As I approached the task of doing my overview of the year, I couldn’t help but think of one of my favorite movies of all time, Planet of the Apes (the original 1968 film starring Charlton Heston, not the far inferior 2001 remake). In the movie, as you might recall, three astronauts awake from deep hibernation/cryosleep after a space journey as their ship is out of control and about to crash into a mysterious planet. The leader, George Taylor (played by Charlton Heston) estimates that they are 300 light-years from home and, because of time dilation at near-light speed, have wound up in the year 3978, their having aged only a year. Most readers, I assume, will be familiar with much of what happens next, as Taylor and the other two surviving astronauts of the four original crew members encounter humans who are mute and living as prehistoric hunter-gatherer/scavengers. Soon after, they fall prey to intelligent talking apes who are hunting the humans down to kill or capture. In the ensuing melee Taylor is wounded, shot in the throat so that he can’t talk. Captured and separated from the other astronauts, Taylor finds himself held as an animal in a society of intelligent apes whose level of technology is at a preindustrial level; i.e., no electricity and horses being the primary means of transportation, although they do have rifles. He is nursed back to health by a married couple of chimpanzees, Zira (played by Kim Hunter) and Cornelius (memorably played by Roddy McDowell), who are, respectively, an animal psychologist and an archeologist.
One of the most memorable moments from the film occurs when, after having been captured trying to escape, Taylor snarls at his captors through the netting ensnaring him (as only Charlton Heston could snarl), “Get your stinking paws off of me, you damned dirty ape!” The shocking revelation (to the apes) that Taylor could speak results in his being removed from the Ministry of Science and Zira’s hands and placed under the control of the military, which views him as a freak of nature and, not incorrectly, a threat to ape society. While in captivity, one guard in particular delights in punishing Taylor by spraying him with a high-pressure water hose, which leads to another memorable moment from the movie, in which Taylor cries out:
Let’s just say that I’ve been feeling this scene all year, given a world turned upside down from a science-based medicine perspective in which the quacks are in charge and real scientists treated not unlike the way the guard treated Taylor in the movie.
Now here’s the thing. I originally thought of this clip and image solely as an excuse for a clever title for my year-end post. However, as I started thinking about the plot and world of Planet of the Apes, I started seeing more and more parallels between the movie and our current government, not the least of which is the denial of science and the fusion of religion and science. That’s because ape society as portrayed in the film is a theocratic militaristic authoritarian state. Indeed, the main antagonist, Dr. Zaius, is an orangutan who serves not just as the Minister of Science but as Chief Defender of the Faith and sees no conflict at all between his two roles. (Sound familiar?) That faith was first laid down by a figure known as the Lawgiver, who taught that god had created apes in his image and urged apes not to let humans “breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours,” to “shun him,” and to “drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.” (Sometimes, when I’m in one of my more cynical and disconsolate moods, I have to admit that the Lawgiver had a point.)
Even more chilling to me, as far as parallels between the movie and real life in 2025, Dr. Zaius is terrified by what the discovery of a talking human like Taylor might mean for his society and religion. He presides over a hearing into Taylor’s origins that is obviously meant to suppress scientific findings that cast doubt upon the religion of the apes, concluding that Taylor was either created by a mad scientist or that he was of a tribe of human mutants living beyond his people’s borders. Cornelius and Zira free Taylor and, seeking to clear themselves of heresy, flee to Cornelius’ archeological dig in a region near Ape City in a region dubbed the Forbidden Zone. Pursued by Dr. Zaius and soldiers, Taylor and his chimpanzee allies are cornered at the entrance to the dig, but Taylor holds off the soldiers with a rifle. He manages to trick Dr. Zaius into thinking he was seriously wounded, allowing him to grab Zaius as a hostage and threaten to kill him to keep the ape soldiers at bay. Under duress, Dr. Zaius agrees to enter the cave. There, Cornelius shows Dr. Zaius artifacts from a society of intelligent humans that predated apes, including a human doll that talks, which is the one artifact that Dr. Zaius couldn’t attribute to apes. I’ll discuss what happened next and its relevance near the end. The immediate point is that exploring this movie led me down a deeper rabbit hole than I had expected in terms of parallels to the current administration.
