2025's US Infectious Disease Epidemics and the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic:

The impact of vaccine conspiracy theories and "Q-Anon" madness.

The photo is courtesy of Aron PW and Unsplash.

A significant portion of the US population will always require ongoing medical care, including young children, the elderly, individuals with disabilities, those who are chronically ill, and the eleven percent of Americans living in poverty.

Before 2020, financial analysts in the US and internationally viewed the American healthcare sector as “recession-proof” despite its long-standing issues with rising costs and inefficient service. Aside from the private, market-based construction of the US healthcare industry, healthcare companies consistently performed better than other sectors during previous economic downturns.

However, in the final year of his first term in office, President Donald Trump put the resilience and reputation of the American healthcare sector and nearly every financial, industrial, manufacturing, entertainment, and service retail sector to the test.

Mr. Trump and his administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) from 2020 through 2021 should have been the prime example of why the US voting electorate should never have allowed him and his political allies anywhere near the White House again.

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The photo of US President Donald Trump is courtesy of the Library of Congress and Unsplash.

In 2020, President Trump delivered a devastating “body blow” to the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) by ineptly handling COVID-19.

Trump undermined trust in medical institutions, making it more difficult to implement measures that could have slowed the spread of the coronavirus. He also spread misinformation and fueled racism against East Asians by calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus.”

Yet, most 2024 voters were so desperate to turn away from former President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Congressional Democrats that they were willing to completely overlook how Mr. Trump’s anti-science policies and xenophobic rhetoric magnified the COVID-19 public health crises. Regrettably, in many other political policy areas from 2021 through 2024, Biden, VP Harris, and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) were equally inept as Trump and the Republican Party (GOP).

Most notably, Mr. Biden and the Democrats continued the party’s long tradition of completely betraying their liberal and progressive voting base to court moderate and conservative Americans who have consistently shunned them for the GOP over the years.

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The graphic animation image of the beginning symptoms of a measles infection is courtesy of Charles Felix.

We are all now paying an exceedingly high price for the political ineptitude and hubris of Donald Trump, the GOP, and the DNC.

Americans must begin investigating and analyzing the current tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas and the measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico, as direct results of Donald Trump’s antagonisms against scientific research, medical expertise, and government public health bureaucracies at the federal, state, and local levels during his first term in office. His budget outlines from 2017 forward proposed cutting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by $1.2 billion, or 17%.

The Trump administration targeted the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for an 18%, $5.8 billion cut – including $1 billion from the National Cancer Institute. Even after Democrats in Congress blocked some of the cuts from 2018 through 2021, Trump weakened and caused understaffing at the federal public health agencies before the coronavirus began to spread across the US in 2020.

All this was previous to President Trump’s 2020 solicitation of support from antivaccination and “Q-Anon” conspiracy theorists to hold onto power.