Impacts of the 2024 change in US government on ME/CFS and Long Covid

Today I learned that I still have antibodies for both measles and polio. I had the blood test last week, and the lab tech told me that lots of people have been getting tested to see if their childhood vaccines for measles have held. Whew! I live in Texas, where there have been 422 cases of measles since late January 2025.

Through an oversight, one of my BILs didn't get the measles vaccine when he was little although all the other siblings did. He got measles a couple of years ago and was extremely sick for 2 weeks. This BIL had no problem or loss of income from not being able to work during this time. Many people wouldn't be as fortunate.

I wish more people understood how serious measles can be and how highly contagious it is. I also wish there were public service announcements to inform the public about the danger of letting measles run rampant and the possibility that it could become an epidemic after having been declared eradicated in the U.S. by the WHO in 2000. But PSAs like this would come under the umbrella of public health, a notion that is on life support in the U.S.

 

October, 2024 to March, 2025, Ontario has reported a total of 572 measles.

The number of cases reported in Ontario over the last week is more than the number of cases recorded over the course of a decade between 2013 and 2023. Mostly unvaccinated children.

 

Assuming the current administration does not defy the court order, it looks like some of the health funding cuts are delayed, for now.

Federal judge says she will temporarily block billions in health funding cuts to states

 

Another update on funding cuts for Columbia University. I know this was posted on another thread but I think it fits here:

Trump administration’s attack on university research accelerates

I guess capitulating to the administration did not work out so well for Columbia.

Resisting is generally a better strategy. Another university that was threatened with cuts (I can't remember the name) filed a bunch of lawsuits and the administration backed off.

 

Harvard Professors Sue Trump Administration Over Threat to Cut Funding

The administration is reviewing about $9 billion in federal funding that the university receives.

"Two groups representing Harvard professors sued the Trump administration on Friday, saying that its threat to cut billions in federal funding for the university violates free speech and other First Amendment rights.

The lawsuit by the American Association of University Professors and the Harvard faculty chapter of the group follows the Trump administration’s announcement earlier this month that it was reviewing about $9 billion in federal funding that Harvard receives. The administration also sent the school a list of demands that it must meet if it wants to keep the funds." ................

..................... "In a statement, Andrew Manuel Crespo, a law professor at Harvard and general counsel of the AAUP-Harvard Faculty Chapter, said the administration’s policies are a pretext to chill universities and their faculties from engaging in speech, teaching and research that don’t align with President Trump’s views."

Full article https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/12/us/politics/harvard-professors-trump-lawsuit-funding.html

 

Although the new administation has a fairly opaque philosophical reference point, the scale of philosophical change can't be ignored and for any advocy group, how the locci of influence in the US has altered with that philisophical redirection has to be responded to if advocacy for ME/CFS & LC in the US is to have any effect at all. The following article may be seen as too political for this forum but without understanding the sheer scale of attitudinal change, discussion about the day to day tactics of ME/CFS & LC advocacy will quickly lose relevance:

The Atlantic

Trump Has Found His Class Enemy
By Franklin Foer

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...t=hVZeG3M9DnxL4CekrWGK3-h3gdyrK22tbt8Qkwl4sX4

"Even the educated mind, or perhaps especially the educated mind, is skilled at deflecting harsh realities. That’s why so many white-shoe lawyers have failed to publicly support their colleagues in firms that President Donald Trump has targeted. It’s why universities have barely fought him in court, even as he has butchered their funding.

Law partners and university presidents like to talk their way out of problems, and they apparently believe that they can ultimately evade the fate that befalls those who resist Trump. They assume that he merely craves gestures of submission—and that once obeisance has been paid, he will move on to his next target.

That, however, underestimates the social revolution that the Trump administration is trying to unleash. Its goal isn’t just to shatter a few institutions. It intends to crush the power and authority of whole professions, to severely weaken, if not purge, a social class.

The target of the administration’s campaign is a stratum of society that’s sometimes called the professional managerial class, or the PMC, although there’s not one universal moniker that MAGA applies to the group it is now crushing. That group includes society’s knowledge workers, its cognitive elite, the winners of the tournament that is the American meritocracy.

It covers not only lawyers, university administrators, and professors, but also consultants, investment bankers, scientists, journalists, and other white-collar workers who have prospered in the information age. Back in the 1990s, as the group began to emerge in its current form, the liberal economics commentator Robert Reich hailed its members as “symbolic analysts”—people who identify and solve problems by thinking through ideas rather than via physical labor.

A decade later, the urbanist Richard Florida put forth an even more triumphalist term: the “creative class.” That is, its members had the academic training to master the complexities of a globalized economy, the intellectual skills to conquer the digital world."

More at above link, or if paywalled try going through: https://bsky.app/profile/anneapplebaum.bsky.social/post/3lmp5qdands22

 

It's funny (not haha funny) how many of the people who made strong arguments for academic freedom are completely silent about this. Many of our psychobehavioral overlords, and those who have minimized the COVID pandemic at every turn, have channeled it as the reason why 'fringe' ideas need to be defended no matter what.

But here, total silence. Funny how that works. Almost like they exclusively considered it their right to be free of criticism, and that it was never about some vague notion of academic freedom all along.

Of course they were always transparent about it, how they never granted that academic freedom to people working the opposite angle they espoused, but their total silence here is really something.

 

Yeah where are the self-appointed martyrs “defending science” from “activists”/“militants” now?

Almost like “defending science” is supposed to mean “defending the interests of the powerful” when used by them.

 

Cornell got $1000MM pulled, NorthWestern $800MM and now Harvard, all on top of Columbia. CDMRP PRMRP totally gone which was funding Stanford, INIM, and a few other ME/CFS centers. Very depressing. I wrote to my congressman about the CDMRP Peer review medical research program disappearing and I just got a boiler plate letter talking about the affects of cuts on NIH.
2 NIH ME/CFS centers and another four that have ME/CFS teams affected. Uggh.

 

Northwestern's still completely in the dark, we've (the grad students, at least) had no update since the news broke. We have a long COVID clinic as well though I'm not sure how it's funded

 

Ugh.

covid.gov now redirects to https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19/.

 

That is probably a fair account of the situation.

Biomedical science does have a lot to answer for. Unnecessary animal experiments, Covid 19, lack of progress in areas where there could have been cures, revolving door into patented commercial production...