Harv's Corner 05/04/2026

Harv's Corner

This is so ridiculous it's painful to publish!  Everyone who thinks this is a good idea, raise your hands???  It's a bit too late to hurt US, but our children and grandchildren will suffer greatly if this situation is not corrected...
and soon!  
Harv

​Hazardous to Your Health 
Why the president fired the scientists and what it means for all of us 
Dan Rather and Team Steady

RFK / TRUMP - Credit: Getty Images

We toss around terms like “American exceptionalism” far too easily. But there is little debate that, in areas of science and medicine, this country has long been the world leader. We have more top scientists, elite doctors, and preeminent researchers than anywhere else. Their work has meant people live longer, healthier lives. It is also a cornerstone of American influence worldwide. Scientific and medical research requires significant funding. It has thrived because our elected officials have had the political will to provide a financial pipeline to the public and private sectors.

President Donald Trump is severing that lifeline.

As the mainstream media was renting tuxedos and getting manicures ahead of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Trump was busy pounding nails into the coffin of the American scientific research community.

Tucked away on Friday evening, in a terse, two-line email, the White House personnel office fired the entire National Science Board.

QUOTE
“On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I’m writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Science Board is terminated, effective immediately,” the email read.

No reason was given in the email, and the White House has not provided any additional comment on the firings.

The independent, 24-person board is composed of top scientists and engineers who serve staggered, six-year terms to ensure overlap between presidential administrations. They are chosen “solely on the basis of established records of distinguished service.” The board advises the National Science Foundation (NSF), which supports a wide range of research, from Antarctic exploration to quantum computing. NSF-funded research helped develop the MRI machine, LASIK eye surgery, and Wi-Fi, among many other innovations. It distributes $9 billion in research grants annually.

“It is not enough simply to keep abreast of the rest of the world in scientific matters. We must maintain our leadership,” President Harry Truman said in 1950, when he established the board.

Keivan Stassun, a physicist and astronomer at Vanderbilt University who was appointed to the board in 2022, called the Trump purge
“a wholesale evisceration of American leadership in science and technology globally,”
to the Los Angeles Times.  

Although the president is often reluctant to explain why he does imprudent and detrimental things, if one looks hard enough, a reason can usually be found. In this case, there may be two.

Reason one: TO SAVE FACE.
The board was scheduled to meet in early May to discuss the release of a new report. The report outlines how the U.S., once the world leader in scientific research, is losing ground to China. If there is no board, the report can’t be released.

Reason two: MONEY.
In its 2026 budget, the Trump administration recommended a 55% cut to the NSF. After lobbying by the National Science Board, Congress rejected the White House’s proposal and funded the NSF at 2025 levels. To avoid the same fate for this year’s budget, which again recommends slashing the foundation’s funding, Trump did away with the board before its members could convince members of Congress.

Friday’s firings are just the latest in Trump’s long list of objectionable actions to cast doubt on scientific findings and thwart research.

The United States has been on the cutting edge of scientific and medical research since the end of World War II. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been the world leader in funding biomedical research. A 2020 study found that NIH-funded research was associated with every new drug approved between 2010 and 2019. But all of that is now changing. And Trump is to blame.

Science is “explicitly designed to counter human self-deception,” psychologist Steven Pinker told Chris Mooney in his book “The Republican War on Science.”

When deception is your modus operandi, you will naturally try to squash, discount, and demonize the truth. Being anti-science helps protect established special interests. Think climate change denialism and fossil fuel companies.

Trump called the climate crisis “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” at last year’s United Nations General Assembly. He said this even as the globe is in the midst of the warmest 10-year span on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The NSF’s board is not the first the Trump administration has hamstrung.
In June of last year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, fired the 17-member vaccine advisory board and replaced many of its members with vaccine skeptics.

Trump himself replaced leading scientists with tech billionaires on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. The administration significantly cut funding to the National Cancer Institute, which had been the gold standard for rigorous, evidence-based research.

The administration no longer funds mRNA research, a revolutionary technology that could radically improve cancer care.

It canceled 22 separate mRNA contracts, including one for a vaccine against brain cancer in children.

Kennedy is an mRNA skeptic who claims the vaccines aren’t safe but provides no evidence.

Pancreatic cancer is an incurable disease with a dismal survival rate. Fortunately for pancreatic cancer patients, research into an mRNA vaccine was far enough along that the cuts didn’t affect the very promising treatment.

BioNTech, a German biomedical research company, partnered with Moderna, an American biotechnology company, to develop mRNA-based pancreatic cancer vaccines. The technology, already in development when the pandemic hit, was used to create the Covid vaccine. 

The Lancet estimated that mRNA vaccines prevented 14.4 to 19.8 million deaths in the first year of use alone. MRNA vaccine technology was in the pipeline thanks to billions of dollars in federal grants over decades. This allowed researchers to get Covid vaccines to market incredibly quickly. This technology is now helping people with pancreatic cancer live years longer than ever before.

Moderna is also using mRNA therapy in combination with other drugs to cut melanoma death rates by 49%.

Applications for a variety of cancers are in the works. Paul Darren Bieniasz, a British-American virologist, wrote in The Guardian, “If we continue the destructive course plotted by this administration, medicines that would otherwise have saved lives in future generations will not be invented. Technologies that would have ensured future employment and prosperity in the U.S. will not be devised. Solutions that generate power while causing less environmental damage will never be developed. Clearly, if we decline to nurture science, the lives of future Americans will be shorter, sicker, and poorer.”

While Donald Trump won’t be around to see that, millions of Americans will. Trump doesn’t like inconvenient truths. Science is a kaleidoscope of inconvenient truths. Rather than deal with them like the world leader he should be, he gaslights, he rages, he denies all. And as with so much else in this administration, 

WE THE PEOPLE PAY THE PRICE!!!
Thank you, Dan Rather