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By promoting pseudoscience, purging government scientists, and censoring their work and speech, U.S. President Donald Trump is following Stalin, Hitler, and Putin’s playbook.
As he sat in his Kremlin office in autumn 1948, Joseph Stalin faced hard decisions about the dangers facing Soviet science. Spies threatened to steal state secrets. Agents of capitalist ideology promoted false research paradigms. With the stroke of a pen, Stalin dictated real Soviet science. He endorsed the bogus theory of “Lysenkoism” with its rejection of genetics. He oversaw the firing, arrests, and imprisonment of biologists. He next identified so-called materialist state physics that repudiated relativity theory—Albert Einstein was a Jewish theorist, after all. And Stalin shut down cybernetics, which waylaid the development of computers into the 1990s.
Under Hitler, too, the Nazi state imposed restrictions on science owing to prevailing racist, antisemitic ideas. What had once been the world’s greatest scientific establishment was destroyed by ideological interference even before its physical devastation in World War II. Nonpareil U.S. science arose in the postwar years on the foundations of scientific freedom and extensive funding.
Shockingly, U.S. President Donald Trump also pursues pseudoscience through false proclamations. He hopes, with the stroke of a pen, to abolish transgender people, vaccinations, and climate change. To manage research and development, Trump has turned science portfolios over to singularly unqualified ideological agents. And he has adopted authoritarian tactics to control science in two major ways.
Trump once said he wanted the generals that Hitler had. He’s certainly working on getting the science that Hitler and Stalin had.
First, Trump has purged thousands of scientists. Firings have been promoted as a way to cut waste in the federal government, but reflect the desire of the White House to halt research that Trump and his minions reject ranging from sickle cell medicine to obstetrics and gynecology; from ecology to climate change; and from vaccinations to Alzheimer’s investigations. Trump, still bruised from his failed attempt to force Hurricane Dorian to follow the path of his Sharpie, not scientific forecasts, fired 880 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists.
Like under Stalin, no bureaucracy is free from interference: the Food and Drug Administration (to prevent a range of medicines from being used), National Institutes of Health (to cut research on gender, health equity, and environmental justice), U.S. Fish and Wildlife (to limit the enforcement of the Endangered Species Act), the Department of Agriculture (to close down the battle with avian flu), and the National Nuclear Security Administration (to weaken the nation’s nuclear arsenal). The wanton firings include researchers, physicians, nurses, clinicians, and even park rangers and foresters, putting the nation’s natural heritage at risk.
Second, the Trump administration is censoring scientific speech and publication. Such world-leading publications as Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reportwere temporarily shut down. Federal scientists whose work uses “gender” and other suspect words are being required to withdraw in-press articles, and are being prevented from submitting future work using these terms. Zealous Trump acolytes have cleansed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) websites of information about immunization, contraception, racism, and health. Others have removed data on climate on which farmers and others rely. A French university in Marseilles is offering a research haven to U.S. scientists who worry about censorship of their work.
Federal scientific agencies have been told in recent weeks to remove such words as nonbinary, woman, disabled, and elderly from their purview. Only in the 1990s did U.S. scientific administrators and researchers began to redress the heavily skewed underparticipation of women in clinical studies, and the inattention to women’s health issues in the national research agenda. Trump administration policies will return women and minorities to being outsiders in R, D, and employment. Indeed, as in Nazi Germany there are natalist, racial, and homophobic overtones to current Trump scientific protocols, not the least in implicit prohibitions against research involving LGBTQ individuals. Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Bobby Kennedy asserts that Black people should follow a different vaccine schedule than whites on the basis of his false claims that Blacks need fewer antigens.
The Stalinists, similarly, slowed scientific publication through a censorship bureau called Glavlit. As a result of this censorship, Soviet science failed to perform well by many measures: scientific citation indices, Nobel, and other major international prizes.
To achieve censorship, Trump is pursuing scientific isolation. The Communist Party prevented scientists from attending international conferences from the 1930s until the 1980s, stultifying the development of Soviet science. In the U.S., the White House has embargoed travel funds. The president has closed down conferences and prohibited such groups as an independent expert vaccine panel from meeting which at the very least delays the funding of cutting edge research in all fields. Not content with the natural sciences, like the Stalinists in the 1940s, the administration has turned on the social sciences as well, for example, closing the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee.
The impacts are already being felt. Trump has long accepted baseless anti-vaccination propaganda. As a result, the CDC ended a successful flu vaccination campaign, while Trump signed a dictate to prohibit federal funding for Covid-19 vaccine mandates in schools. Yet, according to the World Health Organization, over the past 50 years, vaccination against 14 major diseases has directly contributed to reducing infant deaths by 40% globally and saved over 150 million lives. Meanwhile, the worst measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico in the last 30 years has sickened 125 people, most of them children; measles can lead to pneumonia, encephalitis, and death. In a throwback to the medical nonsense suggested by the president to downing bleach to cure Covid-19, Bobby Kennedy is proposing drinking cod liver oil to combat the outbreak.
