Business
Column: Trump and RFK Jr. want to make the world safe again for polio and measles. You should be terrified
What are the chances that the noted anti-vaxxers Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would make common cause to undermine Americans’ health in their pursuit for the presidency?
It didn’t take much hindsight to say the answer is 100%. But there’s no need to speculate any longer — not since this weekend, when Trump and Kennedy both associated themselves with policies that would bring vaccine-preventable diseases such as polio back to the United States.
We’ve already seen that the embrace of pernicious anti-vaccination claptrap by unscrupulous politicians and government officials has had detectable impacts on public health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now reporting 41 cases of measles, for which a vaccine has been available since 1963, in 16 states.
Polio hit without warning. There was no way of telling who would get it….It killed some of its victims and marked others for life, leaving behind vivid reminders for all to see: wheelchairs, crutches, leg braces, breathing devices, deformed limbs.
— David Oshinsky, “Polio: An American Story”
That includes 10 cases in Florida, where public health comes under the jurisdiction of Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, a leading quack and established anti-vaccine activist.
Resistance or refusal of COVID vaccination, plainly due to anti-vaccine propaganda, has kept the vaccine rate alarmingly low.
In only one state, Minnesota, did the percentage of population that has received the latest updated booster exceed 20% as of the end of last year. In Florida, the adult booster rate is an appalling 7.7%. (In California, it’s 14.2%, which isn’t something to be particularly proud about.)
As I’ve reported, as many as 200,000 Americans may have died unvaccinated from COVID since the vaccines were approved in early 2021 — nearly 1 in 5 of the roughly 1.2 million American deaths from the disease. An average of nearly 20,000 Americans a week were hospitalized for COVID during February.
Now let’s take a look at what Trump and Kennedy have been up to. We’ll start with Trump.
At a campaign rally in Richmond, Va., on Feb. 2, he said this, referring to the policy he would implement as president: “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.”
Trump’s words elicited febrile cheers from his Virginia audience, which may be a sign of what I earlier identified as the phenomenon of “herd stupidity” connected with the anti-vaccine movement.
Did these people have any conception of what they were cheering? (We can assume that Trump didn’t.) Did they cotton on to the fact that Trump was advocating depriving all Virginia public and private K-12 schools, nursery schools, child care centers and home schools of federal funding?
We know that would be the consequence of his pledge, because we know that Virginia requires children attending any of those institutions to be vaccinated against 15 diseases, with boosters where appropriate. Virginia’s mandated schedule, like those of every other state, follows the recommendations of the CDC, which calls for some vaccinations within a month or two of birth.
Trump issued his ukase against vaccine mandates right after declaring at the Richmond rally that he would “sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and any other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto our children,” thus covering pretty much the entire right-wing culture battleground, almost all of which is based on manufactured outrage.
In context, Trump’s opposition to vaccine mandates falls into the category of glorifying individual “freedom” over the communal interest. As I’ve written before, opposing vaccine mandates as a substitute for opposing vaccination itself is a fundamentally incoherent position — little more than garden variety small-government Republican ideology almost invariably invoked to protect the interests of the “haves” over the “have-nots.”
What makes it incoherent is that mandates do work. They’ve saved the lives of millions of schoolchildren who would otherwise be exposed to deadly diseases at school and play.
During the COVID pandemic, requirements that people provide evidence of vaccination before attending public events or entering restaurants or bars were associated with heightened vaccine rates abroad. Employer mandates in the U.S. have raised vaccination rates at workplaces, as United Airlines showed.
Now let’s turn to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose campaign for president has allowed his dangerous anti-vaccine hogwash to be mainstreamed into the body politic like an IV drip of strychnine. His pitch so bristles with disinformation and pseudoscience that it’s been disavowed by virtually his entire family, whose name has been synonymous with progressive politics and policy for generations.
Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization Kennedy founded and chairs, last week platformed a fatuously inaccurate 2013 book claiming that polio isn’t caused by a virus and that the polio vaccine “doesn’t work.”
The book was conclusively debunked long ago. But last Tuesday, the organization published an interview with its co-author Suzanne Humphries, in which she repeated her claim that polio is caused by toxins, not the virus.
“According to Humphries, there are no worthwhile vaccines, not even smallpox or tetanus, and certainly not the polio vaccine,” the interview read.
Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine changed history after it was licensed in 1955.
(Associated Press)
One telling factor about this interview is who conducted it: Joseph Mercola, a notorious dispenser of health disinformation who, I reported in 2012, was making millions “from hawking ‘organic’ nostrums and casting doubt on medical science.”
