The Trump DIaries

This new administration of the U.S. Government is changing lots of things, and fast. I have begun a series of commentaries, from the perspective of an academic and a scientist, but also from the perspective of a person who prioritizes human well-being over economy.

Vaccines Cause Autism?

11 March 2025

The antivax movement is going strong in the United States in 2025. The President himself has waffled and equivocated on whether vaccines are okay. His appointee to head the Department of Health and Human Services is an open antivax activist; and appointees who will head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health have both hedged and hesitated on this matter. None of these individuals has succeeded in expressing a clear view that large-scale vaccination is and should be a crucial element in public health policy in the United States (and worldwide).

Vaccination is the process by which immunity to a disease is developed via exposure to a substance that resembles a disease-causing microorganism; vaccines have been made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, or from the toxins or proteins that it produces. Vaccines have been in use at least as far back as the 16th century (in China), and maybe centuries earlier; the first vaccinations reduced vulnerability to smallpox via exposure to cowpox virus, a closely similar virus.

Vaccines have been at the root of many important successes in public health. Thanks to vaccination, smallpox was eradicated globally as of 1980. Other serious diseases, such as polio, measles, and tetanus, are now massively reduced and restricted, though they were previously major public health concerns and sources of considerable mortality and sickness. The efficacy of vaccination in reducing disease incidence can be appreciated in the abrupt declines in incidence of polio and measles in the accompanying figure (adapted from a graphic by Max Roser). Very simply, these vaccines have had an overwhelming positive effect on public health in the United States and worldwide, removing several of the most severe and most damaging diseases from the picture. (For perspective, before vaccines were developed, measles caused on the order of 2.6 million deaths worldwide each year; measles deaths are now vanishingly rare.)

A particularly concerning suite of childhood diseases was measles, mumps, and rubella (or German measles). In 1971, the MMR vaccine was introduced, which was essentially a cocktail of previously developed vaccines for the three diseases. Although this triple vaccine saw very broad adoption, in 1998, a British researcher named Andrew Wakefield published a paper in The Lancet that reported on studies of 12 children, purporting to link MMR vaccination to intestinal problems, and in turn to development of autism. Although the sample size was small, the publication seemed to present a damaging scenario by which MMR could cause permanent developmental damage to children.

But … the story is only beginning … Thanks in largest part to the persistence of a journalist named Brian Deer, Wakefield’s work began to fall apart. Major points in this story are as follows:

Ten of the 12 authors of the original Wakefield paper (all except Wakefield and one author who could not be contacted) later retracted the interpretation that Wakefield promulgated, with the statement, “We wish to make it clear that in this paper no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism as the data were insufficient.”
In the paper, Wakefield altered many facts about patients’ medical histories to bolster his claim that he had identified a new syndrome.
The Lancet formally retracted the original Wakefield publication because of problems with the study design, as well as problems with how the human-subjects permissions were obtained and documented.
Numerous detailed epidemiological studies based on analysis of vastly larger datasets have failed to find evidence of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
The Royal Free Hospital received a grant, and Wakefield personally received more than £400,000, from the United Kingdom’s Legal Aid Board, an entity interested in legal action against the MMR vaccine manufacturers; crucially, these financial conflicts of interest were not appropriately disclosed in the publication.
Wakefield attempted to patent a measles vaccine and an autism cure nine months before the publication in The Lancet, pointing to considerable financial gain for Wakefield if MMR vaccines were to be discredited.

In sum, Wakefield clearly had many reasons to wish to discredit MMR vaccines, other than science and care for human well-being. Rather, he was an unscrupulous, unprincipled, and dishonest individual who was out to “make a buck.”

Now, 20-some years later, unfortunately, Wakefield’s supposed research results published in The Lancet have not faded into the infamy of academic misconduct. Rather, thanks to his own dishonesty, the “antivax” movement reveres his work as a truth that the scientists are trying to cover up. Wakefield is married to a model and lives in the United States.

