Trump prescribes lethal advice for American parents

     It's been a year since I came down with Type I diabetes, and everything is butter. The Dexcom G7 rides on the back of my upper arm, a smooth high-tech medical barnacle, whispering my blood sugar data to my cell phone, which reports a healthy 5.7 glycemic index. The insurance kinks have been worked out. Now CVS and Walgreens send me chirpy little texts announcing it's time to collect bottles of pills and injector pens of insulin — those pens are a marvel, with their 4 mm lubricated needles. You don't feel them going in.
     But technology, no matter how wondrous, cannot conquer human blundering. Last week, for the first time, at bedtime I picked up the orange NovoLog Flexpen instead of the gray Lantus SoloStar for my nightly insulin shot. Twenty milliliters of the long-acting Lantus insulin is just right to tuck me in and keep my blood sugar steady. Twenty milliliters of the short-acting NovoLog could send me to the hospital.
     Fortunately, I noticed the pen color as I was swabbing its tip with alcohol, put it down, and picked up the proper pen. But it was a sobering moment — no matter how finely tuned these systems, carelessness can still mess things up, big time.
     The United States is enduring a master class on how human error can undercut quality medical care. Our secretary of health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been clawing at the American system of vaccination, based on his unsupported folk beliefs that vaccines cause autism, which they do not. Calling Kennedy a "vaccine skeptic" is like calling an arsonist "flame curious."
     The damage has already begun. West Texas reported 762 cases of measles, and two deaths since January. In 2024, there were no cases in the entire state of Texas — which can be expected, since vaccination rate has gone steadily down across the country. The "herd immunity" that protects the unvaccinated is eroding.
     On Monday it was the pain-killer and fever-reducer acetaminophen's turn to face baseless government censure.
     “Taking Tylenol is not good,” President Donald Trump said repeatedy during a briefing at the White House. “I’ll say it. It’s not good.”
     He was referring to pregnant women taking Tylenol, but that detail kept being dropped. He did not cite research but a gut feeling.
     "We understood a lot more than people who studied it," Trump said, praising Kennedy, to his right and and — in one of those surreal notes found in nightmares — Oprah's Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, nodding to his left.
     Acetaminophen doesn't cause autism — studies that suggested it might were confounding taking Tylenol with the conditions that Tylenol was being taken to treat. It was like saying white canes cause blindness.
     Trump shifted from Tylenol to vaccines.
     "They pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies it's a disgrace," the president said. "I think its very bad. It looks like they're pumping into a horse. You have a little fragile child and get a vat of 80 different vaccines, and they pump it in."
     In Monday's most reckless moment, Trump urged parents not to give newborns their routine hepatitis B vaccinations because "hepatitis B is sexually transmitted. There's no reason to give a baby who's just born hepatitis B. I would say wait until the baby is 12 years old."

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