The Trump Presidency Timeline
Documenting the chaos since day one. 97 entries and counting.
Category: anti science
anti science
trump signs executive measles order
Trump, flanked by science-deniers, signs an executive order and effectively gives measles its own White House internship.
Donald Trump has now put the weight of the presidency behind every Facebook aunt’s favorite medical journal: vibes. He signed an executive order telling the CDC and its vaccine advisory panel to "realign" the childhood vaccine schedule with a new HHS memo that – what a coincidence – already reduced the number of recommended shots for kids. The White House framed this as aligning with "scientific evidence" and "peer, developed countries", which is a poetic way of saying: we found just enough cherry-picked data to justify doing what the anti-vax base has been screaming for since 2015.
Instead of the CDC and ACIP setting evidence-based schedules and defending them from conspiracy theorists, the order nudges them to be "flexible" for parents and doctors on timing and sequencing. Translation: if you want to stretch out shots until your kid is a walking petri dish, the federal government is now enthusiastically here for your "choice". Public health gets quietly downgraded to a suggestion, while the administration gets another culture-war trophy. After dismantling pandemic protections, they’re now coming for the basic childhood immunization schedule. What could possibly go wrong, besides everything we already know from the last 100 years of epidemiology?
Source: theguardian.com
#anti-science#healthcare
anti science
trump’s epa literally waiting for the tank to fail
EPA chief Lee Zeldin thoughtfully observes the chemical tank that “will fail,” presumably checking whether the plume will interfere with Trump’s next golf weekend.
The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is facing a chemical tank in Orange County that officials say “will fail”, which is at least refreshingly honest branding for this White House’s approach to environmental protection. EPA chief Lee Zeldin, whose environmental policy background consists of being a Republican congressman who once saw a tree, went on CNN to calmly explain that the worst-case scenario is a chain-reaction explosion five miles from Disneyland. The best-case scenario is a “low-volume release” of dangerous chemicals. So either a toxic plume or a smaller toxic plume. Tremendous choices.
Roughly 50,000 residents have been evacuated because a tank holding 6,000–7,000 gallons of highly flammable methyl methacrylate at a GKN Aerospace facility started overheating after a leak. Fire crews are frantically dumping water on the tank and adding neutralizing agents while air monitors insist everything is “completely normal,” a phrase that has never once calmed anyone living next to an about-to-blow chemical vat. Meanwhile, local officials are trying to reassure people that the tank’s "potential crack" might actually help them make "educated decisions" about how to avoid a Michael Bay sequel.
Residents, who have enjoyed such premium Trump-era amenities as evacuation orders, noxious odors, and "fear of contamination," are now suing GKN Aerospace for turning their homes into an impromptu hazmat zone. And presiding over all this is Trump’s handpicked EPA chief with no environmental chops, leading an agency whose mission has been thoroughly reimagined from "protect human health and the environment" to "hope the tank doesn’t explode on live TV." Regulatory oversight, but make it reality disaster show.
Source: theguardian.com
#anti-science#forever-grifting
anti science
trump discovers the real problem with groceries: too little global warming
Trump and grocery execs celebrate the bold new plan to fight high food prices by microwaving the planet on high.
Lee Zeldin’s EPA has bravely identified the true cause of high grocery prices: not Trump’s tariffs, not a war-driven oil spike, but the scourge of not enough supercharged greenhouse gases leaking out of supermarket freezers. So they’re rolling back a Biden-era rule that pushed grocery chains and A/C companies away from hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) – chemicals thousands of times more potent than CO₂ – and selling it as a discount aisle miracle for “American families.”
Trump, who literally signed the bipartisan 2020 law to phase out HFCs, is now hosting Kroger and Piggly Wiggly execs at the White House to celebrate gutting the very transition that law kicked off. The same business community that once lined up with environmentalists to phase this stuff out is now getting a second bite at the deregulation apple, because nothing says “cost-of-living relief” like sabotaging a yearslong industry shift and torching the climate a little faster.
The administration can’t say how much this will actually lower prices or how soon, but they’re very sure it will put a “dagger through the heart of climate change religion.” Translation: if your groceries don’t get cheaper, at least your planet will get hotter. It’s not policy, it’s performance art for oil donors and corporate chains, with 3.8% inflation and rising emissions as the punchline.
Source: theguardian.com
#anti-science#forever-grifting
anti science
trump saves money by letting ebola go platinum
Health worker in full gear, doing the job that used to be backed by U.S. funding before Trump decided epidemiology was just woke math.
