Disaster Is Here - Susan Levenstein
Luís Filipe Gomes
All posts and archives will always be free to all subscribers. But if you'd like to support me, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription… If you arrive at wording that says [Message clipped], make sure you click on “View entire message.” Disaster Is HereThe new administration is moving so fast that I’m rushing this post, covering everything from spending freezes to RFK Jr, with COVID-19 bits for spice.
Disastrous first days
Los Angeles wildfires
President Trump’s day one executive orders reversed Executive Orders 14087 (aimed at lowering drug costs) and 14084 (Promoting the Arts, the Humanities, and Museum and Library Services), reversed Obamacare expansions(decreasing access and funding) paused Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Act spending, wreaking particular havoc in red states, halted offshore wind farms, limited trans rights, ordered a federal hiring freeze, promoted oil, gas, and coal, allowed ICE raids in churches and hospitals, and withdrew from the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization, drawing blowback for both. The “law-and-order president” pardoned1500+ people who rioted in his name on January 6, 2021, including police assailants and COVID-19 misinformant physicians, commuted seditionists’ sentences, placed a gag order on federal public health agencies (blocking NIH Study Section meetings and publication of at least two issues of the CDC’s MMWR), and scrapped website content on climate, civil rights, and health care. Within days he canceled birthright citizenship (temporarily blocked, twice), laid off DEI and related employees, asked federal workers to spy for him, illegally fired independent inspectors-general in what the New York Times Editorial Board called “Trump’s Test of the Constitution,” shut down the Spanish language White House website, removed the Constitution and Bill of Rights from the English one, pardoned anti-abortion activists, purged web content on gun safety and accessibility, closed a Pentagon office dedicated to protecting civilians, penalized sanctuary cities, threatened to withhold aid for California wildfires, floated eliminating FEMA, suggested banning wind power (the biggest wind power states are red), rebooted family detention, urged the House to whitewash Jan 6, stripped federal workers’ job protections, cancelled 30,000 asylum-seekers’ appointments, then suspended asylum altogether, leaving Afghans who helped the US in limbo. Deportations, on the other hand, are proceeding slowly; at 1500 daily it would take 20 years to deport 11 million undocumented people. After halting DACA in his first term (the Supreme Court saved it) and campaigning on deporting “dreamers,” he’s softened his stance. He froze civil rights cases, authorized deportation of many legal immigrants with humanitarian parole or Temporary Protected Status, reinstated the “Mexico City policy,” revoked a 1965 anti-discrimination order, hobbled an independent civil liberties organization, stopped funding PEPFAR (temporarily walked back); illegally purged 17 independent inspectors-general, also career prosecutors under Jack Smith. Biden should have given preemptive pardons to those prosecutors, Judge Chutkan, and others. Trump purged the National Labor Relations Board and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, banned transgender troops, sought to access a database of unaccompanied minors, revived “star wars” while cutting back on funds for nuclear protection, and mandated "patriotic education”. Another mad executive order, already starting, sends 30,000 migrants to Guantanamo Bay. Plenty of pushback and legal challenges – you can track some here. Three million or so people work for the federal government. On January 28, 2.3 million received a confusing email inviting them to quit, with paid administrative leave through September. Anyone wishing to take the buyout must do so by February 6; following dire warnings, by the 4th only 20,000 had accepted. Military, Post Office, and immigration enforcement personnel and now Indian Health Service employees were exempted, but food, water, drugs, and workplace safety inspectors, administrators of programs like Medicare and Food Stamps, NIH researchers (who are highly alarmed), and meteorologists were not – nor were air traffic controllers until after two deadly air crashes. Next came a cryptic pause on federal grants, blocking trillions of dollars with one stroke of the pen. It included USAID, whose website has vanished and which Musk has tried to kill, risking disaster both at home and abroad. As of midnight Monday USAID was to be merged with the State Department and its funding slashed. These moves have drawn protests both on the street and by Democratic lawmakers who call them “plain illegal.” Also affected: aid to Ukraine (now under negotiation), NGOs, and homeless shelters, EV funding, Ed. Dept. grants, clean energy grants, Meals on Wheels, Head Start, school lunches, child-care help, disaster relief, crime-fighting assistance, CDC health grants, and activity on NIH and NSF grants. Though Medicaid was supposedly spared, portalscrashed in all 50 states. A D.C. federal judge blocked this illegal pause nationwide on funds already allocated by Congress; another blocked it in 22 states, both temporarily; a partial pullback only added to the confusion. Times headline: Trump Kicks Congress to the Curb, With Little Protest From Republicans. Even Democrats are divided. And he’s banned all gender pronouns. Further disaster
