I have said it before and I will say it again that the last election was decided not on policy or platform, but on information, and given the result of that election, it’s safe to say that we have entered a new era, a kind of American Dark Ages, in which superstition, fear and ignorance reign supreme.

That’s because the Democrats do not have a media apparatus of their own that can effectively counter the Republicans’, which is global in scale and powerful enough to determine the news agenda of the Washington press corps. Our information ecosystem is so badly damaged and corrupt that the man who failed to contain the last pandemic was able to win by promising to fail to contain the next one.

Because the Democratic Party does not have its own media apparatus, and is dependent on a weak and fickle press corps to communicate with voters, it’s possible to be unaware of virtually everything they do. This was most obvious when Joe Biden’s transformational economic policies could not rise above obsessive media coverage of his age. 

More recently, however, the perverse state of the news has prevented a broader public from knowing that the Senate Democrats protested the confirmation of Robert F Kennedy Jr, as Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services, by holding the floor for 30 hours before voting today – unanimously – against that insane vaccine conspiracist. 

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I have also said before and will say again that I don’t know more than you about what to do about a demented criminal president who is positioning the republic to be the next Russia. But there is something you and I can do: elevate the Democrats and what they are saying and doing. The noise might not rise above the din of the rightwing media apparatus and the press corps, but at least the Democrats themselves will know where they stand with citizens who share their goals and values, and who see them as the main vehicle out of the darkness.  

Elevating the Democrats does something else: it helps put a spotlight on the arrogance, selfishness and ruthless indifference of the Republicans. All but one of them, Mitch McConnell (who had polio as a child), voted for Kennedy, and they voted for him knowing full well that he has no right to be running a sprawling bureaucracy that’s charged with protecting the health and welfare of 330 million people. 

Here’s Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, last night:

The Department of Health and Human Services, he said, “is an agency that depends on science, on evidence and impartiality … HHS ensures we eat safe food, purchase reliable medication, oversee Medicare benefits and approve the use of lifesaving vaccines. Most importantly, a good HHS secretary makes sure the American people have access to affordable, high-quality healthcare. Mr. Kennedy, unfortunately, is not qualified to oversee any of these things. He is neither a doctor nor a scientist nor a public health expert, nor a policy expert of any kind.” 

Schumer went on to say: “If Mr. Kennedy is confirmed given that lack of background, I deeply fear that he will rubber stamp Donald Trump’s war against healthcare, meaning we will see more of the disastrous funding cuts of the last few weeks, meaning that more people will lose health coverage, meaning that the interests of for-profit corporations and Big Pharma will come before the needs of working Americans.”

On the Senate floor, US Senator Peter Welch, of Vermont, read from a letter written by Caroline Kennedy, in which she accused her cousin of being a “sexual predator.” “Overseeing the FDA, the NIH and the CDC and the centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services agencies that are charged with protecting the most vulnerable among us is an enormous responsibility, and one that Bobby is unqualified to fill. He lacks any relevant government financial management or medical expertise. His views on vaccines are dangerous and willfully misinformed.”

But his views are more than dangerous and willfully misinformed, implied US Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts.

His views are malicious. 

Before this morning’s vote, she said: “Americans didn’t vote to bring back measles. Americans didn’t vote to bring back polio. Americans didn’t vote to bring back dangerous diseases that we thought we had wiped out decades ago. Americans didn’t vote to get rid of critical vaccines that we know — based on science — we know save lives.” 

She went on: 

“But that is what Robert F Kennedy Jr’s vision would mean for Americans. That is the vision Donald Trump will empower him to carry out. Kennedy not only worked to undercut vaccines at home and abroad, he’s made a lot of money doing it. In fact, Kennedy has made millions off of peddling harmful conspiracy theories that hurt real people. He opposed the life-saving covid vaccine just six months into the pandemic. And he’s set himself up so that he and his family could make millions more from putting Americans’ health at risk” (my italics).

I stress that last part, because we are facing the potential for another pandemic. You might have heard about it, but only because it’s been an economics story, not a health story. I’m talking about avian flu, the disease that has sent millions of chickens to their deaths and the price of eggs soaring. It is now spreading to dairy farms, infecting cows and triggering concern about the virus entering the milk supply. 

And it’s reaching humans. “The outbreak poses the threat of a pandemic,” wrote Amy Maxmen of KFF Health News. “More than 60 people in the US have been infected, mainly by cows or poultry, but cases could skyrocket if the virus evolves to spread efficiently from person to person. And the recent news of a person critically ill in Louisiana with the bird flu shows that the virus can be dangerous.

She continued: 

Just a few mutations could allow the bird flu to spread between people. Because viruses mutate within human and animal bodies, each infection is like a pull of a slot machine lever.

“Even if there’s only a 5% chance of a bird flu pandemic happening, we’re talking about a pandemic that probably looks like 2020 or worse,” said Tom Peacock, a bird flu researcher at the Pirbright Institute in the United Kingdom, referring to covid. “The US knows the risk but hasn’t done anything to slow this down” (my italics).

Another pandemic will require good information. But, as I said, we have entered an American Dark Ages, where superstition, fear and ignorance reign supreme. The president and his secretary of health and human services will have an incentive to prevent everyone from knowing what’s going on, how bad the problem is and whether it can be solved. 

Indeed, the administration has already given us a preview of what we could expect from a second Trump administration mired in a second pandemic. It ordered the suspension of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which was crucial to medical professionals during the covid outbreak. The publication was supposed to publish new findings on avian flu spreading to people, but guess what? 

Do you really think Secretary Kennedy would keep the public fully informed about a disease that could become a nightmare for his boss?

God forbid we face another plague, but if we do, and in the face of mass confusion, one thing would be clear: the Senate Democrats stood against that insane vaccine conspiracist. Meanwhile, the Republicans didn’t care one way or another, as long as Donald Trump was happy.