The U.S. used to be the adult in the room during Ebola outbreaks. Now, thanks to Trump’s USAID shutdown and CDC brain drain, we’re the guy who shows up late, empty-handed, and demands credit for "monitoring the situation." Disease surveillance networks across East Africa that Washington once funded? Turned off. Emergency teams that used to deploy at the first suspicious fever? Disbanded. The virus got a weeks-long head start while the self-proclaimed "greatest country in the world" sat on the bench and fumbled its own pager.
Public health experts say this outbreak in Congo and Uganda was already spreading across borders before anyone outside noticed — the predictable result of smashing the surveillance systems that were built after the last time Ebola almost broke the world. Samples were even transported to Kinshasa at the wrong temperature, because the USAID teams who used to handle basic things like not ruining the test no longer exist. The World Health Organization learned about the outbreak nine days before the United States did, and almost a month after the first death. That gap is what you get when you replace global health security with a vibes-based foreign policy.
As of Wednesday, at least 600 people are sick and 139 are dead, with cases in Goma, Bunia, and Kampala — dense cities with millions of people and busy borders. This is what "America First" actually looks like in practice: dismantle global health defenses, walk away from the fire alarm, then act shocked when the house is engulfed. Trump got to brag about cutting "wasteful" foreign aid; East Africa got a faster-spreading Ebola outbreak; and the rest of the world gets to find out, again, that viruses love a power vacuum.
Source: nytimes.com
#anti-science#killing-democracy
anti science
bryson dechambeau takes a mulligan on the moon landing
Bryson DeChambeau, noted physics major, carefully lining up his next shot at the concept of objective reality.
Golf’s self-proclaimed science guy Bryson DeChambeau went on a podcast hosted by Katie Miller — yes, the wife of Trump’s favorite white nationalist wordsmith Stephen Miller — to announce that the moon landing footage is sketchy, but interdimensional beings? Absolutely real. Apparently the Venn diagram of LIV Golf, Trumpworld, and YouTube-brained conspiracy culture is now just a perfect circle drawn on a Mar-a-Lago scorecard.
DeChambeau, a former physics major who now treats evidence like a plugged lie in a bunker, says we probably went to the moon because Elon Musk told him so, but the actual footage? Eh, not buying it. However, UAPs and interdimensional visitors are a sure thing, and thousands of NASA scientists and astronauts might just be part of an elaborate decades-long performance art piece. Truly the perfect guest for the household that helped write Muslim bans and family-separation talking points.
When he’s not implying Neil Armstrong was method acting, Bryson gushes about his friendship with Donald Trump, whom the podcast dutifully refers to as "the most powerful man in the world" — because nothing says "healthy democracy" like treating a twice-impeached coup enthusiast as your permanent supreme leader. DeChambeau’s real dilemma, though, is whether to keep playing golf for the Saudis’ collapsing LIV project or go full-time into content creation. Given how well this little reality-detached media tour went, the propaganda ecosystem is clearly begging for his services.
Source: theguardian.com
#anti-science#trumps-america
anti science
trump solves hurricanes by defunding the forecast
NOAA satellite image of Hurricane Melissa, captured back when the administration still grudgingly funded looking up.
As the US walks into a "super El Niño" summer like it's a surprise party, the Trump administration is helpfully making sure the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has less data to work with. NOAA rolled out advanced AI weather models that need massive, high-quality data to improve forecasts; Trump responded by proposing a 40% cut to NOAA overall, gutting climate programs, and forcing staffing reductions that scale back satellites and weather balloons. Because why just ignore the climate crisis when you can also blindfold the people whose job is to see it coming?
Officials insist there's still a "wealth" of weather data, which is a cute spin when experts are pointing out that critical observation systems, ocean buoys, balloon launches, and climate research are being slashed. The new AI models already struggle with extreme events because they're trained on a past climate that no longer exists, and Trump’s solution is to further starve them of the data they need while also kneecapping the traditional physics-based models that actually handle record-breaking extremes. It’s like ripping out your smoke detectors during wildfire season because you’re tired of bad news.
Scientists are fairly blunt: cutting climate research "arrests our advancement" in forecasting just as record heat, stronger hurricanes, and more chaotic storms line up on the calendar. The administration has essentially decided that if we can’t predict the disaster, maybe voters will just call it "bad luck" instead of policy failure. It’s not weather management, it’s risk laundering — with millions of people in the path of storms that their own government is choosing not to see clearly.
Source: theguardian.com
#anti-science#killing-democracy
anti science
trump bans woke fires, lets real ones burn
A firefighter performs a controlled burn, an activity the Trump administration is heroically replacing with forms, culture-war memos, and a prayer that pine needles respect immigration policy.
