The St. Valentine's Day Health Research Massacre.

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QuackenVille

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as the Trump Administration's Health and Human Services director on Thursday, February 13th.

On Friday February 14th, the following happened, as reported by the pre-eminent US'ian science publication 'Science':

President Donald Trump’s administration today moved to fire 5200 workers at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), using supervisors across the vast agency to warn probationary employees that they would soon receive termination notices. It also fired the director and much of the staff of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a $1.5 billion agency created 3 years ago to fund high-risk, high-payoff research.

The move came on the first full day in office of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had promised to eliminate hundreds of jobs at federal health agencies “on Day 1.”

At the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), where institute directors were hastily summoned to a meeting this morning to alert them of the imminent firings, some 1500 employees were initially scheduled to be let go; at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) the number was 1269...

And, in addition to the generalized gutting of such agencies, there is also the surgical carving up of targeted initiatives:

...At CDC, many of the 50 or so members of the first year class of the Epidemic Intelligence Service—the agency’s prestigious “disease detective” training program for young epidemiologists—were notified they would be terminated. Three division directors in the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, a key front in pandemic prevention, were also on a list of targeted employees...

Clinician scientist David Gorski, who writes at 'Science-Based Medicine', had this to say about the latter:

...It’s almost as though RFK Jr. is trying other make us less prepared for another pandemic. No, strike that. He is, just because he hates what the CDC said about COVID-19, nonpharmaceutical interventions (e.g., masks, social distancing, business closures) to slow the spread of the virus, and, above all, vaccines...

Up here in Canuckistan there is a strain of science geek gallows humour going around about all the outstanding young American talent we will soon be recruiting to the Great White North. Personally, I am not laughing.


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No word yet as to whether Science, the magazine, has been banned from White House, CDC and/or NIH press conferences due to a lack of knee bending...Sound far-fetched?....Well, it turns out that the Associated Press has already been banned from Air Force One and the Oval Office for refusing to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico, which was first named thusly in the mid-16th century, some 200 years before the American revolution.


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