Basically, an idea that started as a bit of a lark ended up confronting me with a bit more complex a post and metaphor than I had intended. Don’t get me wrong. The parallels between ape society in Planet of the Apes and the destruction of science and medicine at the federal level that we’re seeing now are nowhere near perfect, and I’ll mention a couple of glaring differences near the end of this post. However, they are close enough to have made me think of how, right now in 2025 and through 2028, we are ruled by the heirs of Lysenko and, to come back to my science fiction analogy, Dr. Zaius. The two are similar in many ways, but there’s one big difference that I will explore, as it divides RFK Jr. and his sycophants, toadies, and lackeys into two different categories.
Lysenko 2.0
Of course, we don’t need to look to dystopian authoritarian theocracies portrayed in science fiction novels and movies to know that it is not uncommon for humans—and particularly their authoritarian leaders—to value ideology and/or religion over the cold, hard findings of science, nor is it uncommon for them either to co-opt and misrepresent science to falsely make it appear to support their ideology or, failing that, to suppress “inconvenient” science that casts doubt on the teachings of their faith and ideology. We just have to look to history and even today’s politics. That’s one big reason why I’ve reiterated multiple times in 2025 that the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement that is now in power is, in fact, “Lysenkoism 2.0.” Of course, the Lysenkoism in this administration goes far beyond what Trofim Lysenko himself might have imagined. After all, Lysenko only ruled government agricultural science and genetics. Trump- and RFK Jr.-branded Lysenkoism taints all areas of government-supported science, including medicine, public health, and biomedical science, as well as climate science, environmental science, and even NASA.
But what do I mean by dubbing 2025 the year of new Lysenkoism? For those who don’t remember who Trofim Lysenko was, I’ll briefly remind you, although I did discuss him in depth back in March. In brief, Lysenko was a Soviet scientist who gained Josef Stalin’s favor after publishing work that, when boiled down to its essence, was basically warmed-over Lamarckism, or soft inheritance. Lamarckism is a concept named after French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), who championed the hypothesis that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism had acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime. The classic example often taught in high school biology class is that of the giraffe, whose long neck, Lamarckism postulates, came about through successive generations of giraffe ancestors stretching their necks to reach the leaves on ever-higher branches of trees. In contrast, according to Darwinian evolution, a wide variety of neck lengths originally existed in a population of giraffe ancestors, and then a food scarcity at low elevations selected against the short-necked giraffes, leaving only the giraffes with the genes for long necks as the survivors. Lysenko basically fused his warmed-over Lamarckism with his view of Communism to deny the increasing knowledge of genetics based on experimentation from scientists all over Europe, including Lysenko’s colleagues in the Soviet Union. (Prior to Lysenko’s rise, Russia had some of the best agricultural scientists in the world, such as Nikolai Vavilov, who was later imprisoned as a result of Lysenko’s power.)
Based on his ideas, Lysenko proposed that he could “educate” Soviet crops to sprout at different times of the year by soaking them in freezing water and using other interventions, going on to claim that future generations of the crops would then remember these cues and inherit the beneficial traits. He had a number of other crackpot ideas as well. For example, in addition to claiming that plants could pass on traits acquired during life to their offspring, Lysenko denied the existence of DNA and genes and claimed that plants selected their mates. He also espoused the idea that some plants choose to sacrifice themselves for the good of the remaining plants. Based on these Ideas, Lysenko believed he could revolutionize Soviet agriculture, boosting crop yields and transforming the empty Russian interior into vast farms. The result was catastrophic. Not only did he fail to prevent crop failures and famine, but his ideas clearly made the famines worse. When China adopted Lysenko’s methods in the late 1950s, along with its forced collectivization of farms, it too experienced worsened famines. Yet, after being put in charge of Soviet agricultural science in the early 1930s, Lysenko’s grip on power continued for three decades. Although his iron power declined after the death of his patron Stalin in 1953, his powerful influence continued until 1965. Even after that, it took Soviet science decades to recover.