The Trump administration has finally figured out how to fight wildfires: don’t fund prevention, but do grill every grant recipient about immigration, DEI, and whether they have sufficiently pledged loyalty to the fossil fuel gods. In Washington state, land managers like Adam Lieberg were supposed to be conducting controlled burns on hundreds of acres to keep communities safe. Instead, he’s stuck in front of a computer watching his $9 million federal grant sit in bureaucratic purgatory because the Forest Service now makes wildfire groups swear they won’t "support climate change" or fund "DEI" — two things that were not, shockingly, part of the original plan to burn pine needles.
USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins helpfully formalized the arson-by-paperwork strategy on December 31, 2025, signing a memo that rewrote partnership terms to "advance policies that put America First" — which apparently means using wildfire prevention grants to enforce Trump’s culture-war loyalty oaths. States are being told that if they want money to keep their residents from burning alive, they need to accept conditions that violate their own laws on immigration and diversity. Washington’s state forester says he literally can’t accept the terms, so the money just sits while the forests dry out and the clock on safe burn windows runs out.
Across 22 states and two Tribes, about $200 million in Community Wildfire Defense Grants is frozen while the administration makes sure no one accidentally promotes inclusion or acknowledges that climate change exists. The result: fewer controlled burns, more catastrophic fires, and a federal government that treats wildfire safety as a hostage in its war on immigrants, science, and the concept of diversity. America First, forests last, and if your town goes up in flames — well, at least the grant paperwork died pure and un-woke.
Source: npr.org
#anti-science#killing-democracy
anti science
trump discovers you can kill science without technically cutting the budget
The Trump-era NIH funding process, seen here in the wild: a shiny budget line on paper and a lab bench sitting empty in real life.
The Trump administration has apparently unlocked a new level of sabotage: fund the NIH on paper, starve it in practice. After Congress — in a rare moment of bipartisanship and basic human decency — restored billions in research money for 2026, the administration responded by just... not really giving it out. Former NIH officials say the agency is now handing out fewer grants, stretched over more years with bigger dollar amounts, so everything looks fine in a pie chart while entire fields of research quietly flatline.
Instead of openly attacking the "crown jewel" of the federal government, they're running a passive-aggressive demolition. NIH "forecasts" for future research funding are being left up like ghost listings on a dead real estate site — 205 of 336 are past their promised posting dates, never turned into real grant calls. To scientists, it looks like opportunity; to the administration, it's just a screensaver.
On the ground, this means cancer labs like Rachael Sirianni’s are laying people off, closing down promising pediatric brain cancer projects, and leaving once-busy benches as little memorials to the research that could have been. Years of taxpayer-funded progress toward saving kids with metastatic tumors are now politely driven into a brick wall, while HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon shrugs and insists everything is just back to "typical funding patterns" — if by typical you mean weaponizing bureaucracy so children’s cancer therapies lose a race against the calendar.
#anti-science#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
anti science
rfk jr discovers autism causes government transparency, moves swiftly to cure it
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, seen here confidently explaining medicine to the FDA after reading half a blog post in 2007.
The second Trump administration’s Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, has apparently decided the real public health emergency is… accurate information. Autism advocates released a brutal timeline of HHS’s first year, showing RFK Jr firing staff, slashing autism research by $31 million, shutting down the office that handles freedom of information requests, and quietly deleting FDA warnings about dangerous fake autism “treatments”. When he’s not dismantling transparency, he’s packing the federal autism committee with anti-vaxxers and pseudoscience superfans, because who needs scientists when you’ve got Facebook threads.
Having turned HHS into a conspiracy subreddit with a federal budget, Kennedy spent last April promising they’d "know the causes of autism" by September, declaring autism is "destroying families", and rolling out a national autism registry like it’s a loyalty program for stigma. Then came the September stunt: officials hyped leucovorin, a B vitamin, as an autism treatment and blamed Tylenol use in pregnancy for autism — despite the FDA only approving leucovorin for a rare folate deficiency and research finding no Tylenol-autism link. ER orders of Tylenol for pregnant people dropped, confusion spiked, and HHS’s response was to do absolutely nothing to correct the record. Why fix the fire when you can just watch it burn?
Now, with midterms looming, RFK Jr and friends have discovered the concept of an indoor voice. They’ve dialed down the public theatrics, quietly cancelling and then rescheduling the autism committee’s first meeting, while still planning to slap new "prenatal exposure" warnings on acetaminophen labels and leaving their earlier misinformation untouched to keep poisoning the well. Autism advocates describe the past year as "drowning in misinformation" and are openly calling on Congress to hold oversight hearings and, if warranted, impeach RFK Jr for being derelict in his duty. Which raises the obvious question: when the nation’s top health official is a professional anti-vaccine crank weaponizing federal agencies against science and disabled people, what exactly counts as dereliction at this point?
