that it terminated in recent weeks across the federal government. Data published on DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” shows that more than one-third of the contract cancellations, 417 in all, are expected to yield no savings. “ That’s usually because the total value of the contracts has already been fully obligated, which means the government has a legal requirement to spend the funds for the goods or services it purchased and in many cases has already done so. “It’s like confiscating used ammunition after it’s been shot when there’s nothing left in it. It doesn’t accomplish any policy objective,” said Charles Tiefer, a retired University of Baltimore law professor and expert on government contracting law. “Their terminating so many contracts pointlessly obviously doesn’t accomplish anything for savi...

"Donald Trump plans a $200 million anti-immigrant ad campaign in the US and overseas. . . .Apparently we can't afford to fully fund medical research at CDC or NIH these days, but we can find a few dollars under the sofa cushions to thank President Trump for closing the border." We can’t afford Medicaid for America’s most vulnerable, but we can spend $200 million on a Trump campaign commercial?   https://jabberwocking.com/trump-digs-up-200-million-for-anti-immigrant-ad-campaign/#comments

“ Congress is considering proposals that could change Medicaid financing and eligibility. “Some of these proposed changes could cause millions of people to lose access to care under Medicaid. People without coverage often skip necessary care, leading to worse health outcomes. For people in poor health, the results can be dangerous. “Cuts will put a greater burden on emergency rooms and community health providers. “Each additional uninsured person results in $900 in uncompensated health care costs. Hospitals absorb most of these costs. Ultimately, this means fewer services, higher prices, and reduced investments in their local community. “Federal cuts to Medicaid funding could also have a ripple effect in many states that have “trigger laws” that automatically reduce Medicaid care and coverage if federal matching funds are cut.” Medicaid cuts hurt citizens in red states. In particular, the cuts that result in rural hospital closures will fall on rural voters who historically skew Republ...

This certainly isn’t pro-life: “ The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) is a federal data collection system, run out of CDC, “designed to identify groups of women and infants at high risk for health problems, to monitor changes in health status, and to measure progress towards goals in improving the health of mothers and infants,” in the words of the program’s website. It has run continuously since 1988 and covers everything for the particulars of newborn health and morbidity to issues like postpartum depression in mothers. I can report that the Trump CDC has shuttered the program as part of its general clampdown on medical research and public health information.” Shame. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/cdc-shutters-prams-program-on-maternal-and-infant-health

The weight of evidence—scientific and epidemiological—points to a zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2 with the epicenter at the Huanan wet market in Wuhan, China. Although the virus is endemic in bats, there’s little evidence for a direct jump of the virus from bats to humans in Wuhan. The most parsimonious hypothesis is that some other mammal intermediated the transmission. While several animals known to be at the wet market have been suspects, the raccoon dog (which is not related to raccoons) is at the top of the list. Recent review of the data supports this inference: “ Today, mounting evidence from more than a dozen studies point to a person, or people, catching the virus from a wild animal or animals at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China, the city at the epicentre of the outbreak. And the animal at the top of the list is the raccoon dog   ( Nyctereutes procyonoides ). “There is a large focus on raccoon dogs,” says Kristian Andersen, an evolutionary biologist at Scripps Rese...

  "In the facilities—the artificial ecosystems—that now house much of Earth’s terrestrial vertebrate biomass, constraints on virulence that prevail in natural ecosystems are not merely removed. Virulence is actually favored. In the words of Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, the viruses are “a response to the selection pressures that exist in a human creation: the modern poultry farm.”   “I already know people are going to look at that subheading and start screaming about gain of function and other fantasies. It's not about making a virus in a lab. It's about providing the perfect conditions for a virus to evolve into a pandemic.” So US poultry farms are functioning like the Wuhan wet market, although I guess the conspiracy theorists will blame Ft. Detrick. https://nautil.us/the-unnatural-history-of-bird-flu-1189930/?fbclid=IwY2xjawIkSBRleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHZp1IHazCDJeMy_qfzTOLiGbodC8_nWMKyehjaxdJYhbeDMhn6VPGVNk-Q_aem_w0G2fgsu0YijH_bnmtY9Lg   ...