By then, Mercola had attracted regulatory warnings from the Food and Drug Administration on three occasions — twice for marketing what the FDA described as illegal drugs and also for touting thermography as an alternative to mammograms for breast-cancer screening, for which the FDA said it was not effective, and for what the FDA said were other unsupported diagnostic claims.
The FDA warned Mercola again in 2021 for hawking unvalidated nostrums as purported treatments for COVID.
Mercola also appeared on the list of the “Disinformation Dozen” published in 2020 by the Center for Countering Digital Hate — 12 individuals who together accounted for as much as 65% of the anti-vaccine content on social media. Kennedy also appeared on the list.
The truth, of course, is that vaccines work. Polio became a massive threat to public health in the 1940s and 1950s, with a per capita infection rate in the U.S. that reached 87.2 per 100,000 population in 1952, sending tens of thousands of children to the hospital and killing a half-million people per year worldwide during those decades.
Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine underwent a massive trial involving 1.6 million children in the U.S., Canada and Finland in 1954; the vaccine was licensed in 1955.
Salk became an international hero, the more so because he refused to patent the vaccine or profit from its distribution. In 1952 the U.S. had 79,000 polio cases, including 21,300 that led to paralysis, and 3,145 deaths. By 1960 the cases had declined to 2,525 with only 230 deaths. In modern times polio cases have all but disappeared — thanks to vaccination.
The same phenomenon occurred with measles. In 1958, the U.S. saw 763,000 cases and 552 deaths. By 1968, a few years after the vaccine became available, there were 22,231 cases and 24 deaths.
Thanks to immunization mandates, even the most recent spike in cases — triggered by an unvaccinated visitor to Disneyland in 2019 — reached only 1,274 cases.
What makes anti-vaccine propaganda so insidious is that it exploits public inattention. Vaccines have something in common with baseball umpires and football referees — when they do their jobs right, they become almost invisible.
“Vaccines are a victim of their own success,” the eminent vaccine expert Paul Offit told me last year. “When vaccines work, nothing happens.”
The best testament to the success of vaccines may be the disappearance of vaccine-preventable diseases from the everyday concerns of families, especially those with children. Smallpox has been eradicated from the face of the Earth. No one in developed countries has had reason to fear measles, whooping cough, diphtheria or polio for decades.
That also means that the public has forgotten what made some of these diseases so fearsome.
Measles has been reduced in public estimation to a nuisance fever. But it’s an exceptionally dangerous and contagious disease that can explode in communities in which the vaccination rate falls below 95% — whether because of complacency or due to the long-refuted and fraudulent claim that the MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine causes autism.
At the Florida public school that has become the epicenter of that state’s outbreak, the vaccination rate was lower than 90%.
Those whose memories or historical knowledge don’t go back to the mid-20th century may need reminding that polio was a uniquely devastating disease in the 1940s and 1950s.
“No disease drew as much attention, or struck the same terror,” medical historian David Oshinsky wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 book about the period. “And for good reason. Polio hit without warning. There was no way of telling who would get it and who would be spared. It killed some of its victims and marked others for life, leaving behind vivid reminders for all to see: wheelchairs, crutches, leg braces, breathing devices, deformed limbs.”
Philip Roth, in his harrowing 2010 novel “Nemesis,” gave a street-level view of how the disease upended daily life in his native Newark, N.J., during the years when no one knew how it was transmitted and there was no vaccine:
“We were warned not to use public toilets or public drinking fountains or to swig a drink out of someone else’s soda-pop bottle or to get a chill or to play with strangers or to borrow books from the public library or to talk on a public pay phone or to buy food from a street vendor…. We were to keep our distance from anyone who looked sick or complained of any of polio’s telltale symptoms.”
That should underscore the indescribable folly of the anti-vaccine campaigning by Trump and Kennedy. They’re playing with fire, and it’s American families and their children who will be burned. Their efforts to make the world safe again for measles and polio should terrify you.
Scott Bessent, the billionaire hedge fund manager whom President-elect Donald J. Trump picked to be his Treasury secretary, plans to divest from dozens of funds, trusts and investments in preparation to become the nation’s top economic policymaker.
Those plans were released on Saturday along with the publication of an ethics agreement and financial disclosures that Mr. Bessent submitted ahead of his Senate confirmation hearing next Thursday.
The documents show the extent of the wealth of Mr. Bessent, whose assets and investments appear to be worth in excess of $700 million. Mr. Bessent was formerly the top investor for the billionaire liberal philanthropist George Soros and has been a major Republican donor and adviser to Mr. Trump.