Having turned HHS into a conspiracy subreddit with a federal budget, Kennedy spent last April promising they’d "know the causes of autism" by September, declaring autism is "destroying families", and rolling out a national autism registry like it’s a loyalty program for stigma. Then came the September stunt: officials hyped leucovorin, a B vitamin, as an autism treatment and blamed Tylenol use in pregnancy for autism — despite the FDA only approving leucovorin for a rare folate deficiency and research finding no Tylenol-autism link. ER orders of Tylenol for pregnant people dropped, confusion spiked, and HHS’s response was to do absolutely nothing to correct the record. Why fix the fire when you can just watch it burn?
Now, with midterms looming, RFK Jr and friends have discovered the concept of an indoor voice. They’ve dialed down the public theatrics, quietly cancelling and then rescheduling the autism committee’s first meeting, while still planning to slap new "prenatal exposure" warnings on acetaminophen labels and leaving their earlier misinformation untouched to keep poisoning the well. Autism advocates describe the past year as "drowning in misinformation" and are openly calling on Congress to hold oversight hearings and, if warranted, impeach RFK Jr for being derelict in his duty. Which raises the obvious question: when the nation’s top health official is a professional anti-vaccine crank weaponizing federal agencies against science and disabled people, what exactly counts as dereliction at this point?
Source: theguardian.com
#anti-science#killing-democracy
anti science
trump and rfk jr put a vaccine skeptic in charge of public health, what could go wrong
Dr. Sara Brenner, seen here preparing to replace peer review with slogans and Pilates, brings her ‘Make America Healthy Again’ brand of vibes-based medicine to the top of federal public health.
Trump’s latest contribution to modern medicine: putting a vaccine skeptic in the room where public health decisions happen and making sure she doesn’t need Senate confirmation to get there. Dr. Sara Brenner, an FDA deputy commissioner and proud “MAHA mom” (Make America Healthy Again, because acronyms cure measles now), has been tapped as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s senior counselor for public health — the person who will serve as his eyes and ears at the CDC and NIH.
While the new CDC director nominee, Dr. Erica Schwartz, has the radical belief that vaccines work, Brenner has publicly suggested people shouldn’t “reflexively believe” in their benefits, putting her squarely in RFK Jr.’s anti-vax fan club. The job conveniently dodges Senate confirmation, meaning Trump and Kennedy can quietly wire a vaccine skeptic directly into the command center of federal public health without having to explain to anyone why the nation’s disease fighters now report to someone who thinks the basic tools of disease prevention are more of a vibe than a necessity.
From her perch in the health secretary’s office, Brenner will be meeting daily with CDC brass and liaising with NIH, which is already under fire for slashing research grants. So while scientists scramble to keep funding and defend basic evidence, Trump and RFK Jr. are making sure the person whispering in their ears is someone who treats vaccination like a controversial lifestyle choice. It’s not public health policy anymore — it’s a wellness influencer takeover of the federal government.
While the new CDC director nominee, Dr. Erica Schwartz, has the radical belief that vaccines work, Brenner has publicly suggested people shouldn’t “reflexively believe” in their benefits, putting her squarely in RFK Jr.’s anti-vax fan club. The job conveniently dodges Senate confirmation, meaning Trump and Kennedy can quietly wire a vaccine skeptic directly into the command center of federal public health without having to explain to anyone why the nation’s disease fighters now report to someone who thinks the basic tools of disease prevention are more of a vibe than a necessity.
From her perch in the health secretary’s office, Brenner will be meeting daily with CDC brass and liaising with NIH, which is already under fire for slashing research grants. So while scientists scramble to keep funding and defend basic evidence, Trump and RFK Jr. are making sure the person whispering in their ears is someone who treats vaccination like a controversial lifestyle choice. It’s not public health policy anymore — it’s a wellness influencer takeover of the federal government.
Source: nytimes.com
#anti-science#killing-democracy#healthcare
anti science
trump declares war on reality, accidentally creates a science movement
Colette Delawalla on the National Mall, bravely advocating for the controversial idea that cancer research should matter more than Trump’s feelings about pronouns.
Nineteen days into Trump 2: Electric Boogaloo, the White House announced $4bn in cuts to medical and scientific research, slapped gag orders on government scientists, and told the NIH to start shredding any grant that offended the president’s feelings about “gender ideology” and “diversity”. You know, just routine stuff for an administration that treats evidence like a personal attack. While the big professional science organizations mostly responded with a bold strategy of sitting perfectly still and hoping the velociraptor can’t see them, a pissed-off Emory grad student in her pajamas decided that maybe, actually, someone should do something.
