“The occupants lay, resigned and silent, decaying in succession…One after another, ashen-faced men with skeletal bodies reclined, their bony knees pointing upward sharply under their blankets like stakes under a tent. Each had an IV pole and blood pack, wires and hoses attached to the backs of hands and wrists.”
So begins my forthcoming book, “A Song for Olaf,” which describes my first glimpse of a transfusion center in a 1993 AIDS hospital ward.
Such a scene is one we hoped never to have to re-envision. Though we still mourn the loss of thousands of lovers, friends, brothers, sons and daughters, it is human nature to suppress certain memories out of self-preservation, the reality of their excruciating deaths too traumatic to revisit, their bodies wasting before our eyes while the government averted its glance.
But it was the reality in the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan cut the CDC budget by half just as the cases of HIV/AIDS began to emerge. Reagan did not deign to utter the term “AIDS” until 1985. By then, 5,000 people had died.
President Trump followed suit in 2018, discarding the Obama administration’s pandemic playbook and disbanding the Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, leaving the country vulnerable, even as COVID decimated the country.
“Rather than spending the money, and I am a businessperson, I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them,” Trump said. “When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.” The quote reveals his basic misunderstanding of a principle most of us learned in elementary school — the scientific method.
Given this context, we should not be surprised that Trump’s second term has begun with a flurry of anti-science activities that could endanger millions of lives:
- Hours after his inauguration, Trump signed an executive order initiating our country’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization, an agency consisting of a 194-country collaboration to prevent global pandemics. The WHO has worked to eradicate smallpox, reduce polio cases by 99%, and stem the spread of communicable diseases such as COVID, Zika and AIDS. Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health at Georgetown University called it “the darkest day for global health I’ve ever experienced.”
- Shortly thereafter, Trump proposed drastic cuts to the NIH. Litigation has temporarily frozen this action, but if the cuts come to fruition, serious funding gaps will prevent life-saving research. In our SUNY System alone, the proposed cuts include $23 million for Stony Brook’s research on first responders and prevention of future pandemics; $8 million for U-Buffalo’s research on women’s health; and $1.7 million for SUNY Albany’s breast cancer study. Chancellor John King called the cuts “an existential threat to public health.”
- On Jan. 24, programs run by USAID were frozen. Nearly the entire USAID staff of more than 10,000 was furloughed. Hit hard by this action is PEPFAR, an agency that has worked to decrease AIDS deaths in infants and young children by 80% and has saved more than 5.5 million babies of HIV-infected mothers from infection. Without PEPFAR, patients denied regular dosages of essential drugs are at risk of developing full-blown AIDS and prone to the suffering, wasting, and slow death that I witnessed in 1993. Intentionally denying life-saving medication to children? I don’t know about you, but that’s not what I voted for.
- On Feb. 13, the Senate confirmed Robert F. Kennedy’s appointment as health and human services secretary. Kennedy — a lawyer, not a health scientist — is prone to such scientifically-debunked ravings as “Vaccines poisoned an entire generation of American children,” has falsely claimed that childhood vaccines cause autism, that vitamin A and chicken soup are cures for measles, and that the polio vaccine contains “one of the most carcinogenic materials that is known to man.” He has also perpetuated a discredited theory that recreational drug use, not HIV, was the actual cause of AIDS. His position certainly does not bode well for the reinstatement of the life-saving work of PEPFAR.
After his swearing in, Kennedy tweeted, “The future of public health is about to change forever,” one of few Kennedy pronouncements with which the scientific community might agree.
Even if we put aside Kennedy’s dumping a dead bear in Central Park, his 14-year heroin addiction, his “blendering-up” mice and baby chicks, it’s his absolute denial of science that should send a shudder down the spine of any thinking person. And incentive to get to the pharmacy for your vaccines — while you still can.
Boulanger is a writer and educator. Her memoir, “A Song for Olaf,” will be released in June 2025 from Saint Julian Press.