If confirmed as Treasury secretary, Mr. Bessent, 62, will steer Mr. Trump’s economic agenda of cutting taxes, rolling back regulations and imposing tariffs as he seeks to renegotiate trade deals. He will also play a central role in the Trump administration’s expected embrace of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.
Although Mr. Trump won the election by appealing to working-class voters who have been dogged by high prices, he has turned to wealthy Wall Street investors such as Mr. Bessent and Howard Lutnick, a billionaire banker whom he tapped to be commerce secretary, to lead his economic team. Linda McMahon, another billionaire, has been picked as education secretary, and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is leading an unofficial agency known as the Department of Government Efficiency.
In a letter to the Treasury Department’s ethics office, Mr. Bessent outlined the steps he would take to “avoid any actual or apparent conflict of interest in the event that I am confirmed for the position of secretary of the Department of Treasury.”
Mr. Bessent said he would shutter Key Square Capital Management, the investment firm that he founded, and resign from his Bessent-Freeman Family Foundation and from Rockefeller University, where he has been chairman of the investment committee.
The financial disclosure form, which provides ranges for the value of his assets, reveals that Mr. Bessent owns as much as $25 million of farmland in North Dakota, which earns an income from soybean and corn production. He also owns a property in the Bahamas that is worth as much as $25 million. Last November, Mr. Bessent put his historic pink mansion in Charleston, S.C., on the market for $22.5 million.
Mr. Bessent is selling several investments that could pose potential conflicts of interest including a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund; an account that trades the renminbi, China’s currency; and his stake in All Seasons, a conservative publisher. He also has a margin loan, or line of credit, with Goldman Sachs of more than $50 million.
As an investor, Mr. Bessent has long wagered on the rising strength of the dollar and has betted against, or “shorted,” the renminbi, according to a person familiar with Mr. Bessent’s strategy who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss his portfolio. Mr. Bessent gained notoriety in the 1990s by betting against the British pound and earning his firm, Soros Fund Management, $1 billion. He also made a high-profile bet against the Japanese yen.
Mr. Bessent, who will be overseeing the U.S. Treasury market, holds over $100 million in Treasury bills.
Cabinet officials are required to divest certain holdings and investments to avoid the potential for conflicts of interest. Although this can be an onerous process, it has some potential tax benefits.
The tax code contains a provision that allows securities to be sold and the capital gains tax on such sales deferred if the full proceeds are used to buy Treasury securities and certain money-market funds. The tax continues to be deferred until the securities or money-market funds are sold.
Even while adhering to the ethics guidelines, questions about conflicts of interest can still emerge.
Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary during his first term, Steven Mnuchin, divested from his Hollywood film production company after joining the administration. However, as he was negotiating a trade deal in 2018 with China — an important market for the U.S. film industry — ethics watchdogs raised questions about whether Mr. Mnuchin had conflicts because he had sold his interest in the company to his wife.
Mr. Bessent was chosen for the Treasury after an internal tussle among Mr. Trump’s aides over the job. Mr. Lutnick, Mr. Trump’s transition team co-chair and the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, made a late pitch to secure the Treasury secretary role for himself before Mr. Trump picked him to be Commerce secretary.
During that fight, which spilled into view, critics of Mr. Bessent circulated documents disparaging his performance as a hedge fund manager.
Mr. Bessent’s most recent hedge fund, Key Square Capital, launched to much fanfare in 2016, garnering $4.5 billion in investor money, including $2 billion from Mr. Soros, but manages much less now. A fund he ran in the early 2000s had a similarly unremarkable performance.
When devastating wildfires erupted across Los Angeles County this week, David Torgerson’s team of firefighters went to work.
The thousands of city, county and state firefighters dispatched to battle the blazes went wherever they were needed. The crews from Torgerson’s Wildfire Defense Systems, however, set out for particular addresses. Armed with hoses, fire-blocking gel and their own water supply, the Montana-based outfit contracts with insurance companies to defend the homes of customers who buy policies that include their services.
It’s a win-win if the private firefighters succeed in saving a home, said Torgerson, the company’s founder and executive chairman. The homeowner keeps their home and the insurance company doesn’t have to make a hefty payout to rebuild.
“It makes good sense,” he said. “It’s always better if the homes and businesses don’t burn.”