I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. While likening President Donald Trump to Stalin might be opposite of the politics to whom we normally liken him, what matters here more is the authoritarian impulse and worship of ideology, which reject any inconvenient science in favor of pleasant pseudoscience from people like Lysenko that strokes the ego of the leader. In this, 2025 has been the year of Lysenko’s heirs and the sycophants, toadies, and lackeys who abase themselves to serve him and his patron Donald Trump in return for power and revenge against scientists who had criticized them during the COVID-19 pandemic. The result has been a redirection of many areas of federal science as well as, most Lysenko-like, the purging of scientists who oppose the changes or even are simply not on board with science driven more by ideology and grievance than by actual scientific data.
Lysenko’s primary heir: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
If there’s one person who most embodied Lysenkoism in 2025, it has to be Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Moreover, there’s no way that President Trump didn’t know this when he nominated him to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, although RFK Jr. represents a slightly more complex figure in that he is simultaneously a true believer in one form of pseudoscience and quackery, like Lysenko, but clearly compromised his other scientific advocacy for power. Before RFK Jr. outed himself as antivax in 2005, to become the American equivalent of the United Kingdom’s most famous antivaxxer, Andrew Wakefield, he had been an environmental lawyer. Indeed, it was a twisted version of RFK Jr.’s advocacy against mercury in water that led to its accumulation in fish that humans consume that led him to be receptive to mothers who in the 1990s had come to believe against all evidence that mercury in the thimerosal preservative that was used in several childhood vaccines until around 2001 had caused their children’s autism. And the rest, as they say, is history.
In 2005, RFK Jr. published his infamous screed Deadly Immunity simultaneously in Salon.com and Rolling Stone, positing a vast conspiracy by the CDC to cover up evidence implicating mercury in vaccines as a cause of autism, thus popularizing a conspiracy theory that I’ve called the Simpsonwood conspiracy theory to a much wider audience than the group of fringe antivaxxers who had previously been spreading it. Since then and before his elevation to HHS Secretary, RFK Jr. had spent nearly 20 years promoting antivaccine disinformation and conspiracy theories, even to the point of capitalizing on a deadly measles outbreak in Samoa in 2019 to spread antivax misinformation to people whose children were dying of measles. I could go on and on and on about how much RFK Jr. promoted his ideology that vaccines are harmful and cause autism in the face of huge volumes of strong science that contradict his ideology. I’ve been writing about RFK Jr. and his antivax crusade for over 20 years. If you don’t believe me, just search for his name and “vaccines” both here and at my not-so-super-secret other blog. Also, consider that a number of scientists and physicians, including Dr. Paul Offit, have tried over the years to personally educate RFK Jr. about the actual scientific evidence base behind vaccines, including scientific studies supporting vaccine safety and refuting a link between vaccines and autism, as well as explanations why the studies that RFK Jr. likes to cite to support his views are so flawed as to be useless. Unsurprisingly, RFK Jr. has steadfastly refused to listen to them, rather like Trofim Lysenko did with his critics before his power over Soviet agriculture had become near-absolute.
Which brings us to the true parallel between Lysenko and RFK Jr.
As soon as he was confirmed, RFK Jr. did what he had been promising to do for a long time, first during his independent run for President in 2024 and then after he had bent the knee to endorse Donald Trump in return for power; namely, he started to purge HHS agencies, such as the CDC, FDA, and NIH of scientists with actual expertise. Of course, to do this, he eagerly colluded with Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought to rescind funding for projects not deemed to be in line with administration goals. The administration wasn’t even subtle about it, either, as huge numbers of NIH scientific grants were terminated because they did not align with administration priorities. Thousands of HHS employees were let go under “reduction in force” orders. (So haphazard were the layoffs that in October the Trump administration was forced to admit that it had laid off twice as many HHS employees as intended.)