Worst of all, however, thanks to the doubts cultivated by Wakefield, vaccine hesitancy is growing in the United States. At the moment, measles is spreading rampantly, simply because a lower percentage of the U.S. population is vaccinated. Wakefield was out to garner fame and make a buck, but the effect has been and will be that of vaccine hesitancy costing lives. President Trump and his health-related appointees have fallen into the trap of listening to Wakefield’s profit-driven lies, and the U.S. population may pay the price.

MODVaccination-introduction-and-cases-or-deaths-scaled.jpg

Jay Bhattacharya to Lead the NIH?

3 March 2025

Jay Bhattacharya is a Stanford University professor, holding both M.D. and Ph.D. (in economics) degrees. President Trump has nominated him to lead the National Institutes of Health during Trump’s second term as president. On the face of it, an academic at a leading institution of higher education, with one foot in the medical world and one foot in the world of economy, would sound like a great choice for NIH leadership. However, if one goes a bit beneath the surface, this choice may not be as good as it seems to be.

During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Bhattacharya was a very loud and controversial voice. That is, with two others, he coauthored the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued that (1) mortality from COVID-19 was generally low, but significantly higher in the elderly and infirm; (2) lockdowns as a public health measure have significant negative consequences in and of themselves; and (3) achieving so-called “herd immunity” was the best way to damp out the epidemic. (Herd immunity is the idea that if most individuals in a population get infected, recover, and thereby have some level of immunity, the epidemic will die out.) Based on very fragmentary, early evidence about COVID-19 infection rates, Bhattacharya and colleagues argued that it was much better simply to let COVID-19 sweep through the less-vulnerable sectors of the population, building immunity in the great bulk of humanity, and thereby killing off the epidemic.

Bhattacharya’s reasoning, and indeed data generated by his own research team, however, were immediately called into question, with concerns ranging from the design of the sampling, false-positive rates in the serological testing, and others. The concern is that the inference of lower public health threat from COVID-19 (e.g., that case fatality rates were not as high as one might think) is not sound.

Indeed, not only was the science questioned, but it also emerged that the study had been—in part at least—funded by David Neeleman, founder of JetBlue Airways and a loud opponent of lockdowns. This funding—in effect a conflict of interest regarding the conclusions of the research—was not declared in the scientific publication documenting the outcomes of the study, which stated only, “We acknowledge many individual donors who generously supported this project with gift awards. The funders had no role in the design and conduct of the study, nor in the decision to prepare and submit the manuscript for publication.” In MY academic position, if I published a paper that alleged controversial results without acknowledging funding from interested parties, I would be investigated for academic misconduct, and my job would be in danger.

Bhattacharya was criticized widely for his argument, in the scientific community, by the U.S. public health leadership at the time, by the director-general of the World Health Organization, and by the media. Crucially, one of the most biting critiques of his ideas came from Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, who called him a “fringe epidemiologist.”

Although Bhattacharya says that he was just trying to spark debate about what COVID-19 policy would ideally do to eliminate the epidemic, his ideas really were—and are—fringe ideas. Hundreds of studies in public health have analyzed best approaches to damping out infectious disease outbreaks: the broad consensus is that social distancing is a crucial element to combating such outbreaks and epidemics. (Arguing to the contrary is, to be honest, a lot like doubting the reality of climate change, or the efficacy of vaccination.) Bhattacharya would argue that negative consequences of social distancing, as would manifest in a lockdown, outweigh the reductions in transmission of the disease in question, but this argument depends on COVID-19 being less dangerous, and we have seen that that conclusion is based on uncertain evidence.

So President Trump has made his choices about who will head the many government departments and agencies, and among them is Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health. Bhattacharya clearly has an axe to grind with NIH over being called “fringe,” as he has indicated in numerous interviews about the subject. As NIH researchers are being fired and NIH grant budgets are being slashed, what will happen to the institution with a boss who has such a vendetta? My sincere hope is that 2025-2029 will be a period without any major public health emergencies.

How To
Kill U.S. Universities

15 February 2025

The US has long been ranked as the world leader in science. That is, for many decades, the US has dominated in terms of investment in scientific research. For example, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ranked the US in 2022 as #1 in terms of investment in research, at US$761.6B, compared to US$620.4B by China; no other country gets above one-third of those amounts. And those investments paid off in publications and insights deriving from those investments, with 2022 rankings placing the US above China; again, no other country coming close to the top two. Rankings after 2023, however, show China closing the gap, and in a number of cases now surpassing the US in terms of science prominence worldwide.

