What do you think it would happen, I asked my daughter, a practicing nurse who works in addiction medicine, if they narrow, the drug that reverts the overdose of opiates, suddenly disappeared from the pharmacy shelves?
“More people would die of overdose,” she replied. Fairly simple.
Now, perhaps you are the type of person who thinks that people die due to overdose because they should not take drugs such as fentanil in the first place. If you are so insensitive, I don't have much to tell you.
But if you consider that addiction is a disease, as most medical experts do, then it would certainly be in favor of anything that helps preserve lives and help avoid the pain of those whose loved ones have accidentally died of drug overdose.
And if it had happened, let's say, 14 years as heroin addicted, he would surely press as stronger to make Naran, the commercial name of the Naloxone, the most widely available as possible, especially at a time when the fentanil continues to kill the Americans in a depressingly high number.
That, in any case, is what would expect from the Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the aforementioned heroin addict. However, a filtered version of President Trump's budget proposes to reduce the $ 56 million program of the department that distributes Naloxone Kits and enables people on how to use them.
The filtered document is a preliminary plan, and Kennedy has not specifically addressed the proposed cut. In fact, at the end of April at a drug summit in Nashville, he talked about his addiction and acknowledged that solving the addiction crisis requires strategies that include maintenance treatments using suboxone and metadona, which decrease drugs of drugs; Fentanyl detectors to avoid involuntary drug ingestion; and Narcan, who has saved innumerable lives.
But before numerous news reports about the proposed cuts, Kennedy has not offered full public support and throat. Maybe he simply has no time, busy since he has been supervising what Washington Post described as “a radical purge of agencies that supervise government health programs.”
In his search to “make America feel healthy,” Kennedy, with the Eld Musk Efficiency Department, has reduced to 20,000 of the 82,000 employees of the agency for an estimated annual savings of $ 1.8 billion. These are some of the health and human services programs that have disappeared in the middle of the cost reduction frenzy:
The lead prevention personnel from leading centers for disease control and prevention was fired. “They played a key role to address lead pollution in apple puree bags,” the post said.
The black lung detection program for coal miners was briefly killed before a protest led to temporary restitution.
Smoking programs, diabetes prevention and cancer exams have been canceled.
The food and medicines administration lost older veterinarians who worked to keep milk for safe pets during avian flu outbreak.
Scientists from US laboratories said goodbye that track sexually transmitted diseases, such as drug resistant gonorrhea and viral hepatitis.
The list continues. But the most worrying development in all this bloodshed is how Kennedy antipathy is developing towards vaccines.
For years, he has promoted conspiracy theories and has undermined public trust in vaccines.
Last month, he announced that in September he will reveal the cause of autism, which has eluded Real experts For decades.
According to reports, he has hired David Geier, who has no medical license, has no scientific training and has been described as a “cynical and vaccine scammer,” to carry out a study on whether vaccines and autism are linked. This is a madness disguised as science.
The question has been studied, you could say, almost to death. The scientific consensus is clear – Vaccines do not cause autism.
But, can you imagine the damage that Kennedy's war against vaccines will do to the health of American children? These days, very little is needed to shake the public's faith in vaccines.
After all, the erroneous concept of vaccines and autism took the flight after a single fraudulent study of 1998 that involves only 12 children. The study was withdrawn, and its author Andrew Wakefield, guilty of ethical infractions and scientific misconduct, lost his medical license for her.
And yet, the lie is still alive.
Last week, Kennedy told US parents to “do their own research” on vaccines as if the average American mother were able to execute a double blind study on her cooking table in her time of inactivity.
“It seems that the objective of this administration is to demonstrate that vaccines cause autism, although they do not,” said the president of the Autism Science Foundation, Alison Singer, The Post. “They are starting with the conclusion and seek to try it. This is how science is done.”
We are in a sad moment in American history for many reasons. But putting a charlatan like Kennedy in charge of the health of the nation is like hiring a incendiary as its fire chief. It will not end well.
Bluesky: @further.bsky.social Rags: @rabcar
