Ensuring Next Public Health Crisis Is as Lethal as Possible
Insofar as the world is not currently beset with an epidemic like COVID-19, the subject of people’s “rights” to flout health regulations is not a present-day issue in our daily news cycles. That’s a good thing, but it would be foolish to think it’s going to last forever.
It’s apparent that Americans, under this new Trump administration, are even more deeply rooted in their anti-scientific beliefs than they ever were before. As evidence I cite that the new Secretary of Health and Human Services is an anti-vaxxer, and that the federal government is working hard dismantling the Centers for Disease Control.
Here’s an article from the Economic Policy Institute called “Trump’s gutting of public health institutions is setting the stage for our next crisis” that begins:
The Trump administration is gutting our national public health infrastructure in real time, setting the stage for the next public health crisis. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), tasked with “protecting the health of all Americans and providing essential human services, especially for those who are least able to protect themselves,” is set to see a reduction in staff from 82,000 to 62,000 (a decrease of almost 25%) alongside major cuts to spending on contracts.
It’s not just the poor, sick, and elderly who suffer, and whose lives will continue to get worse, to that group, we need to add those who count on:
Regrettably, what U.S. representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says here is completely true. The genie is out of the bottle.
There is no proof of this. Yet.
It would be foolish to think that Pope Francis made a dent in the hate and hypocrisy of the Christian right, but at least he tried.
Apparently the other 44% of Americans believe that Trump has absolute authority to do anything he wants, and that neither the legislative nor judicial branch has any power.
Until the United States is somehow able to rid itself of Donald Trump, and let’s be honest–that’s a tough row to hoe, we will live with a cruel fact: anything in the U.S. government that benefits the health, safety, and general well-being of the common American will eventually be eliminated to enable more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, most of whom are Trump mega-donors.
Speaking for the majority of Americans, I’m sorry we elected such a terrible person, the consequences of whose actions are so deeply hurtful for the people of the world. 
Pope Francis will never be forgotten, in particular for the fact that he completely transformed the Catholic Church into a humanitarian institution.
