'“This is the stuff of nightmares,” virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen told me earlier this week, as she discussed the rising chance of bird flu mutating this flu season.
Hospitals are treating regular flu and bird flu patients in the same wards, increasing the potential for bird flu to pick up genes from other flu strains in a way that would facilitate human-to-human transmission.
With DOGE-mandated cuts destroying vital public health systems, “we’ve disabled our monitoring. We’ve disabled our response capabilities,” she explained. In other words, if bird flu starts circulating in the community, the public health surveillance systems that DOGE has gutted likely won’t catch it until it spreads exponentially and hospitals are overrun. “It’ll be like one day everything’s fine and the next day it’s a bird flu pandemic.”
Musk-Trump’s first month in office has represented such an all-out assault on the functionality of government that it’s hard to comprehend the totality of what is happening. But one way to view it is that each Trump appointee heading a different aspect of the federal system has their own destructive potential. When acting in concert, the result will be catastrophic.'
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in reply to grutjes • •"Musk-Trump’s first month in office has represented such an all-out assault on the functionality of government that it’s hard to comprehend the totality of what is happening. But one way to view it is that each Trump appointee heading a different aspect of the federal system has their own destructive potential. When acting in concert, the result will be catastrophic. We are already witnessing huge foreign policy shifts; the purging of the Justice Department, and the use of Justice Department resources to go after Trump’s enemies; the escalating human rights violations against immigrants; the politicization of the military and national security systems; the expansion of huge tax cuts for the wealthy, paid for by equally huge cuts to medical coverage for the poor; the attacks on the free press; the rampaging assault on anything to do with diversity, equity, or inclusion in the federal workforce, private sector, and federally funded institutions, including colleges and universities; the breakdown of any and all guardrails designed to prevent self-dealing and conflic
... Show more..."Musk-Trump’s first month in office has represented such an all-out assault on the functionality of government that it’s hard to comprehend the totality of what is happening. But one way to view it is that each Trump appointee heading a different aspect of the federal system has their own destructive potential. When acting in concert, the result will be catastrophic. We are already witnessing huge foreign policy shifts; the purging of the Justice Department, and the use of Justice Department resources to go after Trump’s enemies; the escalating human rights violations against immigrants; the politicization of the military and national security systems; the expansion of huge tax cuts for the wealthy, paid for by equally huge cuts to medical coverage for the poor; the attacks on the free press; the rampaging assault on anything to do with diversity, equity, or inclusion in the federal workforce, private sector, and federally funded institutions, including colleges and universities; the breakdown of any and all guardrails designed to prevent self-dealing and conflict of interest at the highest echelons of government; and an unprecedented assault on the concept of public health.
It’s the latter that has been on my mind this week."
(...)
"Cumulatively, these actions leave America grievously exposed to preventable disease outbreaks and raise the risk for the world of global pandemics. These actions are so fundamentally wrong that it’s hard to find any benign explanation for them. They represent the purest distillation of Musk-Trump’s nihilism. Of all the areas of destruction that DOGE is unleashing, it is in the field of science, and in medical research in particular, that the consequences will likely prove most devastating."
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