Nihilism as Public Policy

Before yesterday’s gutting of COVID vaccine recommendations and last night’s Center for Disease Control mass resignations, I was working on a piece on IVF, a subject close to my heart as all three of my grandsons are the product of this miraculous technology. I’m grateful that both of my daughters view their families as complete, because despite Trump’s pre-election promise to make IVF free, it is clear that under the current Secretary of Health and Human Services’ watch not just IVF but most of what we have come to know as modern medicine will be jettisoned.

I wrote a piece about childhood vaccinations way back in 2015, recounting my own bout with polio before the availability of a vaccine and discussing herd immunity and the anti-vaxx movement. We all lived through the devastation of the pandemic and the debate over mRNA and COVID vaccines. And, as many of my readers know, both my husband Dan and I contracted oral cancer from the HPV virus, for which there is now also a vaccine. I have literal skin in the vaccination game, having had to endure three serious illnesses that can now be prevented.

As an over 65 cancer survivor, my access to the 2025 COVID vaccine is assured, for now. I also plan to get a flu shot and the RSV vaccine before they, too, disappear. I worry most about my grandsons’ ability to be vaccinated against a myriad of childhood and adult diseases now that a eugenicist anti-vaxxer is in charge of America’s public health system. 

“I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airports today … and I see kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, inflammation —you can tell from their faces, movements and lack of social connection,” says Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a man with no medical degree, a crank who eats road kill, takes steroids, thinks antidepressants make people violent. This is what the right has foisted upon us all. 

What unites the crunchy moms and the Christian fundamentalists who champion the MAHA movement is a belief in the power of “lifestyle choices” to determine medical outcomes. Whether it is coffee colonics to fight cancer by “detoxification” or eschewing sex before marriage and demonizing homosexuality, these two unlikely groups are in sync in categorizing those who contract a disease as personal failures, defective characters, weaklings. 

According to RFK, Jr., if we all just eat right, exercise and avoid modern medicine we have nothing to fear. Fundamentalists share with eugenicists the notion that a higher power selects those who prosper; it is not up to society to protect the weak of body or will. Both my husband and I exercised regularly, ate a Mediterranean diet, imbibed moderately, slept well, had strong family and friendship circles, attended religious services. Cancer found us anyway. 

As a student and teacher of U.S. History, I know that there have been both religious and secular movements that have at various periods attempted to control personal behavior, but this is the first time that nihilism has become actual government policy. 

As Demetre C. Daskalakis wrote in his resignation letter yesterday, “Public health is not merely about the health of the individual, but it is about the health of the community, the nation, the world. The nation’s health security is at risk and is in the hands of people focusing on ideological self-interest.” 

From the canceling of cancer research to the gutting of infectious disease preparedness to the cuts in Medicaid and reproductive health services to the internment of foreign nationals pursuing scientific research in the states, this administration has one message for its citizens: “You are on your own.”