So Colette Delawalla fired off a Bluesky post – “FUCK IT IM PLANNING A STAND UP FOR SCIENCE PROTEST IN DC” – and within 72 hours she was on the phone with the New York Times, and within a month there were coordinated Stand Up for Science protests in more than 30 cities, organized by early-career researchers with no institutional backing and a shared hatred of watching their life’s work get defunded by guys who think hydroxychloroquine is peer-reviewed literature. The NIH purge and funding cuts stayed in place, of course, because authoritarian policy doesn’t vanish just because the National Mall got loud for a day, but Delawalla and company quietly turned that one-off tantrum into a real organization with 22 staff and thousands of volunteers.
The best part? Her harshest critics weren’t MAGA diehards but other scientists and lefties complaining that she was doing activism wrong, as if the real threat to science is an overworked grad student trying to build a movement while the federal government turns research agendas into a culture-war loyalty test. Trump’s people are busy writing “biological truth” into executive orders and banning whole research topics, but sure, let’s focus our energy on tone-policing the woman trying to keep the lights on in the lab.
Source: theguardian.com
#anti-science#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
anti science
trump fires the people in charge of knowing things
Artist’s impression of the Trump administration overseeing American science: a "NO SCIENTISTS ALLOWED" sign taped to an empty conference table.
The Trump White House just told every member of the National Science Board to get lost via all-staff breakup email, "on behalf of President Donald J Trump" — because nothing screams respect for independent science oversight like a Friday afternoon mass firing. The board, which has existed since 1950 to advise presidents and Congress on science policy and sign off on major National Science Foundation grants, was in the middle of finishing a report on the state of US science. Naturally, that had to go.
This 22-member panel of astronomers, chemists, mathematicians, and engineers was created to keep NSF focused on, you know, science. Trump’s team wants it focused on something else: making it easier to hack the agency’s $9bn budget in half after Congress rudely refused to do that last year. With the board gone, those cuts get a lot simpler, and "eviscerating" funding for basic research and training the next generation of scientists becomes just another line item in the great American decline spreadsheet.
The White House insists the NSF’s work "continues uninterrupted" and that maybe the board’s powers just need a little "updating" — which is a very polite way of saying "we’re replacing independent experts with people who won’t complain when we set the lab on fire." Meanwhile, HUD is literally moving into NSF’s old headquarters, a perfect metaphor for this administration’s priorities: evict science, move in bureaucracy, and call it innovation. American science policy, now brought to you by whoever survives the next purge.
Source: theguardian.com
#anti-science#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
anti science
trump lets rfk jr 'go wild' on vaccines, america gets measles
Trump watching RFK Jr talk about health policy like a man who just realized he gave the car keys to the guy who thinks seatbelts are a deep-state psy-op.
Trump’s big health-care innovation this term is apparently biological roulette. He put Robert F. Kennedy Jr in charge of HHS, promised to let him "go wild," and Kennedy did exactly that: he purged the vaccine advisory committee, stacked it with anti-vaxxers, and helped the CDC slash childhood immunisation recommendations while the US stumbled into its worst measles outbreak in decades. Two children in Texas are dead, but don’t worry, a Facebook group for "MAHA moms" feels very heard.
The new vaccine panel was so laughably unqualified that a judge had to step in and hit pause, ruling that, small detail, credentials actually matter when you’re rewriting national health policy. Meanwhile, Kennedy fired CDC director Susan Monarez for refusing to rubber-stamp his pet policies, leaving the country’s top public-health agency leaderless for months. That’s not health governance, that’s a wellness influencer coup.
Now that pollsters have gently informed the White House that being pro-measles is "political poison," Trump’s team is trying to stuff the anti-vax genie back in the bottle, ordering Kennedy to pivot away from vaccine politics before the midterms. The administration is simultaneously appealing the court ruling (maybe, eventually) while pretending this was all just an over-enthusiastic "conversation about informed consent" and not a live-fire experiment on the immune systems of American children. Bold strategy: burn down public health, then blame the smoke on bad messaging.
Source: bbc.com
#anti-science#killing-democracy
anti science
make the lake great again (with your tax dollars)
Bison contemplate whether the Great Salt Lake or U.S. environmental policy will disappear first.
Donald Trump has discovered the Great Salt Lake, which is impressive for a man who once thought raking forests was sound wildfire policy. After years of Utah leaders shrugging at overuse and climate change while the lake evaporated into an "environmental nuclear bomb," they’ve now arrived at their favorite conservative solution: beg Washington for a $1 billion bailout while still cosplaying as rugged, small-government pioneers.
