Samuel Corum/Getty Images
Samuel Corum/Getty Images
It may be that we are not hallucinating, but what is happening right now in Washington D.C. is causing us to lose our minds. And it may be our minds are not all we will lose.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
Reading the news these last few days feels like being in the depths of a fever. RFK Jr. fires CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez, who was confirmed by the Senate only a month ago, because she refused to go along with his new COVID vaccine policy. She refuses to leave her job, her lawyer telling Kennedy that only the president can fire her, so Trump steps in last night and slams the door on Monarez, a spokesman saying she is “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.” Yes, the capitalized words are in the official statement.
All this after Kennedy moved to limit access to the new COVID vaccine to people over 65 or those who “have other health problems,” according to NPR. Tuesday at Trump’s Praiseworthy cabinet meeting, Kennedy informed his fellow ignoramuses that in September, he will have autism all figured out. This after he announced to the world that the Hepatitis B vaccine should not be given to infants because it is for “prostitutes and promiscuous gay men.”
It’s tempting to say that you can’t make this stuff up, but then, the policies being implemented by Trump’s entire administration fit that description. In fact, it’s impossible to come up with a list of all the outrages perpetrated by this gaggle of criminally negligent incompetents. The New York Times and the Washington Post are regularly criticized for not keeping up with reporting on the damage being done by Trump and his acolytes.
We have entered a time and space separate from the reality of this earth in the here and now. The closest I can come to describing it is having a high fever, when you drift off into a nether world of being neither awake nor hallucinating. It happened to me in the hospital back in January when I came down with a particularly bad case of the flu. It felt like I couldn’t sleep or stay awake. Until the fever broke, I was in a state of abnormal consciousness.
That is where we are right now. Because what is happening to the world we live in should not be allowed to happen, we cannot get an adequate grasp on ourselves or our surroundings. It seems unreal that a maniacal anti-vaxxer and former drug addict who has been accused of “forcibly groping” a family babysitter and has spent the last decade or more papering the planet with lies about vaccines is running the 80,000 employee Department of Health and Human Services. He is a man who felt compelled to issue a written apology to the woman in question—by text message, naturally. Now this abusive monster is making decisions that will lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, from infants to the elderly, according to every medical and health policy expert anyone has ever interviewed.
You are not hallucinating. This is really happening. People are coming down with pertussis—whooping cough—35,000 cases last year, the highest number in decades. There have been 6,600 cases of pertussis so far this year, more than four times the number of cases at the same time last year, according to CNN. Unvaccinated children are dying of this disease—six under the age of one year during 2024 alone. Kennedy has said he wants vaccinations to be “voluntary.” They’re trying that in Louisiana, the governor announcing that the state will no longer “promote vaccines.” Two children have died in Louisiana from pertussis. A hundred and ten came down with the terrible disease in the first three months of this year, almost as many as the number of cases for all of last year.
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Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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