Is It the End of the World as They Know It?
What's the political advantage to cutting federal funding for critical mRNA research?
This week’s post was going to be a highlight of a very interesting Instagram reel I found from a public historian named Tad Stoermer. Professor Stoermer is a public historian and a teacher at the University of Southern Denmark. He’s got a book coming out, A Resistance History of the United States, which strikes me as… timely.
I have always been of the belief that the swing of the American historical pendulum began it’s sharp lunge towards conservatism with Richard Nixon. His presidency was the kick-off of a kind of multi-generational over-corrective to the generational leftward swing of that pendulum which started with FDR, Harry S. Truman, and continued through Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, the Civil Rights Act, the anti-Vietnam War protests, and, socially, the counterculture stuff.
Professor Stoermer would apparently disagree. He suggests that where we find ourselves today is rooted in post-Civil War politics, including the pardon of Confederates by President Andrew Johnson.
Sometimes it’s good to stop and re-think our positions, especially when it comes to our American history.
I’d dive a lot deeper into this, but halfway through the week, a different story caught my attention. Like a worm, it burrowed itself into that twisted little part of my brain that just can’t stand not knowing the answer.
Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. canceled $500 million in mRNA research. This raised some red flags, of course:
Rick Bright, who led HHS’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, from 2016 to 2020 — and criticized the Trump administration’s early Covid response — slammed the decision, calling it a “huge strategic misstep.”
“This decision signals a dangerous complacency,” Bright said in a text. “Disinvesting from mRNA strips us of one of the fastest tools we have to contain the next pandemic, natural or deliberate. Pulling back from proven medical countermeasure platforms at a time of escalating global bio‑risks deeply compromises national security.”
Just as a quick refresher, in case you weren’t paying attention in biology class (like me), mRNA is “[m]essenger RNA (abbreviated mRNA) is a type of single-stranded RNA involved in protein synthesis. mRNA is made from a DNA template during the process of transcription. The role of mRNA is to carry protein information from the DNA in a cell’s nucleus to the cell’s cytoplasm (watery interior), where the protein-making machinery reads the mRNA sequence and translates each three-base codon into its corresponding amino acid in a growing protein chain.”
This story received a lot of coverage — which is a good thing — but even in some of the more political publications, it was tough to find a story about why. What was the political reasoning for this? I mean, this critical research is a huge driver for cancer outcomes. Does the Trump Administration hate… cancer patients?
When RFK, Jr. cut nearly $600 million back in May for Covid vaccines, I at least understood it. RFK, Jr. is a leading vaccine skeptic. So he did what he said he was going to do.
This? This is for sick kids, cancer patients, among many others folks who desperately need it.
Then I watched another reel, this time from New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. In his reel, Mr. Bouie talks about these confounding cuts to mRNA research. But I think he is onto something — something very dark, quite nefarious. He says:
“For RFK healthy really should be thought of as a synonym for ‘pure’ — if you consume the right kinds of things, you’ll be healthy, you’ll pure. If you consume the wrong kinds of things, you’ll be sick, or impure.”
That word “pure” ought to give you a chill. Again, as Mr. Bouie says, “it’s just eugenics.”
It is very, very tough to think about the idea that our political leaders at the highest level are interested in culling the sick from our population. But maybe it shouldn’t be.
After all, there is a town in Arkansas being established for “whites only.”
Not long ago, a man got fired from his job after he admitted, during a debate show, that he was a fascist, and didn’t mind being labeled a Nazi.
And if that’s not enough, the Department of Homeland Security put out an ICE recruitment tweet encouraging you to “Defend your culture!” (You don’t even need a college degree to do so, apparently.)
All of this is, of course, horrifying. Beyond horrifying. But the good news is, if we believe what smart people like Professor Stoermer tell us, there are ways to resist, there are ways to stand up and say “no”.
The pendulum will swing back — hopefully in time for sick people, those with cancer — to the side of justice.