An administration that touts itself as “pro-life” (meaning of course “anti-abortion”) is setting our nation on a course that will further degrade the environment, exacerbate climate change, kill children and shorten American lives.
I’m talking about actions just the first two weeks of this year to charge full steam ahead with climate-change causing pollutants, as well as the recommendations against six health- and life-saving vaccines. (And let’s not even talk about the health risks of the new he-man food pyramid recommendations to add more red meat, steak and other saturated fats — even lard! — to American diets. Admittedly, not all the new FDA recommendations are woo-woo. I’m from the dairy state so I won’t personally argue with the cheese and full-fat dairy recommendations, even though the environmental impact of dairy cow methane emission is another matter.)
Burn our planet, baby, burn our planet
Just this week, the Trump administration announced that the Environmental Protection Agency plans to stop including the health benefits of reducing air pollution — such as avoiding heart and lung disease, asthma attacks and premature death caused by pollutants — in its calculations of acceptable pollution. “In a reversal, the agency plans to calculate only the cost to industry when setting pollution limits, and not the monetary value of saving human lives,” reports the New York Times.
The Times calls it “a seismic shift that runs counter to the EPA’s mission statement, which says the agency’s core responsibility is to protect human health and the environment.” From now on, the EPA will only take into account the negative cost of pollution to businesses.
Many Americans have been treated to the dangers of fine particulate matter, which can enter the lungs and bloodstream, due to the tragically burning forest fires brought to us by climate change. Those with asthma or other bronchial ailments and the elderly are becoming all-too familiar with orange alerts meaning the air we breathe is “unhealthy for sensitive groups.” In this era of a “new normal” of unending wildfires, the EPA action is unconscionable.
The EPA is soon scheduled to repeal limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
The callous EPA changes are just part and parcel of the administration’s withdrawal from all climate treaties. (Unfortunately our Trump-captured Supreme Court is to be the arbiter on whether a president can withdraw from Senate-ratified international treaties.) Trump’s aggressions on Venezuela and eyeing of Iranian oil are another part of his reckless embrace of antiquated and expensive dirty energy that is rapidly changing our planet’s weather.
The administration announced last week it would withdraw our country from the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, known as UNFCCC — even though our nation was actually the first industrialized nation to join it following Senate ratification. The withdrawal from UNFCCC is considered more disastrous than leaving the Paris Agreement, because it provides legal teeth to enforce action on climate change. Fully 197 other nations have approved or ratified it.
Speaking of the Paris Agreement, our “pro-life” administration is officially withdrawing the United States from it on Jan. 20. The administration also just announced that it’s leaving 75 other U.N. treaties and international groups, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Lest the relevance of these actions to religion and state/church separation appear tenuous, here’s a reminder: Christian evangelicals, Trump’s base, are most apt to deny the science of climate change while “Nones” are most likely to accept it and want to combat it.
Kennedy’s war on vaccines
Let’s move on to the new anti-science vaccination policies adopted by so-called Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who started the new year off by removing six vaccines from the 17 previously on the recommended childhood schedule. For now, in part because states oversee vaccinations, it looks like the changes won’t make these vaccines hard to obtain — but as usual it will be the poorer, more rural and less educated whose children are more apt to miss out on these vital inoculations. Of course, the real value of our inoculation policy is not only to protect the individual but to achieve herd immunity. Every knock against vaccinations hurts public health.
Here are the diseases whose vaccines Kennedy has put in the doghouse:
•Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which hospitalizes an estimated 58,000–80,000 infants and children under 5 every year with scary symptoms. RSV vaccination during pregnancy is 70 percent effective in preventing hospitalization and 81 percent effective when given to newborns. Nearly every child will get RSV by the time they are 2, according to the CDC (it’s amazing this webpage is still up). The World Health Organization, which Trump already withdrew the United States from, reports that RSV globally causes 3.6 million hospitalizations and about 100,000 deaths in children under 5. Here’s a vaccine that can greatly lessen major hospitalizations and complications for babies.
How is removing it from the list of recommended vaccines in any way “pro-life”?
• Meningococcal disease — which can kill a college student unlucky enough to contract it in less than a day. The CDC website (still) advises, “Vaccines offer the best protection against meningococcal disease.” The lining of the brain and spinal cord become infected and swell. It can cause bloodstream infections, and both versions are “very serious and can be deadly,” the CDC warns.
