RFK Jr. is not a serious person. Don't take him seriously.

Well, president-elect Trump has announced that he will nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), putting him in charge of most of the nation's public health and medical research.

I can't say strongly enough how unqualified RFK Jr. is for this job. He isn't qualified to come anywhere within a thousand miles of any medical or science-related issue, much less to be in charge of health policy for the whole country. Virtually everything RFK says about science is wrong–actually, it's worse than that, because he speaks with such absolutely certainty, despite being wrong, that he convinces people to take actions that end up hurting themselves. To a normal person, someone not accustomed to lying so boldly, these claims can be convincing.

Since Trump's announcement of the nomination, I've been seeing columns in major media outlets (I'm looking at you, New York Times and Washington Post) saying things like "hey, some of RFK's ideas aren't entirely wrong." 

Just. Stop. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Don't take RFK Jr., or his nomination, seriously.

I don't want to try to list all of RFK's mistaken views, which would require a book-length column, but here are a few. Just last year he said, on the Lix Fridman podcast, that "there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective," and that the polio vaccine did more harm than good. (Both of those statements are wildly wrong.) In 2005, he wrote a long essay for Rolling Stone and Salon which claimed that thimerosal-containing vaccines cause autism (they don't), and that the government knew about it and had been covering it up:

“The story of how government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public is a chilling case study of institutional arrogance, power and greed.” [quote from RFK Jr.]

The article was full of dramatic claims like this one. The only problem was, all of them were false. Rolling Stone and Salon eventually retracted the article and deleted it from their websites. 

In 2019, Kennedy visited the island nation of Samoa to spread his anti-vaccine message, sponsored in part by his anti-vaccine organization, Children's Health Defense. (The name is highly misleading.) Vaccination rates plummeted, and just a few months later a tragic measles outbreak began, causing 83 deaths and 1,867 hospitalizations. Kennedy published an article afterwards calling it a "mild measles outbreak," and in the same article claims (falsely) that vaccines themselves, rather than measles, caused the deaths.

RFK Jr. is someone who never admits he was wrong, even (or especially) when his mistakes cause the deaths of innocent children. Instead, his conspiracy-addled brain blames someone else.

And that's only a tiny sample of RFK's misinformation. He also loves raw milk, which I wrote about in 2014 and again in 2023. Raw milk sometimes contains nasty bacteria and viruses, but fortunately Louis Pasteur solved this problem in the 1860s, when he invented what we now call pasteurization. As I pointed out in my 2023 piece, bacteria just love raw milk. And you know what else is in raw milk but not pasteurized milk? Cow poop. Just don't tell this to RFK Jr. 

By writing columns saying "RFK Jr. has some good ideas" (which I won't link to, since that's just feeding the beast), media organizations are falling into a trap: they're taking RFK seriously. I'd like to ask these journalists: if Trump nominated a first-grader instead, would you write similar stories? Maybe something like "hey, this nominee has some good ideas about nutrition!" 

Don't do it. This nomination deserves ridicule and scorn, nothing more.

I've written multiple columns (both on this site and at Forbes, my former site) warning about RFK Jr. and his dangerous anti-vaccine craziness, starting with this 2014 piece where I called him out for his efforts to lobby Congress against vaccines. His primary obsession then–and he still has this obsession–was the mistaken notion that thimerosal, a harmless preservative that isn't even used in vaccines today, causes autism. This claim has been thoroughly debunked in multiple studies. 

In 2017, I wrote about "Trump's lovefest with anti-vaxxer RFK Jr." – a lovefest that apparently still continues, seven years later. That column was about Trump's promise to put RFK in charge of a commission on vaccines. Fortunately, that vaccine commission never happened, but today we face a much more dangerous threat, if RFK Jr. is confirmed as Secretary of HHS.

I've also pointed out that Kennedy is one of the "Disinformation Dozen," a group of twelve people who, as reported by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, was responsible for 65% of all the anti-vaccine disinformation online. And earlier this year I asked how he could possibly be so arrogant as to think he's qualified to be President, given that his only claims to fame are his name, which he inherited, and his anti-vaccine notoriety.

My problem with RFK Jr. is not just that he is wrong about vaccines, although that is the most immediate threat to public health. But he's also an idealogue, someone who holds onto his mistaken ideas despite mountains of contradictory evidence, and someone who simply makes up things to "prove" his points. 

