Last Tuesday’s election demonstrated that people across the nation agreed that the country is moving in the wrong direction. The people have spoken decisively, indicating the need for immediate relief of bread and butter issues: food, housing and health care. There is so much more to be restored, but the people’s needs are first.
We rejoice at the election outcome and presently are suspending gatherings at 8 and Madison. Rather, we propose writing to representatives across the country, encouraging them to pass legislation that moves along their promised agenda. At a recent Town Hall presentation Pramila Jayapal surprised her supporters, stating that legislators profit from their constituents’ communications, even on issues where it’s clear they agree. Knowing that a good percentage of people are on your side is powerful.
PLEASE LET ME KNOW OF YOUR INTEREST IN A WRITING CAMPAIGN.
After RFK Jr. was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), he said that Americans had lost faith in public health agencies during the COVID pandemic. As the nation’s #1 health official, he promised to restore that faith.
In December 2020, COVID vaccines were available to help prevent a disease that was killing thousands of people every day. Most people rushed to get them. But not everyone. About one-third of the American public refused the vaccine. They didn’t think the disease was that bad or they feared that the vaccine was unsafe. Either way, they didn’t want to get vaccinated. RFK Jr. was right there with them. As the head of a virulent anti-vaccine group called Children’s Health Defense, he had been an anti-vaccine activist for more than 20 years. When the COVID vaccine became available, he testified in front of the Louisiana state legislature that it was “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” and argued that vaccines shouldn’t be mandated. The medical freedom movement was born.
As Secretary of HHS, RFK Jr. tried to regain the public’s trust—or at least the minority of the public that rejected vaccines—by dismantling the vaccine infrastructure. He fired all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), replacing them with people who, like him, thought vaccines were unnecessarily harmful. He reduced the number of routinely recommended vaccines from 17-11. He said that HHS would no longer recommend COVID vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women. In response to RFK Jr.’s agenda, public trust in federal health agencies declined even further from 77% to 50%.
Then RFK Jr.’s quest to restore public trust took another dangerous turn. “If you want to take an experimental drug,” he said, “you ought to be able to do that. We want to respect the intelligence of the American public to decide what treatments will benefit them the most.” RFK Jr. warned the FDA not to “tell physicians what they can and can’t prescribe.”
True to his word, RFK Jr. forced the FDA to remove warnings about bogus cures for autism, such as stem cells, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and chelation. He was particularly enamored with stem cells, which he claimed had treated his voice disorder but was angry that he had to travel to Antigua to get them. Children, argued Kennedy Jr., should be able to use stem cells to treat autism even though the procedure costs $20,000, involves sedating the child with ketamine, and has been shown by Duke University researchers not to work.
RFK Jr. also 1) forced the FDA to take down it’s warnings about testosterone, 2) replaced an FDA advisory committee with members of the peptide industry so he could eliminate restrictions on peptides that were unproven or unsafe, and 3) manipulated the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee so that he could promote saturated fats over unsaturated fats in clear contradiction of the American Heart Association’s warnings that saturated fats increase the risk of heart disease—a fact supported by more than four dozen studies.
RFK Jr. was a perfect example of the 19th century German philosopher Georg Hegel’s warning that, “What we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history.” The United States has for decades benefited from federal oversight of drugs and biologicals, most notably in 1957 when the FDA refused to license thalidomide, a sleeping pill made by the German company Chemie Grünenthal because safety studies in pregnant women were lacking. Thalidomide use in other countries damaged 24,000 embryos, more than half of whom died before birth. According to RFK Jr.’s philosophy, the FDA shouldn’t have restricted thalidomide. Rather, it should have “respected the intelligence of the American public” to make their own decisions.
In RFK Jr.’s America, medical freedom has become freedom from federal regulation of drugs, foods, biologicals, and vaccines. The consequences, as forewarned by Hegel, are entirely predictable.
