First they came for the scientists

Clinical trials canceled; NIH gagged; NSF on pause; an abrupt silence at the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report; HIV drugs denied: what is to be done?

I, like our country, have been sick since the inauguration. Was it the Nazi salute? The Inspectors General purge? An alcoholic rapist with white nationalist tattoos being put in charge of our army? The firehose of ICE raids and illegal directives that will gum up our courts for years? Or was it just a run-of-the-mill germy subway pole I might have accidentally grabbed without wearing gloves? I guess we’ll never know, but whatever it was, I came down with a bone-crushing flu and a 103 degree temperature, which added that extra dash of je ne sais crois to last week’s chaos.

This flu, rough as it was, also gave me the time to finally watch Band of Brothers: a masterpiece I somehow missed when it came out in 2001. I hadn’t planned on binge-watching a show about World War II American soldiers battling the Bulge and a bunch of Nazis as act of resistance to our current chute into tyranny. In fact, I’m a little embarrassed to say I didn’t even really make the connection until I started watching it and realized how relevant, once again, this show and that war suddenly are. I’d simply promised my partner I’d watch a few episodes before our trip to France next month, where we will scatter my friend’s ashes at her family’s home in Brittany before heading to Normandy to see the beach where my great uncle Max, aka Captain Zera, landed his troops on D-Day.

For those who may have forgotten, 400,000 American soldiers—young men, barely old enough to shave—were killed during World War II, defending the rest of the world against the whims and malignant narcissism of that other man with a penchant for surrounding himself with Nazi loyalists and saluters. You remember the dude in question, right? Thin mustache? Murdered 6 million Jews and 5 million others whom he deemed as either lesser than or a threat because they weren’t light-skinned, Christian, heterosexual, white Germans? Longed for a patriarchal world in which women’s sole role was to birth more blond babies while the men fought for racial purity, imperial conquest, and global war?

Anyway, watching Band of Brothers turned out to be an excellent way of putting last week’s deliberate “shock and awe” chaos into historical context. Particularly as I searched, in vain, for the latest CDC statistics on my particular strain of flu. Which like every other piece of valuable, government-funded data last week, including that critical tool for doctors, The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which has been breezily humming along without any interruption since [checks notes] 1960!!!, has been halted and frozen in time. As if science itself were suddenly suspended, along with all the data, money, clinical trials, and tools we American’s rely on to keep us healthy. Or at least apprised of, say, the number of bird flu cases out there. (Apparently, an alarming number.)

I nearly laugh now thinking how incensed I was, when I wrote Ladyparts, to discover that the post-surgical medical condition that nearly killed me—vaginal cuff dehiscence—does not even get reported to the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. How quaint, in retrospect, my ire at the sexism of that when suddenly zero deaths are being reported and recorded for posterity and research. Zero!

Make no mistake: tyrants thrive off wreaking havoc, upending norms, and dehumanizing “the other” while simultaneously pulling up all drawbridges of knowledge and information. Meanwhile, people in cancer trials can’t get their next dose of whatever. As I watched the horrific if incredibly rendered concentration camp scene in Band of Brothers unfold, the ultimate expression of what it looks like when we decide doctors, other intellectuals, and anyone who’s not an Aryan are the enemy was made clear.

Every time I’ve even remotely written about politics or my horror of tyranny in this publication, I lose a bunch of subscribers who then take the time to send me notes, short and long, that all have the same underlying message, which I’ll paraphrase here: “Stick to women’s health, stupid. Keep politics out of it.”

Okay, sure, kids, but the problem is—as it’s always been—that the personal is always political. Women’s health is and has always been a political issue, and it has been hampered since the dawn of medicine by a belief that our bodies and lives don’t count except as incubators of the next generation. It’s no coincidence that we are simultaneously experiencing a rise in tyranny, a dismantling of our reproductive rights, and a minimizing of the importance of science and data. These things, throughout history, have always gone hand-in-hand. The nomination of vaccine denier RFK to run Health and Human Services is part and parcel of all of this, and it will, mark my word, have dire consequences in the future for the health and welfare of the men, women, and children of this country. Even his cousin, Caroline Kennedy, spoke out:

And look: I’d rather not waste this space or my brain responding to a fascist’s firehose. I’d like to get back to reading NIH studies, once they’re allowed to communicate with us again about what they’re doing and be granted the funds to do so. But half of our population has fallen under the spell of a madman who is following Hitler’s playbook, step by step. And when history looks back on us—we average Americans, who are all now caught up in this banality of evil as it plays out day by day—I want us all to be able to say that we were not another fascist’s “willing executioners,” as my friend Danny Goldhagen so wisely put it in his book. That we fought back however we could. With words. With information. With teaching. With empathy. With taking a break now and then from the deliberate firehose to breathe or make art or move our bodies or help a stranger or love those we love. I’m not saying watch TV non-stop or react to every news alert on your phone. That’s what they want you to do to induce a sense of hopeless paralysis and inaction. But all of us would do well to learn the lessons of history, apply them to today as best we can, and figure out our own individual ways of fighting back.

One of the ways I do this is by reading historian

Heather Cox Richardson

’s missive religiously every morning before moving on with my day. She is a national treasure, she synthesizes all the news and puts it into the context of history, and I am grateful for her service to our country. Because make no mistake: she and you and I and everyone we know are in a war now against human decency and progress. You are the soldiers. The bombs—for now, at least—are the daily power grabs, headlines, and chaos. Words, information, and decent actions are your weapons. And it is up to all of us now to do whatever we can to fight back against this hatred and ignorance because, even if you think it’s not about you and your body, it always, inevitably, is.

Or as Martin Niemöller (1892–1984), a once prominent, once right-wing-leaning Lutheran pastor in Germany—later interned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau—put it:

"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me."

So, now, they’ve come for the scientists. And your health. And the trans kids. And the immigrants. And women’s uteri. And international aid workers. And international aid period. And kids in dire poverty abroad with HIV. And everyone and anyone who’s every spoken out against them or tried to speak truth to their power.

Anyway, here’s a photo of the American Cemetery in Normandy.

American Cemetery in Normandy ©Deborah Copaken

I took it in July of 2021, when I visited it with my now dead best friend and our daughters before mine headed to med school to devote her life to the study of science. (Although god only knows what practicing medicine will look like come May, when she graduates.) I post the photo here as a reminder to all of us of what can happen when we allow Nazis to salute, and others to be othered, and science to be silenced without fighting back. It’s only a small corner of that vast field. You can’t even shoot the whole thing in one frame. It’s the vastness that’s so striking. All those hundreds of thousands of lives, lost to the whims, greed, revenge, and malignant narcissism of one fascist.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go fetch another box of tissues. And digest today’s crazy. And try to balance my desire to understand the carpet-bomb of horrors with my equally pressing need for mental health and internal peace. Carry on, soldiers. I believe in us.