Among the torrent of bullshit that is the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025–a blueprint for a second Trump administration–is this section on public health (pp. 451-452; boldface mine):
Goal #4: Preparing for the Next Health Emergency. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated how catastrophic a micromanaging, misinformed, centralized, and politicized federal government can be. Basic human rights, medical choice, and the doctor–patient relationship were trampled without scientific justification and for extended periods of time. Excess deaths, not due to COVID-19, skyrocketed because of forced lockdowns, isolation, vaccine-related mass firings, and colossal disruptions of the economy and daily rhythms of life.
The federal government’s public health apparatus has lost the public’s trust. Before the next national public health emergency, this apparatus must be fundamentally restructured to ensure a transparent, scientifically grounded, and more nimble, efficient, transparent, and targeted response that respects the unique needs and input of patient populations and providers.
Every one of the overreaching policies during the pandemic—from lockdowns and school closures to mask and vaccine mandates or passports—received its supposed legal justification from the state of emergency declared (and renewed) by the HHS Secretary. Tellingly, however, the threshold for what constitutes a public health emergency—how many cases, hospitalizations, deaths, etc.—was never defined. For the sake of democratic accountability, we must know with clarity what will trigger the next emergency declaration and, just as important, what will trigger its end.
Unaccountable bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci should never again have such broad, unchecked power to issue health “guidelines” that will certainly be the basis for federal and state mandates. Never again should public health bureaucrats be allowed to hide information, ignore information, or mislead the public concerning the efficacy or dangers associated with any recommended health interventions because they believe it may lead to hesitancy on the part of the public. The only way to restore public trust in HHS as an institution capable of acting responsibly during a health emergency is through the best of disinfectants—light.
This ignores how COVID has killed over 1.1 million people entirely, and would have been higher, especially early on, had it not been for strict interventions. And these arguments are not only predictable, they were predicted.
The having a threshold before a pandemic argument is ridiculous, though it sounds ‘smart’, because each disease will be different, including the people it targets (e.g., if there were an avian influenza pandemic, if history is any guide, younger people would be hit much harder than they were for COVID). But what’s really galling regarding the threshold argument is that many people in public health were calling for thresholds, such as the number of infections per capita per week, before various interventions were scaled back, and instead, we got vibes-based policies. Republican policy makers, such as those found in the Trump administration, were every bit as responsible for those decisions as Democratic ones.
Then there’s the bit about “bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci should never again have such broad, unchecked power to issue health “guidelines” that will certainly be the basis for federal and state mandates.” True. That power should be left up to Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and other members of the federal judiciary, who have no idea what they are doing.
If they take power, Republicans will do very bad things to public health.
mikethemadbiologist
It would be nice if the Media covered this, and they even might. But there’s no way they’ll hammer the point.
Do we have any way of slipping “death cult” into the Republicans’ own media? Perhaps, “Only 1.1 million persons killed”? Also, Florida’s governor death cult?
Peripherally related, I have the idea for ads about young ladies shamelessly prancing about practically naked in public, versus anti-Moslem ads about one’s daughters’ freedom to wear bikinis. Get the Republicans to fight each other.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure how to do it myself.
Hopefully, one day, America will accurately count all of its dead, as the result of the COVID19 pandemic. Everyone agrees that we have undercounted the number of Americans who died during the pandemic. Modeling indicates that we are undercounting our deaths by a factor of 2.7. So when they tell you, only 1M Americans die as the result of COVID 19; the number is actually closer to 2.7M. If you’re following along at home on the lack of progress, we are experiencing with the recent H5N1 outbreak, I assure you that if the Orange Cheeto gets reelected, a H5N1 pandemic will reap a whirlwind of death, destruction, and chaos, unexperienced in many of our lives. If you care about placing the health, welfare, and safety of all Americans over the principles of capitalism, make your vote count in November 2024.
TFG had his chance to prevent (or at least significantly mitigate) the pandemic. Instead he played political fuckball and lost, along with at minimum 1.2 million American lives. The final tally was only that low because Biden took over and took action. If the nutjob far right has hurt feelings over how that action had to happen, well, their guy had his chance and he blew it.
This ignores excess death estimates suggesting the actual toll from Trump’s decisions were perhaps as high as three million dead. We still don’t know how many are or will end up permanently disabled, but that number could be as high as 60 million Americans, with somewhere between three and fifteen million of those carrying serious lifelong neurological damage.
The right’s approach to pandemic prevention is to tell people to shut the fuck up and let it happen. Project 2025 is an overt threat to democracy and to American lives.