Torgerson’s operation, which has been contracting with insurance companies since 2008 and employs hundreds of firefighters, engineers and other staff, highlights a lesser-known component of fighting wildfires in the U.S. Along with the more than 7,500 publicly funded firefighters and emergency personnel dispatched to the current conflagrations, which have burned more than 30,000 acres and destroyed more than 9,000 structures, a smaller force of for-hire professionals is on the fire lines for insurance companies, wealthy individual property owners or government agencies in need of additional hands.
Their presence isn’t without controversy. Private firefighters hired by homeowners directly have drawn criticism for heightening class divides during disasters. This week, a Pacific Palisades homeowner received backlash for putting a call out on X, the social media site formerly named Twitter, for help finding private firefighters who could save his home.
“Does anyone have access to private firefighters to protect our home in Pacific Palisades? Need to act fast here. All neighbors houses burning,” he wrote in the since-deleted post. “Will pay any amount.”
“The epitome of nerve and tone deaf!” someone replied.
In 2018, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West credited private firefighters for saving their $60-million home in the Santa Monica mountains during a wildfire. But those who serve wealthy clients make up only a small fraction of nonpublic firefighters, according to Torgerson.
“Contract firefighters who are hired by the government are the vast majority,” he said. The federal government has been hiring private firefighters since the 1980s to support its own forces. According to the National Wildfire Suppression Assn., there are about 250 private sector fire response companies under federal contract, adding about 10,000 firefighters to U.S. efforts.
Some private firefighting companies, including Wildfire Defense Systems, are known as Qualified Insurance Resources and are paid by insurance companies to protect the homes of their customers. Wildfire Defense Systems refers to its on-the-ground forces as private sector wildfire personnel.
Wildfire Defense Systems only works with the insurance industry, but other privately held firefighting companies contract with industrial clients such as petrochemical facilities and utility providers. Wildfire Defense Systems declined to disclose company revenue or what it charges for its services.
Allied Disaster Defense, a company that has sent personnel to the fires in Los Angeles, offers services to both property owners and insurance companies. Its website says its services will “enhance the insurability of properties” and “contribute to reduced claims.”
The website also has a page dedicated to services for private clients, which include emergency response and assistance with insurance claims for “high net-worth and celebrity” customers. The company does not list prices for its services and has nondisclosure agreements with its private clients.
Several other private firefighting companies are based in California, including Mt. Adams Wildfire, which contracts with government agencies, and UrbnTek, which serves Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego among other areas. Along with spraying fire retardant on trees and brush to stop an advancing fire, the company offers “a double layer of protection by wrapping a structure with our fire blanket system.”
Torgerson, a civil engineer with 34 years in emergency services, said he has been struck by the speed of the current wildfires. While typically it takes two to 10 minutes for a fire to sweep through a home, he said, the Palisades fire is traveling at higher speeds.
“It’s moving so fast, it’ll likely take one to two minutes for these fires to pass over the properties,” he said.
He said his company responded to all 62 of the wildfires that threatened structures in California in 2024 and didn’t lose a property.
This year just got started, but it is already shaping up nicely for U.S. airlines.
After several setbacks, the industry ended 2024 in a fairly strong position because of healthy demand for tickets and the ability of several airlines to control costs and raise fares, experts said. Barring any big problems, airlines — especially the largest ones — should enjoy a great year, analysts said.
“I think it’s going to be pretty blue skies,” said Tom Fitzgerald, an airline industry analyst for the investment bank TD Cowen.
In recent weeks, many major airlines upgraded forecasts for the all-important last three months of the year. And on Friday, Delta Air Lines said it collected more than $15.5 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2024, a record.
“As we move into 2025, we expect strong demand for travel to continue,” Delta’s chief executive, Ed Bastian, said in a statement. That put the airline on track to “deliver the best financial year in Delta’s 100-year history,” he said.
The airline also beat analysts’ profit estimates and said it expected earnings per share, a measure of profitability, to rise more than 10 percent this year.
Delta’s upbeat report offers a preview of what are expected to be similarly rosy updates from other carriers that will report earnings in the next few weeks. That should come as welcome news to an industry that has been stifled by various challenges even as demand for travel has rocketed back after the pandemic.
“For the last five years, it’s felt like every bird in the sky was a black swan,” said Ravi Shanker, an analyst focused on airlines at Morgan Stanley. “But it appears that this industry does have its ducks in a row.”
That is, of course, if everything goes according to plan, which it rarely does. Geopolitics, terrorist attacks, air safety problems and, perhaps most important, an economic downturn could tank demand for travel. Rising costs, particularly for jet fuel, could erode profits. Or the industry could face problems like a supply chain disruption that limits availability of new planes or makes it harder to repair older ones.