More from Trump: disbanding a federal school safety board: viva school shootings! Dissolving the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities established by Ronald Reagan; one member commented, “It suggests that there’s a proactive hostility toward arts and humanities”; threatening NPR and PBS. Dozens of federal prosecutorswho investigated Jan 6 or Trump have been fired, also many senior FBI officials, kicking off an purge that could involve thousands of agents, drawing blowback. He’s also making steps toward dismantling the Education Department, and 1100 EPA workers might be fired immediately. The first bill Trump signed into law, the Laken Riley Act, makes undocumented immigrants merely accused of crimes such as shoplifting eligible for detention and deportation. He fired the head of the highly effective Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and allowed Elon Musk to take control of the Treasury’s payment system, as Congressional Republicans aim to strip healthcare from millions of Americans to fund tax cuts for the wealthy. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s first move was to roll back key fuel economy standards. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth revoked Mark Milley’s security detail, suspended his security clearance, and might demote him in retirement. Hegseth also stopped military recognition of Pride Month, Black History Month, Martin Luther King’s Birthday, Holocaust Days of Remembrance, and Juneteenth; some other federal agencies followed suit. Back on health, an epidemiologist explains “Why Jay Bhattacharya Does Not Belong Anywhere Near the NIH.” The CDC has been ordered to stop all collaboration with WHO, while weak public health measures cause tuberculosis outbreaks. Between conflicts of interest, lack of relevant experience, proposed privatization of Medicare, and low regard for science, Mehmet Oz is a rotten pick to run Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act, but his deputies seem a bit better. CDC pages reporting epidemiological data and treatment guidelines, especially about HIV and gender issues, have been purged (some are now back online), with other websites similarly censored. The CDC now demands retraction of all its researchers’ manuscripts containing terms like "gender" or "transsexual", flouting Timothy Snyder’s Lesson One: “do not obey in advance.” There’s pushback, also more advance obedience, this time from the NFL. And Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk is back on the warpath, letting states proceed with suits attacking medical abortion. More from NPR on how Trump could damage global health. One Clinton adviser thinks Trump is already failing. I’m not convinced. And don’t get me started on Kash Patel (more on him) or Tulsi Gabbard (more on her). Election denier lite and Trump U supporter Pam Bondi, newly confirmed as Attorney General, is on the job. Next to the Department of Humanity. On January 29, an Army helicopter collided with a commercial jetliner, drowning 67 people in the Potomac. After a few sketchy words as consoler-in-chief, Trump blamed federal diversity and inclusion efforts for the crash, earning him universal opprobrium. Vance quickly chimed in. Trump had just fired the administrator of the Transportation Security Admin. and members of a key aviation security group, failed to appoint an acting FAA chief, and included air traffic controllers in his buyout scheme. He lied that people with severe intellectual disabilities were recruited in the FAA, and viciously attacked an Episcopal bishop for the crime of asking him to “have mercy.” Among products likely to become more expensive due to Trump’s tariffs (paused briefly on Mexico and Canada but headed for the EU): tomatoes, avocados, and other produce, T-shirts, crude oil, automobiles, cellphones, toys, beer, lumber, suitcases, beef, TVs, laptops, and gasoline. Times headline: Trump Tariffs Threaten to Upend Global Economic Order. The Trump-friendly Wall Street Journal calls it The Dumbest Trade War in History. Imperialism, anyone? Trump wants to abrogate Jimmy Carter’s treaty giving the Panama Canal back to Panama, demanding the its return on the false grounds that China controls it. He wants to beg, buy, or steal Greenland from Denmark, within which it is a autonomous territory. Strong resistance from both Denmark and Greenlanders may bring him in conflict with the European Union. Not to speak of his mad call for Canada to become “the 51st state,” meeting fierce opposition, and his proposal that the US take over Gaza, expel its residents to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” This outlandish notion may have originated with $2-billion-from-the-Saudis Jared Kushner. Pushback from Saudi Arabia and Europe was immediate. A propos of Gaza, did you know that Joe Biden had held up delivery of 24,000 assault rifles to Israel. I didn’t. Trump seems to be reversing the hold, adding shipments of 2,000-pound bombs as a sweetener. Trump plans to dismantle the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, and already fired most of its staff. Just in time for another pandemic, which withdrawal from WHO makes more likely (bird flu?). He banned trans women from women’s teams. YES! RFK, Jr