We need more books! Please donate now in the Mt. Baker Room by Thursday!
from Betsy Hansen
The Library Committee is looking for more books. Do you have a stack of books by your bed that you’ve read and want to get rid of? Have you just recently joined us here at Skyline and found that you’ve brought too many with you? You can donate them to our annual collection for the Great Book Giveaway this Friday, November 13. Place your books and DVDs in the box in the corner of the Mount Baker room by November 11. We will scan them for those to be kept for our library before the event.
Ideas matter most when they’re paired with moral clarity — from IN PURSUIT
Before Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” the nation endured a long and difficult twilight. By the mid-1970s, America was experiencing overlapping economic, social, and foreign policy crises. The unemployment rate hit 9 percent in May of 1975 and inflation reached 15 percent by 1980. Between 1960 and 1980, divorce rates doubled, violent crime rates nearly tripled, and drug use exploded. The Soviet Union—far from the weak and doomed enterprise it appears in retrospect—had made communists gains from Cambodia to Angola. In 1964, 78 percent of Americans reported that they trusted government to do the right thing. By 1980, after Vietnam, Watergate, and deteriorating conditions at home, only 26 percent of voters said that. In 1979 Jimmy Carter delivered his notorious malaise speech, in which he described an American “crisis of confidence…threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America.”
By the end of Reagan’s first term, America looked and felt very different. American society had gradually begun to shift to the right, with Congress cutting taxes and deregulating the airline and trucking industries. Reagan won re-election by one of the biggest landslide majorities in history. From 1982 to 1990 the American economy grew by about 4 percent a year. By the time he left office in 1988, Reagan’s approval rating stood at 63 percent. The Berlin wall fell a year later.
How did Reagan lead the country out of hard times and rekindle Americans’ faith in themselves? What made Reagan such a successful president?
This is not an easy question to answer. As the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell put it: “Even those who count Ronald Reagan among the handful of great American presidents have a hard time saying exactly where his greatness lay, or how it made itself felt. Reagan was an enigma: affable but friendless, a nonintellectual man of ideas, an ingenuous power politician.” Out of the riddle of Reagan, however, one lesson emerges clearly: that ideas matter most when they’re paired with moral clarity.
President Reagan grabbing handful of jellybeans with Alexander Haig and Richard Allen during a meeting with Interagency Working Committee on Terrorism in the Cabinet Room. January 26, 1981. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum.
One of the keys to Reagan’s success, paradoxically, was that he was old. When he entered the White House at age 69, he was six years older than FDR was when he died in office. Reagan was born in 1911, chronologically closer to Thomas Jefferson’s presidency than to Donald Trump’s. He was formed in an earlier age, before many of the ideological currents that rocked the 20th century. (continued on page 2)
The President’s unique brand of lurid authoritarianism has finally lost appeal, and he has lost the plot.
David Remnick, The New Yorker Editor (submitted by Charlotte Lin)
Two generations ago, in the fall of 1974, President Gerald Ford and the Republican Party approached the midterm elections with considerable dread. That August, Richard Nixon had learned that he could no longer outrun his crimes in the White House. One tape recording in particular, the so-called smoking gun, proved that he had conspired with his aide H. R. Haldeman to obstruct the investigation into the Watergate break-in. The Republican elders Barry Goldwater, John Rhodes, and Hugh Scott told Nixon that impeachment in the House of Representatives was now certain, and conviction in the Senate likely. Nixon resigned, handing over his office to Vice-President Ford. A month later, Ford issued Proclamation 4311, pardoning Nixon for any crimes that he might have committed as President. Watergate, Ford said, had been “an American tragedy, in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must.”
Until then, despite a dreadful economy, Ford had enjoyed approval ratings as high as seventy per cent. But the Nixon pardon was political poison, for both Ford and the G.O.P. His popularity plummeted by more than twenty points. And, in the midterms, the Democrats gained forty-nine seats in the House and four seats in the Senate. The incoming class of rookie Democrats—among them Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, John Glenn, and Patrick Leahy—became known as the “Watergate babies.”
