The Trump administration continues to wreak havoc on public health and the environment.
“Health” Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. deplorably announced this week that he will end mRNA contracts for flu and Covid vaccinations. Health and Human Services declared “a coordinated wind-down” of mRNA projects at the government’s biodefense agency. Contracts will either be altered or canceled, affecting nearly $500 million in mRNA-related projects, including some focusing on creating an H5N1 bird flu vaccine.
“The mRNA-based coronavirus vaccines are a marvel of scientific ingenuity and the culmination of years of U.S. investment in medical research that literally saved millions of lives,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “It’s tragic and untenable that a fanatic like Kennedy is being allowed to quash the use of one of the biggest breakthroughs in medical research history.”
Laughably, the HHS announcement claimed this destruction of medical research is in the name of “safety” and “ethical grounding.”
The American Medical Association and physicians across the country are holding their collective breath about whether Kennedy will remove all the panelists of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, just as he earlier removed all the members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Kennedy fired all 17 members of the vaccine task force, replacing them with some known vaccine skeptics. The AMA sent Kennedy a letter late last month urging him to retain the 16 panelists on the preventive services committee, pointing out how vital their role is in making care recommendations and determining what treatment insurers must cover.
Meanwhile, the dismantlement of environmental protections continues apace at the so-called Environmental Protection Agency. Last week, EPA Secretary Lee Zeldin proposed to repeal a watershed scientific finding enabling the federal government to regulate greenhouse gases.
“In effect,” reports the New York Times, “the EPA will eliminate its own authority to combat climate change.” A 2007 decision by the Supreme Court affirmed the authority of the EPA to regulate greenhouse cases that threaten public health and welfare, paving the way to the EPA’s landmark 2009 endangerment finding. The EPA is openly and recklessly flouting its responsibility to follow the law and the science.
This action comes after the dismissal last spring by the EPA of hundreds of experts and scientists who had been tasked with completing the federal government’s congressionally required analysis on climate change and how it’s affecting the United States. The National Climate Assessment has been published every few years since 2000.
Just this week, the EPA announced it may claw back $7 billion reserved for the Solar For All program, part of the Inflation Reduction Act, which the administration froze in February. The Southern Environmental Law Center has admirably announced, “We will see them in court.”
President Trump has also called for the elimination or major overhaul of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which would leave many Americans vulnerable to weather-related disasters worsened by climate change. Zeldin has placed business over environmental stewardship, dismissing environmentalists as wanting to “bankrupt the country.”
Under the preamble of our secular Constitution, the federal government is required to “promote the public welfare.” The Trump administration, to state the obvious, is doing the opposite in line with the Christian nationalist anti-science agenda of Project 2025.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation urges its members, the public and lawmakers to vigorously protest these and all other measures that endanger public health and the future of our planet.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters of nontheism. With more than 42,000 members, FFRF advocates for freethinkers’ rights. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
The post FFRF excoriates Trump admin’s anti-science assaults on public health and environment appeared first on Freedom From Religion Foundation.