Engineering is similarly being hit with a funding cudgel, with programs in wind and solar power and high-speed trains cancelled. This can only lead to the end of U.S. scientific priority in a variety of fields, the closing down of promising research directions, and damage to strategic national interests. Personal whims play a role here. Embarrassed by the success of the Chips Act (2022) that rejuvenated the U.S. semiconductor industry, Trump plans to destroy the “horrible, horrible” program.
If Trump seeks contemporary examples of authoritarian interference in modern science, he can look to Russia again. Under President Vladimir Putin, the security police have arrested scientists on accusations of espionage; several have died in custody. In May 2001 the Russian Academy of Sciences ordered specialists to report all their foreign contacts to the authorities for monitoring. Universities followed suit. Next the FSB closed down NGOs. And Russian scientists are again isolated.
Stalin purged his officer corps on the eve of World War II, severely handicapping the Red Army against Nazi Germany. Stalin published a book in 1948 called Marxism and Linguistics to establish himself as the leader in the field. Trump, apparently hoping to be recognized as a scientific expert, recently pontificated on “transgender” mice; of course, he does not understand the value of transgenic research with applications for human health from asthma to chronic wounds to heart disease any more than Stalin fathomed linguistics. But this utterance is in keeping with his firing of military personnel from leadership positions based on pseudoscientific notions of lower intelligence for soldiers of color. Trump once said he wanted the generals that Hitler had. He’s certainly working on getting the science that Hitler and Stalin had.
Defense against dangerous epidemic outbreaks requires constant vigilance. With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump headed to Washington, D.C., we are entering very troubling territory.
Elvis Presley hardly seems a likely candidate for the pantheon of public health heroes. But in October 1956 the ascending rock idol lent his considerable stardom to helping save lives.
His little remembered role is a cautionary tale as incoming President Trump advances a series of farright and unqualified appointees to major public agencies. The most dangerous is likely to be conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, augmented by like-minded, perilous public health heads of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Federal Drug Administration (FDA), and his choice for Surgeon General.
For a century, polio epidemics made it one of the world’s most terrifying diseases. A 1916 outbreak in New York City killed over 2,000 people; another in the U.S. in 1952 claimed over 3,000. Children were especially targeted, over 60,000 infected yearly, facing lifelong severe spinal injuries requiring braces, crutches, and wheelchairs, and the dreaded iron lung, an artificial respirator, or premature death.
Wealth and status proved no barrier, as evidenced by President Franklin Roosevelt who was diagnosed at age 39 in 1921 with polio and endured it the rest of his life. What was a safeguard was the first vaccine, developed by virologist/medical researcher Jonas Salk. The announcement on April 12, 1955 by University of Michigan School of Public Health scientist Thomas Francis, Jr., who declared it “safe, effective, and potent,” was greeted as a national celebration, spread rapidly over radio, television, and wire services.
Parents lined up to vaccinate their young children, plenty did not. Teen immunization levels stagnated at just 0.6 percent. Enter Elvis. He agreed to go on the popular Ed Sullivan TV show, not to sing, but to get publicly vaccinated, viewed by millions. Vaccination rates among American youth soared to 80 percent in just six months. Overall annual cases of polio plummeted within a year from 58,000 to 5,600. By 1961, only 161 cases remained. After an oral vaccine followed, polio disappeared in the U.S. completely.
Yet polio never vanished globally, especially in underdeveloped nations, as in Africa, and in war zones, including in Gaza today—driven by Israel’s decimation of public health protections during its catastrophic and ongoing assault. In 2022, the first U.S. case in decades was reported by the New York State Department of Health.
Defense against dangerous epidemic outbreaks requires constant vigilance, and public support for full embrace of public health safety measures, including vaccinations. The experience of Trump’s first tenure is far from reassuring, especially his abominable failure in the face of Covid-19, the worst global pandemic in a century which ultimately cost the lives of over 1.2 million Americans.
Initial skepticism over the polio vaccine has a long antecedent in the U.S., described early in the Covid pandemic by what Los Angeles Times writer Carolina Miranda aptly termed “toxic individualism” and rugged individualism. It is traceable to a virulent brew of misguided notions of individual liberty that undermine and sabotage the public good, or a commons of national and community interest. Much of its roots are linked to structural racism, as in the resistance to Civil Rights Movement measures, and continuing today in white opposition to reforms such as expansion of health care and other public programs, immigration rights, and other societal benefits.
That history provides context for the eruption of the anti-vax, anti-public health measures that exacerbated and prolonged Covid suffering and death and seeded the ground for opposition to other essential vaccines. It’s true, as medical ethicist Arthur Caplan writes, that much of “the damage to getting Americans to vaccinate has already been done… There are almost no serious state mandates for childhood vaccines. Parents who want to opt out are easily doing so, as can be seen by the resurgence in measles and whooping cough. Nearly 40% of teenagers are not up to date on the HPV vaccine even as Australia and Scotland are on the verge of eliminating cervical cancer thanks to serious immunization campaigns.”
