Trumpian ignorance = people will die

Vaccine and autism changes may be just the beginning

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You may have seen that yesterday, Donald Trump told pregnant mothers not to take paracetamol (Tylenol) because it could give their babies autism.

I’m not going to pretend to be some expert on autism or medicine in general. But what I am capable of doing is reading and listening to people who are experts, so I know that this advice is completely at odds with medical science. If followed, it’s also likely to get pregnant women and their unborn children in trouble, because fevers during pregnancy can be dangerous to both.

Trump and Robert Kennedy’s rampage through America’s public health institutions is one of the saddest and most infuriating parts of Trump 2.0. They are quite literally going to get people killed because they think they know better than everyone else based on what some conspiracy theorists told them.

It’s also a very potent example of the difference between Trump’s first administration and his current authoritarian joyride. During Trump’s first term, public institutions mostly held. The CDC was not immune to political pressure, but it wasn’t rewriting vaccine guidance based on political whims. Those guardrails are now gone, and they’re gone across many different agencies and policy areas.

But because medicine and public health are sciences, the stupidity of the moves – and their likely consequences – are particularly apparent. Trump’s trade policy is also based on really bad economics, but the global economy is so complicated that you can at least see how someone constructs a good-faith defense of it. But these public health moves are just completely, utterly wrong – and wrong in ways that will without a doubt lead people to die.

We shouldn’t be surprised that an administration which proudly touts its opposition to any form of organized knowledge or science is instead making its health policy based on what YouTubers and discredited quacks say. But we still ought to be appalled. The president has a duty to do the best for the American people based on the knowledge available.

But that’s not how Trump does things. Trump’s unforgivable flaw isn’t that he’s ignorant, but that he’s proud of his ignorance – that he has no interest in learning from people who know better than him.

That trait is uniquely dangerous in a president because presidents have to deal with a huge range of policy areas and regions of the world. Even a president who was a world-recognized expert in one or two areas would still need advice on the others.

Instead, we currently have an administration which wings it based on vibes and YouTube videos. As a result, people are going to die.