Trump Sucker Punches Catholic Conservatives – Twice.

Posted on | June 2, 2025 | No Comments

Mike Magee

If there is one thing we Catholic kids learned in what we used to call “Parochial School” was the look and feel of “schoolyard bullies.” They were recognizable from a distance and you gave them plenty of space because they were unpredictable. You could be standing there doing nothing, and the next thing you know they could haul off and sucker-punch you right in the face.

Trump grew up as a member of “the other team” – a mainline Protestant. In the 1959 photo above, the 13 year old in the top row, second from the left is Donald J. Trump, at his own First Presbyterian Church Confirmation Day picture in Jamaica, NY, 11 miles away from Trump Tower on the East River.

His mother was a devout Scot who gifted him a Bible on completion of Sunday School in the 9th grade. But deep dives by investigative journalists into his formal ties to religion found a “seeming lack of deep religious orientation. He doesn’t have a hometown church…” But not for lack of trying. Claims that he later suggested an affiliation with Norman Vincent Peale’s famous midtown Manhattan based Marble Collegiate Church were denied by the church and drew condemnation from Peale’s son.

Rev. Scott Black Johnston, pastor of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church (whose history dates back to 1808 and had a hand in the founding of the Princeton Theological Seminary, the American Bible Society, and New York Presbyterian Hospital), was a bit more diplomatic. Following a 2017 prayer session with the President at the White House, he remarked, “He is a Christian who’s what I would call a young Christian. He is early on this journey. He has not spent a lot of time exploring the faith.”

Trump’s current journey has carried him back to the school yard where he has sucker-punched the Catholic establishment not once, but twice in 2025.

Punch 1: Defunding USAID

On January 20, 2025, Trump by Executive Order issued a 90-day freeze on all foreign aid. In the process, he effectively gutted USAID, “the main international humanitarian arm of the U.S. government” which, in 2023, included $40 billion in combined appropriations (0.4% of the 2024 U.S. federal budget).

Approximately 2/3 of that funding goes to the Catholic Relief Services (CRS), an organization begun “during World War II to answer the call to serve migrants and refugees.” Since it’s beginning, CRS has been governed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Prior to Trump and Musk led defunding, it has supported 200 million people in 121 countries through thousands of projects “from emergency assistance to long-term transformational development.”

When you attack USAID and CRS, you are hitting especially close to Catholics hearts. USAID was created in 1961 by the first Catholic President, John F. Kennedy. Around 1000 parishes, dioceses and schools join the USAID in fund raising that contribute to CRS programs. When Trump and Musk attacked USAID and the CRS, the response from the Catholic top brass was immediate. On February 10th, the Vatican labeled the action as “reckless and could kill millions.”

This was in part a response to the USAID website being taken down, and the USAID building in DC shuttered by Secretary of State and Catholic Marco Rubio who was now declared the Acting Administrator of USAID. It took only four days for a U.S. district court judge to issue a temporary restraining order in American Foreign Service Association v. Trump, with seven more organizations joining in on February 11, 2025, in Global Health Council v. Trump. The USCCB also took the unusual step of suing Trump directly, asking the court to declare the “suspension of aid to refugees unlawful.”

Punch 2: Attacking Conservative Catholic Mega-Donor – as a “Sleazebag.”

Conservative Catholic leaders on May 30, 2025, woke to the news that the President had decided to label their most prominent and beloved financial and policy patron, lawyer Leonard Leo, a “sleazebag”, elaborating on social media that he is “a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions.” As if that wasn’t enough, he included the veiled threat “This is something that cannot be forgotten!”

This was in response to the U.S. Court of International Trade’s federal judge panel ruling that the President’s tariffs were unlawful. A Trump spokesperson took a scorched earth approach, declaring on the day of the decision, “It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency. (The President will) use every lever of executive power to address this crisis.” Then things got really personal.

