Meet America's Terrifying Line of Defense Against the Next Pandemic

I sure hope Bird Flu is weak against ginseng and vitamin D

Hard as it may be to believe, the most frightening thing about Trump’s second term isn’t Donald Trump. Shit, I don’t even know if he cracks the top five most frightening things. If history is going to repeat itself in the next four years then the sequel could be a blockbuster.

After the emergence of Covid it’s easy to miss, but scientists have known that Bird Flu, the catchier name of H5N1, has been trying to get into our soft warm bodies for decades. Though it can already infect a human being under just the right circumstances it’s still trying to hack the access codes and it’s getting closer. A couple of years ago when the height of Covid was still ravaging our world, H5N1 quietly unlocked the ability to infect cows.

Now that it’s getting to know the ways of mammal flesh scientists are trying to raise awareness of the sobering possibility that Bird Flu may finally crack human-to-human transmission within the next few years and spark up a brand new ultra-deadly pandemic, and just look who’s going to be in the White House when that happens! Again! Moreover, look who he’s bringing with him.

But look, no matter how much you may have hated the first presidency of Donald Trump, the one thing that his harshest critics “gotta hand it to him” for is his so-called Operation Warp Speed—the swift development and rollout of a vaccine for Covid-19 during the early stages of the pandemic.

Don’t get me wrong: There was very little about either Trump or his successor’s Covid response that warrants praise. It was and continues to be a tragic disaster. The positive spin here is that Trump promoted the development of a vaccine which spared a further untold millions of lives in spite of the administration’s incompetence.

He’s not going to make that mistake again.

See, of the precious few things the right actually could use to gel up bipartisan support for Donald Trump, vaccines are the best candidate, but it’s his side who rejects them. It’s one of the reasons he lost support on the right toward the end of his presidency and may arguably have contributed to his second term loss in 2020. His base largely don’t accept the premise or practice of vaccination—they don’t accept its mechanism or trust the science that develops it.

As I’ve pointed out recently, when the right talks about the elites or the establishment they are really just talking about the technocrats—experts, specialists, and educators. It’s how doctors and teachers can be considered “elite” while Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos aren’t. They don’t trust anything that runs counter to their intuition or that would interfere with their liberty, so medical science is intrinsically untrustworthy. The conservative ethos is that it’s much easier to believe Grandma’s ginger and arrowroot chicken broth prevents the seasonal flu than a mystery chemical you can’t pronounce developed by liberal city academics and administered by injection.

The former is old knowledge passed down by people you trust and who love you. The latter is some hokey garbage some people you’ve never met invented wholesale from their godless imaginations.

In the aftermath of his term in office, it rather comically became the task of his media pundits to make excuses for Trump and explain why people should still support him despite his apparent worrying belief in the efficacy of medicine. Candace Owens, who at this time was still employed by Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire because she had yet to reveal her fondness for anti-Semitic groypers, did a whole thing where she defended Trump to his audience on the basis that he’s an elderly man from a time when everyone believed in silly myths like the sun went around the Earth and vaccines were effective.

I have no idea whether Donald Trump thinks vaccines are legitimate or not. It seems likely he assumes they are but he’s not susceptible enough to human vulnerabilities for it to be much of a concern. His notorious Covid press conference kind of reveals that he doesn’t know or believe much of anything when it comes to medicine (contrary to the widespread myth, he did not tell people to drink or inject bleach, but he did suggest that doctors were looking at ways of putting disinfectants into the body somehow. It’s not as reprehensible as the bleach thing but it does betray he has no idea what he’s talking about and no interest in learning.)

But then, Trump is not a conservative. He’s not an anything. In almost all arenas of life and politics he professes whatever belief he thinks will earn him the most fame and wealth. What makes the incoming second Trump administration so dangerous is that he’s decided to surround himself with people who share this execrable reverse-utilitarian mindset

Throughout the first carnival ride, America’s health chief was an Eli Lilly Big Pharma stooge, Alex Azar, whose weak and ineffectual ultra-capitalist bullfuckery was right in line with what you’d expect from the kleptocratic grand American heist that was the Trump presidency. Azar was pathetic but at least he believed in vaccines in so far as any high corporate bastard believes in gouging people for products that work. When Covid came along and both Trump and Azar shat the bed immediately, they wisely deferred to an actual mega-expert, then-NIH chief Anthony Fauci.