Further, he adds “Democrats avoided vaccination as an issue this election year because they knew that, post Covid, vaccination has become something of a political third rail. Could Kennedy and [CMS nominee Dr. Mehmet] Oz make things worse—absolutely. But are matters already bad—sadly, yes.”
The Kennedy-Trump threat
Yet Kennedy and his coterie of other department heads can make matters much worse. With the imprimatur of a President-elect already lionized by an often-fawning base will likely discourage more resistance to vaccines that can turn schools into major disease vectors and hasten the spread of new epidemics sure to come.
Even in the wake of Covid, Kennedy, with his power as HHS Secretary has said he would pause NIH’s drug development and infectious disease research and shift its focus to chronic diseases that do need attention but not at the expense of combating global epidemics.
Kennedy has also indicated a desire to shutter “entire” FDA departments, which oversee safety and effectiveness of prescription drugs and vaccines. And he has threatened to purge FDA staff for “aggressive suppression” of unsafe products and therapies, such as raw milk, and discredited COVID treatments, including hydroxychloroquine.
There’s his lurid, scientifically refuted linkage of vaccines to autism and other conspiracies, such as his claim that Covid was bioengineered to exempt Chinese people, already targeted by Trump rhetoric that fueled hate crimes, and Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe origin, reinforcing right-wing antisemitic bigotry.
And that’s not including his attack on fluoride in drinking waterwhich promotes oral health, as cited in a letter by 77Nobel Prize winners opposing Kennedy, or his speculated doubt that HIV causes AIDS and the effectiveness of AZT therapy.
Anti-vax consequences
Still, it is his fanaticism on vaccines that prompts the most alarm.
During the COVID-19 epidemic, Children’s Health Defense, a group Kennedy founded and led, petitioned the FDA to halt the use of all COVID vaccines. In a 2023 podcast, Kennedy proclaimed there is “no vaccine that is safe and effective,” and disputed CDC’s guidelines about if and when kids should get vaccinated.
The implications are alone enough for a mass movement to escalate pressure to block confirmation of Kennedy, and Trump’s nominees to lead the CDC, CMS, FDA, NIH and Surgeon General who mostly share his chilling views on vaccine safety. Multiple studies document what is at stake.
The World Health Organization estimates vaccines have protected 150 million lives over the past 50 years, and that 100 million were infants. About 4 million deaths worldwide are prevented by childhood vaccination every year. More than 50 million deaths can be prevented through immunization between 2021 and 2030. By 2030, it is estimated that measles vaccination alone can save nearly 19 million lives.
In November 2013, University of Pittsburgh researchers issued a similar study. It documented that about 103 million cases of disease had been prevented by vaccination since 1924. The disease with the most cases prevented was diphtheria, 40 million cases. Second was measles, 35 million cases.
Globally, reported Scientific American, measles vaccines, preserved 94 million lives over the past 50 years. It cited a 2024 Lancet study published in October that vaccines against 14 common pathogens protected 154 million people over the past five decades—that's a rate of six lives every minute. They have cut infant mortality by 40 percent globally and by more than 50 percent in Africa. Throughout history vaccines secured more lives than almost any other intervention.
Lancet found that each life defended through immunization contributed to 66 years of full health, without long-term linked to disease.Vaccines impact nearly every measurement of health equity, from improving access to care, to reducing disability and long-term morbidity, to preventing loss of labor and the death of caretakers.
Writing in Forbes, hardly a left-wing Trump critic, earlier this year, ER doctor/health researcher Arthur Kellerman also cited the Pittsburgh study, as well as Johns Hopkins data of nearly 88 million cases of illness. In 1900, he wrote, 30 percent of deaths in the U.S. occurred in children under 5 years of age. In 1999, they accounted for only 1.4 percent. "Vaccines," he concluded, "played a vital role in this progress.”
Measles, a highly contagious childhood disease that can lead to pneumonia and fatal brain swelling, declined rapidly after the first measles vaccine was introduced in 1963. But, the CDC cites 16 measles outbreaks in 2024. Kennedy’s alleged role in promoting vaccine misinformation during a deadly measles outbreak in American Samoa in 2019, which he denies, has also been widely reported. Unvaccinated families, writes Kellerman, “tend to cluster in communities defined by faith, culture or political ideology. When a highly contagious disease gets into such a community, an outbreak can occur. We’ve already seen localized outbreaks of measles, rubella, mumps, and pertussis.”
In 2022, Kennedy’s attorney and close advisor Aaron Siri petitioned the FDA to revoke approval of the polio vaccine for further study despite its long history of success.
Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who endured polio as a child, has denounced the push “to undermine public confidence in proven cures” like the polio vaccine. Only a “miraculous combination of modern medicine and a mother’s love” saved him from paralysis he said in a statement. “The polio vaccine has saved millions of lives and held out the promise of eradicating a terrible disease. Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed—they’re dangerous,” McConnell said.
Yet McConnell, and similar Republican critics have yet to publicly oppose Kennedy and his similar malefactors of health (to borrow FDR’s “malefactors of wealth” frame).
We can no longer count on Elvis to protect our children, families and communities. It is up to the rest of us.