This purge, almost more than anything else, aligns RFK Jr. with Lysenko, who himself purged Soviet science of scientists who opposed him or even just disagreed with his warmed-over Lysenkoism. For example, let’s look at the case of Lysenko’s mentor Nikolai Vavilov, a Russian and Soviet agronomist, botanist, and geneticist. Before his run-in with Lysenko, Vavilov had been renowned in the world of science for having identified the centers of origin of cultivated plants and created the world’s largest collection of plant seeds, having made contributions to the study of genetic diversity of crop plants across the world, the Darwinian problem of speciation, plant breeding, and a geographical approach to studies of crops, as well as the law of homologous series in variation. Among his honors for scientific achievements before Lysenko, Vavilov had been the youngest member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and a member of the USSR Central Executive Committee. He had received the Lenin Prize and was president of the All-Union Geographical Society. Outside of Russia and the USSR, Vavilov was respected among scientists abroad as well, having been elected a fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. So what happened to Vavilov? After becoming increasingly marginalized by Lysenko, by 1936 he had lost the favor of Stalin and was sacked from his position as director of the Institute of Plant Industry. In 1940 he was arrested by the NKVD (Soviet secret police) and thrown into prison for opposing Lysenko, later being accused of spying for the British and degrading Soviet agriculture. After a forced false confession, he was found guilty in 1941 and sentenced to death, although his sentence was commuted to 20 years’ imprisonment. He died in prison in 1943 due to the harsh conditions.
Although it is unknown precisely how many scientists were purged, imprisoned, and even executed as a result of their opposition to Lysenko, estimates are that over 3,000 agronomists and geneticists were fired, many of whom ended up being imprisoned in Gulag labor camps. Numerous scientists were executed as “enemies of the state,” examples including Isaak Agol, Solomon Levit, Grigorii Levitskii, Georgii Karpechenko, and Georgii Nadson. It didn’t take long for scientists to realize that criticism of Lysenko and his crackpot theories was the equivalent of a death sentence, or at the very least an invitation for an indefinite “vacation” in a Gulag, and dissent was suppressed. All research into genetics in the Soviet Union came to a halt.
RFK Jr. is not literally Lysenko, but one can’t help but see the echoes of Lysenko in his actions. It must be acknowledged that the purges began immediately upon Trump’s re-assumption of power and before RFK Jr. was confirmed as HHS Secretary, but he enthusiastically continued the purges and added a few targeted purges of his own in which he replaced those purged with loyalists, just as Lysenko did. For example, here are but two related examples:
- RFK Jr. purged all the members of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the committee that has long produced the CDC-recommended infant, child, and adult immunization schedules, to replace them with antivaxxers. The result has been chaotic incompetence and chipping away at the vaccine schedule, starting with COVID-19 boosters and moving on, most recently, to the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine.
- RFK Jr., after having personally “handpicked” her to be Director of the CDC, persuaded President Trump to fire Dr. Susan Monarez when she wouldn’t unquestioningly go along with his plans to change the vaccine schedule. Basically, she refused to go along with RFK Jr.’s attempts to promote unscientific and pseudoscientific policies at the CDC and would not fire the people he wanted her to fire. Her firing led to a mass resignation of several key CDC managers.
Unsurprisingly, there are many reports out there that RFK Jr. does not consult with or listen to scientists with expertise in vaccines, infectious disease, epidemiology, and public health policy, preferring instead his own stable of cranks and quacks, some of whom he’s elevated to high positions in the CDC, FDA, and NIH. For example, over at the FDA, COVID-19 contrarian and antivaxxer Tracy Beth Høeg is now acting director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, the branch of the FDA responsible for approving and regulating prescription drugs. Never mind that Høeg has no experience running randomized clinical trials or developing regulations for drugs—or anything else.
