Editorial: In Donald Trump’s World, Ignorance is Strength, Sickness is Health
Trump’s policies will get us killed. He doesn’t care.
On a short list of qualities you need to be a dictator, Donald Trump checks all the boxes:
Rule by decree rather than consensus? Check.
Suppression of civil liberties? Ask American women about reproductive freedom.
Cult of personality? It goes without saying.
State of emergency declaration? Been there, done that (Trump has declared immigration and energy “emergencies”).
Claiming to be a savior appointed by God? Did that in his inaugural address.
Censorship? You betcha!
Throughout history, dictators—Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, et al—have known that if you can’t control the media (and Trump is working on it), the next best thing is to silence the messengers.
On January 21, 2025, one day after he took over the Oval Office for the second time, Trump decreed a gag order on US healthcare agencies, including the US Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The information ban prevents agency staffers from sharing “health advisories, weekly scientific reports, updates to websites, and social media posts.”
And clearly Donald’s diktat has the health agencies running scared. One immediate result was that for the first time in 64 years, the CDC’s weekly Morbidity and Mortality Report (MMWR), which contains vital information for clinicians and researchers on epidemics, outbreaks, and other threats to public health, was not published.
Don’t Quote Me
Last week, I received a panicked email from an FDA communications staffer, asking whether an article I was writing that featured quotes from a physician employed by the agency had gone to press.
“Has this interview been published? If not, we may have to retract it due to an HHS hold on external communications that went into effect on 1/21,” the communications officer wrote.
I replied that yes, the article had been published, and I pointed out that I received the quotes in an email on January 14, a full week before the ban, so there shouldn’t be a problem.
The communications officer agreed that there was no conflict with the gag order, but this incident made me wonder: What in God’s name could be the rationale for muzzling medical researchers and scientists? What possible benefit could there be, and for whom?
And how much harm could be done when ignorant, uninformed, and unqualified politicians run one of the largest health agencies in the world?
Keep It Simple, Stupid
As the journal Science reported on the day after Trump’s gag order was announced, “officials halted midstream a training workshop for junior scientists, called off a workshop on adolescent learning minutes before it was to begin, and canceled meetings of two advisory councils. Panels that were scheduled to review grant proposals also received eleventh-hour word that they wouldn’t be meeting.”
Science also reported that NIH researchers are now forbidden from traveling to meetings to present research findings or promote agency programs offsite.
An NIH spokesperson spun the gag order as “a short pause to allow the news team to set up a process for review and prioritization,” but even the dullest observer could read between the lines to see that NIH’s new masters want to clamp down on information, any information, that might contradict the policies of our Dear Leader and his absurdly unqualified political appointees.
Inmate in Charge of the Asylum
Think I’m being alarmist? Just consider some of the assertions made by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, none supported by either evidence or common sense:
“Autism comes from vaccines” as told to Fox News. No, it does not, and there are reams of strong scientific evidence to disprove his claim.
Fluoridation of water is “associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease,” as posted on X (formerly Twitter). No Bobby, not at the levels added to drinking water, and the benefits in terms of oral health and cavity prevention are undisputed (by informed observers, that is).
One might argue that his views on autism and fluoride, while out of the mainstream and based on deeply flawed “research”, have some grounding in reality, no matter how shaky.
But can you justify this shockingly racist and frankly delusional statement Kennedy made in an online video from The New York Post?
“Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Actually, it’s smart of Trump to appoint someone like Kennedy, who has as little regard for science as Trump has for the rule of law, to head the HHS. After all, during his first administration Trump demonized infectious disease experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, botched the management of the COVID-19 pandemic, and touted alleged “treatments” with either no or minimal evidence, such as the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin and the anti-malarial hydroxychloroquine. Trump even, in a press conference, suggested injecting disinfectants.
Kennedy has said that if he were to be confirmed as HHS head he would keep his financial stake in lawsuits against Merck over its vaccine against human papillomavirus infections, despite the obvious conflict of interest. More alarmingly, his lawyer has asked the FDA to revoke approval of the polio vaccine. THE POLIO VACCINE!! And while they’re at it, why not revive smallpox, too.
Whether H5N1, a.k.a “bird flu,” morphs into the source of the next pandemic remains to be seen. Virology experts say it would only take one mutation for the virus to become more readily transmissible to and among humans. The 1918 influenza (“Spanish flu”) pandemic is estimated to have killed anywhere from 17 million to 100 million people worldwide.
But consider this: In May 2021, Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense group filed a petition with the FDA demanding the revocation of licenses for existing vaccines against COVID-19 and the prohibition of licenses for new vaccines, at a time when the vaccines were estimated to have saved at least 140,000 lives.
Given his track record It’s a safe bet that if he’s allowed to run the HHS, Kennedy would show the same hostility to any inchoate bird flu vaccines. So if you still support Trump’s and Kennedy’s approach to health care, you’ve got to ask yourself one question:
“Do I feel lucky?”
Neil Osterweil is an award-winning medical journalist with more than 40 years of experience reporting on medicine and health care.