This week, some commentators, having exhausted the usual marine metaphors for midterm blowouts (a “blue wave” quickly became a “blue tsunami”), scurried to find historical points of comparison for the astonishing nationwide triumph of the Democratic Party. More than a few settled on the post-pardon midterms of 1974. (continued on page 2)
Friendship displayed at Canada’s Niagara Falls and France’s Eiffel Tower
Ed note: Others have let me know that this is artificially generated and thus is spam. Nonetheless, I agree with the comment that it’s pleasant to know from the media that Canada and Europe are no doubt relieved by the election results.
Monday November 9th at 11 AM in the Mt. Baker Room
You are invited to hear Dr. David Horne discuss the problem of tuberculosis, one of the three big killers world wide–TB, HIV-AIDS and Malaria. What are origins of TB? How did it affect cultures, art, literature and opera? Why was Seattle considered a “tuberculosis swamp” in the early 1900’s and how did the city deal with this? Is it still a local problem?
David Horne, MD, MPH is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Global Health and Neurology at the University of Washington. He is an active clinician with a general pulmonary clinic and expertise in non-tuberculous mycobacteria and bronchiectasis. Dr. Horne is a physician-scientist with an active research program in tuberculosis, with particular interest in TB aerobiology and infectiousness, asymptomatic TB and TB pathogenesis. His current studies are based in Nairobi, Kenya in collaboration with colleagues from the Kenya Medical Research Institute. He is a “warm-line” faculty member of the Curry International TB Center of UCSF, a CDC TB Center of Excellence, where he provides regional consultations on the TB.
Ossium Health pioneered a way to cryopreserve bone marrow and completed more than two dozen successful transplants. Now it wants to scale up its technology so anyone who needs bone marrow can access it quickly.
Montrail Moore was 48 years old when he was diagnosed with leukemia last year. His doctors hoped to do a bone marrow transplant, a procedure in which healthy donor cells replace a patient’s damaged ones. But there was no match among his family or on the living donor registry.
Then Moore learned from his oncologist about a new, cutting-edge option: He could get a transplant from a deceased donor that had been cryopreserved at a biobank in Indianapolis. In January, Moore had the procedure, and his health started to improve. He now considers the transplant date his new birthday. “It gave me a new life,” he tells Forbes.
Moore’s surgery is one of 29 procedures completed with bone marrow from Ossium Health, the startup that pioneered the technology to retrieve it from deceased donors and freeze it. All of the surgeries, which were part of clinical trials or compassionate use programs, were successful. Ossium is now preparing to commercialize its bone marrow from deceased donors for blood cancers next February, and then start building out a portfolio of other stem cell therapies.
Ossium has raised $158 million from investors at a valuation of $300 million (as of its last raise in 2023). Revenue is expected to reach $35 million this year, up 75% from last year’s $20 million. Ossium cofounder and CEO Kevin Caldwell expects the number of transplants to surpass 60 next year and reach close to 200 in 2028—on the way to eventually handling 10,000-plus patients a year as the amount of bone marrow it banks increases along with doctors’ willingness to use it.
Why It Matters “Ossium’s cryopreserved bone marrow could solve the problems with relying on living donors,” says Forbes senior editor Amy Feldman. “At least 70% of patients that need a bone-marrow transplant don’t have a family member that matches and need an unrelated donor. While doctors can search registries for a match, not all patients will find one. The odds for Black and South Asian patients are worse because of a lack of diversity among donors. Time is also a problem. Cancer patients who need treatment may not have the two to four months it can take to find a living donor. Ossium commits to getting its bone marrow to patients within 72 hours.”
“Before being reduced to order, it is very common for everything to fall into confusion or seeming chaos. This allows things that cling together poorly to separate, and when they have separated, God arranges them in their place.” Emanuel Swedenborg
When elephants hear music they enjoy, they often appear more relaxed and at ease. Watch closely as the elephants slowly edge closer to Lek when they hear her singing across the sanctuary grounds.
