Guest blog from Arkansas Kidney doctor on Health science

 We are witnessing in real time a dismantling of science and medicine unprecedented in our history. I’m referring to policy and funding attacks on premier institutions which promote and protect the health of every American. Especially the young, elderly and otherwise vulnerable. The CDC, NIH, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, NCI, and other organizations.

The agencies tasked to do the highest level scientific research, develop medicines and vaccines, and promote public health strategies to protect all.

As a physician I know people who work at these places. They are the best and brightest we have. Until recently, everyone… supported and benefited from their work over the past half century. Times have changed.

Bacteria and viruses are the most non-discriminatory entities on earth…  Cancer also. They do not care about gender, ethnicity, political affiliation, where or if you worship… what you believe… or if you’re a butcher, baker, candlestick-maker. They simply infect and kill with no regard.

And now we have a number of top scientists and heads of these agencies placed in the untenable position of making policy decisions based not on science but on political whim and pressure.

I encourage you to ask anyone who spent a life studying and practicing anything related to science…  medicine, for example… I don’t know of any reputable physician regardless of partisanship who supports the policies being promoted by our current Department of Health and Human Services as led by Robert Kennedy… Zero scientific training. Unintelligent, unserious, dangerous. His policies left unchallenged will harm your friends and family.

There’s a lot of political disagreement in our nation. This is the most nonpartisan issue imaginable. Funding cuts, anti-science policy, and the wanton dismissal of premier scientists and public health experts…. places all in danger equally.

People of conscience sometime have to pick a hill on which to die… No one should perish unnecessarily on a hill of imminently treatable and preventable infectious disease or cancer. Take a moment, think… do you really want to live with medieval medicine based not on science… but superstition? Put pressure on your elected officials to correct policies which could be the ultimate killing field.