The Lancet, headquartered in Britain, was once a respected medical journal. Now, it is mostly a left-wing rag. The current issue, just out, leads with an editorial titled “2025: an annus horribilis for health in the USA.” Really? Our health has gone downhill? Has life expectancy declined? Was there an epidemic that I missed?
No. The entire editorial is an anti-Trump screed. 2025 was a horrible year, not for Americans’ health, but for left-wing preferences in health care policy. Thus:
Federal funding cuts had occurred under Joe Biden and mistrust in the nation’s health leaders has been waning over time, but the goal of the Trump administration now seems to be to tear down the world’s premiere scientific infrastructure.
Has mistrust in health “experts” been waning? Not that I have noticed. And the laughable partisanship of organs like the Lancet is a major reason why.
Look no further than many of the targets of Trump’s 218 Executive Orders and actions: the disenfranchised, minoritised and key populations, immigrants, and academics and their institutions.
In other words, that darn Trump isn’t a liberal. What follows is completely unhinged. It might make the DNC blush:
Undermining science is a well-worn tactic of autocrats—passing ordinances with sweeping powers, installing puppet appointees, and aiming to influence public discourse through censure of academic institutions and those populations deemed as enemies and undesirables.
Of course, the alternative view of Trump is that he isn’t an “autocrat,” but rather a democratically elected president who is fulfilling his campaign promises.
I think this is a quote from Chuck Schumer:
The coup de grâce will be if the administration and Congress resolve the debate over the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies humanely, or whether they push millions of people to live without affordable health care after Dec 31.
Those poor folks with incomes up to $500,000. The Lancet is saying, I guess, that the Democrats shouldn’t have voted to sunset their subsidies; unmentioned is the fact that Obamacare made individual health insurance more expensive in the first place. Better they should have voted to abolish the program.
This is intentionally deceptive:
The sowing of mistrust and its consequences for vaccination coverage are already having negative health effects. Measles continues to spread, with 1916 confirmed cases in 2025 as of Dec 12, up from 285 cases for 2024. The USA could lose its measles elimination status in 2026.
Is there a theory on which something the administration has done in the last 11 months is somehow responsible for measles cases? No, there isn’t. The measles have been brought in by immigrants; that is the reason for the increase in cases. The same thing is happening in Canada.
There is much more, but the conclusion really says it all in terms of the Lancet’s demented Trump-hatred:
The razing of the White House’s East Wing for the construction of a ballroom is almost too obvious a metaphor for Trump’s policy of destruction of leadership in health and science: the tearing down of venerable and respected institutions, to be replaced by a self-serving and vainglorious facade.
There is no Democratic Party talking point too stupid for the Lancet.
What that publication utterly fails to acknowledge, and probably to understand, is that there are good reasons why the public, in America and elsewhere, has lost confidence in “venerable and respected institutions,” among them health care agencies like CDC and NIH. Those “experts” were wrong about covid. They violated longstanding principles of how to deal with an epidemic. They overstated the severity of the disease and they lied about its origins. They misrepresented a vaccine that turned out to have limited value. They consistently shored up the real autocrats–the governors who seized dictatorial powers, ostensibly to deal with what turned out to be a moderately severe respiratory virus. They were partly to blame for the destruction of hundreds of thousands of small businesses and the devastation of millions of young lives.
It is possible that some “venerable and respected” health care organizations may regain public trust, but first they will have to actually perform–something they haven’t done in quite a while. As for the Lancet, I am afraid it is a lost cause.
