Trump's Crazy Creepy Public Health Blackout

"I Like My Numbers Being Where They Are"

One of the many first things President Trump did on his first day was muzzle communications from all thirteen divisions of the Department of Health and Human Services. The blanket order to shut down communication was so abrupt and so sweeping that researchers, scientists, medical personnel, federal public health officials, and their counterparts in state and local communities were literally in the midst of meetings when they were told to hang up their phones, or leave Zoom calls, or pack their briefcases and leave the room.

No reason was given, leaving local public health officials baffled and worried, and federal researchers unsure of the status of funding for ongoing projects, or who they were supposed to call if, heaven forbid, a health emergency erupted that needed to be communicated to medical personnel and the American public. (Like: we currently have an escalating bird flu crisis in this country).

The blackout memo was signed by acting HHS Secretary Dorothy Fink and stated that it would remain in effect until an “incoming Presidential appointee” (that’s Bobby “Brainworms” Kennedy to you and me) decided what to do.

News of this insane, mystifying act was reported, but no journalist, as far as I know, has yet extracted or published an explanation from the new regime. On the contrary, reporters who cover national politics are too busy trying to keep up with the "flood the zone with shit” strategy that Project 2025 promised, and which has now overloaded the neurons of people tasked with paying attention to daily blizzards of Trumpish commands, which range from wacky and pandering to cruel and consequential.

Allow me to offer an educated guess.

I covered the Trump administration’s response to the Covid pandemic in a book published in 2021 and updated in 2022. Researching it, I got to know members of the epidemiology and viral communities, in addition to receiving a crash course on the fascinating genetic science behind the mRNA vaccine. I learned a great deal about the history of vaccines and immunization programs and the importance of accurate science communication in a society rife with disinformation purveyors and chaos agents augmented by social media platforms.

I came away from the project with a greater respect and appreciation for the accomplishments of science than I had before.

For most of human history, our species was utterly helpless against disease. We died like flies of things that quacks and witch doctors believed were caused by witches or fog. It’s barely 200 years since we’ve been able to see the pathogens that kill us. And less than a century since mass immunization programs in America eradicated the annual terror of “polio summers” and the baby-killing scourges of diphtheria and rubella.

I could go on in that vein because modern medicine is truly one of the few things that humanity can point to with pride.

But we need to talk about Donald’s comms blackout, on the eve of the Senate considering anti-vaxxer, woo-deluded, conspiracy aficionado RFK Jr (about whom I wrote more here at “We need to talk about Bobby”) to oversee the world’s largest funder of biomedical research and the agencies and experts that are supposed to keep Americans informed about and protected against health threats.

I’m actually not that mystified by the silencing. I remember at the murky, foggy, panicky dawn of the pandemic, when President Trump decided to keep a cruise load of Americans on a Covid-infested ship offshore because, as he put it, “I like my numbers where they are.”

Most Americans recall the pandemic as a time of mass confusion. Part of the reason for that was the ongoing public relations effort by the President to diminish the danger (“like the flu”), to weigh in from the bully pulpit of the White House on quack pre-vaccination cures (“bleach", hydroxychloroquine and “sunlight”), and to constantly contradict his own experts (some of whose names are on the retribution list).

While average Americans spent 2020 panicked about their health, their jobs, and their kids’ disrupted education, the President was laser-focused on his own re-election, which he assumed depended on how the public and Wall Street reacted to the shocking numbers of dead and sick. He liked those numbers low.

But there was a problem. Facts got in the way of the What Me Worry? PR project. His own CDC was tracking COVID-19 deaths and publishing them in a weekly document called the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The MMWR has been published in some form since 1930. The mortality report tracks deaths from various causes. It includes updates on disease outbreaks around the country. If something really nasty is popping up in clusters around the country, or if some new study reveals something dire or important about a drug, if ICUs are filling up with people who can’t breathe, this report gets the word out.

Doctors rely on it. Hospitals rely on it. State and local public health agencies rely on it. Without it, they’re flying blind in the face of pathogens that, thanks to modern science, we can actually do something about in time if everyone is informed.

