Six months ago, I started using this newsletter to track ominous news about science. Only a few weeks had passed since Trump’s second inauguration, and so it was still hard to make sense of those early developments.
Government offices would go quiet, and then open back up. CDC’s team of experts on lead poisoning got fired, only to be rehired. Hundreds studies got terminated, and then some were reinstated.
Still, the overall drift of developments looked bad. It felt like an ocean swell, rising up quietly but relentlessly.
Modern science has delivered many successes over the past century, but they have usually come slowly. It can take decades to build a device that can hear the echo of black holes crashing into each other. Because science moves slowly, it is hard to recognize what gets lost when the science stops: when a clinical trial is halted, when a field station gets abandoned. The discoveries that might have emerged from that stopped science would not come for years.
But over the past six months, the ocean swell has continued to grow into a wave. And now that wave is starting to break.
Just try getting a Covid vaccine. Last year, you could have simply walked into a local drug store. Now people under 65 will need a doctor’s prescription. Many drug stores are not stocking the vaccine at all, waiting until some clarity emerges.
As HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy has ratcheted up his attacks on vaccines, a growing number of government scientists and doctors have refused to play along. The CDC director got pushed out after refusing to rubber stamp Kennedy’s Covid vaccine policies. Then top vaccine experts resigned, warning of the “weaponization of public health.”
Earlier this week, Trump tried to deflect the blame for this chaos onto vaccine makers. He claimed they were hiding the evidence about how well Covid vaccines work. Having spent a few years covering the release of that evidence, I found that absurd. My New York Times colleague Apoorva Mandavilli and I gathered together some of that evidence on Tuesday.
The Covid vaccines were created in record time and saved tens of millions of lives worldwide. Still, there’s room for improvement. After the start of the Covid pandemic in late 2019, it took about a year and a half for vaccination campaigns to ramp up. More research on mRNA vaccines could lead to even faster deployment. But Kennedy torpedoed half a billion dollars in mRNA vaccine research in August.
Why is Kennedy working so relentlessly to slow down vaccine research and deployment? His meeting with Senators this week offered a few clues. Senators reminded him and the world that Kennedy called Covid vaccines a “crime against humanity.”
But I suspect that the opposition runs deeper than that. As Beth Mole reported this spring for Ars Technica, Kennedy believes that the germ theory of disease has made the world unhealthy. In one of his books, Kennedy bemoaned “the pharmaceutical paradigm that emphasized targeting particular germs with specific drugs rather than fortifying the immune system through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition."
Kennedy likes to call this view of health “miasma theory.” I write a lot about the history of miasmas in my recent book Air-Borne, and I can assure you that Kennedy gets it profoundly wrong. But despite his poor grasp of science and history, Kennedy now exerts great power over the health of the United States.
Two whistleblower reports described by my colleague Ben Mueller this week make clear just how far this attitude has taken hold. Among their complaints, they describe remarks made by Matthew Memoli, the principal deputy director of the National Institutes of Health, at a White House meeting about how we should prepare for the next pandemic.
“Dr. Memoli reiterated the administration’s position that vaccines are unnecessary if populations are healthy,” the complaints said.
When Disease X comes, will we have to rely on our healthy diet to protect us?
On a Mostly Lighter Note
Over the past month, I’ve also reported on more uplifting news, exploring some of the insights science gives us about the world and ourselves. Here’s a story on people who can’t talk using their inner speech to communicate. Here’s a story on pygmy sea horses as a lesson in evolution, and another about the genes that enabled our ancestors to stand upright. Also, giraffes are now four species.
But there was also bad new to report. I wrote about a distressing new study on the rising threat of fraud in science. I’ve followed this problem for over a decade, and it’s frustrating to see it become even worse.
Heading to Notre Dame, Miami, and Beyond
My fall travels are coming together. Here’s my itinerary so far. If you live near any of these places, please join me if you can!
September 15. Cambridge MA. Harvard Radcliffe Institute. “Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA as a Window into Human History and Biology.” A conversation with geneticist David Reich. Details here
September 25. South Bend IN. University of Notre Dame. Public lecture. Details to come.
October 11. Morristown NJ. Morristown Festival of Books. Details here
November 13. Charleston SC. The Charleston Literary Festival. Details here
November 21-22, 2025. Miami FL. Miami Book Fair. The plan is for me to be on two panels. For one, I’ll talk to Simon Winchester, the author of a new book on the history of wind. For the other, I’ll be talking to former CDC director Tom Frieden about <waves hands wildly> all this. Details to come
That’s all for now. Stay safe!
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