Derailed
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I’ve been derailed. I was about to send you a new story about the power of music, something both fun and serious. It was to follow last month’s piece about music, Does One Tire of One’s Beating Heart?
Then I hesitated. I just couldn’t bring my finger down on the “send” key. What’s derailed me is the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election.
Where to begin? With the threat of the US abandoning Ukraine to Putin’s aggression, or ditching its NATO allies? With Trump’s pick to lead the Interior Department, a man close to fossil fuel executives who has claimed “there is no climate crisis,” has promised to “drill, drill, drill” for oil and gas, and who will accelerate the crisis of climate change? With Trump’s promises to take revenge against FBI officials who investigated his 2016 campaign’s connection to Russia, and pardon rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6?
It’s hard to keep up. So I’ll ignore his conviction for crimes, and his talk about Haitians eating people’s pet cats. Best to stick with stuff I know: the health nonsense.
Make America Healthy Unhealthy Again
Mr. Trump has picked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has spread conspiracy theories and falsehoods about vaccines causing autism.
Trump has vowed to let him go “wild on health.” He said Kennedy will “Make America Great and Healthy Again!” This is the man who has contradicted the recommendation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s that communities fluoridate their water to prevent tooth decay. Who has promoted a disproved link between vaccines and autism, and spread false information about vaccines.
Vaccines that have nearly eradicated many diseases, and fluoridated water: two of the most impressive advances of the last century.
Kennedy also promotes drinking raw milk. Raw milk can cause serious food poisoning by salmonella, listeria, and E. coli. Pasteurization of milk is another miracle of public health that has saved lives—like vaccinations, and clean drinking water, and. Drinking raw milk is all the more risky amid a bird flu epidemic among dairy cows.
This “expert” has also promoted hydroxychloroquine, a drug whose emergency authorization as a treatment for Covid was revoked by the Food and Drug Administration after a study of 821 people found it lacked effectiveness. Not only did it not work against Covid, but an impressive meta-analysis of no fewer than 10,319 patients found that people who took hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine had an elevated risk of death.
This is the guy who Trump wants to let go “wild on health.”
Head in the Sand
At an anti-vaccine conference, Kennedy said, “I’m going to say to N.I.H. scientists…we’re going to give (studying) infectious disease a break for about eight years.”
In a swamp of nutty ideas, this has to be one of the nuttiest. Why? Because new, dangerous infections can break out at any time. HIV and AIDS surprised us. So did the Zika virus, and killer SARS. Deadly Ebola startled us. Then Covid-19 came seemingly out of nowhere, and killed 3 million people in 2020.
We’ve seen how epidemic infections can spread, turn life upside down. New infectious diseases will continue to emerge. There will be more surprises. Not a great time to be sticking our heads in the sand.
Derailing
To be the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Trump has named someone who pushed the false notion that thimerosal, a preservative in some vaccines, had caused an explosion of autism. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine described how even though it was disproved by excellent epidemiologic studies, it gave rise to a cottage industry of charlatans promoting useless mercury-chelating agents: false hope.
Then there’s Mehmet Oz, the TV personality Trump picked to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who has touted sham diet pills and ineffective Covid treatments. Dr. Oz has promoted quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.
Promoting medical disinformation from positions of power can have disastrous results. And speaking of derailing, they can derail a whole society.
“We'll all get along if we try.” Really?
After all this depressing stuff I needed a change, so to cheer up I read the latest blog of my friend Paula Dunning. She writes of singing a hopeful song as a child while growing up in her Quaker family. To my surprise, it was the same song I sang as a child in my Reform Jewish Sunday school. We all sang about universal brotherhood, and with real gusto:
I'm proud to be me
But I also see
You're just as proud to be you
That's just human nature
So why should I hate you
For being as human as I? We’ll get as we give, if we live and let live, And we’ll all get along if we try!
The next song we learned was: “We’ll soon be one world, one world…”
The “one world”, of course, would be united by brotherhood and sisterhood, not by wars, and pandemics.
The sweet idealism was inspired by the end of World War II, and the formation of the United Nations; our songs gushed with hope, optimism. Sadly, such sentiments feel these days like hopeless nostalgia. Unattainable.
It reminds me of the lyrics of Mary Hopkin’s hit single. You can listen to it here.
Those were the days, my friend, We thought they’d never end…
Then the busy years went rushing by us
We lost our starry notions on the way
However, “Those Were the Days” is a pretty song—too pretty. Nowadays a more fitting song might be “Bad Days”. You can watch it here.
Don't play with things you don't know, know, know, know
I'm falling into dark thoughts that I find
Reality is long gone…It's like praying for rain when you're already drowning
Getting back on the tracks
I’ve felt derailed by world events, and I know that many of you have, too. Please excuse my rant; but I can’t not respond when politicians threaten our health. But now that this is off my chest, I’ll get off the soapbox, and back on track. Next week I’ll send you the promised follow-up story about what music does to us.
Meanwhile, as danger signs sprout around us, and we hope for a better world, a good start would be to respect science. In matters of medicine, to demand that leaders not mislead.
Not going backwards would definitely show kindness to the vulnerable. That group happens, by the way, to include every one of us.
To see other posts on Musings on Medicine and More, click here.
Thank you, Peter. Let's hope that contrarianism, ignorance, and the creators of chaos, don't catch on here in Canada. And you're right: those of us born near the end, and after WW2, grew up in a world of optimism—because, surely, after the world had plunged to its most horrific depths, "hit bottom", so to speak, it would learn its lesson and never go back. That optimism was false: turns out you can never overly underestimate human nature.
Indeed, it's impossible not to be affected by the coming chaos that surrounds us. In Mexico, Trump will impose a 25 percent tariff on day one, despite that hurting the American car manufactures who rely on Mexico to do their assembly. And internationally in general an idolatry of Putin and Netanyahu, as well as other authoritarians, will radically change America's position in the world as ultra nationalism takes hold. And there is so very much more to be concerned about that it truly makes one weep.
Thanks for addressing the elephant in the room. One cannot proceed on any meaningful discourse without that.