It’s gotten so bad that Maine Senator Susan Collins has flipped the switch from “concerned” up a couple of notches to “extremely alarmed.”
Perhaps Collins — who once infamously declared Donald Trump “learned a pretty big lesson" as she voted to acquit him for attempting to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021 — is the one who learned her lesson.
Or is merely “concerned” about her reelection chances next year?
Whatever her level of concern, it doesn’t approach the Trump regime’s apparent “concern” in declaring 90 “emergencies” since returning to the Palace of Versailles Oval Office this year.
Those “emergencies” have essentially provided end-runs around a supine Congress, Supreme Court — and under threat Constitution— and enabled him to impose armed military rule over the streets of Washington, DC, and declare, delay and re-declare tariffs on virtually every spot on the planet (including the penguins of Heard and the McDonald Islands).
The regime has also overridden the Constitution and declared its refusal to spend money appropriated by Congress, a key goal of Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, an author of Project 2025.
But it’s the emergency the regime has created without a declaration that poses one of the most serious threats to the nation’s health. The emergency Collins appears to be “extremely alarmed” about.
That’s the behavior of the Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is systematically dismantling the nation’s public health system.
The former heroin addict and dealer, who admits to having a dead worm in his brain, does not believe germs cause disease. That has also led him to declare that vaccinating against germs that cause infectious diseases like measles and polio in children is the equivalent of putting them in Nazi death camps.
Kennedy believes instead in the long-discredited “miasma theory,” which held that disease stemmed from foul-smelling air or vapors from rotting organic matter.
“He believes that when those two children in Texas died of measles, it wasn’t because of measles — it was because they were malnourished. He said they were living in a food desert,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a leading vaccinologist and co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine. “That’s his worldview: the germ isn’t really the problem.”
And the man trained as a lawyer believes messenger RNA, a naturally occurring part of the code governing all forms of life, is a dangerous platform on which to build a vaccine that scientists estimate saved 1.6 million lives between December 2020 and March 2023.
Kennedy has created a more modern version of the miasma theory, tearing down the structures of the public health system but insisting that doctors and scientists accept his medical theories, particularly when it comes to vaccines.
Starting with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which admittedly has had some significant research and administrative failures in recent years — perhaps most notably its initial failure to grasp the deadly nature of the COVID virus and the subsequent failure to develop a timely test.
Yet the public health system in Trump 1.0 eventually got its act together and, using a platform that earned a Nobel Prize for the researchers who paved the way for its use as a vaccine, developed a product that is arguably the single biggest accomplishment of Donald J. Trump’s presidencies.
Nobel Peace Prize Committee take note.
The Trump and Kennedy purge of CDC scientific and medical professionals has done the exact opposite of some needed reforms of what had once been the crown jewel of public health.
“It’s got, like, a heart rhythm that’s not viable at the moment,” said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who led the CDC’s center for respiratory diseases until he resigned this week. “If it’s not shocked out of it now, it may not survive.”
And that prospect may also apply to millions of Americans — children, elders and immunocompromised adults who as of now have no access to the latest COVID vaccine.
At a time when a new variant is generating a rise in COVID cases.
True to form, the White House has named a Kennedy loyalist, as acting CDC director.
Jim O’Neill, a biotech investor close to billionaire Peter Thiel, has no training in either medicine or the science of infectious diseases. The Guardian reported O’Neill supported the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID despite no evidence that they worked.
A permanent CDC director to replace the fired Dr. Susan Monarez will require Senate confirmation. Collins is a member of one of the committees that will review the Trump nomination, as is Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor who, like Collins, bought what has turned out to be a pack of lies from Kennedy about protecting vaccine access.
It’s likely the leader of the cult of personality — whose picture (one which resembles his mug shot) now adorns federal buildings where National Guard members appear to be paying obeisance — will nominate another unqualified sycophant.
If Collins and Cassidy are indeed “extremely alarmed” about the destruction of public health, they can start by not rubber stamping any nominee who rejects science in favor of crackpot theories.
Lives depend upon it.