Meanwhile programs targeted for reductions in force (RIFs), planned RIFs, or even outright elimination include:
Three employees — two of whom received layoff notices on Tuesday — told Capital B Atlanta that the CDC’s labor force reductions in Atlanta were concentrated in areas of health study that have an outsized impact on Black people, including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, gun violence, and youth violence.
An internal memo provided to Capital B Atlanta by a CDC employee appears to show a list of agency departments and divisions that were downsized on Tuesday. In addition to divisions related to areas of research in which Black people are overrepresented, the memo also lists research divisions primarily affecting women and other minority groups.
Here’s the memo from April:
See what I mean? Any science not in favor with the powers that be is being targeted for reduction or elimination. In addition, beyond the CDC, layoffs and budget cuts were directed primarily at areas of science that the administration and RFK Jr. found conflicting with the MAHA and MAGA ideology. Examples include anything having to do with gender studies or the gender-affirming care of trans people, mRNA vaccine development, environmental causes of disease, and so much more.
Meanwhile, more and more, cranks who align with RFK Jr. are being hired, starting with David Geier, a longtime antivax activist hired as a senior data analyst, clearly to “prove” that vaccines cause autism. He was joined by Lyn Redwood, a former head of an anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy, who is now listed as an expert at HHS. William Thompson (remember him?), the CDC scientist at the heart of the “CDC whistleblower” conspiracy theory at the heart of Andrew Wakefield and Del Bigtree’s 2016 antivax propaganda film disguised as a documentary, VAXXED, has been elevated to a senior supervisory role (GS-15) overseeing research on adverse childhood experiences, including adverse vaccine reactions.
That’s not all, however. All branches of HHS, including CDC, FDA, and NIH have embraced purges, censorship, canceled clinical trials, and shuttered labs, using a combination of techniques, including firings (RIFs), massive budget cuts proposed in the 2026 budget (such as a 40% cut to the NIH budget), and weaponizing federal grants to force universities to comply with repression of free speech and free academic inquiry. As a cancer specialist, I find it particularly egregious that, as fellow SBM blogger Dr. Jonathan Howard pointed out yesterday, such budget cuts disrupted 383 clinical trials, affecting 74,000 trial participants, with some real horror stories about patients on clinical trials out there:
The report indicated that approximately 1 in 30 NIH trials were affected by funding disruptions between February and August 2025, for a total of 383 trials. The cuts disproportionately affected trials involving the study of “infectious diseases, prevention, and behavioral interventions,” the JAMA report noted. For example, the cuts affected 118 cancer trials, 97 trials studying infectious diseases, 18 trials studying cardiovascular diseases, and 48 trials studying reproductive health, among others.
Patel and his co-authors also found that a greater percentage of NIH trials conducted in locations outside the United States experienced funding disruptions, compared to those conducted within the country. This corresponds with other administration actions targeting international researchers.
And:
Disrupted trials also hurt patients. As Patel told Politico, the patients in the trials “were exposed to the potential harms of treatment — whether that’s in the form of drugs or devices or other interventions — but they didn’t receive any benefit, which is what the entire purpose of the clinical trial is.”
Nothing like this has ever been done by any previous administration, certainly not on this scale. Speaking among my colleagues, they complain that they now feel like it’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which they have to self-police their language in grant applications to avoid the censors and the AI scanners that are looking for “forbidden” words. As I gear up to write and submit research grants again in 2026, I’ve been thinking about that myself. Moreover, given how much the powers that be at NIH now despise me, I have turned down an offer to serve as an ad hoc reviewer in a study section simply because I don’t want to get the employee who invited me into trouble, should certain people find out that I’m on a study section roster.
