Imagine you are thirty. You are smart. You like science. You decided to be a doctor, or do something with all your biology-like knowings. You have an interest in public health.
Would you follow Tony Fauci’s path career wise now? Would you want to work at the CDC, or NIH? Get famous fighting disease as Fauci did so you can be reviled? Hunted?
Not that there was any chance of it, but my father warned me against becoming a doctor. As he retired, he saw the crazy insurance pressures rising up all around him and feared how unpleasant medicine would soon be as a career. If anything, he told me, go into research. (Just as unlikely.)
But sticking to the lab and staying away from patients won’t save our smart and decent thirty year old who likes biology.
I would not mind shutting down the CIA, but we do need a few spies, right? And somewhere in all that history of overthrowing Pinochet and setting up black site prisons one or two of our best and brightest found their way to Langley. Which is not to defend the CIA but to say that nationally known agencies once had draw for smart young people.
Amd now?
To pull out of the WHO is not just to build a wall against life saving information, it is to announce to a whole generation they should skip the noble and unspectacular work that once held grip on our more perfect union.
What happened here in America on Monday was sickening. It was sickening to watch and to listen to and it will make us all sicker too, sicker in mind, heart, soul and body. There’s a cancer as the presidency.