Things in the United States are disintegrating rapidly.

I don’t even mean, in this case, how Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE — is rapidly becoming indistinguishable from the Stasi, NKVD, the secret police. Or how Trump is sending the military in to bust up protests with very little if any legal basis, trying to escalate the peaceful and Constitutionally guaranteed right to assemble. Or the grotesque bill going through Congress right now that quite literally steals from the poor and gives to the rich.

Yeah, there’s a lot happening, much of it by design to confuse, rattle, and dispirit you.

But I want to focus on science. As I’ve written, the Trump budget request for NASA absolutely slaughters the science done by the space agency. He has also slashed budgets to all the science agencies, severely curtailing or even totally destroying their ability to do their important research. This includes climate research (because of course) but also a lot of critical health research. This is also leading to a huge brain drain as scientists look to other places to do their work, a loss that may take decades, if ever, to recover from.

And then, late Monday afternoon, word came that RFK Jr., the crackpot quack anti-vaxxer whom Trump put in charge of the department of health and Human Services, fired every single member of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practice (ACIP), the group of experts that advises the CDC on vaccines. This is a grotesque action, clearly meant to cut off any real science advise the CDC can get when it comes to vaccines… a medical procedure that is one of the most successful and safe efforts for human health in history. 

And Kennedy claims he did this because “a clean sweep is necessary to reestablish public confidence in vaccine science”. It’s a tough contest, but I think that may be the single most Orwellian thing ever uttered by the Trump regime. 

As I wrote on Bluesky, I wouldn’t be surprised if he replaced the ACIP panel with people like Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy. I’m not even joking.

The good news is that people are speaking out. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health have made what is being called the Bethesda Declaration, a proclamation against the brutal cuts being made to health science. The good folks at Stand Up For Science have a signup where you can add your signature to their public version. I signed it. 

If Stand Up For Science sounds familiar, it may be because I wrote about them many times; a small group of scientists put together an amazing rally in Washington, DC (and mirrored in many other locations) on March 7, 2025. I gave a short speech at the event; I posted a video of it a while back but the quality wasn’t great. 

That’s why I’m taking the unusual action of posting a newsletter on a Wednesday: what follows is the original text of my talk in its entirety (with added links for references). I don’t want to wait. Given RFK Jr.’s terrifying actions this past week, I think it needs to be seen again, and as soon as possible. I hope this will be read far and wide; please feel free to share it with anyone and everyone you know.

We are at a terrible, dangerous crossroads in this country, and I fear we are already well on our way down the wrong path. The only way to correct our course is to make our voices heard, make our strength seen, and let the growing fascism in this country know they will not win.

STANDING UP FOR SCIENCE

In his 2009 comedy show “Weapons of Self Destruction”, the incomparable Robin Williams describes an interview he did on a German talk show. The interviewer asked him, “Mr. Williams, why do you think there is not so much comedy in Germany?”

Williams replied, “Did you ever think you killed all the funny people?”

It’s funny because it’s true. But… how funny is it, really?

In 1933 Hitler issued a law that said that any government workers who had at least one Jewish grandparent or who stood against the Nazis were to be dismissed. The result? An exodus, a flood of people leaving Germany, including hundreds of scientists. One of those scientists was Albert Einstein. Many others went on to revolutionize our understanding of physics. None did this under the German flag. 

In the 1920s, a biology-denying crackpot named Trofim Lysenko claimed natural selection was wrong. He found favor with Stalin, who made him the head of an important science academy and put his “new biology” into practice. The result? Thousands of actual scientists were imprisoned or exiled, and Lysenko’s practices prolonged famines that killed millions. Soviet work across many sciences was sent back decades.

And now here we are. We’re looking at the most aggressively anti-science government the United States has ever had.

Just look at RFK Jr. He’s anti-vax. He’s anti-medicine. He’s expressed doubts about germ theory. GERM THEORY. In 2019, he stoked already existing vaccine fears in Samoa, casting further doubts on them. The result? A measles outbreak that killed 83 people, mostly children.

And now he’s the head of Health and Human Services. He’s already undermining critical medical research, including vaccinations against COVID, the flu, the bird flu, and measles, even as an outbreak of measles has infected over 150 people and one child has died. His reaction? He shrugged and literally said outbreaks are “not unusual”.

He has downplayed vaccinations and instead promoted BS pseudoscience like taking Vitamin A and cod liver oil to prevent infections. Even during the deadliest outbreak of measles in two decades he can’t be bothered to actively tell people to get vaccines, one of the most effective and proven scientific methods to prevent kids from dying. 

On the other hand, he took this action, meager as it is, because the outbreak got too big to ignore.

We can’t let all these anti-science issues get so big they can’t be ignored. We have to be the problem that can’t be ignored.

We’ve fought anti-science before in this country, and we’ve won. Creationists, anti-vaxxers, climate science deniers — we’ve taken them on, and while these fights continue, we’ve made a lot of progress, but only when we’ve taken action. Action in the courts, action in the streets, actions online.

We do this because we know what happens when governments attack science, and make science denial the official policy. People’s lives are thrown into disarray, and millions can and do die. That’s what happens when you deny science on a national scale. That’s what happens when we don’t fight.

We cannot let this continue. We have to take science back. Talk to your Representatives. Talk to your Senators. Talk to your friends, your neighbors, your family. March. Protest. Go to rallies! Make your voice heard.

Science is for all of us. So all of us must stand up for science.

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!