The heirs of Dr. Zaius
In Planet of the Apes, Dr. Zaius is a bit more complex than just a mindless ideologue. Sometimes, he is even somewhat sympathetic. Although he is both Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith and publicly states that there is no conflict, clearly he realizes that there is and chooses faith over science because he believes that the science being uncovered by Cornelius is too threatening to the established order. Indeed, after seeing products of a human civilization predating ape civilization, he orders the mouth of the cave to be dynamited—and apologizes to Cornelius and Zira over their protestations as he does so, as well as for the need for them to stand trial for heresy. In other words, he knows what he is doing. He knows that the emerging science that Cornelius has discovered in his excavations doesn’t support his religion, but he suppresses it anyway, all to protect the existing power structure and because he is afraid.
I realize that this is an imperfect analogy, but RFK Jr. is a true believer, at least in the antivax cause and MAHA pseudoscience, just as Lysenko was a true believer in his preferred form of agricultural genetics-denying pseudoscience. This is why RFK Jr. has, for the last two decades at least, cherry-picked science, misrepresented science, and even tried to generate his own “science” to support his ideology, the last of which he is doing with a vengeance at HHS. Examples include an unethical study he has funded of the birth dose of hepatitis B in Guinea-Bissau that I wrote about in detail earlier this month. This is consistent with some of the things he had done before becoming HHS Secretary. For instance, in the lead-up to the aforementioned measles outbreak in Samoa in 2019, when vaccination rates had fallen due to a tragic accident involving MMR vaccine that had resulted in the deaths of two infants, RFK Jr. sought to capitalize on the plunging vaccination rates by running an unethical “vaxxed vs. unvaxxed” “natural experiment“:
With a renowned health informatics expert in tow, Kennedy visited Samoa in 2019, to pitch the prime minister and ministry of health on an information system that would track the impact of medical interventions, including vaccines, on the nation’s 200,000 citizens.
The study never happened, but it wasn’t long before plunging vaccination rates demonstrated what happens to children who aren’t vaccinated against measles:
Months after Kennedy’s visit, the question of what would happen to Samoa’s unvaccinated babies was answered. A measles outbreak swept the country, sickening thousands and killing 83, mostly small children.
Something that we could already have predicted. It’s the same sort of crappy science that Lysenko would have approved of though for an equivalently bad study in agriculture and botany.
But back to the analogy (such as it is). As I’ve shown, Dr. Zaius knew that he was peddling pseudoscience, but he did it anyway in return for power and because he honestly believed that what he was doing was for the good of his society, to protect it against the perceived threat of talking humans who might rise again. A wrinkle here is that Dr. Zaius also knew that intelligent humans had arisen before ape civilization and that they were responsible for the wasteland known as the Forbidden Zone. Before the iconic big reveal at the end of the movie, if you looked at things from Dr. Zaius’ perspective, he knew that intelligent humans capable of civilization had existed before the ape civilization in which he lived and that they had caused devastation, out of which intelligent apes had arisen to found their own civilization, led by the Lawgiver. (I’m not going to go into subsequent movies and the TV series that revealed the whole story of how this happened.) In other words, his ideology trumped inconvenient science.