And yes, current president Biden, in his final month, now needs to consider a fucking presidential pardon for Fauci, not because Fauci has committed any crime, but because the sliver of hope that Trump might respect norms for once in his life and adhere to a pardon might prevent him from sending Fauci to the electric chair for making Trump look like a massive bitch.

For those who are understandably worried about another four years of Trump, I have good news and bad news: The good news is that he’s doing things quite a bit differently this time around. The bad news is that he’s doing things quite a bit differently this time around.

By converting to communism? Maybe?

For what it’s worth, one of the foremost criticisms of Trump during his first term was his hypocrisy: He railed against “the swamp” but filled his cabinet wall to wall with Goldman Sachs. He could treat the presidency as an extended golfing holiday, you see, safe in the knowledge that things were being run by professionals who were, at the very least, competent in their corruption.

This time, having learned what I suppose you could call a lesson, Trump has decided to lean all the way in to the reality-TV-ification of government that he only flirted with the first time and fill his cabinet basically with people whose names you know from pop culture. At this point it’s reasonable to expect Judge Judy to be nominated for the Supreme Court.

The people are real. The cases are real. Viruses are fucking real.

This is all bad enough when we’re talking about Fox News hosts being put in charge of the Pentagon, but it’s a nightmare scenario for public health.

Chief among the charlatans who will be running Donald Trump’s traveling medicine show is of course Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who Trump has nominated to be the next Secretary of Health. Although he’s popularly misidentified as some sort of health expert, RFKayJay didn’t gain this reputation through the health or medical industries, with which he has zero qualifications or experience. Rather, he arrived there through conspiracy culture.

I mean, Scully was a doctor

Bobby-K’s uncle was famously assassinated in what has become something of the grandaddy of all American conspiracy theories, and he’s deeply entrenched in the “grassy knoll” camp. People who believe strongly in one mainstream conspiracy theory tend to share a lot of other beliefs in the greater Bullshit Cinematic Universe that includes all the conspiracy theories as well as alternative medicine and interesting ideas about who really built the pyramids.

For some reason, being anti-vaccination simply because that’s included in the starter pack of beliefs for people who find the Moon landing suspicious is sufficient qualification to be recognised as a health expert in right wing circles. And, again, Kennedy has no background in any field related to health. He’s a lawyer.

He’s also a weasel. The most insidious thing about Kennedy is his refusal to be upfront about what he actually believes. It would be one thing if he proudly embraced the anti-vax stuff like many others do, but his views about medicine and health science vary greatly depending on who he’s talking to and, bizarrely, he seems to be caught again and again doing Surprised Pikachu face when recordings made at private dinner parties get leaked, like the time he was caught claiming that Covid was engineered to spare Jews and Asians.

He has repeatedly claimed that he is not anti-vaccine even though he is chair of the anti-vaccine pressure group Children’s Health Defense. When talking to some people, he believes viruses are a lab engineered conspiracy, and when talking to other people, he doesn’t believe in viruses. Notoriously, he either does not or did not believe that AIDS was caused by a virus, professing instead that it’s a side effect of recreational drug use.

A while back when I was writing a piece about health misinformation on Substack I came across a conversation deep within Substack’s Twitter-esque Notes social media feed that I regret not investigating more deeply. It was a discussion between alternative health cranks that purported to be about their correspondence with RFK Jr. The issue with Notes is that there’s no search function and once the algorithm has something else to barf up you can’t go back to it. This user has since apparently deleted their account, so literally all I have is this screenshot I too kwith my phone and I don’t know what else to do with it other than post it every so often in an article like this one.