Trump, of course, is thrilled. On Truth Social he declared the lake an urgent “Environmental hazard” and closed with the legally required campaign slogan pun: “MAKE ‘THE LAKE’ GREAT AGAIN!” Because if there’s one thing a collapsing saline ecosystem needs, it’s a branding exercise. The supposed moonshot here is restoring a terminal salt lake — something no country has ever done — but the more familiar storyline is federal money sluicing toward a GOP state that helped create the problem, now rebranded as visionary stewardship because the president noticed a new backdrop for rallies.
Scientists like BYU ecologist Ben Abbott talk about a world-first rescue of a critical ecosystem; Trumpworld hears “massive construction contracts, endless ribbon cuttings, and naming rights opportunities.” Utah gets to keep draining rivers for development and agriculture while the feds pick up the tab, and Trump gets to pose as the savior of a lake his party’s environmental policies helped kill. It’s disaster capitalism, but with more brine shrimp.
Source: npr.org
#anti-science#money
anti science
cms now stands for coke, miracles & soda
Trump contemplates advanced cancer therapy on Air Force One, also known as a warm Fanta in a Styrofoam cup.
The president of the United States, a man with the nuclear codes and a permanent McDonald’s coupon book, apparently believes diet soda might kill cancer cells because it can kill grass. This revelation comes courtesy of Mehmet Oz — now somehow running the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — who cheerfully recounted how Trump defended chugging Fanta on Air Force One by declaring, “this stuff’s good for me – it kills cancer cells,” and then suggested it was basically health food because it’s made with “fresh squeezed” orange juice from concentrate. America, your tax dollars are sponsoring a live-action YouTube misinformation reel.
Not to be outdone, Don Jr. nodded along and floated the idea that maybe his dad is “on to something,” citing Trump’s “energy, recall, stamina” as if surviving on Diet Coke and grievance were a peer-reviewed clinical trial. Meanwhile, actual doctors are sprinting to social media to remind people that diet soda does not, in fact, cure cancer — though Trump’s logic does raise the exciting possibility that bleach is a superfood. Physicians have to publicly debunk the commander-in-chief’s lawn-care-based oncology theories while the same health department he controls is re-writing US nutrition guidelines to emphasize “real food.” Sure, real food — as long as it comes in a fountain cup and melts a dandelion.
This is the same brain trust that once mused about injecting disinfectant and shining “powerful light” inside the body, now effectively crowdsourcing public health policy from late-night infomercials and whatever pops into Trump’s head when he sees a commercial. With Dr. Oz at CMS and Trump treating sodas like chemo in a can, the line between federal health guidance and a daytime talk show segment has fully disintegrated. The only thing getting killed here isn’t cancer — it’s scientific credibility.
Source: theguardian.com
#anti-science#healthcare#full-stupid
anti science
rfk jr runs cdc like a facebook comments section
Robert F Kennedy Jr studies vaccine policy the way most people read YouTube comments: confidently, incorrectly, and with catastrophic consequences.
The Trump administration’s second-term health strategy is finally clear: if you can’t beat infectious diseases, legally disable the people who know how. A federal judge just hit pause on all the vaccine "work" done by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) — the one hand‑picked by HHS secretary and professional anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr — and in the process vaporized official CDC recommendations for current flu shots, Covid boosters, and a new RSV shot for babies. So yes, the world’s richest country has managed to stumble into respiratory virus season with a vibes-based vaccine policy.
Instead of fixing the mess, the administration has produced a fresh one. There’s no confirmed CDC director, ACIP is legally radioactive, and Kennedy technically could issue recommendations himself, assuming he can stop suing vaccines long enough to read the court order. Health officials might also just ignore the judge entirely — a move that, to be fair, is now standard operating procedure for Trump-world whenever the judiciary gets fussy about laws and due process.
States are splintering off, insurers aren’t sure what they’ll cover, pharmacists don’t know what they’re allowed to give, and professional medical organizations are scrambling to fill the void with guidelines based on whatever data they can legally see. Meanwhile, the administration’s big reform is a new ACIP charter that gives more power to groups that treat PubMed like a Deep State psy-op. Public trust in vaccines and the CDC is circling the drain, and experts say the genie of confusion and mistrust is already out of the bottle. Perfect timing, as always, for the next pandemic roll of the dice.
