Trump's war on medicine will kill miracle cures
It's already happening
Welcome to a Tuesday night edition of Progress Report.
The Department of Justice is charging Rep. LaMonica McIver, a Democrat from New Jersey, with two counts of felony assault after an altercation with ICE agents who would not allow her or other lawmakers to inspect a prison camp in her district.
The White House, it was revealed earlier today, is secretly shipping migrants to South Sudan, in clear violation of a ruling made last week by the Supreme Court.
Legal residents continue to be disappeared, with no warning or recourse, and the secretary of Department of Homeland Security pretended not to understand the concept of habeas corpus today, days after Nazi dweeb Stephen Miller said that the president could suspend it.
We have long since slid into a special American vintage of fascism, which thrives precisely because of a national refusal to acknowledge and confront our new reality. So long as there are still midterm elections on the horizon, and money to be raised for TV ads, it seems that we’re not actually in the midst of any emergency.
How else to explain Democratic lawmakers continue to bombard me with emails begging me for cash to fight Donald Trump, then a dozen of them — including that tough-talking ultra-patriot Elissa Slotkin and the anti-Sinema, Ruben Gallego — can go and vote for a crypto law that enables the president to accept unlimited bribes from the worst people in the world.
Much of the party probably needs to be razed to the ground, and I’m working on ways to support primary challengers in the weeks and months to come. Tonight, I’ve got a look at a policy fight that could mean life or death for millions of people around the world.
Note: A new study revealed that right-wing influencers dominate the online media space, and unfortunately, Democratic donors have decided to respond by pouring their money into ineffectual, unlikeable liberal “influencers” who have toe the party line and have no reach with the young people who determined the 2024 election.
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Scientists can cure diseases or the rich can get tax cuts. But not both.
Jack Somers wanted to be a leader, and with his fraternity suspended from campus, the prospect of personal growth and service advertised on a recruitment flyer made officer training school seemed like the best option available. He looked the part, so much so that the Marines made him the focal point of a major public recruitment campaign, and he was conscientious and brave enough to quickly rise to the rank of captain.
Then an insurgent grenade cleared a wall and exploded at his feet while he was on patrol in Kunduz, a city in northern Afghanistan. The traumatic brain injury from the blast turned into epilepsy, forcing Jack into early medical retirement in 2012. Even as he continues to struggle with the disorienting and sometimes violent seizures central to the brain disorder, Jack is stepping into a new kind of leadership role, with stakes that go beyond any mission he’s experienced before.
Jack has testified against the Trump administration’s devastating medical research cuts, which began with freezes to existing grants and now could explode with the reconciliation bill’s proposed 40% reduction to the National Institute of Health’s research budget.
The GOP continuing resolution, passed thanks to Chuck Schumer in March, already contained a 57% cut to the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs, which fund research into health issues predominant among veterans. In the past, that has included traumatic brain injury-induced epilepsy, which is often hard to diagnose and is rarely relieved by currently available treatments.
“I think I had about 50 different treatment plans, probably 15 total anti-seizure medications,” Somers told me. “When you add up how many different treatment plans people have with how long it actually takes to determine if that treatment plan is better or worse, the years just add up. Those three-to-six month increments, before you know it, you're five, seven, ten years down the road still having seizures and not having a clue what direction you're supposed to go.”
There are approximately 80 million people worldwide who suffer with some kind of epilepsy, and about a third of them have seizures that cannot be curtailed by existing medications and treatments. Hope for a cure has recently emerged, but right now it’s hanging by a thread in a lab on the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Lead researcher Dr. Avtar Roopra and his lead assistant, Olivia Hoffman, have spent years working to find a pathway to identifying and blocking a molecule that goes awry during seizures. Collaboration with labs around the world has led them to promising results with an already-existing arthritis medication, which has managed to stop seizures in mice for long periods, even after the subject stops receiving regular dosages.
Yet as Roopra and Hoffman told me, the Trump administration’s freeze on grants for medical research and draconian reduction on overhead allowances have already caused them serious problems, leading to abandoned tests, researchers laid off, and downsized mouse colonies. They need just $3.3 million overall to finish their research — money a foundation could not provide, but would be almost meaningless in the federal government’s vast budget.
Cures and techniques are already on the verge of being canceled or left undiscovered, and Roopra says that proposed NIH cuts would mean “the destruction of the most powerful biomedical research force the world has ever seen.”
The NIH is responsible for funding early stage research, the kinds of projects that pharmaceutical companies and hospitals then pick up on when they seem like they might lead to a breakthrough. The system is imperfect, but only because the healthcare industry hikes its prices for developments keyed by these grantees.
This federal funding generates immense return on investment for the public, yet this year alone, Trump’s NIH has provided nearly $3 billion less in cancer research grants.
Originally from England, Roopra came to the US during that country’s government-induced brain drain. He sees the signs of that happening in the United States, the world leader in these developments.
“If funding gets cut and we have to let people go, they take their expertise and intellect with them,” he explained, speaking of medical researchers more broadly. “They don't just wait around hoping that funding comes back and they can rejoin the lab. They have lives to lead, so when they go, we are then left bereft. And even if funding was to be restored after a break, we'd be set back decades because we'd have to build up that generational knowledge up from scratch.”
A lot of this can feel abstract, because sometimes experiments lead nowhere and even the most productive ones often take years of additional research and countless trials to produce a workable treatment. But that also means that anything is possible, which is a critical source of hope for countless families who live with pain and uncertainty.
For the past two years, as I’ve fought with faulty heart valves and related deformations and disorders, doctors have stressed over and over again that by the time that I really need this repaired or that replaced again, there’s almost certainly going to be some kind of amazing new procedure available to high-risk patients such as myself. That insistence becomes mildly less reassuring as interventions pile up in the here and now, but knowing that there are top scientists and doctors out there in a lab somewhere, working on the theory that could one day save your life, is still a critical source of hope. Shutting that scientific pipeline down will not only have disastrous long-term ripple effects, but it’s also going to create a sense of despair that Americans are not used to feeling.
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I know this isn't what this post is about, but it is so fucking disappointing that the dems continue to run centrist CIA spooks like Slotkin and Spanberger and expect that somehow they'll win. It's like they refused to learn from what happened to McGrath in Kentucky.