There is a bitter arithmetic being proposed in Washington these days, a sum that does not add up no matter how you figure it, and it arrives with a history that makes the numbers even harder to swallow.
Having formally withdrawn the United States from the World Health Organization, the administration is now quietly crafting a plan to spend $2 billion a year of the people’s money to build a new American version of the very same outfit we just walked away from.
The arithmetic is simple enough for a child, or even a government accountant, to grasp.
For about $680 million a year, the United States enjoyed membership in the world’s preeminent global health alliance.
Now, for nearly three times that sum, we are told we must build it all over again, from scratch, by ourselves.
But this is not merely a story of wasteful spending. It is a story of a philosophy that has made life in America measurably more dangerous, a philosophy that treats public health not as a common good but as a political battlefield.
To understand where we are, you must first understand where we have been, and the path we have traveled is littered with the consequences of this same reckless ideology.
When the coronavirus arrived on our shores, we witnessed what happens when ideology supersedes science.
While the administration now proposes to spend billions on a new global health infrastructure, we might recall how it dismantled the existing one when we needed it most.
The president ignored early warnings throughout January 2020, squandering precious weeks when the virus might have been contained.
He offered false assurances, telling the public the coronavirus was contained and would soon disappear like a miracle.
He muzzled the experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sidelining the very people who had spent their lives preparing for precisely this moment.
A House oversight panel later concluded that these decisions “contributed to one of the worst failures of leadership in American history.”
Dr. Jay Butler, a deputy director at the CDC, wrote at the time that he felt “very troubled that there will be people who will get sick and perhaps die because of what we were forced to do.”
More than a million Americans would ultimately perish, many of them needlessly.
The pattern was set. Rather than follow the science, the administration turned public health into a site of furious partisan contestation. The president touted dangerous and unproven drugs like hydroxychloroquine, despite the risk of fatal side effects and the complete absence of sound evidence.
He even suggested, in one of those moments that would be funny if it hadn’t come from the most powerful office in the land, that injecting disinfectants might be worth investigating.
His supporters flocked to these false remedies, making them totems of political loyalty rather than treatments for a deadly disease.
A fringe group of advisors pushed a herd immunity strategy that would have let the virus sweep through the population while attempting to isolate the most vulnerable. Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s own COVID response coordinator, called them “a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience.”
She warned that such a strategy would trigger an “unacceptable death toll” given the millions of vulnerable Americans not living in long-term care facilities. The president met with them anyway.
This is the same philosophy that has now brought us the worst measles outbreak in over thirty years. Measles, if you recall, was declared eliminated from the United States in the year 2000. Eliminated. Gone.
A disease that once killed hundreds of children each year had been vanquished by the simple, miraculous power of safe and effective vaccines. But under the current administration, it has returned with a vengeance.
The outbreak began in West Texas in January, just days after the new term began. Two unvaccinated children were hospitalized, and local health officials immediately reached out to the CDC for help.
What followed was a chilling silence. Katherine Wells, the public health director in Lubbock, wrote in a February email that her staff felt “out here all alone.” A child would die before CDC scientists finally made contact.
The administration had imposed a freeze on federal communications.
Even after it technically ended, CDC scientists told reporters they could not speak freely for weeks, afraid to resume communication as they watched their colleagues laid off in droves.
“All of us at CDC train for this moment, a massive outbreak,” one researcher said. “All this training and then we weren’t allowed to do anything.”
Meanwhile, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, a man who has built his career on sowing doubt about vaccines, used his platform to promote vitamin A as a treatment and to question the safety of immunizations.
Local pharmacies in Texas reported that vitamin A supplements and cod liver oil were “flying off the shelf,” while doctors began treating children for toxic levels of the very vitamin being promoted as a cure.
Too much vitamin A can cause liver damage and blindness, but when ideology drives public health, such details become inconvenient.
The outbreak spread across state lines into New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and even into Mexico. More than 4,500 people have been sickened, at least 16 have died, and the full cost in human suffering has yet to be tallied.
And for what? To satisfy a political movement that views vaccines with suspicion and expertise with contempt? To prove that we don’t need global cooperation, even as a preventable disease crosses borders faster than any bureaucracy can track it?
