Hey Hey, Ho Ho!

Remember the chant “hey hey, ho ho, Trump and Musk have got to go!”? Well, one of them has gone! Good work, gang! Yesterday, attorney and Substack writer Norm Eisen reflected on Elon Musk’s departure, saying, “He was driven out because his project has failed, and was stopped so often in court --as well as through the unceasing efforts of protests and the people.”

So the people’s voice has been heard, we can hope his cars and his space rockets and his brain technology company will be the worse for his catastrophic dabbling in politics, his firing thousands of valuable government workers and invading the private data of Americans. It’s Musk himself who has generated waste, fraud, and abuse for decades to come, and we say good riddance to him! Good riddance, Elon! Good riddance, Elon!

There’s a local story that mirrors the events we’ve seen nationally: the creeping censorship on colleges and universities, elected officials, law firms, newspapers, and art institutions. The Bainbridge Island Museum of Art cancelled, at the last minute, yesterday’s performance of a play called “One Family in Gaza.” Apparently the museum’s board of directors got spooked by the prospect of riling its donors by hosting a “controversial” event that voiced a Palestinian view of the ongoing slaughter of Gaza’s culture and people. They were more worried about the bottom line than their own stated principles.

Fortunately, the Bainbridge Senior/Community Center agreed to host the performance and the show could go on. But yesterday a crowd showed up to demonstrate in front of BIMA, decrying the museum’s suppression of free speech. History tells us that we need to confront challenges to free speech at the outset.

Art is always a target of fascism, because its diversity of voices poses a danger to the authoritarian’s control of our thinking. We salute those who stood up. We’re disappointed by BIMA’s action, and we hope the protest has helped make the museum change and be responsive to ALL the community it serves.

Our third and final comment concerns the state of HEALTHCARE. We know that a culture of incompetence, sloppiness, and disdain for expertise permeates Trump’s government. This has been alarmingly on display in the Administration’s health efforts led by RFK Jr. It was revealed that their much-touted “MAHA Report” (subtitled “Making Our Children Healthy Again”) was riddled with errors. The New York Times and others reported that it “cited studies that did not exist,” including “fictitious studies on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, mental illness and medications prescribed for children with asthma.”

AI experts believe that the report’s citations were generated using artificial intelligence. It’s unclear whether scientists, public health professionals, or physicians with strong scientific research and writing skills were consulted at all. Did anyone in HHS actually read the report before releasing it?

In other health news, on Tuesday, Secretary of Health & Human Services RFK Jr, announced that under his watch, the CDC would no longer advise healthy children and pregnant women to get vaccinated against Covid-19. This was an unprecedented move, since the HHS director normally makes vaccine recommendations only after panels of experts in the CDC and Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices deliberate and decide about vaccine viability, safety, and effectiveness.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists issued a statement that coronavirus infection during pregnancy “can be catastrophic.” The only way infants get any immunity against Covid is through the mother being vaccinated. Nevertheless, Kennedy said during his announcement that he “couldn’t be more pleased.” He’s doing an end run around the government’s own experts.

These recommendations determine whether insurers subsidize the shots. Without coverage, a Covid shot costs around 200 dollars. In other words, people with money can stay safe, and those who can’t afford it might have to gamble their health, their jobs, and in the case of pregnancy, their life or their child’s life.

RFK Jr, along with Doge, has helped purge government employees, some of whom were let go by mistake. Kennedy is simply against science, preferring to impose his own wacky opinions on the 340 million of us who depend on research to help make our lives healthier.

Here’s an example of his willful destructiveness. He abruptly ended one of the world’s longest-running diabetes trials.

This landmark trial has gone on for 25 years to study long-term effects of treatments ranging from meds to exercise and diet, and which has already produced two hundred scientific papers. The study’s duration allows researchers to begin to understand causes and effects of diabetes, its relation to dementia, and other factors by following the lives of its hundreds of thousands of subjects. But in early March, the study was terminated. Hundreds of millions of dollars were frozen. Guess which institution was one of the main administrators of these trials? Columbia University.

Kennedy’s HHS oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and nearly a dozen other units. He has cut over 20,000 jobs. A department in the CDC that works to prevent childhood lead poisoning was eliminated.

Medicaid workers who were fired were told to direct their complaints to an administrator who died last year. At the FDA, experts working on controlling the bird-flu outbreak were fired, and on Thursday, the CDC canceled its contract with Moderna to develop a bird-flu vaccine. That cancellation tosses out not just the $175 million already invested, but dismantles our entire pandemic response strategy to a virus that has already killed 173 million birds and is now infecting mammals and humans across 17 states. 

Prominent scientists have quit, citing interference with their work and outright censorship when their findings don’t conform to narratives their overseers desire.

 And we’re not even talking about the massive cuts to Medicaid and Medicare in the Big Ugly Bill if it makes it through the Senate intact.

It’s hard to understand why Trump’s administration is so bent on destroying our national system of healthcare and research and protections. We know that the big cuts are necessary for Trump’s big tax breaks for the rich, but childhood lead poisoning? Long Covid research? Mental health for veterans? Nutrition packets for children in poor countries?

This is why it’s so important to turn out, to stand up for democracy, sanity, and our nation’s literal health and survival. We helped boot Musk out – now it’s time to preserve our ability to have free and fair elections so we can boot the rest of them out and end the nightmare of incompetence and cruelty.

Show me what real democracy looks like.

###