And in that quote from him above, where he uses the phrase "institutional arrogance," highlights another danger: RFK Jr. is the one who is arrogant. He believes that he can substitute his own unsubstantiated beliefs for the knowledge of genuine experts, and why? Because he's a Kennedy, a man who has lived a life of great privilege, getting into Harvard as a "legacy" despite being expelled from prep school over his drug use, all the while pretending to be fighting against the system. He is too arrogant to listen to others, or to admit his mistakes.  

So no, I cannot take this nomination seriously. Children will die if RFK Jr. is put in charge of HHS. There are tens of thousands of people who are far, far more qualified than Kennedy, and I hope the Senate will refuse to confirm him. I'm not optimistic, but I hope a few Senators will look at the man's record and treat him with the scorn he deserves.

Can the SARS-CoV-2 virus damage the brain?

A certain very famous politician came down with Covid-19 recently, and has been acting even more erratically than usual. This has led a number of pundits (and some doctors) to speculate that this politician’s behavior might be a symptom of his ongoing infection. Could this be true?

Well, maybe. Most of the attention around Covid-19 has been focused on the damage that the SARS-CoV-2 virus causes in the lungs, which can lead to difficulty breathing, the need for a respirator, and even death. The virus has the ability to replicate explosively in a person’s lungs, not only causing serious damage but also triggering an over-reaction by the immune system, a so-called “cytokine storm” that itself can kill you, even if the virus doesn’t.

However, numerous reports have shown that the virus gets into many other tissues besides the lungs, including the brain. Just this week, a new study out of Northwestern University School of Medicine found that over 80% of patients with Covid-19 had at least some neurological symptoms. 80% is a startlingly high number.

While that sounds alarming, let’s look at the details. The new study looked at 509 Covid-19 patients, all of them admitted to hospitals in Chicago. These were “consecutive” patients, meaning that the investigators didn’t cherry-pick their subjects, but just took 509 in a row. That seems sound.

Most of the symptoms, although definitely affecting the brain, were mild. 38% of the symptoms were headaches, and 44% were “myalgias”, which refers to aches and pains throughout the body. (Note that some patients had more than one type of symptom, so the numbers in the study add up to more than 100%.)

However, 32% of the patients had encephalopathy, which can be much more serious than a simple headache. According to NIH, encephalopathy can involve:

“loss of memory and cognitive ability, subtle personality changes, inability to concentrate, lethargy, and progressive loss of consciousness.”

Does this sound like any of the behaviors we’ve seen in our most famous infected politician?

The new study is not the first one to report neurological symptoms caused by Covid-19. Back in July, a research team from University College London reported multiple cases of neurological problems in their cohort of 43 patients. They observed not only encephalopathy (in 10 patients), but also encephalitis in 12 other patients and strokes in 8 more. Some of the patients in that study were reported as experiencing “delirium/psychosis,” and strokes often cause permanent brain damage. Clearly, the SARS-CoV-2 virus can cause serious health problems, and disturbing behavioral changes, if it gets into the brain.

None of this means that any current political leader is experiencing an altered mental state. We don’t have a direct test that measures whether the virus is present in a person’s brain, so all we can do is observe symptoms and make inferences from those. The best available evidence today, though, shows that for anyone with Covid-19, neurological problems are definitely something we should be worried about.

What do Trump and Yale Medical School have in common? Both were duped about hydroxychloroquine

Hydroxychloroquine, promoted just a few short weeks ago as a cure for COVID-19, is useless.

Actually, it's worse than that. Hydroxychloroquine causes heart arrythmias, which can be fatal. Data from early trials of hydroxychloroquine show that it is killing people, not saving them.

Why, then, are so many people talking about hydroxychloroquine? The answer is a tale of scientific hubris and incompetence bordering on fraud. It's also a tale of how Yale Medical School and the Trump administration both fell for it.

Part 1: the hubris of a French "science star."
Last week, the New York Times ran a lengthy profile of Didier Raoult, a French microbiologist who the Times lauded as a "science star." Raoult vaulted into the public eye in March, when he published a very small study claiming that a combination of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, and the antibiotic azithromycin could cure COVID-19. Claimed Raoult:

"We know how to cure the disease" (Didier Raoult, quoted in the NY Times)

Actually, Raoult's proclamations began earlier, on February 25, when he posted a video on YouTube called "Coronavirus, game over." Not surprisingly, the world took notice. (Note that as the evidence for his so-called treatment evaporated, he re-titled the video "Coronavirus, towards a way out of the crisis.")