Which brings me to he heirs of Dr. Zaius. Who are these heirs? They are the collection of grifters, sycophants, toadies, and lackeys who know better, who know MAHA is mostly pseudoscientific quackery, but who have signed onto MAHA to serve RFK Jr. and Trump in order to have power and to exercise their ideology to reshape science because they fear what unfettered science will show and where it might lead. Who are these people? I think you know. They all started out as “COVID contrarians,” who made a name for themselves by downplaying the severity of the pandemic, attacking public health mitigations (which they called “lockdowns”), and, later, casting doubt on the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines:
- Marty Makary MD (FDA Commissioner). Dr. Makary first came to my attention as one of the foremost promoters of the myth that medical errors constitute the third leading cause of death in the US, all based on a risibly incompetent study that was a tour de force of bad math and using an unjustifiable extrapolation from small numbers to conclude that 250,000 deaths occur each year in hospitals due to medical error. Basically, Dr. Makary started out semi-reasonable on COVID-19 but was, as our very own Jonathan Howard has long documented, quick to be captured by his audience and fully embrace the “let ‘er rip” approach to the pandemic in a futile effort to achieve “natural herd immunity,” which, he promised, was always no more than six months away, after which he rapidly pivoted to fear-mongering about COVID-19 vaccines. Amusingly and predictably, now that he is FDA Commissioner, after having long criticized pandemic mitigation strategies and vaccines as not being sufficiently evidence-based and calling for randomized controlled clinical trials on a variety of questions, whether RCTs were feasible or ethical or not, he has pivoted to accepting a more “fluid” standard of evidence for interventions RFK Jr. likes (e.g. stem cell-based therapies, many of which are currently offered in quack clinics without full FDA approval) while simultaneously moving towards embracing RFK Jr.’s deceptive “no saline placebo controlled RCTs” myth about vaccines. Here’s the thing. I really do think that Dr. Makary knows better. He simply wanted the opportunity to impose his ideology at the FDA, and RFK Jr. gave it to him. The price for power? He had to embrace MAHA. Oh, and he also had to embrace purges of FDA staff.
- Vinay Prasad, MD (Director of the FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research). Dr. Prasad, of course, has been a topic on this blog for a long time. I first encountered him when I approved of his then reasonable suggestions for improving the rigor of randomized controlled trials of oncology drugs back in 2019. Unfortunately, before the end of that year, he was mocking me and other physicians for supposedly wasting our time and intellect debunking homeopathy, jade eggs, and other quackery, sneeringly dismissing it as the equivalent of “dunking on a 7′ hoop.” When the pandemic arrived a few months later, it didn’t take him long to join Dr. Makary as a “COVID contrarian,” downplaying the risks of COVID and then later casting doubt on the safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines, all while demanding RCTs of public health interventions as well as different vaccine combinations and boosters, whether such trials were ethical or even feasible. Eventually, he started to sound more and more sympathetic to RFK Jr.’s antivax tropes, even though at that time I didn’t think he had (yet) become antivax, although at one point he fully embraced the longstanding antivax message of “do not comply” with COVID vaccine mandates. Amusingly, he soon ran into trouble with some MAGA/MAHA stans when he tried to apply his evidence-based methodolatry to a treatment they liked, resulting in his “resignation,” although RFK Jr. somehow got him reinstated. Again, I am pretty sure that Dr. Prasad knows better, but he was just so eager for the power to impose his EBM methodolatry to the approval and regulation of vaccines that he’s willing to go full MAHA for the opportunity.
- Jay Bhattacharya, MD (NIH Director). Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is, of course, a coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration, that famous anti-public health manifesto calling for a “let ‘er rip” approach to the pandemic—in October 2020, before there was a vaccine!—with the futile goal of achieving “natural herd immunity,” with a poorly defined strategy of “focused protection” that would supposedly keep those most vulnerable to severe disease and death from COVID-19 while the presumably young and healthy died at a much lower rate than the elderly and ill as the virus rampaged through the population. It was a tendentiously libertarian and profoundly social Darwinist approach to “open up the economy” at the expense of disease and death that never would have worked and ultimately caused enormous damage to public health. As was posted in a lab research group on Reddit, “NIH director is usually someone that A) has an entire career dedicated to biological and medical research and B) is a leader in their field and has extensive administrative experience. Bhattacharya has an MD but is health care economist, is appointed because he is a COVID skeptic, not because of his academic and research qualifications. Harold Varmus and Francis Collins changed the world of research and medicine, this guy posted on Twitter.” Unsurprisingly, since becoming NIH Director, Dr. Bhattacharya has signed onto everything President Trump and RFK Jr.’s MAHA agenda demand, including canceling hundreds of research grants on topics that don’t align with administration priorities, targeting especially anything having to do with mRNA vaccines, gender, gender-affirming care of transgender patients, and diversity, just as Lysenko would have done. He is also widely viewed as ineffective, with some staff giving him the divisive nickname of “Podcast Jay,” based on his seeming to care more about his podcast than actually running the NIH.