Source: theguardian.com
#anti-science#healthcare#killing-democracy
anti science
epa now stands for environmental pollution agency
Lee Zeldin tells a ballroom of professional climate deniers that they’re the real victims, moments after they finish cheering the rollback of the EPA’s legal basis for regulating pollution.
While scientists announce that March was the most abnormally hot month in U.S. history, a bunch of middle-aged men in conference lanyards huddle in a D.C. hotel basement to declare that, actually, everything’s fine and CO2 is your friend. The Heartland Institute, a fossil-fuel-funded monument to professional wrongness, throws a climate denial pep rally complete with children’s books minimizing sea level rise and buttons bragging "Unashamed about my carbon footprint" — because nothing says serious policy movement like merch that could double as gag gifts from Spencer’s.
Presiding over this science bonfire is Trump’s EPA administrator Lee Zeldin — also reportedly on the shortlist for attorney general, because this administration views qualifications the way it views emissions limits: something to be repealed. Zeldin uses his keynote to rail against a "cabal" of elites who believed in things like data, while the crowd cheers the repeal of the EPA’s "endangerment finding" — the legal backbone of virtually all U.S. climate rules. Meanwhile, denialist groups brag about getting an ophthalmologist with no air pollution background placed on a crucial EPA science panel, proving the new standard for environmental expertise is "has eyes."
Naomi Oreskes dryly points out that these guys aren’t oppressed outsiders; they’re bankrolled by big oil and Republican megadonors like the Mercers, and now enjoy direct lines into Trump’s White House and Project 2025. Heartland and its friends have already helped kill offshore wind projects, gut climate regulations, and build a government where climate deniers write climate policy. Polls show most Americans — including a big chunk of young Republicans — accept climate reality, but the people in charge are the ones handing out stress balls that say "Don’t stress. There is no climate crisis" as the planet quite literally bakes. Climate denial isn’t just winning the argument in this administration — it’s holding the regulatory pen.
Presiding over this science bonfire is Trump’s EPA administrator Lee Zeldin — also reportedly on the shortlist for attorney general, because this administration views qualifications the way it views emissions limits: something to be repealed. Zeldin uses his keynote to rail against a "cabal" of elites who believed in things like data, while the crowd cheers the repeal of the EPA’s "endangerment finding" — the legal backbone of virtually all U.S. climate rules. Meanwhile, denialist groups brag about getting an ophthalmologist with no air pollution background placed on a crucial EPA science panel, proving the new standard for environmental expertise is "has eyes."
Naomi Oreskes dryly points out that these guys aren’t oppressed outsiders; they’re bankrolled by big oil and Republican megadonors like the Mercers, and now enjoy direct lines into Trump’s White House and Project 2025. Heartland and its friends have already helped kill offshore wind projects, gut climate regulations, and build a government where climate deniers write climate policy. Polls show most Americans — including a big chunk of young Republicans — accept climate reality, but the people in charge are the ones handing out stress balls that say "Don’t stress. There is no climate crisis" as the planet quite literally bakes. Climate denial isn’t just winning the argument in this administration — it’s holding the regulatory pen.
Source: theguardian.com
#anti-science#killing-democracy
anti science
trump cures autism by giving everyone a headache instead
Trump explaining to doctors that his gut knows more than 1.5 million patient records and several decades of epidemiology.
Science has once again rudely interrupted Donald Trump’s medical fan fiction. A massive Danish study of 1.5 million children finds that taking Tylenol during pregnancy has no link to autism, despite the Trump administration’s months-long crusade to turn a basic pain reliever into the new vaccine bogeyman. Autism rates were actually lower among kids exposed to Tylenol in utero than those who weren’t, which is what happens when you compare reality to whatever Trump free-associated at a podium.
The administration leaned so hard into the Tylenol-autism myth that the FDA began a label change process in 2025 to warn pregnant people about a "potential link" that…doesn’t exist. Trump went on stage and repeatedly told pregnant people not to take Tylenol, except in "extremely high fever" situations where they couldn’t "tough it out"—a bold new public health strategy known as just suffer. Meanwhile, Tylenol use in pregnant ER patients dropped 10%, because nothing says "pro-life" like scaring expectant parents away from safe fever control.
As a bonus, the same circus also announced that leucovorin, a B vitamin, could be used to treat autism—an announcement so scientifically bankrupt it had to be quietly walked back this year. So the Trump team managed a perfect public health trifecta: elevate junk science, weaponize the FDA label to validate it, and push desperate families toward a fake treatment. Regulatory capture, medical misinformation, and cruelty toward pregnant people and autistic kids—all for the price of a bottle of Tylenol.