Raoult's study was deeply flawed, and it has been taken apart by multiple scientists, so I won't repeat all their points here. A good summary of many of the flaws was written by Elisabeth Bik, first on Twitter and then in a blog article, back in late March. Among other flaws, the study dropped 6 of the 26 patients who were given hydroxychloroquine without explaining why. One of those patients died. “My results always look amazing if I leave out the patients who died,” Bik commented.

Raoult is not happy with Dr. Bik. He recently called her a "witch hunter" on Twitter. This apparently is not unusual for Raoult; the NY Times compares his psychology to that of Napoleon. I wonder what he'll call me after this article appears.

In addition to its serious flaws, the paper was published in a journal whose editor-in-chief, Jean-Marc Rolain, was also a co-author on the paper. Even worse is the fact that, as the journal itself notes, the paper was accepted just one day after being submitted. Clearly, this paper did not undergo careful peer review, and it reeks of extremely sloppy science.

Since then, several larger, better-run studies have either found no benefit for hydroxychloroquine, or found actual harm. To be specific, a study of 368 patients in US Veterans Administration hospitals found that the mortality rate in patients given hydroxychloroquine was 27.8%. Patients who received both hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azythromycin had a mortality rate of 22.1%. But patients who did received neither one had a mortality rate of 11.4%.

In other words, giving patients hydroxychloroquine doubled their risk of dying.

One final note about Didier Raoult: he has a truly unbelievable number of scientific publications, over 2,800 according to PubMed. From 2012-2019, he averaged 176 papers per year, or about one paper every two days. Speaking as a scientist, it simply isn't possible that he made any real contribution to the vast majority of these papers. The NY Times explained that Raoult puts his name on every paper published by his institute, which employs hundreds of scientists. Again, speaking as a scientist, this is grossly unethical. No scientist should put his/her name on a paper unless they made a genuine scientific contribution to it. At many universities, Raoult's behavior would be grounds for dismissal.

Part 2: Trump and Yale Medical School fall for it.
As the NY Times reported, and as most of the U.S. knows, Trump began touting the benefits of hydroxychloroquine at a news conference on March 19:

“I think it’s going to be very exciting. I think it could be a game changer and maybe not. And maybe not," Trump said.

Right. Soon after that, the FDA, "under what appears to have been strong pressure from the Trump administration," issued an emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine.

Medical experts, including NIAID director Anthony Fauci, quickly injected a note of caution, pointing out that the evidence was very preliminary, and that we needed better studies. Nonetheless, Trump and his political allies ran with the news that a "cure" was available. They were wrong.

Perhaps most disturbing, though, was the behavior of some highly regarded doctors, who also fell for Didier Raoult's hype. One might excuse politicians for being fooled–they don't have the training–but the same excuse doesn't work for a medical expert.

And yet on March 26, Yale Medical School boldly tweeted out its "Treatment algorithm for COVID19," promoted with two megaphone icons:

Attached to the tweet was a graphic of a flowchart, showing that the first steps in their treatment algorithm were hydroxychloroquine and atazanavir. At the time, I replied to their tweet and warned them that there was no good evidence for their recommendations. Their response:

"While there are no FDA approved treatments for COVID19, this protocol is based on available knowledge, personal observations & communications from other institutions. In the absence of firm evidence for best treatments, this is intended as a working document & subject to change."

Well, at least they responded. But in their response, they admit that their protocol is based on anecdotal evidence and little else. This is seriously disappointing, coming as it does from one of the nation's top medical schools. It also displays hubris not that dissimilar from Didier Raoult's.

Now that more evidence has emerged, and we know that hydroxychloroquine doesn't help and probably harms COVID19 patients, has Yale updated its treatment protocol? Well yes: they tweeted out a new algorithm on May 15. Now it says:

"Consider hydroxychloroquine x 5 days with close cardiac monitoring."

This is truly appalling. The only evidence of efficacy was the small, badly-run study promoted by Didier Raoult, which has now been contradicted by much larger, better run studies. We now know that hydroxychloroquine is harmful. Others on Twitter quickly questioned the new Yale recommendation, but it's still there as of this writing.

