Attack of the Quack-Industrial Complex

Another front in the war on American greatness

Source: KFF Health System Tracker

By now it’s obvious to anyone willing to see — which many people still aren’t — that Donald Trump is, in practice, waging war against American greatness. And the attack is taking place on multiple fronts.

For the past few days everyone has understandably been focused on tariffs and the destruction of the world trading system. But in the long run, and maybe much sooner than that, the dire impacts of tariffs may be matched by the havoc Trumpism is wreaking in other areas.

For example, DOGE is just getting going on its downsizing of the Social Security Administration, yet it has already degraded the agency’s website. The Washington Post reports:

The website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day, according to six current and former officials with knowledge of the issues. Even when the site is back online, many customers have not been able to sign in to their accounts — or have logged in only to find information missing. For others, access to the system has been slow, requiring repeated tries to get in.

And then there’s health policy, which Trump has effectively turned over to the quack-industrial complex.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a crank who tried to block the rollout of Covid vaccines that saved millions of lives, is now the secretary of Health and Human Services. That agency’s top vaccine regulator quit late last month, declaring that

it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.

We don’t know how many Americans will die prematurely because public health is now being run by a man who rejects medical science, but it’s likely that the number will eventually run into the millions. As the chart at the top of this post shows, America had substantially lower life expectancy than other advanced countries even before Covid, and the gap widened when Republican hostility to vaccines led many Americans to refuse Covid shots.

Furthermore, savage funding cuts and layoffs at the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes for Health are already having a catastrophic effect on medical research. We may never know how many lives could have been saved, but won’t be, because of this wholesale assault on science. But the number won’t be small.

Efforts to kill scientific research seem frantic. Last week, with no warning, CDC labs studying sexually transmitted disease were closed and all their scientists fired. Make gonorrhea great again? The layoffs were so sudden that there are freezers full of samples with no custodians.

Oh, and yesterday Jack D. Ripper, I mean RFK, called on states to ban fluoridated drinking water, an action that will be especially cruel to lower-income families that have trouble affording dental care.

Why is this happening? Is it about anti-science ideology, or is it about greed?

Yes.

Two months ago I wrote about how the partisan divide had become a divide between people who focus on facts and reason, on one side, and those who prefer to rely on feelings, on the other. At that point layoffs of scientists were just getting started, but I predicted that

the current purge of language will eventually turn into a purge of people, with the administration firing anyone suspected of being more loyal to science than they are to Donald Trump.

Alas, I was right.

But — as with so many things in this administration — greed and self-dealing are also an important part of the story.

I use the term “quack-industrial complex” advisedly. Medical snake oil plays a surprisingly large role in right-wing extremism. Right-wing influencers gain audiences by peddling hatred. But they monetize that hatred largely by selling fake remedies and nutritional supplements. So it’s not surprising, if you think about it, that a right-wing extremist administration has put quacks and snake-oil salesmen in charge of the nation’s health care.

Did I mention that Dr. Oz has been appointed to run Medicare and Medicaid?

In the long run the demolition of U.S. medical science may be even more damaging than tariffs. Our health won’t be the only thing that suffers; the biopharmaceutical sector is a huge industry that will atrophy without publicly supported research.

And the long run may not even be that long. How well do you think we’ll handle the next pandemic — for there will be a next pandemic — when U.S. health care is being run by a man who told Americans to fight measles with cod liver oil?

I’d like to offer some reassurance that we will eventually recover from this self-inflicted calamity. But I can’t. Even if research funding is restored, even if NIH and other agencies try to rebuild, U.S. science will have suffered huge long-term damage. So will the world trading system, which will never be the same even if the Trump tariffs are reversed, and the effectiveness of the federal bureaucracy, which will be impaired for many years even if DOGE’s depredations stop.

So much wreckage, achieved in so little time.

MUSICAL CODA

We’ll find out in the long run. But by then it will be too late.