There’s a well-known scene from a 2001 episode of “SpongeBob SquarePants” in which a mob of fish mistakes a feeble old man for a bully and attacks him. The gag happens again, leading a blue fish to famously quip, “How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?” As far as metaphors go, it’s a pretty apt one for how pathogens, parasites and other infectious organisms serve as lessons for President Donald Trump on basic principles of public health. The problem is he’s seemingly incapable of learning — and Americans are paying the price.
The reason I’m referencing a children’s cartoon is that this is the level of intellectual discourse that science has been reduced to under the MAGA and MAHA movements spurred by Trump and lackeys like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Most of this anti-science policy amounts to plugging their ears and going “nah nah nah” whenever something about climate change, vaccines or racial injustice is mentioned. The rest is standard schoolyard bullying, which, as a new tracker from the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists demonstrates, has resulted in 574 attacks on science and 187 potential scientific integrity violations since Trump began his second term. These attacks include censorship, appointing cronies to key agency positions, gutting regulations and funding and targeting scientists based on identity. Consequently, the last year and a half has been a disaster in almost all realms of scientific progress and public health in the U.S.
The examples of this administration flouting science and reaping the painful consequences are nearly endless and date back to Trump’s first term, when he flouted virus surveillance programs, essentially inviting COVID-19 in, then did little to stop it and let it flourish into a pandemic that has killed at least 1.1 million Americans and counting. But for more recent cases, we need only look at the last few weeks and boy, have the consequences of an anti-science agenda piled on recently.
To take an easy example, there’s the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool scandal, in which “renovations” ordered by Trump resulted in a nauseating algae bloom, because whoever the president hired to paint the pool bottom didn’t seem to grasp how this would trap heat and provide the perfect conditions for algae to thrive. This science experiment is far less consequential than the record-breaking Ebola crisis that has been worsened by cuts to foreign aid, for example, but it’s no less anti-science. Rather than admit he doesn’t understand basic pool science, Trump’s response has been to arrest at least six people and float accusations against rogue vandals, a “painfully stupid” conspiracy theory, as my colleague Amanda Marcotte has noted, “but that hasn’t prevented widespread uptake among Republican politicians and GOP voters.”
This is far from the only rake the Trump admin has stepped on in recent days. There’s also the Pentagon announcement last week that it is reversing course on flu vaccines, making them mandatory yet again. This comes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made the shots optional in late April. It only took about two months for a serious outbreak to occur: this month, nearly 300 people have been sickened at Lackland Air Force Base in Bexar County, Texas, which has so far hospitalized four people and may have resulted in one death (the case is still being investigated).
An anonymous source at the Pentagon told AP News that the reversed decision had nothing to do with the outbreak and was just a coincidence. Sure. The fact remains that this outbreak was entirely predictable and entirely preventable. This Air Force base alone handles 700 new recruits every week, with people flying in from all across the nation, bringing whatever illnesses they pick up along the way. CNN reported that “around 60% of unvaccinated trainees at Lackland initially declined the flu shot.” So it makes sense that an outbreak of highly contagious flu was a matter of when, not if.
But Hegseth seems to think you can deflect viruses with creatine powder and tanning lotion. Vaccines are “woke” — until you have hundreds of people sickened for no reason when there is a safe and effective vaccine that millions of people take each year. If more people got vaccinated, flu season wouldn’t be nearly as severe as it is every year in America. We collectively and effectively choose to get sick, slowing down the economy and killing vulnerable people, because some of us don’t like getting shots. I’ve argued before that the lack of flu vaccine uptake is one of many aspects of the American death cult, but for this shot in particular, mandates are unlikely to work on the broader public. But when you’re in a position of public service, which is allegedly what military service is supposed to be, it’s a different story — and protecting yourself to protect others is something every veteran should understand.