So there you have it. As of this writing, many so-called experts are still pushing the use of an ineffective, dangerous drug that doesn't help, and may harm, people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. A bogus claim promoted by a self-important, egotistical scientist who published a sloppy study in a journal run by one of his co-authors turned into millions of doses of medication wrongfully prescribed.

And for now, Yale Medical School still hasn't admitted any error. I'm waiting.

[Note: I am an alumnus of Yale University, and I have long been one of its biggest fans. I did not attend medical school there, but their unscientific behavior is nonetheless especially disappointing to me as an alum.]

NIH institute purges climate change references, but not very well

Last week, one of NIH's institutes, the National Institute for Environmental and Health Sciences (NIEHS), did something rather mysterious. The institute purged references to climate change on its website by replacing the phrase "climate change" with "climate."

For example, a page formerly titled "Health Impacts of Climate Change" is now titled "Health Impacts of Climate," a title that obscures the main point of the page's content, which is all about climate change. Another page formerly called "Climate Change and Human Health" is now called "Climate and Human Health." Ironically, the web addresses of both these pages still contains the term 'climatechange':

•   https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/programs/geh/climatechange/health_impacts/
•   https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/programs/geh/climatechange/

which is something of a smoking gun showing the after-the-fact alterations. The attempted purge was first revealed by the nonprofit group EDGI, a group dedicated to addressing "potential threats to federal environmental and energy policy." The Washington Post revealed that these changes were made by Christine Flowers, the NIEHS Director of Communications. As quoted in the Post, Flowers explained that:

"It’s a minor change to a title page, but the information we provide remains the same. In fact, it’s been expanded."

True, the contents of these pages seem to be unchanged. But in that case, why change the titles and headings? Clearly something more is afoot. Is NIEHS trying to pretend that climate change isn't real, or that it has no effect on human health? If so, this would undermine the very mission of the institute. Are the NIEHS staff fearful that one of Trump's minions will attack them for describing objective scientific facts? If so, perhaps they should get another job.

NIEHS's attempt to re-write its own history has been woefully ineffective. It's easy to find other NIEHS webpages devoted to climate change, such as:
https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/climate-change
which has the title "Climate Change" right at the top, and which links to a major report called "The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: A Scientific Assessment." There's also the NIEHS Climate Change and Environmental Exposures Challenge, a competition sponsored by NIEHS to create graphical visualizations showing the effect of climate change on health.

The WashPost story did not mention whether the NIEHS director, Dr. Linda Birnbaum or her boss, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, had plans to restore the original language to the website. I've written to them both to ask, and I'll post an update here if they do.

Reject this incompetent Trump appointee

Sam Clovis standing next to Trump during the campaign.

Trump has nominated a non-scientist to be chief scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This is an outrageous slap in the face to science. It's also a slap in the face to Congress.

As I predicted back in May, Trump has nominated Sam Clovis, a former right-wing radio talk show host and failed Senate candidate from Iowa, to be the chief scientist of the USDA. ProPublica was the first to break this story, and they also pointed out that Clovis was a vocal climate change denialist. Clovis has an undergraduate degree in politics and graduate training in business, but he has no formal training in science at all.

Clovis does have one qualification, though. As ProPublica pointed out, he has been a "fiery pro-Trump advocate on television." Sounds like a good candidate for a chief scientist job to me.

Fortunately (perhaps), the Senate has to approve this appointment. The Senate itself stipulated, in a bill that Congress passed in 2008, that the USDA's chief scientist (the Under Secretary for Research, Education, and Economics) must be appointed from

"distinguished scientists with specialized or significant experience in agricultural research, education, and economics."

The law also says, just to make it crystal clear, that the Under Secretary "shall hold the title of Chief Scientist of the Department."

Why is this appointment so wrong? I'll repeat what I wrote back in May:

Overseeing the USDA's research programs requires strong expertise in biological science. A non-scientist has no basis for deciding which research is going well, or what questions need further study, or which questions present the most promising avenues for research. A non-scientist is simply incompetent to choose among them–and I mean this in the literal sense of the word; i.e., not having the knowledge or training to do the job. This does not mean that I think Sam Clovis is incompetent at other things; I don't know him and he might be very capable in other areas. Among other problems, a non-scientist leader of a scientific agency will be incapable of using scientific expertise to set priorities, and instead can make up his own priorities.

