Last week, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. The amount of money that he controls is beyond imagination. The news of his new wealth came out as we learned more about his disastrous reign as the king of DOGE. Musk promised to take a chainsaw to government programs. He was cheered on by Trump and the MAGA faithful. Now, just over a year later, the bill is coming due. And it’s Texas cattle farmers who are paying the price. For the first time in decades, the American beef industry is scrambling to contain an outbreak of the screwworm parasite. It is expected to cost the US cattle industry two billion dollars in losses this year. Canada has shut its border to prevent the spread. The move has enraged MAGA governor Greg Abbott, who says we are overreacting. This is after Abbott closed his border to Mexican cattle, but the damage has already been done. The screwworm is a larva carried by a particular form of fly. It burrows into warm-blooded animals like cattle, horses, and deer. The impacts are devastating. In the 1970s, the US government set up programs to monitor and eradicate screwworm. One tactic was to breed sterile male flies to kill off infestations. The program was relatively cheap ($15 million a year) and eradicated the parasite that had been costing the industry hundreds of millions of dollars. But, as with vaccine programs, once the predator had been erased, it became easy to forget why the programs were established in the first place. Right-wing podcasters loved to crank out the story of government “eggheads” spending taxpayers’ money to study the “sex lives” of flies. It filled the rage bile of the MAGA airwaves, to crank the rage bile of the right-wing podcasters. Never mind that this program was monitoring 180 outbreaks in 22 countries and had the capacity to utilize 160 laboratories to stay on top of any threat. Trump rode the dumbed-down rage bile into the White House, and Elon Musk was his enthusiastic wrecking ball. Musk ridiculed the program as a “crazy waste of money” and a “radical-left psy ops.” The screwworm prevention program is just one of 5,300 monitoring programs that were slashed by DOGE in a single month. Now, less than a year later, the screwworm has returned with a vengeance. It is the latest warning sign of what happens when medical science is trashed for the sake of ideology. I have written about the outbreak of hantavirus on the cruise ship the HV Holdius. Normally, such an outbreak would be a red flag concern for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), but the CDC wasn’t ready to deal with the outbreak because it had been devastated by the so-called Friday Night massacre, where Robert Kennedy Jr. fired thousands of researchers and scientists in a single shot. Among those who were fired were the inspectors who monitor health on cruise ships. In trying to contain the damage, President Trump appointed MAGA loyalist Admiral Brian Christine to oversee the crisis. Christine has no real public health experience. He runs a podcast called the “erection connection” for men suffering from erectile dysfunction. The hantavirus outbreak hit as a deadly Ebola outbreak began to spread. The United States had trashed the CDC and was locked in an ideological fight with the other frontline of defence — the World Health Organization. Screwworm, Hantavirus, and Ebola are just warning signs that worse threats are on the horizon. RFK Jr.’s attacks on vaccines, monitoring and research have set the stage for what could be a cascading crisis in public health. His own cousin Caroline Kennedy warned that it was a dangerous mistake to put RFK Jr in any position of power because he was, in her words, “a predator.” His anti-vaxx positions are so extreme that when pushed to state what he thought of the polio vaccine, RFK Jr falsely claimed the vaccine “killed many, many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.” It is a fabrication. A lie. A dangerous disregard from the man in charge of keeping Americans safe. Polio was completely eradicated in 1998. Now there are reports that this nightmare disease has begun to prowl again. A medical doctor writing on X said that the real plague we are facing is the “stupidity nightmare.” It brings us back to Albert Camus, who wrote about the disregard people in his time had for the reality of the return of dangerous outbreaks. His words could have been written for today: “We tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away.” If any photos or images on this site are under copyright, please let us know and we will provide appropriate credit. This content is used in accordance with applicable copyright laws, including “fair dealing” under Canadian law and “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act, for purposes such as criticism, comment, and news reporting.Thank you for reading Charlie Angus / The Resistance. If you’d like to upgrade to a paid subscription your support will help keep this project independent and sustainable. I’m grateful to have you here - thank you for your support.
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