If We Stop Tracking Measles/Cancer/Infant Mortality, We'd Have Very Few Cases, If Any
Man tapping his temple dot gif.
On Tuesday morning, the Trump administration fired some 10,000 employees from the Department of Health and Human Services. When you add in the nearly 10,000 other employees who took early retirement or accepted buyout offers/threats, that’s roughly a quarter of HHS employees eliminated. Who needs clean food or drugs that actually work? The Market will take care of that!
Among the HHS agencies hit by the layoffs are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health, all of which angered Trump supporters by saying COVID-19 was a deadly disease, which was treasonous.
And if we’d just stopped the testing, we’d have had fewer cases, if any.
That’s if we even know that it’s a pandemic, of course. Among the employees getting the ax are researchers who track infectious diseases, so we won’t have a firm idea of who's getting sick where, or from what. Even more important to the holy goal of not letting the government boss us around, the communications offices at multiple health agencies are being eliminated or cut to the bone, as NBC News details:
The entire team at the FDA’s office of media affairs was axed, according to sources familiar with the matter. Most of the communications team of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research — about 50 people — was also cut, according to a senior staffer.
That office’s work included managing public databases on drug approvals, such as information about potential risks of FDA-approved drugs and labeling, which are required by law to be published. The office was also responsible for managing the drug shortages database.
Just to prove what a great idea this was, Dr. Mandy Cohen, director of the CDC under Joe Biden, said that the cuts will “leave our country less safe, less prepared and without the necessary talent and resources to respond to health threats,” which is the point. Can’t very well mandate masks (which literally strangle you to death and make you die) or vaccines (which simultaneously don’t do anything but also kill you dead, while all diseases are harmless) if there’s nobody being paid to lie to Americans and tell them that chugging 30-weight motor oil doesn’t cure the common cold.
Is anyone saying people should drink motor oil for colds? Not yet, but we do have a secretary of HHS whose advice on measles is damaging kids’ livers. And now, if you want to urge people to guzzle Valvoline, you can probably do so without some government bureaucrat censoring you or saying it’s “bad for you.”
Reporter Marisa Kabas is keeping a running list of HHS offices that have been eliminated or gutted, and it keeps getting longer. We don’t need an office to track global HIV and tuberculosis anymore, you see, because America First.
And while you may think the Trump administration is TOUGH ON DRUGS, you should also know that, at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the firings include the entire staff of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which provides “population-based statistical data on alcohol, tobacco, drug use, mental health, and other behavioral health information.”
Why would we need any of that, anyway? There have been plenty of health statistics collected already. Why would we need more? We certainly don’t need to track infant and maternal mortality. Right?
Donald Trump helped set the stage for the mass firings last week by eliminating collective bargaining agreements for most federal workers with an executive order, because workers’ rights are just a signature away from not existing. HHS is just one of many agencies expected to be affected by that bit of Trumpfuckery, which also removed collective bargaining rights at other agencies connected to “national security,” including the departments of Justice, Treasury, and Commerce.
Well sure, that’s merely Trump’s pretext for the move, under the “Civil Service Reform Act of 1978.” But some smart weasel found the loophole, and we can all feel a lot safer that union workers will no longer get in the way of dealing with that great big national security emergency we’re having right now, whatever it it. No, not the entire national security staff talking about national security stuff on an easily hacked app. Some other emergency that might be harder to deal with if people aren’t immediately shitcanned.
The American Federation of Government Employees said it’s going to sue on behalf of the more than 820,000 federal workers it represents, but just in case, the Justice Department preemptively sued the union’s affiliates to let ‘em know who’s boss. Attorney General Pam Bondi said, with a perfectly straight face, “By affirmatively suing in Texas, we are aggressively protecting President Trump’s efforts to ensure unions no longer interfere in the national security functions of the government.”
The real emergency, as Trump readily acknowledged, is that those damned unions keep suing the Trump administration in an effort to stop the massive cuts to the government.
Don’t you feel safer already?
At the NIH, the AP reports, “the cuts included at least four directors of the NIH’s 27 institutes and centers who were put on administrative leave, and nearly entire communications staffs were terminated,” according to an anonymous leader at the agency who feared for their job.
But don’t worry! Some of those being shitcanned have been offered other jobs, like being transferred “to the Indian Health Service in locations including Alaska.” They have until the end of business Wednesday to decide.
Almost everyone at the FDA who’s involved in regulating tobacco was shitcanned, so hooray, that will go great with earlier cuts in cancer research.
HHS Secretary Brainworms insisted last week that the cuts were a great idea because even with a $1.7 billion annual budget, the agency “has failed to improve the health of Americans.” Oh, sure, you could point at any number of examples to the contrary, like the sharp decline in cervical cancer deaths among young women following the widespread adoption of the HPV vaccine. But some people still get cancer, and besides isn’t reducing rates of a disease that could only affect half of Americans a kind of DEI?
In any case, we probably won’t have to think about that anymore, because as we eliminate experts and their wasteful jobs, we won’t actually have so much troubling, America-hating data on anything. Whether it’s “medical science,” “climate change,” “employment statistics,” or other beloved liberal myths, Trump and Musk are out to get rid of the people who collect and distribute information, so there won’t be any meddlesome data to make Trump look foolish.
As a wise man once said, “facts all come with points of view, facts don't do what I want them to,” and that is a good reason to get rid of them. Only when we dethrone the false religion of facts can we listen to our Great Leader, the end.
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***there’s nobody being paid to lie to Americans and tell them that chugging 30-weight motor oil doesn’t cure the common cold.***
I told my doctor I drink a bottle of brake fluid every day.
"Do you think you have a problem," he asked.
"No," I said. "I can stop whenever I want to."
OT
https://bsky.app/profile/nycsouthpaw.bsky.social/post/3lltdxz6ats2r
Elon meant to lose yestersay, you guys.