The US Government provides billions of dollars of funding to support scientific research at institutions across the country. The lion’s share of this funding goes, of course, to support the research per se, such that the fantastic insights that US university-based researchers produce derive from grants from US Government funding agencies. These grants come from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and many other US Government agencies. However, what academic researchers put into their grant budgets is what is needed directly to do the research… supplies, salaries, and equipment… which does not cover what else is needed to sustain the institution’s support for that research.

Think about it… a business might sell a TV for $500, which it purchased for $200. It does not take the $300 difference as pure profit; rather, the business needs to pay the electrical bill, the water bill, the upkeep of the building where it is located, etc. Rather, much of the $300 difference between purchase price and actual cost gets eaten up by those other expenses that must be covered in order to keep the business in business.

Universities are no different. They maintain enormous physical facilities and human resources that are not covered in the “direct” costs of a grant, and instead are covered via what is called “indirect costs” in grant budgets. Indirect cost rates are set by means of a negotiation between the US Government and the institution, and are the result of long years of experience with the costs at the university associated with carrying out the research. These indirect costs play a crucial role in “keeping the lights on” at US universities: they pay for the facilities and infrastructure that make our research production possible.

At the University of Kansas, where I work, these indirect costs amount to about one-third of the total expense of a research project, which again is at a rate negotiated with the government and which is vital to the university’s ability to function as a research institution. Universities function based on budget revenues that come from various mixtures of state appropriations, tuition, gifts, endowment, etc., but one crucial element is those indirect costs that accompany research grants. About 21% of KU’s budget comes from grants and contracts; other universities may be lower or higher.

Back during his first term, President Trump was apparently looking around the government budget, trying to find money for his “wall” along the Mexican border, and was impressed by the amount of money in the budget of the National Institutes of Health that went to indirect costs, rather than directly supporting research. Now, in his second term, those indirect costs are apparently a prime target in Trump’s cost-cutting rampage… the new Trump-era “DOGE” policy is that all NIH indirect cost rates have been cut to 15% (down from the 40-60% that is normal), although this reduction is being debated in the courts. The simple truth is that indirect costs are not waste, but rather go to pay very real expenses associated with universities supporting research: if the US is to be a leader in research worldwide, then this is a massive slash to its research budget.

What happens if President Trump’s assault on indirect costs in federal research grants continues? US universities will, quite simply, face massive budget shortfalls, on the order of 10-15% across the board. Not only will these budget cuts affect research per se, but they will also affect the universities themselves: research grants contribute significantly to fostering a rich educational environment for our students. State governments are unlikely to respond by increasing their contributions to higher education budgets, and tuition rates are already far too high, creating barriers for many promising students who would like to study. So the effect will be that US universities decline, in the short time because of budget shortfalls, which will affect the programs that they are able to offer. In the long term, as US universities decline, so also will the US’s prominence as a world leader in research.

Do we have to be #1 worldwide in terms of research? Is that so significant? Maybe not—I have many great colleagues in China and elsewhere, and I have learned an incredible amount from them. So more power to the world scientific community. But what happened to Trump’s idea that his second term would make America great again?

THE
DE LONG STRAIT?

6 February 2025

The name change from “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America” seems to be a done deal now, notwithstanding the horror of geographers and historians. Shortly after taking office again, on 8 January 2025, President Trump said, in a press conference, that the name of the Gulf would be changed to the Gulf of America because “we do most of the work there and it’s ours.” On this basis, in spite of the fact that Mexico has more than 2000 miles of Gulf coastline compared with only a bit more than 1600 miles for the United States, President Trump feels that the name change is more than appropriate.

(I do need to point out that the original “Gulf of America” was a remote bay in the Russian Far East. It was named after the ship “America” that carried its Russian discoverers there in the 1850s. However, it was renamed by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in the 1970s to a more appropriate, Russian, name, Zaliv Nakhodka.)