- Mehmet Oz, MD (Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services). I long ago dubbed Dr. Oz “America’s Quack,” in a “nod” to Oprah Winfrey having declared him “America’s Doctor,” thus launching his TV career. It’s worth mentioning first how Dr. Oz routinely had antivaxxers like RFK Jr., Dr. Mark Hyman, and Mike Adams on his daytime TV show back in the day. During the pandemic, Dr. Oz also boosted quack tycoon Joe Mercola, who’s now (hilariously) in the thrall of a psychic medium claiming to channel Bahlon, an “ancient and wise high-vibration entity from the Causal Plane,” and as a result now thinks he’s a “new Jesus” who will save the world. His promotion of COVID-19 misinformation started early too. During the early weeks of the pandemic in 2020, Dr. Oz, enamored of Didier Raoult‘s horrendously awful science, promoted Didier’s protocol using hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a cure for COVID-19. Meanwhile, as he was angling to run as a Republican to be one of Pennsylvania’s Senators, he started embracing the minimization of COVID-19, in particular becoming critical of school closures. Indeed, he went so far that he was forced to apologize for having suggested that reopening schools was a “very appetizing” opportunity because it was estimated that reopening schools might “only” increase the total number of COVID-19 deaths by 2-3%. Dr. Oz also had Donald Trump on his show in September 2016 in the heat of the election season, and the two got along so famously that I referred to it as a “huckster bromance.” Now here’s the thing. I’m pretty sure that Dr. Oz knows better too. He knows that a lot of MAHA is nonsense, and, even though he was a “pioneer” (if you can call it that) in “integrating” quackery with medicine, I’m pretty sure he realizes that the MAHA obsession with trans people is nonsense. That didn’t stop him from justifying blocking paying for “bottom surgery” for trans people with a bizarre speech in which he complained that it costs $150,000 to create a penis and $60,000 to create a vagina.
It’s not a coincidence that all of these men are down with purges, censorship, and vendettas to create an environment in which scientists fear to speak up at the NIH and FDA. Of course, I would argue that the fictional Dr. Zaius, as wrong as he might have been, was more honorable than any of these men. He more or less stuck with actual science unless and until it conflicted with his religion. In other words, in the movie at least, he was far more reactive than proactive. He didn’t act to suppress inconvenient science until he could no longer ignore it and saw no choice but to act. In contrast, Trump’s minions are very proactive, actively seeking at every turn to suppress and censor science that clashes with their ideology and the evangelical religion that props it up.
Come to think of it, despite his prioritizing ideology and religion above science, the fictional Dr. Zaius was far more honorable than any of the men listed above who’ve signed on to the MAHA agenda in return for the chance to impose their ideology on the agencies that they currently lead.
And that brings me to one last point. The big reveal at the end of Planet of the Apes is deservedly famous, producing one of the most iconic closing images in all of film history. This moment occurs when Taylor, riding a horse along the ocean shoreline with the native human whom he’d fallen in love with after Dr. Zaius had basically said, “Screw it!” and let him go, encounters this:
Yes, it’s the Statue of Liberty, the sight of which leads Taylor to realize that he’s back on earth—he’s home—his ship having somehow circled around and come back, over 2,000 years in the future, after an apocalyptic nuclear war that had destroyed human civilization and led to the current ape-dominated civilization. As Nova stands by looking confused, Taylor falls to his knees and pounds his fist into the wet sand in despair crying, “You murders! You blew it up! Damn you! Damn you all to hell!”
Sadly, I fear that this final image will be a metaphor for what US federal medicine, public health, and biomedical science will look like by the time the heirs of Lysenko and Dr. Zaius are through with it on January 20, 2029, with proponents of science-based medicine in the role of Taylor as they survey the wreckage.
