The Rachel Maddow Show WEEKNIGHTS 9PM ETMorning Joe WEEKDAYS 6AM ETDeadline: White House with Nicolle Wallace Weekdays 4PM ETThe Beat with Ari Melber Weeknights 6PM ETThe Weeknight Weeknights 7PM ETAll in with Chris Hayes TUESDAY-FRIDAY 8PM ETThe Briefing with Jen Psaki TUESDAYS – FRIDAYS 9PM ETThe Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnel Weeknights 10PM ETThe 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle Weeknights 11PM ET
States fight back as Trump’s CDC wages war on health and science
What do Americans do when the authoritative source our doctors turn to for the best scientific guidance can no longer be trusted?
By
Rachel Maddow
This is an adapted excerpt from the Dec. 8 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
Recently, I traveled to one of the greatest cities in this great country, Chicago, for a live event at the amazing Harris Theater, right on the edge of Millennium Park.
There, I got to speak with some of the really impressive, creative, resourceful community leaders, who led the defense of the people of that city when Donald Trump’s masked, violent, undisciplined, pseudo-military immigration agents mounted a weekslong attack on it.
I also got to sit down with the historian Tim Snyder, author of “On Tyranny,” a pocket-size guidebook to resisting authoritarianism — something Chicago has been providing a master class on in this first year of Trump 2.0.
Trump is not just consolidating his power over the government, but he is also simultaneously and deliberately breaking it.
One of the things that really stuck with me from that night was when Snyder told the crowd that he’s less worried about there ultimately being a coast-to-coast, totally autocratic Trump dictatorship than he is that what the president is doing to the country may pressure us and damage us in such a way that the U.S. effectively breaks up.
Because Trump is not just consolidating his power over the government, but he is also simultaneously and deliberately breaking the government. And if the federal government is broken — if he destroys it and Americans lose the data and infrastructure and services it provides — well, people are going to start organizing alternative structures to provide those things.
Take the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For decades, the CDC has been the gold standard of science and health data, not just for this country but for the world. That was, until now.
You may have heard that, a few days ago, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s handpicked CDC advisory panel voted to roll back the long-standing recommendation to vaccinate babies for hepatitis B, even though universal vaccination is credited with virtually eliminating the virus among newborns in the United States.
Later that day, Kennedy’s CDC panel welcomed a lengthy presentation, 76 slides long, about vaccines — not from a doctor or public health expert, but from the secretary’s personal attorney, who has demanded, among other things, that the government should revoke its approval of the polio vaccine — because who among us is not interested in bringing polio back at scale in the U.S.
It’s clear things are weird at the CDC under Trump. And the closer you look, the worse it gets.
The Trump administration has quietly appointed as second-in-command at the CDC a former Louisiana health official who halted that state’s vaccination campaigns and promoted quack cures for Covid-19.
This is what has become of the global gold-standard health organization that our country spent decades building.
So what do we do about this, as Americans, as a country, when the authoritative source our doctors turn to for the best scientific guidance on how to keep us healthy can no longer be trusted?
Turns out, there’s a plan: A few months ago, groups of states in the West and the Northeast formed their own health alliances to provide their residents with guidance about vaccines, based on the best scientific evidence.
After the advisory panel’s hepatitis B vote, these new health alliances rejected the CDC’s advice and told doctors and patients in their states to continue vaccinating at birth.
Just last week in Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker signed a bill ordering his state’s health department to establish vaccine guidelines for its residents, to make vaccines more available to Illinois children, and to require insurance companies to cover them.
The health consequences will be devastating. More babies and young children will suffer from severe preventable illness, and some will die.
DR. RICHARD BESSER
After that vote, a former CDC chief, Dr. Richard Besser, said in a statement that if the agency he once ran continues in its current direction, “the health consequences will be devastating. More babies and young children will suffer from severe preventable illness, and some will die.”
“Those of us who care about children’s health cannot allow this to happen,” he continued. “Policymakers, physicians, and families must turn to reputable medical and public health groups for guidance, and health insurers should do the same for informing what vaccines they will cover.”
The word “reputable” is important there. Right now, “reputable” means not affiliated with the increasingly bizarre U.S. federal government.
If states and health institutions, and even insurance companies, start turning away from the federal government to create their own health infrastructure across the country, by necessity, that is a very different kind of country than the one we have been living in.
Allison Detzel contributed.
Rachel Maddow
Rachel Maddow is host of the Emmy Award-winning “The Rachel Maddow Show” Mondays at 9 p.m. ET on MS NOW. “The Rachel Maddow Show” features Maddow’s take on the biggest stories of the day, political and otherwise, including in-depth analysis and stories no other shows in cable news will cover.
