CDC – R&R – Reachout and Rebuild

Trump’s Science Denialism

David Posnett — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 19:32:34 +0000

“People don’t seem to understand that public health is a critical element of national security,” said Randall Larsen, a retired Air Force colonel.

“To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead”. —THOMAS PAINE

In just over three years the Trump administration has decisively diminished the influence of science in its priorities and policies.

Throughout his time in office Mr.Trump has proposed sweeping budget cuts at a variety of science based federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation among others.

In 2017, he cut Health and Human Services (HHS) funding, which oversees the Center for Disease Control (CDC), by 18%, Already considered “woefully” underfunded by many, CDC funding has been cut every successive year.

.—In 2018 he shut down the National Security Council’s Pandemic Preparedness & Global Health Security Office which was charged with preparing for when, not if, another pandemic would hit the nation. The elimination of this office, along with Trump’s proposed budget cuts for the CDC, suggests that he saw the fact based pandemic threats not worth his attention.

He shut down the National Guideline Clearinghouse (NCG) which informed the nations health care system on current medical advances along with science based practice guidelines.

In 2019 he ignored a joint HHS/FEMA/DHS exercise termed “Crimson Contagion Simulation”

which anticipated gross health care infrastructure preparedness problems, shortages of medical supplies, overwhelmed hospitals, and economic deterioration.

Three months before Covid-19 went global Trump ended the Pandemic Early Warning System (PREDICT).

in January and February, alone He was warned over a dozen times by researchers of a potential global pandemic and ensuing national security threat.

He calls the Pandemic the “Democrat’s new hoax…It is what it is…It’ll just go away…We’re in great shape…Don’t believe what you see…!”

Meanwhile Trump abruptly dismissed Nancy Messonie MD, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, for declaring the immanent dangers of Covid-19 and then demoted Dr. Rick Bright, one of the nation’s leading vaccine specialists, from the National Institute of Health. Their critical messaging, heralding science for the common good, clashed with Trump’s myopic political and economic priorities.

Our country is sorely reeling from this administration’s astounding and dangerous ignorance and incompetence.

To date over 175000 Americans, have fallen to Covid-19 largely due to failed, if not absent, leadership.

Last April Trump announced defunding the World Health Organization. We still have no national testing plan, no protective equipment distribution plan.

Trump’s science denialism reflects on this entire Republican party. All GOP candidates supporting this ruinous administration are accountable and should be definitively removed from office.

We need more Science and expertise in Government:
Vote Nancy Goroff PHD to replace Lee Zeldin (R).

James Ewing, Water Mill, NY

How We Got Here

David Posnett — Fri, 24 Apr 2020 20:36:44 +0000

In the Southampton Press:

How We Got Here

The media has accurately reported how President Trump’s mismanagement of COVID-19 has exacerbated this global health crisis. But Trump’s damage to our public health goes back to the beginning of his administration — and for Congressman Lee Zeldin and the rest of the Republican Party, their culpability starts much earlier.

It begins with the universal Republican vow to eliminate the Affordable Care Act and is compounded by their ideological orthodoxy to starve every federal agency of funding, including those agencies that are charged with public health. Like every Republican, this was the platform Zeldin ran on in 2014, and this is how he has voted as a member of Congress.

But these dual GOP missions — repeal the ACA and reduce the size of government — have directly contributed to the disastrous federal response to this crisis.

The ACA, while primarily concerned with health insurance access and patient protections, also focused on public health issues through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2010, the ACA established the Prevention and Public Health Fund (PPHF) at the CDC. It supported a public health mission that included the “early detection of and response to health threats.”

The GOP could not repeal the ACA while Obama was president, but once they took over the House after the 2010 election, largely on the strength of campaigning against the ACA, they worked hard to consistently weaken it, including weakening the PPHF. Then, in 2017, with the inauguration of Trump and complete control of the federal government, they went full-steam ahead to repeal the ACA and reduce the size of all federal agencies. The CDC and the PPHF were no exception.

In early 2018, Trump signed the budget bill that cut the PPHF by $1 billion over 10 years. Later, in 2018, Trump eliminated the global health security office within the National Security Council and made further cuts to public health programs by diverting money from the CDC and the National Institutes of Health for his policy to detain migrant children. Public health experts at the time warned that such drastic moves would harm the country’s ability to respond to and contain outbreaks of disease.

Trump and Zeldin are now working overtime to bury this history. To deflect blame, Trump insists that his name be stamped on the stimulus checks being mailed to desperate Americans. In a similar vein, Zeldin recently announced how he alone got much-needed medical equipment rushed to Suffolk County.

They would like you to forget how we got here.

Barbara Weber-Floyd

Westhampton Beach

Don’t vote Republican: it is a Matter of Life or Death

David Posnett — Sat, 24 Feb 2018 21:25:35 +0000

Photo credit: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/parkland-shooting/553778/

Letter to the Editor in the Southampton Press, Feb 22nd 2018, by James Ewing:

The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was the 239th school shooting since Sandy Hook in 2012 and overall there have been more than1600 mass shootings since then. On average, two dozen children are shot every day in the United States, and in 2016 more youths were killed by gunfire — 1,637 — than during any previous year this millennium.

Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but own 48 percent of the world’s guns, estimated at more than 330 million—roughly one firearm for every citizen.
From 1966 to 2012 more than 31% of mass shootings worldwide —in which four or more people were killed—were by Americans. Only Yemen has a higher rate of mass shootings among countries with more than 10 million people and Yemen has the world’s second-highest rate of gun ownership after the United States.

A 2015 study by the NIH estimated that only 4 percent of American gun deaths could be attributed to mental health issues, suggesting that mass shootings were better explained by a society’s access to guns than by a false correlation with mental health or any inherent cultural baseline violence. “Epidemiologic studies show that the large majority of people with serious mental illnesses are never violent. However, mental illness is strongly associated with increased risk of suicide.”

According to this analysis of 130 studies from 10 countries around the world it was concluded that gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders.

Between 1999 and 2015 the Center for Disease Control claims there were 533,879 gun related deaths. That’s an average of 33,367 killed every year.

So what is preventing our Government from enacting sensible gun control legislation if the correlation between gun access and gun violence is so well understood? What is the status of the debate right now? How are we doing?

The National Rifle Association gave $5,900,000 to Republican candidates and $106,000 to Democrats in the 2016 election cycle. The debate is governed by the obvious players and persuasions. “Republicans will never do anything on gun control.” says Rep. David Jolly, (R-Fla.).

Don’t vote for Republicans. Republican control of the government ensures that nothing is done to address a problem that kills more than 30,000 people every year. Don’t vote Republican.