Featured in the NY Daily News | 2/20/2025
“The occupants lay, resigned and silent, decaying in succession…One after another, ashen-faced men with skeletal bodies reclined, their bony knees pointing upward sharply under their blankets like stakes under a tent. Each had an IV pole and blood pack, wires and hoses attached to the backs of hands and wrists.” So begins my forthcoming book, A Song for Olaf (SaintJulian Press, 2025) which describes my first glimpse of a transfusion center in a 1993 AIDS hospital ward.
Such a scene is one we hoped never to have to re-envision. Though we still mourn the loss of thousands of lovers, friends, brothers, sons and daughters, it is human nature to suppress certain memories out of self-preservation, the reality of their excruciating deaths too traumatic to revisit, their bodies wasting before our eyes while the government averted its glance. But it was the reality in the 1980s, when President Reagan cut the CDC budget by half just as the cases of HIV-AIDS began to emerge. Reagan did not deign to utter the term “AIDS” until 1985. By then, 5000 people had died.
Trump followed suit in 2018, discarding the Obama administration’s pandemic playbook, leaving the country vulnerable even as COVID decimated the country. “’Rather than spending the money, and I am a businessperson, I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them,’ he said. ‘When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.’” (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/us/coronavirus-fauci-aids-hiv.html) His statement reveals his basic misunderstanding of a principle most of us learned in elementary school —the scientific method.
Given this context, we should not be surprised that Trump’s second term has begun with a flurry of anti-science, life-endangering activities:
• Hours after his inauguration, a Trump executive order initiated our country’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization, a 194-country collaboration to prevent global pandemics. The WHO has eradicated smallpox, reducedpolio cases by 99%, and stemmed the spread of diseases such as COVID, Zika and AIDS. Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health at Georgetown University called it “the darkest day for global health I’ve ever experienced.” (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-signs-executive-withdrawing-world-health-organization-2025-01-21/)
• Shortly thereafter, Trump proposed drastic cuts to the NIH, impacting life-saving research. In our SUNY System alone, the proposed cuts include $23 million for Stony Brook’s research on first responders and future pandemics; $8 million for U-Buffalo’s research on women’s health; and $ 1.7 million for SUNY Albany’s breast cancer study. Chancellor John King called the cuts “an existential threat to public health.” (https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/02/12/trumps-funding-cuts-put-suny-programs-9-11-responders-womens-health-risk/)
• On January 24, the administration furloughed nearly the entire USAID staff of over 10,000 employees. Among other USAID initiatives, PEPFAR has reduced childhood AIDS deaths by 80% and saved more than 5.5 million babies of HIV-infected mothers from infection Without PEPFAR, patients denied essential drugs are at risk of developing full-blown AIDS and prone to the suffering, wasting, and slow death that I witnessed in 1993. It is unfathomable to realize that we live in a country that could knowingly subject children to horrific, yet preventable, deaths. (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11009499/#:~:text=Failing%20to%20reauthorize%20PEPFAR%20would,infected%20than%20their%20male%20counterparts.)
• On February 13, the Senate confirmed Robert Kennedy as Health and Human Services Secretary. Kennedy — not a health scientist — is prone to such scientifically-debunked ravings as “Vaccines poisoned an entire generation of American children,” falsely claiming that childhood vaccines cause autism, that vitamin A and chicken soup are cures for measles, and that the polio vaccine causes cancer.(https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/01/28/rfk-jr-disparaged-vaccines-dozens-times-recent-years-misled-race/) He has also perpetuated a discredited theory that recreational drug use, not HIV, was the actual cause of AIDS. His position makes the reinstatement PEPFAR’s life-saving work highly improbable. (Robert Kennedy. The Real Anthony Fauci. 2021. Children’s Health Defense.)
• On February 14, USDA specialists working to stem the spread of bird flu were fired by the Trump administration — even while, in the past ten days alone three different states have reported new cases in humans. (https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2025/02/19/the-latest-on-bird-flu-in-humans-chickens-and-more/#:~:text=Human%20Cases&text=The%20new%20reports%20from%20Nevada,Control%20and%20Prevention%20spokesperson%20confirmed)
After his swearing in, Kennedy tweeted, “The future of public health is about to change forever,” one of few Kennedy pronouncements with which the scientific community might agree. Even if we put aside Kennedy’s dumping a dead bear in Central Park, his 14-year heroin addiction, his “blendering-up” mice and chickens, it’s his absolute denial of science that should send a shutter down the spine of any thinking person. And incentive to get to the pharmacy for your vaccines — while you still can.