Given that President Trump has moved forward with renaming the Gulf of Mexico, we might think a bit about the set of placenames of major bodies of water that surround the United States. The Great Lakes are named Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan, and Superior; we could certainly think of some reasons to dislike some of those, as all are either Native American names or of French derivation. Another target might be the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, as they come from Greek mythology and a Portuguese misnomer (it apparently seemed like a peaceful sea when Ferdinand Magellan first sailed it in 1520), respectively. In this essay, however, I would like to address a particularly disturbing name for a body of water that adjoins the United States, the Bering Strait.

Vitus Bering was Danish, born in 1681 (he would die in 1741, but more about that in a bit). He was a cartographer and explorer, and became an officer in the Russian Navy early in the 1700s. In the course of two expeditions from the North Pacific Ocean northward into what is now called the Bering Strait and the Arctic Ocean beyond, Bering mapped and explored large swaths of these remote parts of Russia. However, on the second expedition, after documenting the fact that Siberia and Alaska were separate land masses, terrible conditions forced Bering to take refuge on an island in the Commander Islands group. There, Bering and quite a number of his ship’s crew died, perhaps of scurvy.

So, what to do about this body of water just west of Alaska? I think that we should take this name back from Denmark and Russia, and change it to something much more American. The “Strait of America” doesn’t work for me, though: too many U.S. Americans probably don’t know the difference between a gulf and a strait, so we have to diversify our use of names a bit, no?

I will argue for the De Long Strait as a better name. Why? A bit after Bering’s expeditions, Lieutenant Commander George W. De Long led the Jeannette Expedition of 1879–1881 in an effort to reach the North Pole via a novel route northward from the Pacific Ocean, passing between easternmost Asia and westernmost North America. Although the Jeannette got snared in ice, and eventually sank, the effort was nothing short of heroic, and achieved what success it achieved thanks to the heroism of De Long. De Long died of starvation in a remote river valley in northern Siberia.

In sum, the Bering Strait was named after a foreigner, and indeed after an officer in the Russian Navy. Worse still, President Trump has underlined on many occasions how much he dislikes “losers” of any sort, and particularly in the military. Bering was just such a loser, dying for lack of vitamin C in his diet. As such, I will advocate strenuously for renaming the Bering Strait to something more appropriate. While it is true that De Long also died a “loser” (like Bering did), at least it was to starvation rather than to scurvy. And in this age of “America First,” it is high time that we recognize the De Long Strait as a better name.

WHAT’S GOING ON WITH THE TRUMP “RESEARCH GRANT PAUSE”?

30 January 2025

The US government gives out billions of dollars in research grants to various sectors, including academia. These grants are a crucial element in how our government invests in research and development across all of science, both basic and applied. These grants, in my own case, currently range from mapping risk of tick-borne disease across the Great Plains, to cataloguing the diversity of African plants, to understanding how many viruses are “out there” hosted by mammals of the world. More generally, however, US government research grants are how the US stays a world leader in science.

The new Trump administration, however, has issued a series of executive orders, which have led the major science funding agencies to “pause” research grant activities. That is, I just got an email from the Director of the National Science Foundation to all NSF grant leaders, indicating that “all review panels, new awards, and all payments of funds under open awards will be paused as the agency conducts the required reviews and analysis.” Why? Well, later in the same message, it is indicated that “In particular, this may include, but is not limited to conferences, trainings, workshops, considerations for staffing and participant selection, and any other grant activity that uses or promotes the use of DEIA principles and frameworks or violates Federal anti-discrimination laws.”

A bit of background on how the National Science Foundation gives out grants. Proposals for funding from NSF are judged on two criteria, which are to be given equal weight in proposal evaluations. These criteria are (1) “intellectual merit,” which is whether the proposal lays out a solid case that the project proposed will do interesting, useful, and novel science, and (2) “broader impacts.” Broader impacts are all about ways in which the project can be designed to have positive effects on science more generally. A common focus of broader impacts in NSF proposals has been on opening avenues for broadening participation in science, particularly among groups of people that are underrepresented in scientific endeavors.