Guess what’s not being updated for the first time in nearly a century?

If that shocks you, it shouldn’t. You’ve probably just forgotten how the Trump administration handled the Covid pandemic (don’t feel bad, historians and researchers find a kind of amnesia about pandemics is a common human reaction).

The whole game was to keep us in the dark, blithely unmasked, maybe catching “just the flu,” pretending Trump was actually presiding over a Golden Age, deserving of four or maybe more years.

To jog your memory about how Trump handled that real emergency, here is a passage from my book:

Even before Trump announced he liked the numbers low, members of the pandemic-preparedness community—scientists, medics, policy planners outside the government who studied and made policy recommendations for just such emergencies—were growing more alarmed. No one could yet quite believe the federal government of the United States was standing down in the hour of the nation’s greatest need.

One of those in shock was health systems expert Dr. Bruce Y. Lee, a CUNY professor and analyst. “In March, people in the community were clamoring, Do something,” he said. “They were clamoring all over the place, on social media. Public health experts were saying, publicly, Do this. This is what you should do. And the response from the White House and from the administration was actually not to do anything. . . . The messaging wasn’t there; instead, there’s this mixed messaging, talking about how, Oh, maybe this may go away, or, We’re rounding the corner, or whatever synonym you want to have of that statement. Rounding the corner. I never want to say one hundred percent, but I can’t think of a single public health expert or infectious disease expert who believed that we were rounding the corner in March. It was quite the opposite. Most everyone that I talked to agreed that we were only at the beginning of a huge problem.”

The CDC, when it works, functions as a kind of nexus for experts, especially in pandemic preparedness. As awareness of the scale of the challenge grew in February and early March the pandemic-preparedness community was buzzing with alarm, sharing data and information. It amounted to a massive human resource waiting to be tapped.

But no one from the federal government reached out. And none of them knew whom to call on the inside.

When I read about the HHS comms blackout, I thought immediately of Dr. Lee. I wondered what he and the public health community outside the federal government were thinking. So I called him and we talked about the community’s concerns.

One worry of course is the bird flu, which has affected hundreds of millions of farm animals. So far, there have been only a few human cases, and most – but, he told me, not yet all – have been definitively ruled not to be human-to-human transmission.

But something else about bird flu spread concerns experts like Lee. The virus is now infecting farmed pigs, where viruses tend to undergo a high “reassortment rate,” that is, mutations. And that’s potentially bad news for humans.

“The concern is that at some point there will be enough mutations so that this thing can not only infect humans, but the key thing is spread from person to person,” Dr. Lee told me. “The big question mark is will we get to the point where you have person-to-person transmission. If that's the case, then we have to be ready for this because you're talking about a novel virus that might spread. This is not a good time for communications to be ceased.”

Epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists are concerned that the blackout presages a new public health communications system that routes factual data through political channels to be assessed for effect before being disseminated.

“Back in 2020, there was that situation where there was concern about - there was a difference between the administration and MMWR and what CDC was putting out there. So the concern is that maybe it's some way of specifically coming up with a plan to then make sure that all these kinds of communication go through a central source first,” Dr Lee said.

I think we know where that “central source” would be. And no one in that room of political schemers, not Don, or JD, or Susie Wiles, has an M.D., or for that matter has ever evinced an iota of concern for the common good.

The Trump HHS blackout order is set to end February 1, by which time, perhaps, anti-vaxxer Bobby will be overseeing the agency. And we can all breathe a sigh. Of dread or relief? Depends.

Hopefully not a cough.

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NOTE TO READERS:

Thank you for subscribing. If anyone wants to upgrade to annual paying status (it costs less than a Starbucks caramel latte and a bag of bodega peanuts per week) this week, I will send you a signed copy of my book about the pandemic, Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic. It is packed with amazing (to me and I hope to you) bits of science history, an informed analysis of the hideous politicization of the 2020 trauma, and a post-mortem into the tsunami of disinformation, lies, and, as we see now, malicious vengeance - not against the virus but against knowledgeable, devoted humans who tried and are still trying to keep us informed and safe.