For those who were duped into believing that DOGE is serious about defense budget cuts rather than centralizing control of spending and aligning spending with the political priorities of the Trump/Musk Administration, here’s Secretary of Defense Hesgeth: “ Hegseth said beginning immediately, the Pentagon will pull 8% — or roughly $50 billion — from nonlethal programs in the current budget and refocus that money on President Donald J. Trump's "America First" priorities for national defense.  "That's not a cut; it's refocusing and reinvesting existing funds into building the force that protects you, the American people," Hegseth said.” Read past the bafflegab and you see that there won’t be cuts. No surprise, since Congress wouldn’t approve a budget with defense cuts anyway—that’s just tooth fairy thinking. Budget cuts are for civilian programs. https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4072698/hegseth-addresses-strengthening-military-by-cu...

Wanna know why nobody wants to cut defense spending? It’s because defense dollars are spread all over the country. There’s a military installation in every state. Many companies have contracts with the DoD. So any discussion of cuts ends up with folks saying “don’t cut our piece, cut their piece.” No Congressman wants their piece of the pie taken away. If DOGE was serious about government efficiency, it would be attacking the DoD with the same alacrity that it is cutting NIH, NSF, USDA, CDC, FDA, NPS and NFS. As Willy Sutton famously said, that’s where the money is. The fact that they haven’t fired 30% of the troops, closed 50% of the military bases and cut the budget by 30% shows that this isn’t about spending tax money efficiently, it’s about finding the most politically expedient path to extending tax cuts for the top 1% and corporations. Full stop. https://installations.militaryonesource.mil/view-all

“Before President Donald Trump started mass layoffs of federal workers, he demonized them, arguing, despite evidence to the contrary, that most never went into the office.  “As he moved to cut foreign aid, he and Elon Musk alleged widespread waste and abuse, although they offered little evidence to back up their claims and may simply disagree with how the money was being spent. “With that in mind, consider what the Trump administration is now doing to Social Security, seeding the idea, which is not backed up by known facts, that millions of dead people are collecting payments. “Add in the departure of Michelle King, the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration after a run-in with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency over the agency’s recipient information, and it’s worth paying attention to what’s going on. “Trump promised throughout the presidential campaign that Social Security payments and Medicare coverage would not be cut.” Of course the Trump/...

I’ve been a big fan of airline travel and have flown hundreds of times on commercial flights for business and pleasure over the past five decades. Not anymore: “The Trump administration has begun firing several hundred Federal Aviation Administration employees, upending staff on a busy air travel weekend and just weeks after a January fatal mid-air collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.   “Probationary workers were targeted in late night emails Friday notifying them they had been fired, David Spero, president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union, said in a statement. “The impacted workers include personnel hired for FAA radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance, one air traffic controller told the Associated Press.” My guess is that this will delay takeoffs and landings at most airports, bollox up airline schedules and cost airline customers. Those would be the most benign consequences. “The firings hit the FAA when it faces a shortfall in co...

There’s no question that SARS-CoV-2 jumped from bats to humans. Whether that jump was direct or indirect and whether it occurred in a lab or in the Wuhan wet market is unknown. The Chinese government has been less than completely forthcoming about the epidemiology. There’s no question that bird flu can jump from birds to humans. Whether that jump is direct or indirect, tracking the virus and infections in livestock, pets and humans is paramount. The Trump/Musk Administration firings at the CDC and censorship of CDC publications is making our government less than completely forthcoming about the epidemiology. ““I think we know very little about what’s happening with the peridomestic animals,” Cardona added. “So, skunks, raccoons, rabbits, they’ve all been experimentally shown to get H5 influenza and be able to transmit it. In addition, we’ve seen many, many cases in foxes around the country. And so, we’ve seen it in bears. We’ve seen it in all kinds of species.”   “Cardona said that...

