You are not hallucinating

Photo: The New Republic

Reading the news these last few days feels like being in the depths of a fever. RFK Jr. fires CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez, who was confirmed by the Senate only a month ago, because she refused to go along with his new COVID vaccine policy. She refuses to leave her job, her lawyer telling Kennedy that only the president can fire her, so Trump steps in last night and slams the door on Monarez, a spokesman saying she is “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.” Yes, the capitalized words are in the official statement.

All this after Kennedy moved to limit access to the new COVID vaccine to people over 65 or those who “have other health problems,” according to NPR. Tuesday at Trump’s Praiseworthy cabinet meeting, Kennedy informed his fellow ignoramuses that in September, he will have autism all figured out. This after he announced to the world that the Hepatitis B vaccine should not be given to infants because it is for “prostitutes and promiscuous gay men.”

It’s tempting to say that you can’t make this stuff up, but then, the policies being implemented by Trump’s entire administration fit that description. In fact, it’s impossible to come up with a list of all the outrages perpetrated by this gaggle of criminally negligent incompetents. The New York Times and the Washington Post are regularly criticized for not keeping up with reporting on the damage being done by Trump and his acolytes.

We have entered a time and space separate from the reality of this earth in the here and now. The closest I can come to describing it is having a high fever, when you drift off into a nether world of being neither awake nor hallucinating. It happened to me in the hospital back in January when I came down with a particularly bad case of the flu. It felt like I couldn’t sleep or stay awake. Until the fever broke, I was in a state of abnormal consciousness.

That is where we are right now. Because what is happening to the world we live in should not be allowed to happen, we cannot get an adequate grasp on ourselves or our surroundings. It seems unreal that a maniacal anti-vaxxer and former drug addict who has been accused of “forcibly groping” a family babysitter and has spent the last decade or more papering the planet with lies about vaccines is running the 80,000 employee Department of Health and Human Services. He is a man who felt compelled to issue a written apology to the woman in question – by text message, naturally. Now this abusive monster is making decisions that will lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, from infants to the elderly, according to every medical and health policy expert anyone has ever interviewed.

You are not hallucinating. This is really happening. People are coming down with pertussis – whooping cough – 35,000 cases last year, the highest number in decades. There have been 6,600 cases of pertussis so far this year, more than four times the number of cases at the same time last year, according to CNN. Unvaccinated children are dying of this disease – six under the age of one year during 2024 alone. Kennedy has said he wants vaccinations to be “voluntary.” They’re trying that in Louisiana, the governor announcing that the state will no longer “promote vaccines.” Two children have died in Louisiana from pertussis. A hundred and ten came down with the terrible disease in the first three months of this year, almost as many as the number of cases for all of last year.

And pertussis is only one disease easily preventable by vaccination.

You must use numbers to catalog the statistics for pertussis, for measles, for COVID. But numbers are not enough. An infant with whooping cough frequently comes down with pneumonia. The baby’s coughing is so severe, it makes putting them on a ventilator more difficult. “They just never stop coughing,” Dr. John Schieffelin, associate professor of pediatrics at Tulane University told CNN. “They’re just coughing so much, they can’t eat, they can’t drink.”

Try to think of that for a moment. He’s talking about a baby less than a year old, a little thing you could hold with one hand. The baby is coughing and coughing so hard that it can’t breathe. The hospital throws every machine they’ve got at the little baby. Nothing works. The baby’s parents are standing in the hall on the other side of a glass window, watching as the baby’s body stops convulsing and dies.

You look at the perpetually angry face of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. You are not hallucinating. He went on Fox News after the firing of the CDC director and the resignations yesterday of four top CDC officials in protest. This is what Kennedy told the salivating hosts of Fox News about the CDC this morning. “The agency is in trouble, and we need to fix it. It may be that some people should not be working there anymore.”

According to Kennedy and Donald Trump, it may be that a pill used to treat roundworm in large animals like horses and cows will cure measles and COVID. It may be that changing your diet and eating healthy food and exercising more will cure your infertility, as we learned the Department of Health and Human Services is considering as an alternative to IVF this week. It may be that measles can be cured with cod liver oil and hot compresses on the forehead.

It may be that we are not hallucinating, but what is happening right now in Washington D.C. is causing us to lose our minds. And it may be our minds are not all we will lose.

The patient is running a fever. The patient may live, or the patient may die. We may know “in a matter of two weeks,” as Donald Trump is fond of telling us. Or we may be arrested and spirited off to a cage in a concentration camp somewhere, and no one – not our family, not our friends, not even our lawyer – will know where we are or what is being done to us.

You are not hallucinating. This is real.