Pissed-Off Doctors Aren't Enough to Combat Trump's Attacks on Public Health

[douglas9]

In response to the unspooling protections, groups of individual U.S. states have veered off in national schisms long found in U.S. public health. West Coast and New England states are establishing vaccine alliances whose policies supersede the CDC’s now-inadequate COVID-19 recommendations. In the other direction, Florida moved to ban all vaccine mandates for schoolchildren.

In op-eds in The New York Times and walkouts at the CDC, public health’s managerial class is punching back against Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s efforts to strip out federal-led public health research and policy.

It’s been a necessary and laudable response. It’s also telling that these very managers met protests against the Biden administration’s own eugenics-proximate response to COVID-19 with silence or dismissal.

Failure in deed matched failure in word. The Biden administration moved Paxlovid to the open market — at an exorbitant mark-up — and instituted an employer-friendly five-day recommendation for COVID-19 quarantine that the CDC subsequently dropped, entirely despite molecular kinetics showing high viral loads 10 days and on in many infected people.

What’s the point of all that peer-reviewed biomedicine the managers are defending if everyday Americans can’t access it? Is merely reverting to the policies and practices that helped set the stage for Trump’s return the correct strategy forward?

https://truthout.org/articles/pissed-off-doctors-arent-enough-to-combat-trumps-attacks-on-public-health/