I grew up in the South. While there were no snake handlers in my town, there were fundamentalists in the area who practiced snake handling. I see no significant difference between those snake handlers in East Tennessee and folks in West Texas who refuse to vaccinate their kids for preventable diseases. Both are tempting God, which the Christian bible explicitly prohibits. However, unlike venomous snakes, measles virus is highly contagious.   “The ongoing measles outbreak in West Texas has doubled in size to 48 cases, mostly in children and teens, making it the state’s worst in nearly 30 years.   “State health officials said Friday in a news release that those who are infected are either unvaccinated or their vaccination status is unknown. Thirteen people have been hospitalized.   “The outbreak has spread from its epicenter in Gaines County, with single-digit cases in nearby Lynn, Terry and Yoakum counties. Officials in the area also expect the outbreak to contin...

“Right-to-work” is one of those marketing euphemisms like “pro-life,” which is designed to disguise the actual agenda. In the case of “right-to-work,” the actual agenda is to kill unions and give workers the “right” to work for low wages under oppressive conditions. Much to my surprise, Republicans—who have long been in the vanguard of “right-to-work”—joined Democrats in the New Hampshire legislature to kill a RtW bill that the GOP governor favored.  ““It is a failed concept of a bygone era pushed by an organization whose influence and relevance is rapidly disappearing,” [Republican Representative Stephen] Pearson said. “It is time for New Hampshire to look forward, solve actual problems the voters care about, and end this pointless attack on working families.” Mirabile dictu. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/02/14/metro/new-hampshire-right-to-work-bill-killed-afp-labor-union-trump/

  "Kennedy, an “unfathomable” nominee in the eyes of public health experts, has questioned the link between HIV and AIDS, tied gay and transgender identities to chemical exposure, pushed to remove fluoride from drinking water, suggested COVID-19 was genetically engineered to target certain races, claimed Black people may have different immune systems and suggested anti-depressants are more addictive than opioids and are linked to school shootings.   "But he’s perhaps best known for the misinformation** he’s spread about vaccines. He’s said they aren’t tested enough — something experts dispute — and has suggested vaccine trials that would be ethically dubious, potentially requiring children to go without protection against severe disease. He’s also falsely linked vaccines to autism. When given the chance to walk that claim back during his confirmation hearing, he refused.   "Now that he’s been confirmed, he’ll have multiple avenues to curtail vaccine access and uptake, in...

““Contrary to the hysteria, redirecting billions of allocated NIH spending away from administrative bloat means there will be more money and resources available for legitimate scientific research, not less,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said.” Here's how you know they’re lying. If they were telling the truth, there would be no net reduction to the NIH research budget. The cuts to F&A would be plowed back into funding more projects. Of course, that won’t happen. The reason for these cuts is to pay for tax cuts for the 1% and corporations. Watch what they do, not what they say. Prove me wrong.

Suddenly, Trump supporters are no longer fans of district judges: “For those of us who lived through the reigns of Judges Matthew Kacsmaryk and Reed O’Connor (so, like, we who were alive six months ago), this is a surprising turn of events.  The Kacsmaryks and O’Connors thwarted the Biden administration constantly, and on much hackier grounds than the bipartisan swath of judges are acting on now. The resulting epidemic of right-wing litigants challenging federal government actions in the random corners of Texas under the control of these friendly judges grew to such proportions that both congressional Democrats and the administrative bodies of the courts halfheartedly gestured in the direction of doing something to fix it.   “Republicans, though, were just fine with the blatant gaming of the court system. At worst, the amenable district judge would get overturned months down the line; they still got sand thrown in the Biden administration’s gears in the meantime.  ...

Apparently, there’s this weird, ahistorical conspiracy theory that the CIA is a leftist organization. Not only is there not an atom of evidence for this theory, there is overwhelming evidence of CIA involvement in destabilizing and overthrowing liberal and leftist governments in favor of right-wing dictatorships: Here’s a short list of CIA interventions in foreign governments:   • In 1953, the CIA orchestrated a coup against Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh; • In 1954, the CIA orchestrated of the democratically elected leader of Guatemala,  President Jacobo Árbenz;   • The CIA helped facilitate the assassination in 1961of the Congo’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba;   • The CIA funded and encouraged the 1963 coup against, and assassination of, the president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem;   • In 1970, the CIA met with Chilean military contacts in a direct effort to foment a coup to stop the social...

