Define “we,” Mr. Secretary.
The secretary of health — standing behind the president, who was nearly awake — stepped lively to field a question about the hantavirus on the cruise ship:
“We’ve got it under control.”
This would be true if he spoke broadly. “We,” meaning the human race. “We,” meaning the family of man. It looks like things will be contained, but reports indicate little thanks are due him or his department.
Out to lunch. On the shelf. Tied up in the closet. We can’t be sure where the Centers for Disease Control was when it was needed to lead on a killer hantavirus, except that it was nowhere.
On an outbreak that involved 17 Americans, the CDC “has been uncharacteristically missing in action,” reports the Associated Press.
The World Health Organization – reviled by this president, who yanked its funds and ended U.S. involvement — took the lead in the matter.
The CDC was “not even a player,” an international health expert told the AP. “I’ve never seen that before.”
Said another, the “new” CDC’s handling of the matter showed “how empty and vapid” the agency is now under current leadership.
Well, what did we expect when this administration laid off thousands of CDC employees?
What could we expect from the man in charge, Secretary of Health Robert F. Google Jr.?
“Restore the CDC’s focus on infectious disease, invest in innovation, and rebuild trust through integrity and transparency.” That’s his pledge, stated boldly online.
I don’t think that’s what Secretary Google and his band of not-ready-for-infectious-disease players are doing.
What they’re doing is huddling beyond public view – “integrity and transparency” be damned – with the goal of undermining medical science.
Secretary Google? He’s earned the name, and not the one on which he campaigned.
He is an online search engine unto himself: a seeker ever out to confirm what science won’t.
When I think of him, I think of a dusty, worn laptop as picked-away as Willie Nelson’s guitar.
One of the most telling statements I’ve heard about the internet, and about Google searches, is that “for every notion there’s a nation.”
A since-disgraced British doctor named Andrew Wakefield had a paper published in the ‘90s linking the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine to autism.
Tragically, though Wakefield was cast out of his profession for falsifying data, his notion was embraced by Crackpot Nation. Suspicion of Everything Nation. Bad Information Nation.
Bogus or not, the anti-vax study is still out there. You can Google it. And you know the health secretary has.
Now, in a Cabinet job he got only by tantalizing Transaction Man with his shallow pool of supporters, Secretary Google has launched a $50 million study to re-examine baseless claims that countless studies have rebutted – that vaccines cause neurological harm and chronic disease.
The study’s stated objective: “to restore public trust in vaccines.”
If trust were the secretary’s true objective, he’d be on the stump right now beseeching families to get their shots.
Instead, amid a measles outbreak not seen since pre-vaccine, he is huddled secretly with his panel of science deniers.
At the same time, the “new” CDC has blocked publication of its own study showing COVID-19 vaccines cut the risk of hospitalizations and ER visits in half.
Well, well.
On the hantavirus front: The other day, after its alarming role of no-show on the hantavirus, the “new” CDC finally showed its face in the form of Assistant Secretary of Health Brian Christine, who spoke of the agency’s commitment to aggressive action against transmissible diseases using “sound science,” and, again, “transparency.”
What is Christine’s qualification for assuring the public?
One, as a urologist, his specialty is penile implants.
Two, during the pandemic he downplayed vaccines’ role in saving lives. He said the Biden administration was acting like Nazis to control people’s lives.
Share his concerns? You can find stunning proof by Googling them.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