At first, only Faa Mai and Thong Ae stand nearby, quietly taking in her soft, melodic voice. But as Lek continues to sing, more elephants begin to approach, drawn by the familiar, comforting sound. They gather around her in quiet stillness, sharing a peaceful moment together at Elephant Nature Park.
“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered, but we have this consolation: The more difficult the struggle, the more glorious in the end will be our victory.” —Tom Paine
Dr. Katelyn Jetelina is an epidemiologist and scientific communicator. Dr. Jetelina is the founder and CEO of Your Local Epidemiologist- a public health newsletter that “translates” ever-evolving science to the public, reaching over 500 million views in over 133 countries. In addition, she is the co-founder of Healthier Together, an adjunct professor at Yale School of Public Health, and former Senior Advisor to the White House and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Jetelina has received numerous national awards, including recently being named a TIME100 Most Influential Person in Health. She has her Masters of Public Health and PhD in epidemiology and biostatistics from the University of Texas Health Science Center and an honorary doctorate from SUNY.
Last night I took to the streets of Texas. People poured out, cheering, dancing, honking, and waving Texas and American flags. I ran out with my public health friends and I just… cried.
This has been the most exhausting seven years for health in the United States in I think… ever. We have found ourselves riding an extreme pendulum through a magnetic storm. A pandemic followed by backlash followed by the absolute destruction of systems at a rate I didn’t even think possible. The result: 1.6 million people died from Covid-19; many people lost jobs and were traumatized for all types of reasons; then there were record-breaking cases of measles (and deaths), whooping cough, more hungry people, less Medicaid coverage (so more medical debt), less clean air, immense confusion, and less scientific discovery for things like cancer and heart disease. And people from all sides did not feel heard.
But last night, I saw a STEM wave. More U.S. scientists and physicians ran for state and federal office this cycle than ever before. And many won:
A pediatrician in South Carolina
A public health physician in Michigan
A microbiologist in Georgia
A nuclear engineer in Virginia
A physician in Ohio
An ER nurse in Wisconsin
An environmental engineer in Iowa
A mathematician in Illinois
A physician in New Jersey
The United States said clearly: Health matters. Science matters. Integrity matters. Empathy matters. People matter.
But let’s not forget: change matters. Many of these candidates weren’t focused on defense or the status quo. And rightfully so. We cannot go back to 2019. We cannot go back to 2024. The health ecosystem was not working for people. It was built for another time and has failed everyone for years. We need an alternative path forward from the one we’ve been on for the past 20 years, and the one we’re on now.
This means it’s time for something bigger than repair. It’s not just about putting the pieces back together; it’s about reimagining what’s possible, and, quite frankly, what’s needed.
This will take a lot, but two things are top of mind:
An all-hands-on-deck response. Creating a more responsive, transparent, accountable, inclusive system that listens and builds a healthy health ecosystem (not just a sick system) is a complex and complicated problem to fix. Fancy doctorate degrees alone won’t solve it. It will take community expertise and lived experience. It will take prioritization and savvy and strategy and innovation. It will take historical knowledge, but also new thinkers. It will take doing things differently. People from all walks of life will have to be at the table to solve it.
This is going to take time. As an 8-year-old Texan said this morning: “Breaking is faster than making.” Last night was just the first inch. And things can and probably will still get worse. I give it 10 years for this ship to turn. But the important thing is that it is turning. Let’s make sure it goes forward instead of U-turning.
After every period of darkness is a period of light. I, for one, am ready.
There have been three great crises in American history: the Civil War, perhaps the defining event in our history after the Revolution itself, the Great Depression and World War II. These events tested our republic and our resolve in fundamental ways, but the center always held — elections took place, there was a peaceful transfer of power and the judiciary was still independent. Our core democratic institutions remained fundamentally strong, respected by the public and our leaders alike. The guardrails of our democracy held and were even strengthened as we emerged from each.