Early last year, a panel blew off a Boeing 737 Max during an Alaska Airlines flight, resurfacing concerns about the safety of the manufacturer’s planes, which are used on most flights operated by U.S. airlines, according to Cirium, an aviation data firm.
The incident forced Boeing to slow production and delay deliveries of jets. That disrupted the plans of some airlines that had hoped to carry more passengers. And there was little airlines could do to adjust because the world’s largest jet manufacturer, Airbus, didn’t have the capacity to pick up the slack — both it and Boeing have long order backlogs. In addition, some Airbus planes were afflicted by an engine problem that has forced carriers to pull the jets out of service for inspections.
There was other tumult, too. Spirit Airlines filed for bankruptcy. A brief technology outage wreaked havoc on many airlines, disrupting travel and resulting in thousands of canceled flights in the heart of the busy summer season. And during the summer, smaller airlines flooded popular domestic routes with seats, squeezing profits during what is normally the most lucrative time of year.
But the industry’s financial position started improving when airlines reduced the number of flights and seats. While that was bad for travelers, it lifted fares and profits for airlines.
“You’re in a demand-over-supply imbalance, which gives the industry pricing power,” said Andrew Didora, an analyst at the Bank of America.
At the same time, airlines have been trying to improve their businesses. American Airlines overhauled a sales strategy that had frustrated corporate customers, helping it win back some travelers. Southwest Airlines made changes aimed at lowering costs and increasing profits after a push by the hedge fund Elliott Management. And JetBlue Airways unveiled a strategy with similar aims, after a less contentious battle with the investor Carl C. Icahn.
Those improvements and industry trends, along with the stabilization of fuel, labor and other costs, have created the conditions for what could be a banner 2025. “All of this is the best setup we’ve had in decades,” Mr. Shanker said.
That won’t materialize right away, though. Travel demand tends to be subdued in the winter. But business trips pick up somewhat, driven by events like this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
The positive outlook for 2025 is probably strongest for the largest U.S. airlines — Delta, United and American. All three are well positioned to take advantage of buoyant trends, including steadily rebounding business travel and customers who are eager to spend more on better seats and international flights.
But some smaller airlines may do well, too. JetBlue, Alaska Airlines and others have been adding more premium seats, which should help lift profits.
While he is optimistic overall, Mr. Shanker acknowledged that the industry was vulnerable to a host of potential problems.
“I mean, this time last year you were talking about doors falling off planes,” he said. “So who knows what might happen.”
LIVE BLOG: Updates From Indiana Basketball’s Game At Iowa
Former Kansas State Wildcat Ben Sinnott Looking For First Playoff Action With Washington Commanders
Kentucky vs Mississippi State score today: Updates, highlights from UK basketball game
Shortened teal season tops proposed hunting seasons
Maine State Police respond to dozens of highway crashes amid Saturday snow
Colorado Rockies game no. 116 thread: Zac Gallen vs José Ureña
Why Marjorie Taylor Greene was ‘kicked out’ of the Freedom Caucus according to Rep. Buck
See it: Tesla crashes into Columbus convention center at 70 mph
Fox News Politics: Georgia the whole day through
Death of missing Oregon girl found in stream ruled homicide
Los Angeles Geared Up for Fire Risk, but Fell Short
Gov. Newsom cut fire budget by $100M months before lethal California fires: report
Sudan army says its forces enter Wad Madani in push to retake city from RSF
The architecturally significant houses destroyed in L.A.'s fires
Tulsa Massacre Was a ‘Coordinated, Military-Style Attack,’ Federal Report Says
-
Politics1 week agoNew Orleans attacker had 'remote detonator' for explosives in French Quarter, Biden says
-
Politics1 week agoCarter's judicial picks reshaped the federal bench across the country
-
Politics1 week agoWho Are the Recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom?
-
Health6 days agoOzempic ‘microdosing’ is the new weight-loss trend: Should you try it?
-
World1 week agoSouth Korea extends Boeing 737-800 inspections as Jeju Air wreckage lifted
-
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25822586/STK169_ZUCKERBERG_MAGA_STKS491_CVIRGINIA_A.jpg "Meta is highlighting a splintering global approach to online speech")
Technology2 days agoMeta is highlighting a splintering global approach to online speech
-
World1 week agoWeather warnings as freezing temperatures hit United Kingdom
-
News1 week agoSeeking to heal the country, Jimmy Carter pardoned men who evaded the Vietnam War draft