Yesterday Trump's director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention resigned after it was revealed she bought stock in tobacco companies while serving in that position.

Courtesy of Buzzfeed:  

Brenda Fitzgerald, the director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, resigned from her role at the agency this week. 

Fitzgerald's departure was announced by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services in a statement on Wednesday morning, citing financial conflicts of interest. 

"Dr. Fitzgerald owns certain complex financial interests that have imposed a broad recusal limiting her ability to complete all of her duties as the CDC Director. Due to the nature of these financial interests, Dr. Fitzgerald could not divest from them in a definitive time period," HHS spokesperson Matt Lloyd wrote in the statement statement. 

On Tuesday, Politico reported that Fitzgerald had traded tobacco stock, including shares in an international tobacco giant Japan Tobacco, after assuming the lead role at the public health agency in July.

What a good idea for the person in charge of helping to protect Americans from preventable disease to attempt to benefit financially by purchasing stock in companies whose product causes the death of millions of people a year.

Seriously, what a great message that sends.


Is ANYBODY that Trump puts in charge of these agencies, actually qualified to be in charge of these agencies?

Okay sorry, I realize that is a stupid question.

A reminder of why gun violence statistics are so damn hard to come by.

Courtesy of The New York Times:

For nearly two decades, Congress has banned needed research on gun violence by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Last week, Congress, doing the bidding of the gun industry, quietly killed a provision in the omnibus spending bill that would have reversed that ban. 

In so doing, it left intact an anti-science smoke screen that has helped the industry and its lobbyists deny and dispute the facts of the gun violence that takes more than 30,000 lives a year. Imagine if the tobacco industry had been similarly favored by Congress with a ban on federal research about cigarette deaths. 

Imagine, too, if the auto industry had such a shield during the years when the government successfully fought unsafe cars in the cause of public health. 

Perversely, the gun industry claims that research by private and academic interests — which it can’t block — is untrustworthy. Expect that argument to be invoked in reaction to alarming research about the Missouri General Assembly’s repeal eight years ago of background checks for gun buyers that required people to appear in person at the local sheriff’s office. 

A study by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research found that in the first six years after the repeal, gun homicides rose within the state by 16 percent, while the national rate declined 11 percent. By contrast, it also found that Connecticut, which has maintained its 1995 background check law, registered a 40 percent drop in gun homicides across a decade.

This is what we are going to have to keep in mind, and fight against if we ever want to REALLY pass any meaningful legislation against gun violence in this country. 

And if Hillary continues putting the need to do something about all of these gun deaths front and center in her campaign I imagine the amount of misinformation put out by the NRA will increase a hundred fold.

Here my question. If the NRA is right and the statistics often used by media outlets are often exaggerated then why would they NOT want the CDC to set the record straight?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Physicians demand end to 20 year ban on research into gun violence.

Courtesy of Think Progress:  

This ban, supported by the National Rifle Association (NRA), has effectively silenced researchers at both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) for conducting any comprehensive studies on what causes violence — and what can be done to prevent it — since 1996. As expected, it’s left public health experts and policymakers with little to lean on as they attempt to craft new legislation to help quell the fatal trend. 
 doctor

At Wednesday’s press conference, led by Doctors for America, doctors presented a petition signed by more than 2,000 physicians in all 50 states requesting an end to the restriction. 

“It’s disappointing to me that we’ve made little progress in the past 20 years in finding solutions to gun violence,” said Dr. Nina Agrawal, who’s been a pediatrician in the South Bronx for years. “In my career, I’ve seen children lives saved from measles, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, motor vehicle accidents…because of federal scientific data and research. It’s frustrating that the CDC is not permitted to do the same type of research for gun violence.” 

Instead, GOP leaders have tried to make gun violence an issue that requires mental health research, despite the fact that less than 3 percent of U.S. crimes involve someone with a mental illness. And the most recent argument against CDC-funded research is that “a gun is not a disease” — even though the CDC has been researching motor vehicles, natural disasters, poor ventilation systems, and many other topics that wouldn’t be labeled a disease for years. The politicians behind these arguments have yet to suggest simply allocating money to another government agency. 

“Politicians have put a gag order on public health research for gun violence only to score political points,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who also spoke at the event. “On public health matters, it’s critical we listen to doctors — not politicians.”

Please let this last spate of gun violence be enough to finally get Americans off their asses and willing to vocally, and politically, support changes in how we deal with guns in this country.

I don't know about everybody else but I am goddamn tired of writing headlines about people being shot to death.

Ever wonder why two years after the Sandy Hook shootings, and after President Obama ordered them to study gun violence, the CDC still refuses to do so? Here's a hint. The Republicans don't want them to.

Courtesy of The Washington Post:

The CDC had not touched firearm research since 1996 — when the NRA accused the agency of promoting gun control and Congress threatened to strip the agency’s funding. The CDC’s self-imposed ban dried up a powerful funding source and had a chilling effect felt far beyond the agency: Almost no one wanted to pay for gun violence studies, researchers say. Young academics were warned that joining the field was a good way to kill their careers. And the odd gun study that got published went through linguistic gymnastics to hide any connection to firearms. 

The long stalemate continued until shortly after the December 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., when Obama announced several gun-control proposals, including reversing the CDC research ban. His higher-profile proposals – tightening firearm background checks, reinstating the assault weapons ban – were viewed as impossible to pass into law. Congress wouldn’t bite. But ending the CDC research ban? Done by executive order, it appeared to have the best shot, along with broad support from a scientific community upset that gun violence as a public health problem was being ignored. 

......
 
But today the CDC still avoids gun-violence research, demonstrating what many see as the depth of its fear about returning to one of the country’s most divisive debates. The agency recently was asked by The Washington Post why it was still sitting on the sidelines of firearms studies. It declined to make an official available for an interview but responded with a statement noting it had commissioned an agenda of possible research goals but still lacked the dedicated funding to pursue it. 

“It is possible for us to conduct firearm-related research within the context of our efforts to address youth violence, domestic violence, sexual violence, and suicide,” CDC spokeswoman Courtney Lenard wrote, “but our resources are very limited.”

And WHY are their resources limited? 

Well because the Republican led Congress continues to block funding even though the President requested 10 million for the research and Democrats have introduced  bills supporting the funding.

So here's a question, if guns really do keep us safe in America, as is often claimed by gun enthusiasts, then why is the NRA and their Republican flunkies working so hard to keep that data out of the hands of our citizens?

And why have they been doing so for almost twenty years?