An oral history of a failson’s wanton destruction of the CDC

This detailed account of RFK’s war on public health in America is essential if harrowing reading [free link.] There’s so much here it defies effective excepting, so I’ll note that it bean at the beginning:

Tom Simon, former senior director for scientific programs in the division of violence prevention: There was an executive order about defending the Second Amendment that called on the attorney general’s office to examine how federal agencies interfered with gun owners’ rights. Political appointees from H.H.S. sent us a blank spreadsheet and asked us to fill in which of our programs interfered with gun rights. I told them we only evaluated prevention strategies to see if they worked; we had no authority to regulate or prohibit anything.

They took down the first-ever surgeon-general advisory on firearm violence, written by Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general who served under Obama, Biden and the first Trump administration. You’re trying to move the field forward, and you start to see very quickly that — wow, we are not just losing momentum; we are going backward.

Jonathan Mermin, former director of the National Center for H.I.V., Viral Hepatitis, S.T.D. and Tuberculosis Prevention: It seemed like someone had just run an A.I. algorithm to find any program with the word “equity” in it. You couldn’t even say that certain populations are more likely to get H.I.V. or sexually transmitted infections. When you explain the concept of health equity to people who are against D.E.I., most would say health equity is still consistent with what they consider appropriate work. But we did not have that chance.

It turns out “training AI by feeding it Fox News transcripts” is not an effective public health management system.

Needless to say, much of this has been lawless in addition to being awful on the merits:

Vi Le, former behavioral scientist for violence prevention: I did research on sexual violence and how to prevent it. We had programs that were proven effective, over and over, at reducing multiple forms of violence, including teen-dating violence, bullying, sexual violence. We had rape-prevention programs. Three out of four branches were basically wiped out. Entire programmatic areas, things that were congressionally mandated, just gone.

Aryn Melton Backus, former health communications specialist in the Office on Smoking and Health: At one point, somebody had gotten on a whiteboard, and as news of different programs came in, they were making a list of the ones that got cut. That was the main way we knew who had been fired, because H.H.S. would not release a list of all the programs that they cut. I was in disbelief. We thought that because Secretary Kennedy wanted to focus on chronic illness, the Office on Smoking and Health would be untouched. But they got rid of it completely.

Reading this will make you even madder at the American marginal voter than you already should be.