EGGS ARE STILL EXPENSIVE, BUT HEY, AT LEAST NO ONE'S FINANCING HUMAN-ANIMAL HYBRIDS!

Josh Marshall writes:

It’s still uncertain precisely how long the duration will be, but we’re getting fast emerging information that there appears to be an indefinite halt on the various meetings, review panels and so forth that keep the pipeline of medical research funding going in the U.S. This article in Science gives a broad overview. Put simply this just turns off the spigot of funding for a huge amount of cancer research as well as research across various other health fields and diseases.... This comes after a similar halt to the weekly MMWR report which CDC sends to hospitals and doctors every week with information on flu, COVID and other infectious diseases.

I think we’re at the point in this where you can’t yet categorically say that this is being done for RFK Jr.-adjacent anti-research nuttery, but basically all signs point in that direction.

Yes, it seems as if they're clearing the way for Robert Kennedy Jr. at the Department of Health and Human Services. But the right has had its eye on federal science agencies for a while. Mandate for Change -- the Project 2025 manifesto -- has some thoughts about all this:

When our Founders wrote in the Constitution that the federal government would “promote the general Welfare,” they could not have fathomed a massive bureaucracy that would someday spend $3 trillion in a single year.... Approximately half of that colossal sum was spent by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) alone—the belly of the massive behemoth that is the modern administrative state.

HHS is home to Medicare and Medicaid, the principal drivers of our $31 trillion national debt. When Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law these programs, they were set on autopilot with no plan for how to pay for them. The first year that Medicare spending was visible on the books was 1967. From that point on through 2020—according to the American Main Street Initiative’s analysis of official federal tallies—Medicare and Medicaid combined cost $17.8 trillion, while our combined federal deficits over that same span were $17.9 trillion. In essence, our deficit problem is a Medicare and Medicaid problem.

But the folks at Project 2025 don't just hate Medicare and Medicaid. There's more:

HHS is also home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the duo most responsible—along with President Joe Biden—for the irrational, destructive, un-American mask and vaccine mandates that were imposed upon an ostensibly free people during the COVID-19 pandemic.... Under COVID, as former director of HHS’s Office of Civil Rights Roger Severino writes in Chapter 14, the CDC exposed itself as “perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government.”

This isn't Kennedy's "all vaccines are bad" argument. It's the "but mah freedum!" argument advanced by the right as soon as it became clear that the COVID pandemic would interfere with right-wing billionaires' God-given right to make profits at all times.

There's more:

Nor is the CDC the only villain in this play. Severino writes of the National Institutes of Health, “Despite its popular image as a benign science agency, NIH was responsible for paying for research in aborted baby body parts, human animal chimera experiments”—in which the genes of humans and animals are mixed, “and gain-of-function viral research that may have been responsible for COVID-19.”

Let me explain "baby body parts." Back in 2015, a right-wing group called the Center for Medical Progress released a surreptitiously shot video in which a Planned Parenthood doctor discussed the sale of fetal tissue -- a completely legal practice as long as the tissue was used for research and the money exchanged covered only costs, such as the cost of transporting the material. I wrote about this at the time. The right tried to make it a massive scandal, and conservative commentators made certain to use the phrase "baby body parts" -- those exact words, in that order -- whenever possible.

We're in the United States of America & THIS is what we're protecting? An abortion business that harvests baby body parts? #JayLive #ProLife

— Jay Sekulow (@JaySekulow) October 27, 2015

Will you JOIN ME in praying that the truth comes out at 10AM when Cecile Richards testifies about the #PP baby body parts for sale scandal?

— Eric Metaxas (@ericmetaxas) September 29, 2015

Should Planned Parenthood return the taxpayer money is used for the sale of baby body parts? One lawsuit says yes. https://t.co/aa3waf5Xu8

— Heritage Action (@Heritage_Action) November 27, 2015

The message got through to Robert Lewis Dear, who killed three people in an attack on a Colorado Planned Parenthood office in November 2015, although he didn't get the phrase exactly right:

In one statement, made after the suspect was taken in for questioning, Dear said "no more baby parts" in reference to Planned Parenthood, two law enforcement sources with knowledge of the case told NBC News.

Clearly the right still thinks "baby body parts" is a good propaganda phrase.

As for "human animal chimera experiments," those with long memories might recall that in his 2006 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush vowed to pursue a ban on human/animal hybrids. Republicans have been proposing legislation to ban such hybrids for years. This is a big deal for them.

The Project 2025 report goes on to warn about "The incestuous relationship between the NIH, CDC, and vaccine makers" (Dr. Anthony Fauci is prominently mentioned), and, of course, about time-tested culture-war subjects:

HHS also pushes abortion as a form of “health care” ... Severino writes that the “FDA should...reverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs because the politicized approval process was illegal from the start.” ... Severino writes that the HHS “Secretary should pursue a robust agenda to protect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology.” The next secretary should also reverse the Biden Administration’s focus on “‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage,” replacing such policies with those encouraging marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families.

So this is an agenda that predates not only Donald Trump's unholy alliance with Robert Kennedy, but also Trump entry into politics. It's the same agenda the right has had since at least the Reagan era. Let's see how far the Trump administration pursues it.