As John Kenneth Galbraith famously observed: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”   I suspect that the Must techbros who concocted the recent announcement of immediate cuts to NIH grants imagined that they were just smacking around the elites in blue states. Turns out, red states also take in huge amounts of federal research dollars that benefits their universities and economies. Here’s Josh Marshall over at TPM: “Yesterday I made the point that while research universities and academic medical centers may be coded-blue in many ways, they’re far from limited to Blue states. Indeed, overall they tend to be more crucial to regional economies in red states and districts than in blue ones. And sure enough, Alabama’s junior senator Katie Britt, who inherited the seat from one-time boss Dick Shelby, has chimed in to support my argument. She ran to the local paper...

When discussions turn to decarbonizing energy, the topics typically concern solar, wind, geothermal and tidal energy. But nuclear energy doesn’t generate CO2 during normal operation, either.     “Since Yikpotey had been born, few new reactors had been built on either side of the Atlantic. Competition was fierce for the few opportunities left.   “So Yikpotey looked east. He applied to Tsinghua University, which boasts Beijing’s premiere nuclear research program. It had begun admitting foreigners and offering classes largely taught in English.   “Before going to Tsinghua, Yikpotey had a bad impression of China.   “When I got there, I learned it was not what I was thinking. They are peaceful and clean, and their technology is so advanced,” he told me by phone from Beijing one recent morning. “In Ghana, we have an energy crisis,” he said. “In China, I never had to go without electricity.”   “China’s nuclear industry is on the leading edge, and the country has b...

Indirect costs on research grants represent charges to cover the administration of grant funds; heating, cooling, water, gas, fume hoods and other centralized infrastructure; building and grounds security; facility maintenance and custodial services. Historically, these have been negotiated every two years between each institution and the NIH depending on the proportion of infrastructure devoted to NIH-funded research. My medical school, for example, had a negotiated IC rate of around 50%. The NIH just announced a new policy whereby all NIH funded institutions will be held to an IC rate of 15%. This is far too little to support NIH-funded biomedical research at any medical school. Most universities cannot subsidize the NIH research mission on this scale. Talented researchers will leave in droves for industry or for other countries. If this decision is not overturned, it marks the end of an era in which the US was the premier nation for biomedical research. https://grants.nih.gov/grants...

(from a comment over at jabberwocking.com ): " . . . Musk doesn’t like it that his guy lost his job for just being a racist so he puts his boot out for Vance to lick it and throw his own family under the bus (one of the guy’s racist tweets was “normalize Indian hate”. Vance is married to a woman with Indian immigrant parents and his kids are half Indian). So Musk gets to hire his guy back and humiliate Vance at the same time. "Looks to me like Musk is the guy in charge."

Sen. Bill Cassidy, MD (R-La.) is a physician. I’m sure he’s pretty smart, but as I’m frequently caused to observe, the traits of high intelligence are unlinked. Dr. Cassidy is exercising poor medical judgement by supporting RFK Jr.’s nomination for Secretary of HHS, although he may be showing good political judgement. “Sen. Bill Cassidy, MD (R-La.), said he received numerous pledges from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Trump administration to protect medicine and science -- particularly regarding vaccines -- that clinched his support for the HHS secretary nominee.   “Cassidy said Kennedy and the administration promised an "unprecedentedly close collaborative working relationship" that includes the two of them meeting or speaking "multiple times a month." They also said that Kennedy could appear before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee -- which Cassidy currently chairs -- quarterly if requested.   “Kennedy will work within current approv...

Until 2021, I didn’t pay much attention to the housing market. At that point, we’d lived in the same house for 34 years. There was no Zillow when we bought that house, and we bought directly from the owner, without an agent. We ended up using an agent to buy our house in Rhode Island. The house had not gone on the market when we bought it, so we didn’t have to compete with other buyers, and from what we’d already seen, the price was fair and the neighborhood was what we wanted. We didn’t use Zillow to shop. I have to admit that since we bought this house in 2022, I’ve been tracking the Zillow price on a weekly. That price has been seasonal, going way up in Spring and Summer and down in Fall and Winter. The net is an increase year-over-year, but the weekly fluctuations have sometimes been on the order of thousands of dollars. So I wasn’t entirely surprised to read this: “Buying a home looks very different than it did 20 years ago. Instead of calling up a local real estate agent, typical...