If the Senate has any backbone at all–if Republicans are willing to show that they are capable of doing something other than rubber-stamping every action, no matter how damaging, of our self-absorbed, ignorant President–then they will turn down this nomination. Sam Clovis is so obviously unqualified that this should be easy to do.

Actually, if Mr. Clovis cared about the USDA's mission, he would recognize that he's the wrong man for the job and refuse the nomination. Even Dan Glickman, the former Secretary of Agriculture, said "I wouldn't be qualified for that job" (about himself–he's a lawyer) in a recent interview about Clovis' appointment. The current and previous Chief Scientists at the USDA have Ph.D.s and extensive scientific publication records. Mr. Clovis does not. (Note that when I wrote to Mr. Clovis in May to ask about his pending appointment, he declined to respond on the record.)

The Senate's Republicans have confirmed all of Trump's nominees so far, and I fear they will rubber-stamp this one as well. Let's hope that a few of them (and only 3 have to object, assuming all 48 Democrats vote no) realize that appointing a non-scientist to be Chief Scientist of the USDA is a slap in the face not only to science, but to Congress itself, because the appointment scoffs at Congress's own law, passed during the George W. Bush administration.

Trump can find another political appointment for Sam Clovis, as he has for other Trump loyalists. But appointing a former talk radio host, a non-scientist who has never published a single scientific paper, as the Chief Scientist of the USDA is a gross insult to the thousands of hard-working real scientists at the USDA, and to millions more who depend on, and benefit from, the USDA's research programs. Senators: do the right thing and tell Trump to appoint a real scientist to this job.

Trump to appoint non-scientist as chief scientist of USDA

Scientists work here now, but Trump's new overseer

will probably make them all want to flee.

This is how corruption starts.

Donald Trump's expected appointment for under-secretary for research at the USDA will be a right-wing talk radio host with no scientific credentials, according to a new report from ProPublica. The expected appointee, Sam Clovis, worked as a political aide to Trump on his transition team, and was installed at the USDA in a temporary role soon after Trump took office, to be Trump's "eyes and ears" until a permanent USDA director was approved.

Clovis has no scientific background or credentials. As ProPublica explained, he was a talk radio host in Iowa who ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 2014. He majored in political science in college and studied business administration in graduate school, and has never published a scientific paper.

Now Trump is appointing Clovis to be Under Secretary for Research, Education, and Economics (REE) at the Department of Agriculture. This administrator is responsible for a large portfolio of research, both internal and external, conducted by and supported by the USDA, including NIFA, the National Institute for Food and Agriculture.

I've had several research grants supported by USDA's NIFA, through which my colleagues and I sequenced the genomes of many agriculturally important animals and plants. I've also collaborated with internal USDA scientists who work for the Agricultural Research Service, another branch of the USDA that will soon report to Sam Clovis. I've met many outstanding scientists, both inside and outside the USDA, through these projects.

Overseeing the USDA's research programs requires strong expertise in biological science. A non-scientist has no basis for deciding which research is going well, or what questions need further study, or which questions present the most promising avenues for research. A non-scientist is simply incompetent to choose among them–and I mean this in the literal sense of the word; i.e., not having the knowledge or training to do the job. (This does not mean that I think Sam Clovis is incompetent at other things; I don't know him and he might be very capable in other areas.) Among other problems, an non-scientist leader of a scientific agency will be incapable of using scientific expertise to set priorities, and instead can make up his own priorities. In the case of Sam Clovis, his history leads me to believe that his priorities will be based on his conservative political agenda.

The previous under secretary, Catherine Woteki, has a Ph.D. in human nutrition and was previously the dean of the school of agriculture at Iowa State University. The current Acting Under Secretary, Ann Bartuska, has a Ph.D. in ecology and has worked in many scientific positions, including high-level positions at the U.S. Forest Service and the Nature Conservancy.

Both Dr. Woteki and Dr. Bartuska could run circles around Sam Clovis on any of the scientific issues under the purview of the USDA's Under Secretary for Research. Nonetheless, Clovis will soon oversee thousands of scientists currently working at the USDA, despite the fact that he has no idea what they do. It is still possible that Trump will appoint someone else, or that the Senate will decline to confirm Clovis, but these possibilities seem unlikely.

