In your opinion, what would happen, I asked my daughter, a practitioner who works in medicine of drug addiction, if Narcan, the medication that reveals the overdoses of opiates, suddenly had to disappear from the pharmacy shelves?
“More people would die from overdoses,” she replied. Quite simple.
Now, maybe you are the kind of person who thinks that it is normal for people to die of a overdose because they should not take drugs like fentanyl in the first place. If you are also insensitive, I don't have much to tell you.
But if you consider dependence as a disease, like most medical experts, then you would certainly be in favor of everything that helps preserve life and helps to avoid the sorrow of those whose loved ones have accidentally died of a drug overdose.
And if you had passed, let's say, 14 years as a heroine, you would surely push as hard as possible to make Narcan, Naloxone's trade nameas widely available as possible, especially at a time when fentanyl Continue to kill Americans in depressing number.
In any case, this is what I would expect from the Secretary of Health and Social Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the above -mentioned heroine drug addict. However, a disclosed version of President Trump's budget proposes to reduce the ministry's $ 56 million program that distributes naloxone kits and trains people on how to use them.
The document disclosed is a preliminary plan, and Kennedy did not specifically address the proposed cut. In fact, at the end of April at a drug summit in Nashville, He spoke of his dependence And recognized that the resolution of the drug addiction crisis requires strategies including maintenance treatments using suboxone and methadone, which reduces the desires of medication; fentanyl detectors to prevent involuntary ingestion of the drug; And Narcan, who saved countless lives.
But faced with numerous reports on the proposed cuts, Kennedy did not offer full -fledged public support for the Naloxone program. Maybe he just doesn't have time, busy because he supervises what the Washington Post describes Like “a radical purge of agencies that oversee government health programs”.
In his quest to “make America again in good health”, Kennedy – with the Elon Musk Government Ministry of Elon – reduced 20,000 of the agency's 82,000 employees for an annual economy estimated at $ 1.8 billion. Here are some of the health and social services programs that have disappeared in the middle of the cost frenzy:
Plumb prevention staff of disease control and prevention centers have been dismissed. “They played a key role in the fight against pellet contamination in apple compote bags”, ” reported the post.
The black pulmonary screening program for coal minors was briefly killed Before an outcry led to a temporary reinstatement.
Programs cessation of tobacco,, Diabetes prevention And Cancer projections were all canceled.
Food and Drug Administration has lost Senior veterinarians Who worked to ensure milk and pet food safe during the bird flu epidemic.
American laboratories scientists who follow Drug resistant gonorrhea And viral hepatitis have been dismissed.
The list continues. But the most worrying development in all this bleeding is how Kennedy's antipathy takes place towards vaccines.
For years, he has promoted conspiracy theories and undermined public confidence in vaccines.
Last month, He announced that in September, he will reveal the cause of autism, which has escaped real experts for decades.
Cooled, He would have hired David Geierwho has no medical license, no scientific training and has been described as a “Cynical and fraudster vaccineTo conduct a study on the question of whether vaccines and autism are linked. It is a madness that emerges like science.
The question has been studiedYou might say, almost to death. Scientific consensus is clear – Vaccines do not cause autism.
But can you imagine that the Kennedy war against vaccines will do the health of American children? These days, it takes very little to shake the faith of the public in the vaccines.
After all, the false idea on vaccines and autism took off after A single fraudulent study from 1998 implying only 12 children. The study was retracted and its author Andrew Wakefield, guilty of ethical violations and scientific misconduct, lost her medical license on her.
And yet the lie lives.
Last week, Kennedy told American parents to “Do your own research“On vaccines as if the average American mother was able to conduct a double blind study at her abundance kitchen table.
“It seems that the objective of this administration is to prove that vaccines cause autism, even if they do not,” said the president of the Autism Foundation Singer Singer said to the message. “They start with the conclusion and seek to prove it. This is not that science is done. “
We are at a sad time in American history for many reasons. But putting a charlatan like Kennedy in charge of the health of the nation is like hiring an incendiary as a leader of the firefighters. It won't end well.
Bluesky: @ rabcarian.bsky.social Subjects: @rabcarian