The National Science Foundation is one of the nation’s premier agencies to advance non-biomedical research (the NIH has the biomedical research portfolio). Full disclosure: I was principle investigator on three NSF grants in my career and served on six NSF review panels that made grant funding recommendations. Now, the Trump administration wants to tear that down: “One of the United States’ leading funders of science and engineering research is planning to lay off between a quarter and a half of its staff in the next two months, a top National Science Foundation official said Tuesday.” *snip* “But if the White House and its so-called Department of Government Efficiency are serious about slashing NSF, the result would be catastrophic, the same program manager warned. Cutting the $10 billion grantmaking agency in half would “gut the intellectual center of U.S. leadership in science and technology,” the official said.   “It’s unclear how the threatened reduction in force at NSF would ...

Per Heather Cox Richardson: “. . . Donald Trump, sparked a crisis last Friday when his White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, announced that he fully intended to go through with the trade war he had hyped on the campaign trail. Trump announced he would levy tariffs of 25% on most products from Mexico and Canada and of 10% on products from China, beginning at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday, in violation of the trade agreement his own team had negotiated during his first term.    “As soon as Leavitt announced the upcoming tariffs, the stock market began to fall, and by last night, stock market futures had fallen 450 points on the expectation of tariffs hitting at midnight tonight. Today, the stock market continued to fall. Even reliable Trump allies began to complain that the tariffs would raise prices. The Wall Street Journal editorial board called Trump’s tariffs “the dumbest trade war in history.” “Today, the president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, announced that she and Trump...

Trump has said that “tariff” is the most beautiful word in the dictionary. Last Friday, he announced his intention to shine that beauty on the American people. “Outside analyses make clear that Trump’s tariffs would hurt the voters that he intended to help, meaning that he might ultimately need to find a resolution.   “An analysis by the Budget Lab at Yale shows, if the tariffs were to continue, an average U.S. household would lose roughly $1,245 in income this year, in what would be the overall equivalent of a more than $1.4 trillion tax increase over the next 10 years.   “Goldman Sachs, in a Sunday analyst note, stressed that the tariffs go into effect on Tuesday, which means they’re likely to proceed “though a last-minute compromise cannot be completely ruled out.”   “The investment bank concluded that because of the possible economic damage and possible conditions for removal that “we think it is more likely that the tariffs will be temporary but the outlook is unclea...

For the past century, Republicans have used the words “Marxist,” “Socialist” and “Communist” as epithets to refer to anything and everything they disapprove of. Now that a generation of Americans that was born after the collapse of the Soviet Union has come of age, those swear words have lost their potency. Looks like “DEI” is the GOP bleat de jour: “Vice President JD Vance backed up President Donald Trump’s claim that diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, policies led to Wednesday’s plane crash in Washington, D.C., telling Fox News that white people have been discouraged from applying to be air traffic controllers because of what he referred to as the “DEI regime.” Lame. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jd-vance-dei-regime-plane-collision-dc_n_679f9a31e4b0702fa93fcdb5 "

I graduated college in 1977 with a BA (with honors) in microbiology. I took courses in virology and immunology, among others. Thus, as a 22 year-old, I was already more qualified to discuss vaccines against polio and COVID than RFK Jr is or will ever be. He’s not the only clown in the Trump clown car, but he’s definitely one of the worst: “In recent weeks, Kennedy has said he fully supports the polio vaccine, but Americans are right to be skeptical of any revelation spouted in the face of a tough nomination hearing.   “Thousands of the nation's caregivers are not buying Kennedy's newfound embrace of a lifesaving inoculation. More than 15,000 doctors signed a letter earlier this month urging senators to vote against Kennedy's confirmation. "This appointment is an affront to the principles of public health, the tireless dedication of medical professionals," the letter said. "RFK Jr. has a well-documented history of spreading dangerous disinformation on vaccines...