A professor with the Yale School of Public Health claimed that Donald Trump is "destroying a generation of knowledge" just like Mao Zedong did during China's Cultural Revolution.
Gregg Gonsalves wrote for The Nation, "What we are seeing is a purge—of the administrative state, of the universities, of expertise—that is consistent with events like the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s and ’70s, or the dismantling of the tsarist civil service after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917."
He continued, "Just because this moment isn’t associated with the intense political bloodshed of those eras doesn’t make the comparison any less apt. In one way or another, the goal is to get rid of an entire set of people and institutions in the service of a radical ideology."
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The author referred to the Trump administration's massive cuts at the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Health and Human Services, plus the rise of "pseudoscience" through the appointment of anti-vaxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as HHS secretary.
"The scope and scale of these attacks are unprecedented," Gonsalves wrote. "They have sent institutions reeling, from state and local health departments to colleges and universities, imperiling frontline work to protect the public health and aborting progress on new advances in the treatment and prevention of infectious and chronic diseases."
Gonsalves claimed that Trump "has created a lasting legacy" in less than 100 days that will adversely affect the health and safety of Americans for decades after he's gone.
"We have lost a generation of expertise, of systems built up to care for our nation and provide for our collective future in terms of scientific advances," Gonsalves wrote, concluding that, "We are living through times that are now focused on destruction as a central goal, meant to inflict pain and suffering on millions now and into the future, long after they’re gone."