As we go to the polls today in this most consequential of midterm elections, we face our country’s fourth great crisis. Because of misinformation, which the current administration encourages, age-old fears and conspiracies have created a sense of us versus them that is fundamentally at odds with a healthy democratic society. Elections are in doubt, the highest court seems compromised, history has been distorted, books have been banned, and dictators have been coddled while our closest allies have been ridiculed and dismissed. People are rightly concerned whether our institutions are at a breaking point.
I’ve spent the better part of the past two years crisscrossing the country, discussing the release of our PBS series on the American Revolution. No matter where I went or to whom I spoke, people asked me the same questions: What did I learn about our complicated and fragile republic over the nearly 10 years it took to make the film? Can a country as divided as ours survive? What might our founders think of us today?
I think the founders would be hugely disappointed that so many members of the legislative branch have ceded so much power to the executive branch, which has filled that vacuum with corruption and assaults on the rule of law, even undermining the fundamental right to vote. John Adams, who insisted that a republic could not function without virtuous leaders, would be appalled at the prevailing vulgarity and incompetence.
From the start, the creation of the United States was unlikely. For most of human history, people had lived under authoritarian rule, but in the 13 former British colonies clinging to the Eastern Seaboard, people (white men) would create something new: citizens.
“All experience has shown,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Maintaining a democracy would be difficult, an active exercise that would simultaneously try to honor our individual freedoms (what each of us wants) and our collective freedoms (what we need).
George Washington’s great achievement was not just winning a war against overwhelming odds, but persuading 13 new states with different economies, religious beliefs and competing interests that they were now part of something new in which old animosities would yield to an individual, as well as collective, sense of union. There would be an “us,” with no “them.”
During the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787, delegates understood that in the many compromises they would strike, they also had to engineer defenses against the rise of a tyrant. In a letter to James Madison, Jefferson worried that a president who lost an election might “pretend false votes” and “hold possession of the reins of government.” Alexander Hamilton was also concerned that an “unprincipled” man would “mount the hobby horse of popularity” and “throw things in confusion.” “In a government like ours,” he wrote, no one is “above the law.”
Today, nearly six years after an angry mob stormed the Capitol to overturn the results of the 2020 election, election denial is still part of the current administration’s playbook. Only four of the 13 Republican candidates in highly competitive Senate races have said that they would accept the outcome of the upcoming elections unconditionally.
It hasn’t always been that way. During Watergate, as damning evidence accumulated, members of President Richard Nixon’s own party concluded that their obligation to the Constitution was greater than their obligation to him or the G.O.P. In August 1974, Republican congressional leaders went to the White House and told Nixon that his support in Congress had collapsed. He announced his resignation the next day.
Citizens today should remember that our democracy relies on an ongoing conversation between them and the past. At Gettysburg, only a few months after the largest battle ever fought on American soil, Abraham Lincoln asked the living to dedicate themselves to “a new birth of freedom,” recognizing that every generation must renew and expand on the promises first made in Philadelphia. Dwight Eisenhower, who knew better than most the terrible cost of war, reminded us in his farewell address that only “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” could preserve liberty and security.
I’m optimistic that the American people recognize that our democratic institutions and sense of decency can bring us together.
We have come back from crises before. We were more divided than we are today during the Revolution, the Civil War, Reconstruction and Vietnam. For 250 years, our country has prevailed in fits and starts, forging achievements, however imperfect, related to race and equality in American life.
But given our divisions, as we vote we must each ask ourselves: What kind of leadership will see us through the current crisis? Why do we continue to support leaders who are invested in deepening our divides, who tap into conspiracy theories to frighten the public, deny facts and, to quote Alexander Hamilton, “throw things into confusion,” so that they “may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind’”?
Most midterm elections are seen as referendums on the policies of the president. This one is no different. But there’s something more fundamental at stake here, beyond policy differences. This election is about the people — who are empowered to check our chief executive — and the candidates running for Congress, who either have sworn an oath to the Constitution or hope to do so. Whether they are prepared to honor their oath should matter enormously to everyone who values the idea of us — the idea of America.