Source: theguardian.com
#anti-science#healthcare#killing-democracy
anti science
trump celebrates nasa moonshot, proposes extinction-level budget asteroid
Artemis II splashes down flawlessly as somewhere in Washington, a Trump staffer tries to cancel a mission that already died last year and calls it a bold new space policy.
NASA just pulled off its biggest human spaceflight achievement since Apollo: Artemis II looped around the moon, broke distance records, and splashed down like a training video for competence. Astronauts waxed poetic, engineers cried, the country got one of those rare moments where science, ambition, and basic human awe briefly drown out the daily political sewage.
Enter Donald Trump, logging into Truth Social to praise the "great and very talented" crew while simultaneously pushing what space policy experts are calling "extinction-level" cuts to NASA. He wants a 23% overall slash, including a 46% hit to space science, in a budget proposal so lazy it tries to save money by canceling missions that were already canceled and double-funding telescopes because someone couldn't be bothered to edit the copy-paste. It's less a budget than a cry for help from an administration that lost a fight with Microsoft Word.
NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, whose job apparently now includes pretending the agency can "meet high expectations" while being slowly dismembered, dutifully defends the cuts. Meanwhile, Congress — in a rare outbreak of functional brain activity — has already rejected a nearly identical slash-and-burn proposal once and looks ready to do it again. Space policy experts describe the whole thing as "discordant" and "from an alternate universe", which is a very polite way of saying the White House is trying to gut the very agency it’s using as a patriotic backdrop.
So while Artemis II proves the US can still send humans to the moon and back, the Trump administration is hard at work trying to make sure there’s no functioning NASA left to do it again. America’s astronauts are "ambassadors for humanity"; Trump is the guy airlocking their budget and calling it fiscal responsibility.
Enter Donald Trump, logging into Truth Social to praise the "great and very talented" crew while simultaneously pushing what space policy experts are calling "extinction-level" cuts to NASA. He wants a 23% overall slash, including a 46% hit to space science, in a budget proposal so lazy it tries to save money by canceling missions that were already canceled and double-funding telescopes because someone couldn't be bothered to edit the copy-paste. It's less a budget than a cry for help from an administration that lost a fight with Microsoft Word.
NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, whose job apparently now includes pretending the agency can "meet high expectations" while being slowly dismembered, dutifully defends the cuts. Meanwhile, Congress — in a rare outbreak of functional brain activity — has already rejected a nearly identical slash-and-burn proposal once and looks ready to do it again. Space policy experts describe the whole thing as "discordant" and "from an alternate universe", which is a very polite way of saying the White House is trying to gut the very agency it’s using as a patriotic backdrop.
So while Artemis II proves the US can still send humans to the moon and back, the Trump administration is hard at work trying to make sure there’s no functioning NASA left to do it again. America’s astronauts are "ambassadors for humanity"; Trump is the guy airlocking their budget and calling it fiscal responsibility.
Source: theguardian.com
#anti-science#killing-democracy
anti science
epa chief celebrates burning the mission statement
EPA chief Lee Zeldin addresses a room full of people insisting fire is cold and smoke is good for the lungs.
Lee Zeldin, the guy currently cosplaying as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, just gave the keynote at the Heartland Institute’s climate denial jamboree – the same outfit that once compared climate worriers to the Unabomber on billboards. From the stage, Zeldin declared that well-established climate science is based on “bad, flawed assumptions,” while a roomful of fossil-fuel-funded contrarians nodded along like they’d just discovered gravity. Heartland, naturally, has been bankrolled by Shell, Exxon, and the Mercer family, and helped write Project 2025 – so yes, this is less a conference and more a shareholder meeting for planet-wrecking.
Under Trump 2.0, Zeldin has been busy turning the EPA into the Environmental Pollution Acceleration agency: exempting dirty facilities from rules, shuttering climate research offices, gutting the workforce, and rolling back dozens of protections for air, water, and, minor detail, a livable climate. His proudest achievement? Helping shred the EPA’s “endangerment finding,” the legal backbone of nearly all US climate regulations, while Heartland cheers that carbon dioxide is “not a pollutant and never was.” Meanwhile, scientists, public health groups, and anyone who enjoys breathing are pointing out that this isn’t “climate realism” – it’s regulatory arson.
Zeldin framed the entire scientific community as a “cabal” of “biggest grifters” who cruelly insist on things like data and physics, as he stood at an event literally sponsored by oil money and Project 2025 architects. He insists this demolition of environmental safeguards is exactly what Americans voted for when they put Donald J. Trump back in office – a refreshing bit of honesty that yes, the plan is to torch climate policy, mock the consequences, and call it freedom while the planet cooks.
Source: theguardian.com
#anti-science#forever-grifting