The sad truth is that academia has not had this focus on broadening participation in the past. As a consequence, nationwide, for example, only 43.3% of employed professors are women, while 56.7% are men. That is quite different from the balanced gender composition of the broader US population. The disparities are even stronger in terms of representation of groups such as LGBTQIA+, African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and Native Americans. So “diversity” is not about some crazy liberal scheme to favor immigrants or anything like that, but rather just to get the world of science and the academy to look more like how the American populace looks.

No indication is given as to how long this “research grant pause” will last: already, it has been challenged in the courts, stopped by judges’ decisions, and partially rescinded. No doubt, of course, the Trump administration will try again, and will come out with something similar (maybe slightly less problematic), and some of this anti-“diversity” thinking will infuse into how this country operates.

To me, science is a world of marvels, in which people pursue their curiosity and explore how the world works. Sharing these marvels with a broad swath of humanity seems to me to be the neatest thing possible. Maybe that’s why I became an educator in science. These ideas of stopping anything having to do with diversity (in this case in science) seem to me to be unjust, unkind, and certainly nothing that sounds Christian. How about let’s “make American great,” and let everyone into the science club?

A NEW MAP OF THE UNITED STATES

8 January 2025

President-elect Trump has been making statements about his plans or wishes to rename geographic features. First came his idea to return “Denali” to its earlier “Mount McKinley,” notwithstanding the fact that the Koyukon (a Native American group) had referred to the peak as "Denali" since well before the birth of McKinley in the 19th century. More recently, he has stated his wish to rename the “Gulf of Mexico” as the “Gulf of America,” regardless of the fact that Mexico was a named place bordering that water body when the southeastern parts of what is now the USA were not yet part of the USA. Trump seems to be offended by geographic features relevant to the USA having names that are not derived from good, pure American English.

Given all of these plans coming from the future President of the United States, I have a modest proposal for the USA. We have a whole bunch of state names that are also more than a bit offensive. Think about this:

Alabama is a Native American name, as are Alaska (though perhaps modified a bit by being stated in Russian!), Arkansas, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. For that matter, Indiana is derived from Latin for “Land of the Indians.” Given the Denali precedent, we cannot accept the continued use of these names.

And, of course, our state names should be in English. Arizona is a Spanish word, as are California, Colorado, Florida, Montana, and Nevada. Vermont is from a French word. Hawaii is (obviously) from Hawaiian, and Rhode Island is from a Dutch word. While we are at it, New Hampshire is named after the English county of Hampshire, and New Jersey after one of the British Channel Islands. New Mexico is (obviously) named after old Mexico. We cannot be honoring these varied references to other cultures or other parts of the world.

Then we get to the really bad ones. Delaware was named for a French first Governor-General of the Colony of Virginia, and Georgia was named after King George II of Great Britain. Louisiana was named in honor of King Louis XIV of France, and Maryland after Queen Henrietta Maria (wife of King Charles I) of England. New York was named after King James II of England (then the Duke of York). North and South Carolina were named after kings Charles I and II of England. Then, in a rather prurient reference, Virginia (and, of course, West Virginia) is named in honor of the virginity of Queen Elizabeth I of England, who never married.

We are down to just five states that might have acceptable names. Pennsylvania after Admiral William Penn, the father of the state’s founder—but the elder Penn was a member of the British military, so forget that one. Oregon’s name is of controversial derivation, but it was first so named by a British army officer in a petition to King George III, so forget that one too. Maine’s name might refer to the idea of being the mainland, but probably comes from the French province of Maine or the English village of Broadmayne. And the name Idaho may have been made up as a practical joke, but was supposedly from a word in a Native American language

So that leaves just Washington: George Washington, often termed the father of this country. However, Washington was originally a commander in a regiment in service of the British colony of Virginia before he went on to more American occupations. And what is more, the name Washington comes from the town of Washington in County Durham, England.

For that matter, the whole country is named the United States of America, and the name America is in honor of Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer. What is more, the first maps of America show South America and the Caribbean, so it wasn’t even “our” America that was given the name of that Italian guy.

In sum, here is my proposal for revised place names for US states. (For clarity, these are integer numbers assigned randomly to the 50 states. All historical details cited above were cribbed from various sources on the Internet, to give full credit.)