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Young chickens at a farm in Pescadero, Calif., on Feb. 29, 2024. Farms are fertile ground for the H5N1 virus to jump species — from cat to cow to pig and human, in any order.
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Gene Collier: Trump’s incalculable damage to science and health

Rachel Bujalski/The New York Times

Gene Collier: Trump’s incalculable damage to science and health

Five years ago this week, the planet began to understand what can happen when the newest thing to go viral, was, of all things, a virus. It was Jan. 23, 2020 when the Chinese government locked down the city of Wuhan in Hubei province, where citizens awoke to find themselves at ground zero for a respiratory contagion soon to be called COVID.

Seven million people would die from the virus around the world in the coming years, more than 1.2 million of them in the United States alone, triggering a heightened understanding of disease lethality and the urgency of shared medical information and intelligence.

You’d think.

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Going dark

Five years later, in the first days of the second Trump administration, all external communications and travel has been frozen at the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.

At the same time, U.S. health officials have been instructed to stop communications with the World Health Organization, a directive that a CDC memo obtained by the Associated Press says applies to “all CDC staff engaging with WHO through technical working groups, coordinating centers, advisory boards, cooperative agreements or other means — in person or virtual.”

You’re free to conclude that this level of inexplicable interference in the global health sciences is merely this week’s booster shot of regularly scheduled Trumpian malevolence/incompetence, but you can only hope it’s not related to another story now destined for inadequate coverage, specifically the ominous potential of bird flu.

This week, the first documented case of bird flu in poultry in the U.S. was detected on a California farm, meaning the virus that’s kept global health experts up at night has now accelerated its mutation biology. Again. Bird flu has killed humans who’ve contracted it from infected animals, but the risk remains low as there is no incidence of human-to-human transmission.

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Today. Or at least none that we would know, because all external Health and Human Services communications have been halted.

“It is extremely unusual, and I believe it reflects the policy decision for everyone to go dark,” vaccine specialist Michael Kinch told Bloomberg. “It’s troubling because any sort of non-typical influenza is particularly problematic when it gains the ability to jump between species.”

The California poultry case was announced by the Organization for Animal Health, a Paris-based association of scientists.

The damage done to public health and scientific research in the first week of Trump 2.0 is already incalculable even before the bird flu plots its ultimate course. The National Institutes of Health, for example, are the No. 1 public source of biomedical research in the U.S., the lifeblood of universities engaged in that work, some of which, someone might soon discover, are in red states.

Disruptive “pause”

What the new administration is calling a “pause” in travel and external communications at HHS also disrupts meetings, seminars and all manner of academic and scientific work that fuels the grant process, jeopardizing some $40 billion in NIH dollars annually. The “pause” thus shuts down the research structure that fuels discovery, lifesaving drugs, and groundbreaking treatments.

As one researcher told The Washington Post this week, “it’s like a meteor crashed into all of our cancer centers and research areas.”

Multiple media outlets have reported on a memo sent to Acting Health and Human Services Secretary Dorothy A. Fink instructing that department heads should refrain “from sending any document intended for publication to the Office of the Federal Register until it has been reviewed and approved by a Presidential appointee.” They must also refrain from “participating in any public speaking engagement until the event and material have been approved by a Presidential appointee.”

In other words, you’ll say only what we say you can say, and it’s not going to be some woke scientific thing that would upset Donald Trump, whose idea of modern science is that wind turbines are negatively affecting the psychological well-being of whales.

“They’re dangerous,” Trump said about offshore wind turbines again this month, whale health being a staple of his campaign rantings. “The windmills are driving the whales crazy, obviously.”

Obviously?

“Yeah, I’m voting for him,” said 77 million Americans.

Fortunately for the people trying to sort out the chaos at HHS while wondering if they’ll still have a job on the other side of the “pause,” the memo to the acting secretary also said they’re still allowed to have personal correspondence, communicate with members of Congress, and continue to engage in “whistleblower-protected communications.”

No whistleblowers

When that memo went out, Health and Human Services still had a whistleblower, but Trump fired 18 inspectors general in a late night purge Friday, including those at HHS, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and the Department of Labor.

If you’re sensing a theme, it might be that anyone who might do or say something the president doesn’t like will be removed from his or her position.

Some have pointed out that this kind of thing is illegal, as though that’s ever stopped him.

The Health and Human Services part of this whole mess is about to come into better focus, or course, beginning with Wednesday’s hearings on whether the agency’s new leader should be Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Oh boy.

Gene Collier’s previous column was “The war in Ukraine’s over, right?”.

First Published: January 28, 2025, 10:11 p.m.
Updated: January 29, 2025, 5:33 p.m.

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Young chickens at a farm in Pescadero, Calif., on Feb. 29, 2024. Farms are fertile ground for the H5N1 virus to jump species — from cat to cow to pig and human, in any order.  (Rachel Bujalski/The New York Times)
Rachel Bujalski/The New York Times
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