When leaders are incompetent, they appoint people under them who are also incompetent. Trump's intention to appoint Sam Clovis as the chief scientist of the USDA isn't the first demonstration of his incompetence, and I don't expect it to be the last. What's most dangerous about this appointment (and others like it) is that incompetence enables and even encourages corruption, because the appointees don't understand or respect the mission of their own agencies. Instead, they follow their own agendas, whatever those might be.

The 2008 Farm Bill stipulated (section 7511) that the Under Secretary for REE must be chosen from

"distinguished scientists with specialized or significant experience in agricultural research, education, and economics."

Sam Clovis is not such a person, but Donald Trump just doesn't seem to care.

Trump's Energy Department just killed jobs in 19 states

ARPA-e's announcement sounded good. But now it turns out

to be just a tease.

It's a lot easier to kill jobs than to create them. It is much easier to kill innovation than to create it. Trump's Department of Energy, led by former Texas governor Rick Perry, seems to be taking the easy route.

As reported in the journal Science this week (and first reported by Politico Pro), DOE has halted its process to award $70 million in new grants that its research agency, ARPA-E, had announced this past December. ARPA-E is the Energy Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, created to fund high-risk, high-reward new ideas about energy.

Even more alarming is that DOE has imposed a gag order on the program managers, so that scientists have no idea why their funding is being delayed, or it if will ever arrive. According to the Science story,

"The resulting uncertainty is having a devastating impact on research teams, scientists say, and even threatens the viability of small companies for whom these major awards are so important."

The move, which came with no warning, leaves many scientists, including young Ph.D.s just starting new jobs, suddenly without jobs. Bloomberg BNA was able to extract this tiny bit of explanation from an Energy Department spokesman:

"As with any transition from administration to administration, we have undertaken a full review of all department programs, policies and taxpayer-funded grants."

I'm sure that makes the unemployed scientists and struggling energy technology companies feel much better.

Cutting funding that has already been awarded–and which used money that was already appropriated by Congress–is especially disruptive. How can anyone hire new scientific staff when the federal agency might yank away a grant that it had already announced? The Science story described a young Ph.D. plant biologist from Penn State, Molly Hanlon, who was due to start work next week on one of the new ARPA-e projects, but now she might not have any job at all.

The 26 projects, all of them now on hold, were originally announced by DOE in December. Here are the states that are homes to the threatened projects:

California, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Washington, West Virginia 

15 of the 26 projects are led by companies, most of them small companies trying to creative innovative new technologies. The other 11 are housed at universities, including Energy Sec. Rick Perry's alma mater, Texas A&M (so at least we can't blame Perry for bias). And 9 of these 19 states voted for Trump last November.

This isn't even the whole story. Eight more projects under a different ARPA-E program, ENLITENED, were told in mid-March that they would be funded, Science reports. Just a week later, though, the press conference to announce the awards was cancelled, and the program now appears to be in danger of cancellation.

I'm sure that all of these project teams invested many months in preparing their winning proposals. Leaders of the projects announced back in December were poised to begin their research until the sudden announcement this week, with no explanation, that everything was on hold.

All that Mr. Trump has to do to save these valuable, high-tech jobs is nothing; just let the DOE's ARPA-E program do its work. Unfortunately, this seems to be too much to ask.

Trump's budget proposal eviscerates biomedical research, for no good reason

Donald Trump proposed a budget this week that will cut funding to NIH by nearly $6 billion, or 20% of its $31 billion budget. A cut of this magnitude would be devastating for biomedical research, and for the health of the nation.

This is colossally short-sighted, stupid, and even cruel. The U.S. budget this year is $4.0 trillion, which means that the entire NIH budget is only 0.75% of the budget. A 20% cut to NIH, while incredibly damaging to medical research, would only reduce expenditures by 0.15%.

Besides being shortsighted, this proposed cut is heartlessly cruel. What diseases, Mr. Trump, do you want people to die of? Should we halt research on aging? (Not a good idea for 70-year-olds like you.) How about cancer, or diabetes, or infections, or schizophrenia, or heart disease, or lung disease? Or maybe Trump wants to eliminate the NIH Children's Inn, where desperately ill children stay while receiving treatments. The list is very long; NIH supports work on 265 diseases and health conditions.

Everyone who is reading this either already benefits from medical research, or will some day.  Even if you are in perfect health, someone close to you probably uses a treatment that was supported by NIH. Virtually every major medical center in the United States depends on this funding. There are few investments with broader impact, and broader public support, than biomedical research.