JFK’s daughter Caroline Kennedy urged senators to reject her cousin’s nomination to lead HHS, in a letter to committee members. Beyond his lack of experience, misinformed views on vaccines, and financial stake in anti-vaccine litigation, she called him a “predator” who “led other family members down the path of drug addiction.” MedPageToday and Leana Wen on confirmation hearings where Kennedy was clueless about Medicare and Medicaid. The Finance Committee hearing focussed on his vaccine stances and abortion flip-flops, while the HELP committee once led by Bernie Sanders brought a little support. “Make America Healthy Again?” – in 1950, 589 people per 100,000 died of heart disease, in 2021, 210. For cancer that’s 194 (216 in 1990) vs. 144. While claiming vaccinating his own children proves he’s not anti-vaccine, he also says he regrets having done so, and that there’s no vaccine that’s safe and effective. His vaccines cause autism idea is based on a phony, retracted study by a disbarred physician, and other junk. It’s estimated that hepatitis B vaccines (which RFK thinks don’t work and cause autism) will save 38 million livesworldwide in people born between 2000 and 2030, between acute hepatitis, cirrhosis, and liver cancer. When Republican senator Bill Cassidy, MD (LA), at a hearing, read aloud proof that vaccines don’t cause autism, Kennedy dismissed it. On Tuesday Kennedy was approved by the Finance committee on a party-line vote 14 to 13, after Senator Cassidy caved fearing a primary challenge. Next he will face a full Senate vote, as yet unscheduled, which he’s likely to pass. A pro-RFK letter was titled Doctors For Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. but its nearly 800 signatories included both laypeople and physicians with revoked licenses. An anti-RFK MD letter has over 18,000 vetted and verified signatories. It turns out that in May 2021 RFK Jr petitioned the F.D.A. to “immediately remove Covid vaccines from the market,” months after President Trump had called them “a miracle,” and shortly before they were estimated to have saved 140,000 American lives. In some Florida counties nonmedical (primarily religious) vaccination exemptions for kindergartners in 2023-24 reached 50%, though no major religions prohibit vaccines. Kennedy’s influence? More on his pseudoscience. He’s claimed that early on the polio vaccine caused a wave of cancers “that killed many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.” In fact it’s saved 20 million people from paralysis and 1.5 million lives. The American Public Health Association warns if Kennedy gets in “people are going to die.” Prevention
With poor general uptake of the updated COVID-19 vaccine, it’s a relief to see that at least the sickest are getting vaccinated, like 83.3% of heart failure patients. A British observer blasted pandemic restrictions in UK universities, complaining they “were legally required to treat students as germs on legs. They were first closed down, then subjected to a range of bizarre ‘social distancing’ requirements.” Obviously the writer didn’t see the University of Illinois study finding that 90% of people on one campus would have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 without routine testing and isolation, or another showing that a campus vaccine mandate lowered viral levels in the entire surrounding community. Thousands of falsified COVID-19 vaccines have gone into arms in China, Africa, and India. British and Indian researchers think they know how to tell real vaccines from fakes. British researchers report that immunosuppressed individuals who don’t mount an adequate antibody response to COVID-19 vaccines have an increased risk of hospitalization. COVID-19 miscellany
The CIA has chosen this moment to weigh in on the SARS-CoV-2 leap vs. leak controversy, coming down, with “low confidence,” on the side of a lab leak. In addition to genetic and geographic evidence supporting animal-to-human transmission, scientists agree that the actual SARS-CoV-2 virus differs from anything that could have been designed in, thus leaked from, a virology laboratory, while Anthony Fauci said the differences between Wuhan Institute viruses and SARS-CoV-2 made the lab-leak hypothesis “molecularly impossible.” There is also zero evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was ever in any laboratory. Some have described vaccine misinformation a lasting side effect of COVID-19. Pandemic impacts