Meningococcal disease has caused many tragic and premature deaths, among the most famous the sudden death of Mark Twain’s daughter, Susie, at age 24 in 1896, a blow that Twain never recovered from. I’ve never forgotten a local story about the death from bacterial meningitis of a strapping, healthy 20-year-old college junior in 2002, who died within a day of contracting the disease. A follow-up news story 14 years later reported on how Eddy Bailey’s mother, still mourning her son’s death, remains an advocate for the meningitis vaccine that could have spared her son’s life. One in six who get bacterial meningitis die and one in five have serious complications, according to WHO. While comparatively rare, it is deadly.
Why on earth would our federal government want to discourage a vaccine against this scourge?
• Hepatitis A and B, which both inflame the liver. Hepatitis B is blood-borne, and therefore can be transmitted from mother to baby during childbirth. It can even live on surfaces for up to a week and be transmitted by nail clippers, razors or toothbrushes. As many as 90 percent of infected newborns and up to 50 percent of infected young children will develop a lifelong infection. It’s the world’s leading cause of liver cancer.
This vaccine has been prescribed for all newborns since about 1991 because many new mothers do not realize they are infected (about half of the 640,000 adults infected do not realize they have it) — and, frankly, because our health care system is broken. The United States lacks systematic testing of pregnant women (unlike in Denmark, whose outlier vaccination policy Kennedy chose to emulate). Before universal vaccination of newborns was being done, only about half of children under 10 contracting it were infected during birth, another reason for universal vaccination. “We used to have 18,000 or 20,000 kids a year being born with this, a quarter of them going on to have liver cancer,” Dr. James Campbell, pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Maryland, told PBS News Hour. “We now have almost none.”
Hepatitis A spreads via feces from hand to mouth, such as by not properly washing hands after changing diapers or using the bathroom and before preparing food. The vaccine apparently got on Kennedy’s bad side because people at risk of hepatitis A include men who have sex with men and people who use or inject drugs. But international travel and even some jobs increase risk, and pregnant women are at higher risk of serious complications if contracting hepatitis A. Many have pointed out that Denmark, a tiny, homogenous country with about the same population as Wisconsin, has reliable national health care, where sick people can quickly be seen, isolated and treated, unlike here in the United States.
Continuing to inoculate against hepatitis is a no brainer.
• Influenza, which can be more dangerous for children under 5 and especially those younger than 2. Complications from flu in such children include pneumonia, dehydration, encephalopathy, sinus and ear infections, worsening of chronic medical problems and sometimes death. An estimated 6,000 to 25,000 children younger than 5 are hospitalized annually. Deaths are rare but 80 percent occur in unvaccinated children. Vaccinations reduce illness, doctors’ visits and missed school days as well as the risk of hospitalization and death. Nuff said.
• Rotavirus, another miserable childhood ailment that causes diarrhea and vomiting, stomach pain, dehydration and sometimes hospitalization and death. About 55,000 children with rotavirus need to be hospitalized every year in the United States. It spreads from feces and can live on hard surfaces such as toys and door knobs. One good reason, besides avoiding all of the above, that rotavirus vaccinations have been recommended is because it easily spreads among child care centers, families and hospitals. The CDC (for now) still advises that while good hygiene helps, it’s not enough to control the spread of the disease.
Americans have been so lucky to have access to a rotavirus vaccine because worldwide it causes about 600,000 childhood deaths a year, compared to 20 to 40 here.
Some of these endangered vaccines fall into the category of becoming victims to their own success, such as Hep B vaccinations, where rates of infection dropped about 200,000 to 300,000 a year to around 14,000 after universal vaccinations began. Science works!
While I’ve concentrated on the impact of new policies on public health in this nation, current U.S. policy is internationally a brutal killer of children dying needlessly from malaria, typhoid or AIDS after the senseless shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the funding freeze of PEPFAR.
While greed and rapaciousness can easily account for Trump’s actions to deny and exacerbate climate change, it is difficult to account for Kennedy’s conspiracy-laden antipathy to vaccines — unless we remember that a worm ate part of his brain. What Kennedy and Trump both share in common is a damn-the-consequences rejection of science and evidence-based policy that threatens the health of our biosphere and of our children.