For those who want to look at this from an economic perspective (as I explained in 2013), NIH funding is a terrific investment. A nonpartisan study in 2000 concluded that:

"Publicly funded research generates high rates of return to the economy, averaging 25 to 40 percent a year."

That's an amazingly good investment. The same report provided detailed examples showing how NIH-funded work saves billions of dollars per year in health care costs. But keep in mind that most of these benefits don't appear for many years. The private sector simply won't make such long-term investments.

On a more mundane level, NIH generates thousands of jobs in states all across the nation. If you want to see how it affects your state, check out this graphic from United for Medical Research. Do you live in Ohio? NIH directly supports over 11,000 jobs and $670M in funding, affecting 2,500 businesses in your state. Florida? Another 11,000 jobs, $520M in funding, and over 5,000 businesses. Texas? 21,000 jobs and over $1B in funding. And so on.

Does Congress want to kill NIH? I seriously doubt it. Does Donald Trump? I'm just speculating, but I think the ansswer is no. I think Trump doesn't understand what NIH does, but that someone in his inner circle–someone with a wildly distorted worldview–has inserted his own warped ideology into the President's budget proposal.

Finally, what's the motivation for these cuts? The U.S. economy is doing quite well, far better than it was in 2008 when Obama came into office. The economy then was in a devastating recession, but we didn't implement drastic cuts then, and we climbed out of it. We've had low unemployment and steady growth for years. It's not clear we need to cut the budget at all, much less make draconian cuts that would eviscerate and eliminate enormously beneficial programs. And if Trump wants to reduce spending, it makes no sense to cut programs that collectively only represent a tiny part of the total. One can only conclude that Trump's proposed budget cuts are entirely ideological, not financial.

Fortunately, budget making authority in the U.S. rests with Congress, not with the President. Let's hope that Congress will ignore this shortsighted, cruel, and pointless proposal to cut medical research to the bone, and instead will continue to invest in what is, for now, the strongest biomedical research community in the world.

Government scientists go rogue. What a great idea!

Government scientists are very worried, apparently with good reason, that their new boss wants to muzzle them. They've just come up with a brilliant strategy to circumvent this attempt at censorship.

Donald Trump and his minions have already made moves to suppress science within the government, with word going out that government employees cannot say anything to the public without the prior approval of political appointees. This has the marks of Stalinist (or should I say Putinist?) repression of free speech, not the sort of thing any of us ever expected to see in the United States. However, after running a campaign marked by outrageous anti-science claims on climate change and vaccine safety, Trump appears on track to use the enormous power of the federal government to suppress basic scientific facts.

Vladimir Putin has done the same thing. Most Russians think that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down in Ukraine in 2014, killing all 298 passengers, was shot down by Ukraine–despite the overwhelming evidence that the plane was shot down by a Russian missile provided to Russian-backed separatists by Russia. Putin had a record of suppressing, threatening, and even murdering those who speak out against him. Yet Donald Trump seems to find him the most admirable of all world leaders. And one of his closest advisors, Newt Gingrich, has said that he wants to fire all federal workers who didn't vote for Trump.

In just the past few days, though, government scientists have come up with a devilishly clever–and entirely legal–strategy to oppose the Trump administration's efforts to suppress their speech. Using Twitter, the same vehicle that Trump himself used so effectively throughout his campaign, they have created a set of "rogue" and "alt" accounts that have already started tweeting the real news about science, medicine, and the environment.

All of these accounts are run by non-government employees with no government sponsorship, but government scientists, in their off-hours time, can't be prevented from sending them information. In just a few days, these accounts have over 3.3 million followers, a number that is rising fast. Here's are some of the account with their total followers as of January 29:

• @NotAltWorld 1.3 million followers
• @RogueNASA  734K followers
• @altUSEPA  226K followers
• @ActualEPAFacts (a second alt-EPA) 176K followers
• @BadHombreNPS (National Park Service) 158K followers
• @alt_fda 144K followers
• @altusda 145K followers
• @altHHS 121K followers
• @alt_CDC 106K followers
• @alt_NIH 104K followers
• @AlternativeNWS 93K followers (deactivated on 29 Jan - no idea why)
• @ungaggedEPA 79K followers
• @altNOAA 69K followers
• @NatParkUndrgrnd 52K followers

Here are just a few of the tweets from these accounts so far:

As one tweet already pointed out, quoting the ACLU, "the First Amendment still protects workers' ability to speak in their own private capacities, on their own time, about matters that concern the public."