I obviously can’t prove this was a real email RFK sent to one of his fans and I’ll stress that as much as I’m legally required, but I personally believe it because it’s very much in line with the kind of shit that he says and his moral and intellectual cowardice. If true indeed then it’s a terrifying insight into the mind of the man who will soon be running America’s health system, and who does “not take a position” on whether the germ theory of disease is correct, but in the name of “strategy” will not clarify this publicly.

What is clear is that, whether he’s a conscious liar or simply very confused, he suffers from the need to be looked up to as a world class expert in something. But instead of doing the work to justify this perception he relies on sensationalism and a combination of deliberate and incidental misinterpretations of shit he doesn’t understand, based on clever “gotcha” research he stumbles upon in reams of ancient and taken out of context patent applications.

Is he just that desperate for attention or is there a grander motive? It’s probably relevant to this mystery to bring up the fact that his salary as chair of a “non-profit” anti-vaccine group was recently as high as $345 grand.

In any case, his proposals for heading the health department are all straight off the Alex Jones Bingo card of alt-science scarecrow woo horseshit. He’s going to take fluoride out of the water, citing some cherry-picked data he’s using to arrive at the preselected conclusions of American conspiracy culture (who largely believe fluoride is some sort of mind control chemical akin to chemtrails, which Kennedy also believes in).

Kennedy is also a heavy proponent of “raw milk,” which is a kind of nice-PR term for simply unpasteurised milk. The infuriating thing about the raw milk trend is that there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever not to pasteurise milk. Proponents will give you all sorts of justifications that largely amount to the claim that it’s “more natural.” And that’s true, in the same sense that eating your food off the ground with your hands is more natural than using a plate and fork, but the leap between that and “beneficial” is not a straight unbroken line.

How it would make sense for Kennedy to push for ending pasteurisation is if the purported correspondence in the screenshot above is legitimate and Kennedy secretly adheres to “terrain theory.” This was, at the time of Pasteur, the leading alternative to germ theory. Its modern day adherents still believe, as they did in the day, germs, microbes, bacteria, and viruses either do not exist or do not cause diseases, and that Louis Pasteur was a villain and a fraud.

If this does describe Kennedy’s beliefs then it also completely lines up with his AIDS denial, as well as his purported and terrifying plan to suspend research into infectious diseases entirely and focus instead on chronic disease. Again, terrain theory adherents don’t believe that infectious diseases exist at all.

Oh and by the way, remember how I said earlier that Bird Flu infects cows now? And pasteurisation kills the germs in milk? Guess what’s a significant transmission vector for Bird Flu at the moment? That’s right, raw milk.

Look, if nothing else convinces you, then just remember if you don’t pasteurise the milk you’re basically just putting your mouth on this

So RFK Jr is a terrifying enough person to find within a thousand degrees of separation from health policy during a pandemic, but he’s just the tip of the arrow. Joining him as the head of the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid will be, and I shit you not, Dr fucking Oz.

Mehmet Oz, of course, rose to fame as not even the only celebrity quack Oprah doctor to turn out as a far-right Trumpist crank.

He’s not even the stupidest one

Most recently, he ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in Pennsylvania, a race he failed due to losing a bunch of humiliating meme wars against John Fetterman.

Unlike Kennedy, Oz actually has a background in real legitimate medicine and is even an accomplished surgeon, which makes it all the more baffling that he either believes in some really stupid shit or lies about believing in some really stupid shit, for money.

He’s been repeatedly in legal trouble for peddling bullshit medical supplements and making false claims about “miracle cures” that are in fact just sugar and horseradish. Even though he’s been repeatedly busted for this he continues to be involved in illegal practices involving bogus supplements even as he’s awaiting confirmation to cabinet. I honestly don’t know what bodes worse for his upcoming high-level health administration role—is it the fact that he keeps trying to illegally promote crushed up fava beans and camel spit as the cure for cancer? Or is it the fact that he’s so astonishingly incompetent that he keeps getting busted for it?