This is the same ideology that now proposes spending $2 billion to replicate the WHO’s functions.
The administration says it wants to build on bilateral agreements and expand the presence of American health agencies into more countries.
This comes at a time when global health expertise in the federal government has been depleted by repeated layoffs and resignations.
The NIH has experienced an estimated $12 billion in funding cuts.
Scientific advisory boards have been terminated. The CDC’s immunization advisory committee was abruptly ousted. You cannot simply plant a flag and call it influence when you have fired the people who knew how to do the work.
Public health experts have watched all of this unfold with a mixture of horror and resignation.
Tom Inglesby, who served as a senior COVID advisor during the previous administration, put it plainly: spending two or three times the cost to get less than you had is no kind of stewardship at all.
You cannot will into existence the trust and cooperation of nearly two hundred nations, he reminded us. That takes time, and patience, and a willingness to work together.
Atul Gawande, who served at USAID until recently, noted that the dismantling of foreign aid has already cost upward of three-quarters of a million lives, according to a Lancet study.
And now this new proposal comes along, not to repair the damage, but to spend more money on something that will likely accomplish only a fraction of what we once did simply by showing up and working alongside the rest of humanity.
The WHO itself offered a quiet epitaph last month, saying the American departure makes both the United States and the world less safe.
It is a sentiment echoed by medical societies and public health experts across the land, who warn that pulling out of the global health alliance is scientifically reckless.
Disease, after all, does not recognize borders or respect sovereignty. A fever in a far-off village can become a crisis in an American city before the politicians have finished their speeches.
Some have begun to use stronger language.
One epidemiologist recently called the Republican Party “a fascist death cult,” adding “God help us.”
She pointed to the dismantling of health agencies, the withdrawal from the WHO, the absence of any plan for the coming flu season.
“I genuinely can’t breathe having to act normal,” she wrote. “Like nothing is happening. Like people aren’t going to die because a cult is in charge of the country.”
The word “fascist” is not thrown around lightly, but there is a through-line here that demands honest description.
The same administration that muzzled scientists during a pandemic now proposes to spend billions on a parallel health structure while cutting basic research that might yield cures for cancer and heart disease.
The same administration that promoted unproven drugs and undermined vaccine confidence now presides over a measles outbreak that has killed children.
The same administration that withdrew from the WHO now wants to build a shadow version of it, at triple the cost, while having fired many of the people who might have built it.
This is not mere incompetence, though there has been plenty of that. This is a coherent worldview that views public health not as a common inheritance but as an arena for ideological warfare. It is a worldview that distrusts expertise, disdains cooperation, and dismisses the very idea of a common good.
And it has consequences. A million dead from COVID. Children dying of measles. A nation less prepared for the next pandemic than it was for the last one.
The administration insists it remains a leader on global health. But leadership is not something you declare; it is something you demonstrate.
A consistent pattern of putting political loyalty above public health, of elevating quacks and conspiracy theorists over scientists, of withdrawing from the world while pretending to lead it.
In the meantime, some of our own states have quietly decided to join the WHO’s global outbreak network on their own. California, Illinois, and New York have recognized that a plague does not wait for the federal government to sort out its organizational chart.
They understand what our forebears understood when they helped create this world health body generations ago: that cooperation is cheaper than catastrophe, and that the only way to stop a fire is to put it out before it reaches your own front porch.
And so the strange arithmetic continues. We will spend two billion to go it alone, to build a pale imitation of what we already had, while the real thing goes on without us.
We will watch preventable diseases return to communities that had forgotten their names. We will wonder, when the next pandemic arrives, why we are less prepared than we were before. And we will reckon with the bitter truth that ideology, when elevated above all else, has a way of costing more than dollars.
It costs lives. It costs the safety we once took for granted. It costs the commonwealth of health that previous generations labored so hard to build.
This is what a fascist philosophy looks like when applied to public health: not just incompetence, but a determined dismantling of everything that protects us, followed by a proposal to build it back more expensively and less effectively, all while claiming to make America healthy again.
It is a cruel and costly deception, and the bill has not yet been fully presented.
Discover more from NJTODAY.NET
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.