The Demolition of Scientific Research and Public Health in the US
Slightly updated version of the essay first published in the column 'Understanding America' in the German daily newspaper 'Koelner Stadtanzeiger' on April 19, 2025.
It is becoming more and more obvious. Whatever the Trump White House views with suspicion and distrust, the administration has set out to demolish and destroy rather than reform, develop and build. During the almost first 100 days of his second term, Trump has effortlessly managed to offend Washington's most loyal and reliable allies, undermine US global soft power by shutting down development aid and disaster relief agencies and successfully run down the flourishing US economy and booming stock market.
Quite contrary to the national interest of the US, Trump is also threatening his country's most renowned research institutions with billions in cuts if they do not dance to the government's nationalist tune. In quite a large number of cases significant cuts of federal grants running to hundreds of millions of dollars have already been implemented.
Trump vs Harvard
In contrast to many other universities, which have backed down, Harvard, the oldest and richest university in the world, has finally put up a fight. Trump is demanding that the university make changes to its teaching, hiring of professors and admission of new students in order to combat the allegedly widespread anti-Semitism on campus. Over two billion in research funding has already been held back and now Trump is even threatening to suspend the university's tax exemption as a non-profit organization and not grant visas to any foreign students who have gained admission to Harvard. The world’s most famous university argues that all of this is completely unconstitutional and has taken the matter to court.
Numerous other research institutions funded by the US government are also threatened with a drastic reduction in funding. For example, the budget of the scientific service of the space agency NASA is to be cut in half. This would mean that the further development of giant telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope would no longer be possible. This gigantic telescope may have just discovered signs of living organisms on a massive planet called K2-18b, 120 light years away.
Instead of investing in the research landscape, the Trump administration is planning massive tax cuts. And no expense is being spared for the extensive deportation and incarceration programs to kick illegal and not-so-illegal immigrants out of the country. In contrast, leading global research institutions and think tanks such as the non-partisan and partially congressionally funded Woodrow Wilson Center and the U.S. Institute for Peace in Washington, DC, have been abruptly forced to shut down. In all areas that Trump and Musk consider superfluous or infiltrated by liberal thinking, the budgets have been relentlessly cut. The role of the US as by far the world's leading scientific nation is rapidly coming to an end. China in particular is about to jump into the breach.
Robert F. Kennedy’s Strange Views on Public Health
Trump's cutbacks are also affecting the public health system, which has been headed by Robert F. Kennedy Junior, known as Bobby, since the end of February 2015. However, many deep-seated prejudices and Kennedy's tendency to think along conspiratorial lines also play a major role in this area. Kennedy, the far right-minded son of ex-President John F. Kennedy's brother and closest confidant, has been known for years for his strange views regarding the nation’s health policy. Before the lawyer was appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services by Trump and confirmed by Congress, he ran the non-profit Children's Health Defense for eight years. The organization regularly provided the press with a great deal of misinformation about vaccines and their effects.
Kennedy is a staunch vaccine skeptic and, like Trump himself, he sometimes advocates the use of rather unconventional methods to combat infectious diseases. For example, taking lots of vitamin A, cod liver oil and some steroids and antibiotics containing cortisone are said to help against being infected with measles. Contrary to well-supported decades of research, Kennedy also claims that autism is not based on complex neurological conditions or genetic disposition, but is a “preventable disease” caused primarily by environmental influences.
The US Secretary of Health and Human Services is not letting up in his efforts to call into question the public's trust in the tried and tested, albeit rather expensive, American healthcare system. His aim is, it seems, to further promote the formidable skepticism that is already widespread in many states and some social classes about being routinely vaccinated against influenza, shingles, Covid and other diseases. Kennedy has not only fired 10,000 allegedly superfluous health experts in his own ministry, but has also already cut billions of dollars for individual states to immunize preschool children.
The measles epidemic in Texas and New Mexico
These disconcerting consequences are being felt right now during the current measles epidemic, which the USA has been unable to cope with for several months. In Texas and New Mexico in particular, but also in over 20 other states, a total of almost 800 people have already fallen seriously ill, but the number of unreported cases is probably considerably higher. In the two large states, measles has already claimed three lives, two unvaccinated pre-school children and one unvaccinated adult.
Measles was officially eliminated in the USA in the year 2000. However, since 2015, there have been repeated cases of the disease, mainly brought in by travelers from abroad. Measles is a highly contagious disease which, if one is unlucky, can have life-threatening effects if it leads to pneumonia and swelling of the brain. However, infection from the disease has declined significantly since the exceptionally safe and effective measles, mumps and rubella combination vaccine (M.M.R.) was introduced in 1963. With the beginning of a nationwide immunization campaign eight years later, the U.S. became increasing measles free. A 95 per cent M.M.R. double vaccination of the population ensures that lifelong herd immunity is achieved and the risk of infection from measles has thus become extremely low in much of the country.
However, since the Covid-19 pandemic at the latest, vaccine skepticism has steadily increased in the US. And Trump's Health Secretary has spoken out particularly vehemently against vaccinating children. Vaccinations, Kennedy has claimed repeatedly, would lead to autism, result in infection with the disease the vaccination was meant to prevent and might even lead to death in some cases. Still, at the funeral of one of the two children who died of measles in Texas, Kennedy surprisingly announced that vaccination was the best way to contain the contagious disease.
But then he quickly added to reassure his large number of anti-vaccine supporters – and ignoring the proven effectiveness of the M.M.R. vaccine - that of course a vaccination was always a “personal decision” as a measles vaccination would contain many unknown risks. Instead of a vaccination there were many good alternatives available to prevent a measles infection. Yet, all these claims have been disproved for decades by the established research community in the US, which the Trump administration has begun to dismantle.
Professional competence and rational thinking have become a scarce commodity among the highest government representatives in the USA.