Maybe giving too much credit

Health reporter Julie Rovner is perplexed that Republicans, who she maintains were once big supporters of public health, now seem to want to kill us all. Her examples of former Republican championship for public health are pretty narrow and a bit dubious. Funding for the NIH is mostly about biomedical research, not public health; and GW Bush's President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, while certainly a good thing, was focused on Africa and probably as much about international relations as humanitarianism.

 

But it's certainly true that the party has turned its back on these programs:

 

The GOP-led House this year wants to cut funding for the Department of Health and Human Services by more than 12 percent — including nearly $4 billion from the once-revered NIH. “We cannot continue to make our constituents pay for our reckless DC beltway spending,” Rep. Robert B. Aderholt (R-Ala.), chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees HHS, said when the bill came to the floor last month. 

And for the first time, bipartisan support for PEPFAR has eroded, with antiabortion Republicans blocking the latest renewal of the program. “Regrettably, PEPFAR has been reimagined — hijacked — by the Biden administration to empower pro-abortion international nongovernmental organizations, deviating from its life-affirming work,” said Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) on the House floor in September.

 

The bit about PEPFAR and abortion, BTW, is 100% bullshit.  But I digress. Rovner's diagnosis is essentially that part of the essence of Trumpism is rejection of the authority of science. 

But then came Donald Trump, the embodiment of the party’s turn toward populism and skepticism of institutions and authority figures. 

“He made fun of people who wore masks,” said Jim Greenwood, a former Republican House member from Pennsylvania who made a lot of health policy in the 1990s and 2000s and later headed what is now the Biotechnology Innovation Organization. “He turned scientists and ‘elitists’ into the bad guys and made it seem as if good old common sense is what we need, not science.”

 

There's certainly something to that, although I would see the Dumpster as more of a symptom than a cause. Many people seem to think they know more than the experts -- they do their own research and Aha!  Einstein was wrong about gravity! 

 

Well, Einstein's theory of gravity is rather difficult to understand, and it has some implications that are discomfiting to some people, such as the universe being more than 13 billion years old. You do need to take advanced courses in calculus and physics to understand it, but it is in fact how the universe works, like it or not, and whether or not it satisfies your need for purpose and meaning. 

 

The same goes for the danger posed by the Covid virus and the effectiveness of masks and vaccines. People who have studied virology and epidemiology and immunology through hard years of graduate school and postdoctoral fellowships and as principal investigators know a whole lot more about this stuff than you do (unless you happen to be one of them), and also more than Aaron Rogers, Alex Jones, or Lauren Boebert. Much more, because any number multiplied by zero is still zero. So we no longer have a liberal and a conservative party. We have a party of reality, and a party of nonsense.