The damage already done

The Trump administration's cuts are already harming people

For years, I’ve thought about the damage wellness misinformation causes in the real world. Three scenarios often come to mind:

• The most dangerous: people choose not to see a doctor and forgo the care they need, something we covered in the final chapters of Conspirituality

• The most expensive: people waste money on things like supplements that do nothing for their health

• Rare, but important: all chemicals, even in the form of supplements, have contraindications; while pharma companies need to list every known potential side effect and contraindication on the packaging, supplements manufacturers do not

What no one has brought up—and to be clear, I don’t think it was possible to bring up before this year—is what happens when an anti-vaxxer is put in charge of all American health agencies?

We’re starting to find out. And it’s much, much worse than any of the above issues.

Here’s brief rundown of some of the existential problems we’re now facing when it comes to health.

• The administration cut $800M in funding to Johns Hopkins University, which ranks 1st in biomedical engineering and 2nd in medicine and biology out of all American universities. They were immediately forced to cut over 2,000 jobs. These cuts impact the university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, its medical school and affiliated non-profit for international health. And the lack of funding means one of our top research universities is no longer going to be able to conduct research.

• The NIH cut or canceled over 40 grants focused on vaccine hesitancy or improving immunization levels. After that move, the agency’s acting director requested information about mRNA vaccine research, leading some to speculate that those will be cut next.

  • KFF Health News recently reported that the NIH has directed all scientists to remove references of mRNA from grant applications. This comes at a time when cancer researchers are discovering that a new wave of mRNA vaccines could actually provide a moon shot. This move could also stunt research on mRNA vaccines to combat influenza and bird flu.

• The FDA, which falls under HHS, canceled an annual meeting of independent vaccine advisers for the 2025-26 influenza season, then made its recommendations without their input. Only strains selected by the FDA are allowed to be distributed in the US. Normally, the WHO and FDA are in lockstep, as they meet twice a year to discuss this vaccine. This is usually public knowledge, but now the recommendations were published without any information on who selected them, or why.

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• HHS sent all 80k employees a $25k buyout offer to leave their jobs. While there has yet to be an official number of workers that have accepted this offer, according to the White House, 77,000 employees across all federal agencies have accepted a buyout (including HHS). This is on top of thousands of probationary employees being fired across agencies in the last two weeks.

• The CDC is planning a large-scale study on a potential link between vaccines and autism, despite decades of research showing there is none. Given the new crop of anti-vax publications posing as scientific journals, we can bet they’re going to magically find a link and publish it in one of these journals, further spreading this horrendous myth.

• HHS and USDA announced they’ll be updating dietary guidelines. These are updated every five years, so there’s no backend finagling going on in terms of schedule. Yet given RFK’s recent advertisement for beef tallow and his known distrust in seed oils, we should be very concerned about what these guidelines state.

• The NY Times recently crunched numbers revealing what a year without USAID intervention means in terms of deaths, and it’s startling:

  • H.I.V. prevention and treatment: 1,650,000

  • Vaccines: 500,000

  • Food aid: 550,000

  • Malaria prevention: 290,000

  • Tuberculosis prevention: 310,000

A federal judge recently blocked Elon Musk from firing anyone else at USAID. Given that the Trump administration is ignoring court orders, however, there’s no telling whether or not DOGE will comply.

While the USAID numbers are horrifying, that still has little to do with what’s going on in Kennedy’s HHS. What we know for sure is that it’s going to be a long four years, and our health is certainly going to suffer for it.