Anyway, here’s Dr Oz promoting homeopathy:

For those who don’t know, homeopathy is the crown jewel of crank, fake medicine. It’s so fake that most other snake oil charlatans won’t touch it because it sounds so fucking fake. I once dated a naturopath who balanced her chi with crystal healing and told me how notoriously bullshit homeopathy is even among the alt-med community. Adherents will attempt to come up with a sciency-sounding explanation but you’re basically putting a magic spell on a bottle of distilled water.

Possibly the least insane candidate for Trump’s health cabinet is Jay Bhattacharya, who Trump is selecting to head the National Institutes of Health. Bhattacharya, whose name I’m really looking forward to hearing Trump try to pronounce, is a Stanford physician and a professor of medicine. By all accounts he doesn’t seem to think infectious disease is caused by HAARP or gypsy magic—great!!

He's an anti-wokeness, anti-cancel-culture guy, which is about the bare minimum that you would expect from a Trump admin pick, and in fact if his politics are at worst described as Reddit-reactionary then I’d be happy to take that, just as long as he’ll recommend chemotherapy for colon cancer instead of Jesus and ginseng.

“And my good friend, Dr Jay Batta-chihuaua. Batta-bing-batta-boom, great guy, I love the Indians. The Indians are great people, they say he’s the greatest witch doctor in his tribe.”

So how would he fare in a hypothetical Bird Flu pandemic? Well, here’s the thing. Yeah… here’s the thing. Read that in an ominous tone. Here’s the thing.

At the start of Covid, Bhattacharya was one of the chief authors of something called the Great Barrington Declaration, which was an alternative proposal for dealing with the pandemic that essentially ditched the masks and lockdowns and replaced them with, er, nothing.

To be clear, Bhattacharya et al accepted the scientific consensus that the immune system, and by extension, herd immunity is something that exists and works as advertised. The only thing is, they advised civilization should take advantage of that fact and let the virus rip through the population as fast and hard as possible, letting the strongest survive and, you know, you can lock Grandma in the attic until it’s over if you like.

Slammed by much of the medical community as “deeply unethical,” it’s nevertheless a sound-ish idea based on accepted science that allows for the best of both worlds: Humanity builds up an immunity more quickly and you still get to go out for a Big Mac maskless whenever you want. Don’t even wash your hands if you don’t want to.

It also relied on Bhattacharya profoundly underestimating the severity of Covid before its true mortality rate became clear. Something that it’s unclear Bhattacharya has taken any lessons from, as he now kind of just spends his time bitching about being suspended from Twitter.

That, by the way—his supposed social media censorship at the behest of a corrupt deep state cabal—seems to be the primary reason Bhattacharya was selected for this role, and it also happens to be complete garbage. Although his whiny social media bullshit was subject to the same level of moderation scrutiny as any one of us who tried to stir shit on an internet forum in the late 90s, even the heavily Trump-slanted Supreme Court ruled that there was zero evidence that him being chastised by The Mods had anyything whatsoever to do with the US Government. Nevertheless, he’s now going to be part of that government via his qualification as a a loud internet troll.

It would be remiss of me to end without mentioning Kash Patel, Trump’s pick for Director of the FBI. This isn’t a medical posting, but it’s one of the most batshit picks of his cabinet so far and not just because Patel looks perpetually like he’s just started “the bad part” of an ayahuasca trip.

I’VE SEEN THINGS

Patel is a QAnon guy with a hit list who will probably abuse his power going after Fauci and anyone else who supported any kind of health measure at the start of the Covid pandemic. And yes, this should be apparent as soon as I said QAnon, but he is vehemently anti-vaccine, even having run a business selling hilarious bullshit supplements called “Warrior Essentials” that he claimed would reverse the vaccine if you were forced to take it, like an Uno reverse card made of placebos.

So yeah, none of this is ideal. The optimistic news so far is that none of these people are actually confirmed yet and as the chances begin to look dim for some of Trump’s other hopeful cabinet confirmations there is room for hope that the Senate hasn’t lost every one of its marbles. But in any case, as a rule generally but for the next four years at the very least: Stay away from birds and pasteurise your damn milk.