Trump’s health department is stacked with people hostile to the idea of public health. The People’s CDC, an anti-COVID advocacy organization, had this to say about NIH Director Bhattacharya in March prior to his confirmation:
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a health economist with a medical degree but no further medical training or practice. He endorsed and promoted mass COVID-19 infections to pursue an impossible to achieve infection-driven herd immunity. His policies such as mass infections relying on natural immunity would have led to even more illness, Long COVID, and deaths across the US. His extraordinarily wrong views on the pandemic include predicting, even late in 2020, that US COVID deaths would not reach 50,000, and assuring Floridians in mid-2021 that enough had been vaccinated – though far more have died since then. Videos from as recent as 2024 continue to show him advocating ineffective treatments for COVID-19 such as ivermectin, opposing layered protections against COVID-19, and belittling the value of important tools such as masking and vaccines.
Instead of focusing on advancing the medical sciences, Bhattacharya wants to intertwine politics and policies at NIH and prioritize funding based on academic freedom instead of innovative and impactful medical and health sciences research. If confirmed as the director of NIH, he will continue to downplay the seriousness of COVID-19 and potentially other infectious diseases, and steer NIH towards investment in ineffective treatments for diseases such as focusing on seroprevalence studies. Ultimately, this will harm and reverse the already monumental discoveries at NIH. He will likely assist Secretary Kennedy’s current efforts to delay and even prevent the development of effective therapeutics for infectious diseases, including COVID-19 – and for Long COVID. Finally, there is no reason to think he will fight this administration’s attacks on NIH staffing and cuts in research funding.
jj4211@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
The NIH director was appointed by Trump, which came with a pretty strong anti-mask, anti-vaxx, and general ‘covid was a hoax’ sort of baggage, so he is unfortunately not that credible.
There is a study that correlates to the ages he specifies, but the conclusion is that the risks inflicted by the vaccine were still lower than the risks of COVID itself even for that age group, but no matter how they sliced it the risks either way for the age group was minimal, neither the vaccinne nor COVID were too risky overall. Pre-vaccine chicken pox was deadlier to kids than COVID was to that age group, and we didn’t consider that to be particularly risky, mostly worth vaccinating due to heading off the chances for shingles later.
NotANumber@lemmy.dbzer0.com 32 minutes ago
That’s another one I don’t understand. In my country at least when I grew up (born 2001) most kids didn’t get chickenpox vaccines. I didn’t have one and actually caught the virus. I think I even had a scar from it. I know someone about 4 years younger than me who also is scarred from it. Not sure if they started giving it out now. I certainly hope so.
jj4211@lemmy.world 5 minutes ago
I’m old enough that the vaccine was unavailable, so I got the illness and at least one scar, but my kid was vaccinated and all my peers’ kids are vaccinated so they just won’t know what it’s like.
Seems like some countries think it’s better to keep it around to keep previously sickened people exposed to keep their immune system active to mitigate shingles, but seems like the data in the ‘vaccinate most of the kids’ countries have shown that this doesn’t actually matter, so we might see more countries embrace vaccinating against it.
mmmac@lemmy.zip 6 hours ago
Gotcha thanks for the info, yeah I don’t follow politics too much so was unaware the director was appointed by trump and came in with that baggage.
Wish Huberman had specified that in the caption