Wake up and smell the rot, urges Russ Swan.
If you aren’t crapping yourself at what’s going on right now, you obviously haven’t been paying attention. The freshly-installed leader of what was until recently one of the greatest countries on Earth has turned his personal vindictiveness and illinformed prejudices into a full-blown war on science. And this affects us all.
It’s hard to keep up with the onslaught that is currently taking place, which is I think part of the strategy. We’re being bombarded with one unbelievable action after another, making it very tempting to just ignore it and hope it will go away.
It will not go away.
As well as appointing an outspoken vaccine sceptic and conspiracy theorist to the slightly significant position of health secretary, the Trump administration has slashed health research funding and erased published scientific papers from government websites.
Federal funding of research, previously set at 50-70%, is reduced to just 15%, almost eliminating the portion of funding previously allocated to university laboratories and other overheads.
But who needs laboratories when we have the very stable geniuses of Don and Elon to tell us everything we need to know?
It’s not as if the USA has a good record on public health to start with. It is the only developed nation where plague – actual black death plague – remains endemic
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is a world-renowned institution leading the fight against disease. It is being castrated, with (one report suggested) all fellows and post-doc staff laid off with immediate effect. Its Epidemic Intelligence Service, known as the Disease Detectives, seems to have been eliminated. Public information on influenza has been taken down from its website, just as the worst flu season in decades is blossoming. Outbreaks of measles in the poorest southern states have increased even since the administration took over.
It’s not as if the USA has a good record on public health to start with. It is the only developed nation where plague – actual black death plague – remains endemic. The current epidemic of avian influenza has led the price of eggs to spiral, and the mass culling of flocks.
Sure, nobody is concerned that those carcasses (even droppings) are being fed to cattle – what could possibly go wrong? If only some learned person were available to point out that that might be a bad idea.
It’s not only health. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is to see mass layoffs.
Try looking on its website for information on Nexrad, its climate radar network, and you may find the PDFs have been ‘deleted by executive order’.
This, and many, many other actions, are basically book burning. Digital book burning. And history tells us that the ones who burn books are never the good guys.
I do not think it is an exaggeration to call this a coup d’état. The war is not just against science but against the USA itself, its institutions, its people.
Where the USA leads, the UK often follows. Certainly, there are those in political positions here that profess their admiration for what is going on.
Be prepared, my friends. Speak up when necessary, keep archives on personal devices, and don’t let the forces of endarkenment win. This is not a drill.