We might not be able to trust any official statements from the government for the next few years, but perhaps we'll still be able to find accurate science through the alt-gov Twitter accounts. So when you hear the Secretary of Health and Human Services (far right Congressman Tom Price, if he's confirmed) making claims about health care, check out @AltHHS to find out the real story. And when you hear Secretary of Big Oil Energy Rick Perry claim that global warming is a hoax, go to @NotAltWorld or @RogueNasa to find out the real story.

Trump's lovefest with anti-vaxxer RFK Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., liberal activist
and Donald Trump's new best friend.

Anti-vaccine conspiracy theories make for strange bedfellows. Witness this past week's widely reported meeting between Donald Trump and liberal activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to discuss vaccines and vaccine policy. RFK Jr. emerged from the meeting to claim that Trump had invited him to chair a new commission on vaccines, specifically to discuss the thoroughly discredited claim that vaccines cause autism.

Talk about the blind leading the blind. Trump has been an anti-vaxxer for years (as I've pointed out before), but for him it seems more like an afterthought–yet another of the many false claims he likes to throw out at random moments. RFK Jr., in contrast, has made anti-vaccine conspiracy mongering his raison d'etre for many years, most recently when he published an entire book to promote the bogus theory that thimerosal causes autism.

Just to get this out of the way: vaccines don't cause autism. (If you want details, here's a nearly book-length article that explains more.) The thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines was removed a decade ago (in an excess of caution), but that never caused autism either. Because of one bogus, now-retracted study published by Andrew Wakefield in 1998, millions of dollars have been spent investigating–and ultimately disproving–any possible link between vaccines and autism. All that money could have been better spent trying to find the real causes of autism, but it was wasted instead in an effort to undo the damage caused by one fraudulent doctor, Wakefield, who eventually was found to have committed fraud and lost his medical license.

Autism is a complex disease with a strong genetic component, and thousands of devoted scientists are trying to understand it better. RFK Jr. is not one of those scientists. He's a lawyer who previously devoted himself to environmental causes. He's also a ideologue who is all too willing to distort the facts and simply make things up if it suits his agenda. He and Trump share that particular style of discussion.

(Aside: it's hard to ignore the irony of a devoted liberal such as RFK Jr. joining forces with Donald Trump. For example, on the issue of global warming, in 2007 RFK Jr. said about Exxon and other companies that denied global warming, "This is treason and we need to start treating them now as traitors." Apparently he doesn't feel that way any longer.)

So back to this "vaccine commission" that RFK Jr. wants to lead. Besides the blindingly obvious fact that RFK Jr. is completely, utterly incompetent to lead such a commission, he and Trump also seem unaware that the U.S. already has a vaccine commission. It's called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and it's filled with medical experts who have spent their lives studying vaccines and vaccine safety. It also includes a consumer representative, and it is completely open, despite the conspiracy-mongering protestations of RFK Jr. If you want to see who's on it, just look here. The ACIP meets three times a year, its meeting schedule is also posted on the website, and the meetings are open to the public.

Cleary RFK Jr. loves the attention he's getting from Trump. And Trump seems to have found a soulmate in his fellow anti-vaxxer, despite RFK's strongly liberal political views. After the private meeting and RFK's announcement that Trump had invited him to chair a vaccine commission, Trump's representatives denied it. But a day later, RFK Jr. announced that he was leaving his environmental group in order to chair this hypothetical "vaccine safety" commission, and he also claimed that he and Trump had been discussing it for a month.

Putting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of a commission on vaccines is akin to putting Josef Stalin in charge of prison reform. By insisting that vaccines cause autism, both Trump and RFK Jr. have already ignored a vast body of science that shows vaccines to be not only safe, but perhaps the single greatest benefit to public health in the history of medicine. If Trump gives RFK Jr. a platform to spout his anti-vaccine nonsense, the two of them will set back healthcare by decades. Infectious diseases such as measles will return with a vengeance, and children will die. That will be an awful outcome, and no one–not even Trump or RFK Jr.–can possibly want that. Let's hope that someone in Trump's inner circle stops him before this goes any further.