The summer of sickness was wrapping up. The toteboard was full. There had been listeria, measles, and cyclospora, the foodborne illness that injected the phrase, “explosive diarrhea” into the lexicon of our politics for the first time since the death of Rush Limbaugh.
There had been 160 food recalls, more than 24,000 cases of foodborne illnesses, 740 hospitalizations thereof, and a spate of fatalities. Measles were an even worse story. By the end of August, there were severe outbreaks in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia. Soon after, there were announcements of tainted mangoes and tofu that was contaminated with … ink.
Project 2025 is working like a charm.
Foodborne illnesses are way up this year, due primarily to the cyclospora outbreak. There are also upticks in salmonella and listeria. These arrived, perhaps coincidentally and perhaps not, just as the Trump administration was cutting the guts out of not only the regulatory agencies, but also the scientific analytical programs and oversight programs. As Forbes reported:
The U.S. has also rolled back specific safety rules and dissolved long-standing scientific oversight groups, including the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods.
Like a charm, I tell you.
The summer of sickness was produced by a mass casualty event involving good government, respectable science, and common sense. It was a multi-car collision of bad political policies that nonetheless have become shibboleths on the American Right: deregulation, self-regulation, economic oligarchy, and corporate impunity morphed into corporate immunity. The abandonment of the idea of a political commonwealth and a social contract. Market worship as pure idolatry, except that the beef from the Golden Calf may kill you.
These phenomena were thrown into overdrive by the current administration’s infallible ability to find the absolutely wrong person for absolutely the wrong job. Secretary Kennedy is the most grotesque example, but Secretary Rollins, Secretary Hegseth, EPA administrator Zeldin are right up there. It was Ronald Reagan who pioneered the technique of dismantling government agencies by appointing people opposed to their very existence to run them. (Hey, James Watt. How you doing, Anne Gorsuch.) But this administration has refined this method down to its core. They put people opposed to the existence of the agencies in charge of them, but those people are as incompetent at that job as they are at their ostensibly official jobs. To paraphrase Rick Blaine from Casablanca, we don’t object to hacks. We object to cut-rate ones.
And thus we came to the summer of sickness.
Saturday, September 12, 2026
Public Health Is Done For
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