The New York Times reported this morning: “The Trump administration laid off thousands of federal health workers on Tuesday in a purge that included senior leaders and top scientists charged with regulating food and drugs, protecting Americans from disease and researching new treatments and cures.”
While Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. suggested that eliminating 10,000 jobs would relieve the budget deficit, health personnel make up less than 1% of HHS spending; most funding goes to hospitals, doctors, and nursing homes.
Last Friday, the FDA’s top vaccine scientist, Peter Marks, resigned under pressure. Marks accused the secretary of trafficking in “misinformation and lies” in his campaign against vaccines, adding, “This man doesn’t care about the truth.”
Unfortunately, Kennedy, who has promoted vitamin A to ward off measles, has a following among parents who take him seriously.
The partial quotation in the headline above this post is from Michael T. Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. From Nature: “This will go down as one of the darkest days in modern scientific history in my 50 years in the business. These are going to be huge losses to the research community.”
And Americans will suffer and die as a consequence. This policy is worse than senseless. It is recklessly, callously harmful. All because Donald Trump craves attention and deference and the Kennedy aura, and Robert Jr. — after being rebuffed by Kamala Harris — offered his support for Trump’s campaign in August 2024.
Politics is often transactional. But seldom as stupid and destructive as Trump has made it. For years to come, Americans who could have lived and thrived, will be struck by diseases and many will die as a result of Trump and Kennedy’s misrule.
In 2023, 107,500 people — mostly children — lost their lives to measles, a highly contagious respiratory virus. In 2025, kids in Texas and New Mexico have died from measles. Yet the disease was considered eliminated in the United States in 2000 as a result of the MMR vaccine and high vaccination rates. Vaccine skepticism, now boosted by the nation’s cabinet official overlooking the health agencies, is taking a toll, as vaccine rates plummet.
And of course the harm of the misinformation and lies extends much further and wider than measles, a single infectious disease.
Whatever Make America Great Again conjures up for the true believers, this can’t be it, can it? A return to the good old days (before the vaccine became available) when there were tens of thousands of hospitalizations due to measles in the U.S. and hundreds of Americans, mostly children, died from the infection each year?