Allison Quinn is writing a series of columns about her son’s treatment for a rare disease.
It may just be a coincidence that my son asked if humans “can go extinct from stupidity” after the Trump administration went on a rampage of idiocy.
It may also have more to do with an overall sense of doom given that we are surrounded by children fighting for their lives as my son recovers from a bone marrow transplant.
But it’s also hard not to see a pattern here.
My son, Aedrik, is perhaps more aware of the current chaos than other 8-year-olds because he knows the doctors saving his life from a rare disease have been affected by the Trump administration’s funding cuts to scientific research.
He watched his doctor grimace and reply in the affirmative when I asked if research into adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD) would take a hit.
“But why?” my son asked.
“Because someone decided it’s a waste,” I said.
Cold comfort to future generations of mothers who can do nothing but stand by and watch as their kids succumb to under-researched diseases.
In the ALD community, the difference is on grim display: Parents of children whose disease was caught early—thanks entirely to screenings made possible by scientific research—post updates about how their kids respond to treatment, while families with children diagnosed too late routinely announce that they’ve finally “given up the fight.”
The latest such announcement underlined the horror of the disease, one that slowly strips away every function that makes someone human and keeps them prisoner in their own body as they fade away: “You are free now,” a mother wrote in tribute to her son.
Diagnosed too late, she said, he “lost all his abilities in half a year” and spent the remainder of his life bedridden.
Researchers are working to determine why some people develop the deadly form of the disease while others don’t—and hoping to pin down factors that can predict which route each patient will take. The U.S. is currently the leader in this research, though perhaps not for long if such life-saving work is discarded under the guise of eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse.”
The reality is that we’re witnessing an inexplicably gleeful erasure of progress, and a full-throated endorsement of stupidity. Fringe, long debunked ideas are being repackaged and certified as authoritative by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who just tapped an anti-vaxxer without a medical degree and with no discernible qualifications whatsoever to carry out a study looking for links between childhood immunizations and autism.
This baffling move reveals one of the most troubling hallmarks of MAGA: the flat-out rejection of expertise as something sinister.
I’ve now seen several fellow moms angrily rebuff the advice of doctors, simply on account of them being … doctors. As if a medical degree and years of experience is akin to the mark of Satan.
“It just doesn’t make sense to me,” one mom complained about a newborn screening for rare and genetic diseases, scoffing at doctors warning that her refusal to allow the screening means “if a disease isn’t found early it can cause death.”
But perhaps that sentiment isn’t at all surprising when we’ve reached a point in the kakistocracy where one of the most popular podcasts on Spotify is pushing claims previously made by health czar RFK Jr. that polio isn’t really a big deal and the vaccine that eradicated it was a myth.
Meanwhile, after he promoted a “miraculous” alternative treatment for measles that reportedly just made some kids sicker, the highly contagious virus has now spread to new states and cases have exploded.
So yes, it seems feasible that humans might go extinct from stupidity.
Look no further than the new mantra of the country’s leadership, which claims to be all about merit and “American excellence” but can muster only a lazy “everyone makes mistakes” when confronted by an egregious national security blunder.
Firing those nuclear safety workers was also a mistake, but there was a fix for it. Likewise on a federal health program for 9/11 survivors that the Trump administration gutted and then restored.
But what about the kind of mistakes you can’t take back? How many are being made that we just don’t know about yet? The ones that are too macabre and depressing to make jokes about or spur memes are the ones I worry about, that play out silently out of public view.
Is “everyone makes mistakes” also what they’ll say if more kids die from preventable diseases? If the critically ill lose all access to care?
“Everyone makes mistakes” is the new “thoughts and prayers” of this administration, and we can expect to see it trotted out again and again. In fact, I know we will.
Because there’s one very good reason why the White House didn’t simply take accountability for the idiocy known as Signalgate, and it’s ugly but true: Acknowledging that the screw-up was inexcusable implies a promise it won’t happen again.
But it will, and they know it will, so they lay the groundwork, the seed of expectation, for many more mistakes to come.
