Dear Editor,
Can an entire country kill itself? We’re about to find out. Among all the self-destructive policies being pursued by this administration, I’ll focus on the one I spent my entire academic career studying: our medical response to infectious disease.
In 1796, Dr. Edward Jenner created the smallpox vaccine. But now, under Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is preparing to turn back the clock to before the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution, before the Age of Modern Medicine, and repudiate vaccines. Recently, the top vaccine official at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Dr. Peter Marks, resigned. In February, an advisory committee meeting on vaccines at the FDA was abruptly canceled. In response to a measles outbreak in Texas, which has sickened over 400 people, Kennedy has promoted alternative remedies, such as cod liver oil and vitamin A, instead of vaccines. When I visited my doctor last month, she said it was unclear whether flu vaccines would be available this fall, when I typically get vaccinated because my lung condition makes me more vulnerable to infections.
The implications of not having access to vaccines are dire. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that during the 2023-24 flu season, the flu vaccine prevented nearly 10 million “flu-related illnesses.” In any given year, as many as 52,000 people in the U.S. die from influenza, and that’s with a vaccine. When there’s no vaccine, the number of deaths will be far higher. And if we get an avian influenza outbreak? All bets are off as to how many will die. Kennedy has said that the current outbreak of avian influenza in poultry farms should just “burn itself out,” which was also proposed by some for human victims during the COVID-19 pandemic under the first Trump administration. Moreover, massive layoffs and cuts to HHS mean that we will be woefully unprepared, even less so than during Covid-19, should an avian flu outbreak occur among humans. Especially concerning is that development of vaccines and other treatments for pathogens, including the family of coronaviruses that caused Covid, were abruptly halted even though they were on the verge of important discoveries. Millions upon millions of people could die. I’ve spent my career studying the Black Death, or plague, which killed an estimated 50 million people in Europe in just a few years, between 1347 and 1353. Could a modern pandemic kill that many?
Under current conditions, I’d say yes. While I’ve greatly enjoyed studying the Middle Ages, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live through them. We’re about to do something unprecedented among developed countries: reject the benefits of modern science and medicine. Third World countries, which have no choice but to do without, must be looking at us and scratching their heads.
To use a medical analogy, one could say that Trump and his administration are a kind of cancer on the body politic. There are two ways to deal with cancer. One is to allow the cancer to spread and eventually kill the body. The other is to cut it out, which in a democracy means removing elected officials through the ballot box or by the constitutional means of impeachment.
We must step back from the edge and save ourselves before it’s too late.
John Aberth, Roxbury
