Guns, Viruses, Pollution, Premiums, Racism, Hate, and Oil

 

What do these seven nouns have in common? Maybe other connections than the one I’m thinking of, but what I’d like to focus on is that they all kill more people than they need to. And they are all causes of death that Republicans, and particularly Donald Trump, are making worse.

Over the weekend, two mass shootings made the news—one at Brown University in Rhode Island and the other in Sydney, Australia. We don’t know what led to the former, but the latter appears to be a hate crime. The shooting at Brown was just one more in a long string of mass shootings in America. The shooting in Australia, by contrast, was an extremely rare event. Some people have tried to use the Syndey assault to show that strict gun laws don’t work. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consider the following graph.

The United States is definitely an outlier on the world stage when it comes to gun deaths. The biggest difference between the USA and other countries is our lax gun laws. Polling reveals again and again that a large majority of Americans wants stricter gun laws. But Congress is owned by the gun lobby, just as they are owned by large corporations and billionaires. This is primarily a Republican problem. Democrats would pass stricter gun laws. And after the shooting in Sydney, Australia is already looking at ways to beef up their already strict laws.

Yesterday I was talking with a neighbor of mine who is a pediatrician. Just this past week, he encountered his first measles case, ever, and he has been practicing for a long time. My daughter is an ER nurse. She also saw her first measles case not long ago. This is a new phenomenon for a lot of American doctors and nurses because for decades measles was pretty much eradicated in the United States. But no longer. The anti-vax movement, which is being promoted now by the Trump administration, has been sending out misinformation about vaccines and making many Americans hesitant to protect themselves against potentially lethal viruses. And it’s not just measles. It’s COVID and the flu and HPV and hepatitis and others. I’ve even heard of mothers who are organizing measles parties, so their kids can get some “natural immunity.” This, pardon my French, is stupid.

Let me take you back a few decades. I’m old enough that as a child I had mumps when I was one year old, chicken pox at some point I can’t remember, measles when I was in the third grade, and Rubella a couple of years later. I am one of the lucky ones. I did not have any complications, but they are very real. I do remember the measles. I came down with symptoms just as the Christmas school break was starting. I was quite sick for the whole Christmas holiday. I remember lying on our old brown sofa for a couple of weeks, miserable. I got better just in time for school to start, so I didn’t miss a day of school, but many people who catch the measles are not so lucky. The vaccine has saved a lot of lives and is far, far safer than the illness, which is true of all vaccines. But the misinformation party in this country has deceived a lot of people. And some of them will die.

The chart above shows pediatric flu deaths in the United States. Of course, the flu vaccine is not nearly as effective as, say, the measles vaccine, largely because the influenza virus mutates rapidly, so it’s sort of a moving target. But most of the children who die from the flu are unvaccinated. During the pandemic, we had almost no flu deaths because everyone was isolating and most were masking, but since then, flu deaths among children have reached record levels. This year, for which we don’t have statistics yet, will likely be another record setter.

Pollution causes deaths. They are much more difficult to track than gun deaths, but more pollution does cause more deaths. The Trump administration has been very active in repealing and relaxing pollution standards. Just this past week, for instance, the EPA, now run by former chemical industry insiders, nearly doubled the amount of formaldehyde it considers acceptable for people to breathe. Formaldehyde is a known carcinogen. This pleases some corporations, but the relaxing of pollution standards will kill people. Let’s face it, nobody except a few people (like certain corporate executives) want dirty air or filthy water, and those who do want it, want it for others, not themselves. But money talks, and Republicans in Congress and in the White House are listening.

Unless Republicans in Congress come to their senses before the end of the year (and there is no evidence that that will happen), between four and five million Americans are projected to lose their health insurance. Without government subsidies, insurance costs are projected to double (or worse) in 2026. The GOP put its money where its values are with its Big Ugly Billionaire Bill that cut taxes for the wealthy but allowed health-care subsidies for poorer Americans to lapse. If four to five million Americans lose health insurance, many will die unnecessarily. Many others will have serious illnesses get worse because they can’t afford treatment. The United States stands virtually alone among “advanced” nations in not providing universal health care to all citizens. Why? Because the Republican Party prefers to keep a profit-based health-care “system” that is twice as expensive as the universal care systems of other comparable nations, and we also get far worse health outcomes for the exorbitant prices we pay. Once again, Republicans prefer policies that increase death and disease among their constituents.

No one can reasonably argue that the Trump administration’s anti-immigration program is not based on racism. Trump is actually very blunt about wanting to deport people from what he calls sh*thole countries and welcoming immigrants from lily-white countries like Norway. Racial profiling among ICE and DHS agents has led to repeated instances of U.S. citizens and legal immigrants being detained and sometimes deported, all because they have brown skin or speak with an accent. Racism has long been a subtle welcome mat in the Republican Party, but now it is very much out in the open. Undoubtedly, some people will die because of how this blatant racism is being acted upon by government agents.

To go along with the racism, there is a large element of hate and cruelty-for-the-sake-of-cruelty in both the Trump administration and the Republican Party generally. Nowhere is this more evident than in Trump’s use of the Department of Justice to exact retribution from his perceived political enemies, especially those who investigated his crimes and prosecuted him. But it also shows up in such acts as shutting down USAID. That action alone has already led to an estimated 600,000 deaths, two-thirds of which are children (numbers from Boston University epidemiologist Brook Nichols). A report published in The Lancet in July 2025 projects that continued defunding could result in more than 14 million deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children under the age of five. While deaths may not increase because of Trump’s alienation of our longtime allies, deaths are certainly increasing because of his kowtowing to Vlad Putin. This hatred of Ukraine goes back to Trump’s rebuffed efforts to have Ukraine dig up dirt on Joe Biden, but it is very obvious and has cost thousands of lives on both sides of that war.

Finally, let’s talk about oil. Our dependence on crude oil is real and will go on for many years, but it comes at a steep price. People around the world are already dying from the increasing severity of climate disasters, most of them exacerbated by all the carbon we’re pumping into the atmosphere. Trump, of course, is a climate-science denier, but his love of fossil fuels and his policies that reduce our investment in clean energy will cost many lives over the coming years. We are falling way behind China in the development of clean energy alternatives. China does still burn a lot of coal, but it is moving rapidly in converting to clean energy. Trump, meanwhile, will have us living in the 1950s, causing immense damage to the planet and paying for his self-delusion with human and animal lives, as well as massive destruction of physical property.

I’ve written before that the Republican Party is a pro-death party. They claim to be pro-life, but their stand on almost every other issue places them at odds with their stand on abortion. These seven items are just the most obvious right now. But this is what happens when you elect a narcissistic ignoranus [sic] as president.