Watch Out. The Plague Years Start Now

Since the inauguration of Donald Trump on Jan. 20, the greatest health sciences organizations in the world have been first silenced, then frozen or outright destroyed. The scale, speed and stupidity of the destruction have been breathtaking.

The Trump regime is doing this to its own people, especially those in states that voted for Trump, but the shock is being felt around the world.

It is a safe prediction that Trump’s attack on health science will result in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. And millions of lives will be diminished.

The damage began with an order to all U.S. health agencies shortly after the U.S. presidential inauguration: they were not to communicate with the public or with each other until a Trump-appointed official vetted every statement. Conference calls on issues like H5N1 avian flu were cancelled. No agency employees could travel.

The order ended all reviews of grant applications, halting research in hundreds of universities. It also caused a two-week lapse in the publication of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which every week for over 70 years has alerted the United States and the world to health issues.

When the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report did resume publication on Feb. 6, it carried reports on health effects of wildfire smoke in California. But two anticipated articles on H5N1 avian flu went unpublished. One article did appear in the Feb. 13 issue, about three bovine veterinarians who had been infected with H5N1; two had not been exposed to known or suspected H5N1, and the third didn’t practise in a state with known H5N1 infections in cattle.

The cautious conclusion: “These findings suggest the possible benefit of systematic surveillance for rapid identification of HPAI A(H5) virus in dairy cattle, milk and humans who are exposed to cattle to ensure appropriate hazard assessments.”

Whether the benefits are merely “possible” or dead certain, systematic surveillance will be rare in the United States for some time to come.

Among his other achievements as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Elon Musk effectively dismantled the Epidemic Intelligence Service, which trains its students to spot the first signs of a disease outbreak and then to act on their findings.

As part of the layoffs of 10 per cent of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s personnel, half of all its Epidemic Intelligence Service officers were fired, including the entire first-year class of the service’s two-year training program.

Ill-timed cuts to health services

Observers quickly noted that such cuts were ill-timed, since the United States is currently facing an ongoing H5N1 avian flu outbreak in both poultry and dairy cattle, a severe flu season with 24 million cases and 13,000 deaths, a serious tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas and measles outbreaks in Texas, Georgia, Alaska, Rhode Island, New York City and New Mexico.

In related news, just as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as U.S. secretary of health and human services, Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who teaches at Harvard Medical School, noted that the state of Louisiana will no longer promote mass vaccinations.

Dr. Faust also pointed out that the Trump-ordered “Make America Healthy Again Commission” did not even mention the two chief causes of U.S. children’s deaths — firearms and automobiles.

Dismantling USAID and threatening millions

While most of these measures chiefly affect Americans, Trump also began dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. Its 10,000 employees were reduced to 290. Trump referred to its leadership as “radical left lunatics,” while his State Department ordered the freeze of all programs — including the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, a program created by President George W. Bush that provides life-saving HIV-AIDS medication and treatment for 20 million people, including 500,000 children, worldwide.

A Trump-appointed judge issued a temporary restraining order against the freeze, and Doctors Without Borders warned that uncertainty about PEPFAR has compromised its ability to prevent new HIV-AIDS cases.

The question inevitably arises: What nation would do this to itself?

And what is all this in the name of? “Efficiency”? “Cutting waste”? “Saving tax dollars”?

These are pretexts, lies made by known liars like Donald Trump. They’re not even for the gullible voters who might believe them; they’re intended to remind skeptical voters that Trump can do this, lie to them and get away with it.

Dismantling U.S. health science will have other effects besides the simple display of unchecked power.

Research funds that would have gone to thousands of universities and laboratories will cease, forcing project cancellations and layoffs of highly skilled scientists and technicians. Many leading universities may not survive the loss of research funding.

That will be convenient for the Trump regime. U.S. university towns have dramatically moved left in the past 25 years, even in Republican-dominated states.

A financial crisis in universities will force their faculty and staff to spend their time hunting for new jobs rather than digging up information on health threats.

In his first term, Trump discouraged case counts as COVID-19 spread; his premise was that if you don’t count it, it doesn’t count.

Meanwhile, Kennedy as the head of Health and Human Services will be able to downplay outbreaks as mere rumours while calling attention to imaginary vaccine hazards — further confusing and alarming both health-care providers and their patients.

Health-care workers on their own

With health agencies silenced, doctors and nurses will have to figure out for themselves if they’re dealing with an outbreak of H5N1, flu, measles or other communicable diseases, and, if so, what to do about it.

Chaos in the health-care system will be another reason to ignore events outside the United States like the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and the trouble stemming from diseases that U.S. aid had suppressed until now.

The likeliest substitute for U.S. foreign aid will be assistance from China. African countries dealing with everything from Ebola to malaria to HIV-AIDS will be grateful to turn to China, which will soon become not only a reliable partner but an essential one.

And how will Canada fare when Trump’s tariff wars affect the costs of drugs and vaccines? We’ll be bombarded with fake news on social media platforms, and Canadian researchers will be under intense pressure to develop domestic equivalents to the immense pharmacopoeia the United States has built up in the past 80 years.

But we should be able to address concerns like tuberculosis in Indigenous communities, lack of vaccination in children and other urgent issues. With enough resources, Health Canada might be able to rebuild our Global Public Health Intelligence Network, which was downgraded to a purely domestic role just before the COVID-19 pandemic began.

By linking to its counterparts like the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the Global Public Health Intelligence Network could help Canadians and the rest of the world (including the United States). If, for example, H5N1 avian influenza ever learns how to transmit efficiently between humans, the Global Public Health Intelligence Network could save lives with guidance based on evidence and reliable updates, shared around the world.

The Trump regime has made 2025 a plague year. More such years will follow until the Americans come to their senses and restore their health agencies to something like their former power.

Until that happy day, we Canadians will have to rely on ourselves and our new friends overseas to stay healthy.