On the topic of vaccines that probably should be mandatory, measles continues to wreak havoc across the U.S., with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting 2,134 confirmed cases this year. In 2025, there were just shy of 2,300 cases, which means 2026 is almost certainly going to outpace that record. Approximately 93% of these measles patients are unvaccinated or have unknown vaccine status. The disease, which was once eliminated from the U.S., is now so embedded in our society that we have essentially lost that measles elimination status, whether anti-vaccine health officials like Kennedy acknowledge it or not, as Dr. Jess Steier argued in a recent op-ed for CIDRAP.
“Pretending otherwise does two kinds of harm,” Steier writes. “It tells the public the situation is borderline and offers a false sense of hope that this year’s shots can still save the status, and it hands the people responsible for the decline an easy story in which the outcome looks like a bureaucratic surprise rather than the foreseeable result of dismantling the very systems that secured elimination to begin with.”
Meanwhile, Kennedy is working overtime to further restrict access to vaccines by rewriting the charter of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a federal committee that provides guidance on vaccines. If the ACIP votes to remove vaccines from a free vaccination program — unfortunately, a real possibility — more than half of US kids would lose access to that immunization, experts warn. Once again, it’s the American people who pay the price of the Trump admin’s anti-science agenda.
Yet another example of Trump’s anti-science policies coming back to bite him — this time, somewhat literally — is the return of New World Screwworm, a parasitic fly with larvae that bore into the open flesh wounds of its victims. For decades, the U.S. has maintained a program in which these flies are bred in a lab, bathed in sterilizing radiation and released around Panama, which prevents the insect from creeping northward.
As Salon reported last year, cuts to these programs and Trump’s antagonism toward Mexico, Panama and other Latin American countries threatened to bring the parasite back to the United States. Now it’s happening, with the latest update from the Department of Agriculture reporting 27 cases in the last 30 days. It may not sound like much, but it will be a multi-billion-dollar effort to contain. The response from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has been, predictably, to blame immigration and former President Joe Biden.
When cases of screwworm began popping up in Mexico in 2024, Biden’s USDA shuttered southern ports of entry to live cattle imports to prevent the spread. Trump reopened those ports in Feb. 2025 to appease the cattle industry, while staffing cuts at the USDA and sluggish funding reviews have arguably contributed to screwworm’s return.
Screwworm is mostly a concern for cattle ranchers — and given the outsized climate impacts of factory farms, it would be a good thing if people eat less meat — but it still stands as yet another embarrassing neglect of science and public health that is egg on Trump’s face. It’s certainly bad news for the ranchers and farmers that President Screwworm has consistently screwed over.
How many times must he learn his lesson? Trump’s hostility to science isn’t just ignorant; it’s destructive. But it seems like no matter how many times a totally predictable result blows up in his face, he won’t stop the rancor toward science. He won’t stop attacking scientific leaders, cutting their funding or hampering their ability to do their job. He allows his flunkies to attack proven technologies like vaccines or deny the catastrophic decay of our environment due to burning fossil fuels, and on and on.
Trump is only tightening his grip on science, recently proposing rule changes to how federal research is funded under the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently overseen by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought. The rule changes would not only weaken the peer review process and forbid international scientific collaboration, but they would also ban research on gender and diversity, equity and inclusion. The blowback is impossible to predict, but if the last 18 months have indicated anything, it’s about to get a whole lot worse.
There is some good news among all this chaos. Last year, Trump destroyed the climate.gov website, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s renowned climate science portal, but this week, ex-NOAA scientists launched climate.us, which is bringing back key ways to track climate change, such as the loss of sea ice and the rise of ocean temperatures.
And in response to Kennedy’s ruinous vaccine policies, two recent efforts were launched to help restore public trust in immunization. The first is the Vaccine Integrity Project at the University of Minnesota, which aims to fill in the gaps where the ACIP is failing. The second is The Evidence Collective, which seeks to break echo chambers and strengthen trust in public health.
These are far from the only enterprises that seek to rebuild what the Trump admin has demolished, and they all need our support. Unfortunately, it won’t be nearly enough to undo the damage — some of which could take decades to repair, with a staggering death toll in its wake — unless we finally rein in this out-of-control, anti-science crusade once and for all.