The academic losses suffered by American schoolchildren during the pandemic seemed to be retreating, but new data suggest some backsliding, especially among weaker students.Missed vaccinations and anti-vaccine conspiracies have caused massive measles outbreaks in Morocco, infecting 25,000 people and killing 120. It’s now five years since national and global COVID-19 health emergencies were declared, but people are still dying. American deaths are finally trailing off a bit, but in the month before January 19 there were at least 2300 deathsworldwide, mostly in the US. Fully 718,660 scientific papers with nearly two million authors have been published about COVID-19, peaking at 4.7% of all papers in September 2021 but still 1.9% in July 2024. Inequities
Schizophrenia is considered largely a matter of family history and brain chemistry, sometimes primed by cannabis and psychedelics, but Blacks have two to five times the rate of Whites in the US, perhaps even more in Europe. In Italy women are now 51.3% of all physicians and 60% of NHS physicians, but they’re only 19.2% of Chiefs of Service. Minority enrollment in US top colleges and medical schools plunged following the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action in college admissions. One of the webpages purged by Donald Trump is a CDC page about efforts to address racism as a driver of health disparities Department of for-profit medicine
2025 has already brought price hikes for prescription drugs in the US. But 15 more drugs are now slated for Medicare price negotiation under the Inflation Reduction Act: Ozempic/Rybelsus/Wegovy, Trelegy Ellipta, Xtand, Pomalyst, Ibrance, Ofev, Linzess, Calquence, Austedo, Breo Ellipta, Tradjenta, Xifaxan, Vraylar, Janumet, and Otezla. Most are new to me. Amazingly, the 15 new drugs plus the 10 in the first batch represent a third of Medicare Part D spending on prescription drugs. All contraceptives are free under Obamacare, but one young woman was charged $14,658 (eventually bargained down to $5,236) to have an IUD placed, because her insurance was a non-ACA-compliant plan that had been grandfathered in. Worse care under private equity. …in Italy thousands of fake dentists have been closed down, though many remain. The State of the Pandemic
The US winter surge is the mildest yet, with flu deaths just as high. The number of states with high or very high wastewater levels of SARS-CoV-2 dropped from 34 to 27 at last call (Jan. 25), though levels are climbing nationallyand hospitalizations and deaths rose through early January. In the EU, though, deaths are a quarter what they were in October. 2024 Lown Institute Shkreli Awards
tongue-tied baby
The awards, named for “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli, go to the perpetrators of the ten most egregious examples of profiteering and dysfunction in health care: #10: University of North Texas Health Science Center (UNTHSC) in Fort Worth dissected and distributed (i.e. sold parts of) unclaimed bodies without properly seeking consent from the deceased or their families. #9: Despite little evidence of effectiveness, baby tongue-tie cutting procedures are touted as a cure for everything from breastfeeding difficulties to sleep apnea, scoliosis, and even constipation, with most parents paying out-of-pocket. #8: Zynex Medical, a company specializing in nerve stimulation devices used for pain management, gets 70% of its income from unsolicited batteries and electrode pads. #7: A family was billed $97,599 for their baby’s life-saving emergency helicopter ride (see “Fauci Testifies”). #6: In 2023, there was a massive upsurge in Medicare billing for unnecessary urinary catheters (see “Ladapo Rides Again”). #5: Memorial Medical Center in Las Cruces, New Mexico, refuses cancer treatment to patients or demands upfront payments, even from those with insurance. #4: St. Peter’s Hospital oncologist (Helena, Montana) Dr. Thomas C. Weiner, the hospital’s highest earner, gave chemotherapy to patients without cancer, among other abuses. #3: Amgen peddled highly toxic doses of its $20,000 a month cancer drug, Lumakras, when a much lower dose was just as effective. #2: I’ve discussed many of the abuses of UnitedHealth. Here are more. #1: Dr. Ralph de la Torre, as CEO of Steward Health Care, orchestrated a dramatic healthcare debacle by prioritizing profits over patient care – see “Presidents Come, Presidents Go,” and “Suits, Misinformation, and Suicide.” - The Acadia methadone clinics I described in my last post. - Emory Hospital for losing a piece of a patient’s skull and charging him $19,000 for a plastic replacement. - A hospital CEO who embezzled $15 million. - A Brooklyn cardiologist who charged the government $100 million for fraudulent procedures and falsified records as a coverup. All posts and archives will always be free to all subscribers. But if you'd like to support me, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription..
© 2025 Susan Levenstein
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