Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday removed every member of a scientific committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how to use vaccines and pledged to replace them with his own picks.
The 17-member Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices had been in a state of flux since Kennedy took over. Its first meeting this year had been delayed when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services abruptly postponed its February meeting.
Valid.
Its like how we are in a mass extinction event right now.
Extinction is usually a long and drawn out process. There can be delayed responses to changes in the natural environment that mean that the species is essentially bound to be extinct even thousands of years before it actually goes extinct. Steller’s sea cow is an interesting example. Humans certainly dealt the killing blow, but the species would have been doomed anyway.
This is what is very concerning in our current mass extinction. Ocean acidification is going to wipe out a lot of species. If you make the environment hostile to phytoplankton, you are reducing calories available in the ocean. Certain more harmful algae species might overproliferate in response to the new space to live in. Phytoplankton and different species of sea grass are huge oxygen producers - decreased oxygen production could possibly have long term effects on us.
Ecology is ridiculously complicated, and tugging on one thread in the web of life can cause an entire ecosystem to collapse through a delayed response. Things are rarely instant.