Leonard Leo is not used to being punched in the face. He co-chairs the Federalist Society and is the chairman of the uber-conservative PR firm, CRC Advisors, where he is credited with having a hand in the appointment of Catholic friendly Supreme Court Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Coney Barrett, and Kavanaugh.

In addition to traditional corporate clients like GM, Chevron, and the Walt Disney Company, CRC Advisors has a litany of Catholic clients beginning with the USCCB, but extending deeply into a wide range of religious freedom advocacy organizations.

Leo himself is a member of the Knights of Malta, described as “a lay religious order of the Catholic Church dating back to the 12th century, and he and his wife, Sally, were named Stewards of St. Peter, an honor given by the Papal Foundation to those who donate $1 million or more to the Vatican.” Add to that board positions at the Catholic University of America, the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, the Catholic Association and its affiliated Catholic Association Foundation,The Becket Law Fund, the Napa Legal Institute, and the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Trump is likely believing that a professional like Leo can take a hit in stride, and that delivering a message to Supreme Court patrons, most especially Roberts and Coney Barrett, is worth the risk. But angering a person like Leo, and those who adore him, and humiliating Supreme Court Justices could carry a hefty price.

Like the rest of us, all these power players grew up in the same rough and tumble school yards that we did. And beyond being able to recognize a bully from a distance, we also learned to hold a grudge when bruised, and orchestrate pay-back that had been well-earned. We Catholics made a sacrament out of forgiving, but penance never required that we forget.

The Meaning of “Memorial Day” in 2025.

Posted on | May 25, 2025 | 2 Comments

Mike Magee

According to Veterans Administration historians, one claim on the origin of Memorial Day dates back to 1864 when three women from Boalsburg, Pennsylvania joined in grief to decorate the graves of family members who had died in the Civil War. A year later, other townspeople joined in and one year later, in 1866, women in Columbus, Mississippi, joined the event, in honor of fallen Confederate soldiers. That was 14 years after the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1952.

In that first year it was published, Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold over 300,000 copies. Author and critic Alfred Kazin called it “The most powerful and most enduring work ever written about American slavery.” It’s prominence in the American lexicon speaks for itself, and its relevance regarding goodness and governance, leadership by legislation, women’s roles in creating civil societies and the underpinnings of Christianity in the unrealized potential of the American dream all speak to the continued value of the publication.

On page 2 of the preface, Harriet Beecher Stowe comments on “memorializing” human hatred and cruelty to the ash bin of history. She writes, “It is a comfort to hope, as so many of the world’s sorrows and wrongs have, from age to age, been lived down, so a time shall come when sketches similar to these shall be valuable only as memorials of what has long ceased to be.”

To this, we must respond today, “Not yet. There is work that remains.”

On the last page of her book, Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852 reflects (as if on our own modern day predicament), “This is an age of the world when nations are trembling and convulsed. A mighty influence is abroad, surging and heaving the world, as with an earthquake. And is America safe? Every nation that carries in its bosom great and unredressed injustice has in it the elements of this last convulsion.”

To this, we believers in human goodness and democracy must respond, “We will never be free, safe and healthy if our elected leaders promote policies – whether here or abroad – that belie our finer instincts, promote fear, and trigger predation.”

The White House, until recently, has largely been a sacred and treasured shrine. Back in 2013, our President at the time, Barack Obama, hosted our former President, George H.W. Bush and his family there to commemorate the 5000th award of a “Daily-Point-of-Light”, that the former President had launched to “honor individuals who demonstrate the transformative power of service, and who are driving significant and sustained impact through their everyday actions and words that light the path for other points of light.”

Here in part, is what President Obama said that day: “…given the humility that’s defined your life, I suspect it’s harder for you to see something that’s clear to everybody else around you, and that’s how bright a light you shine — how your vision and example have illuminated the path for so many others, how your love of service has kindled a similar love in the hearts of millions here at home and around the world. And, frankly, just the fact that you’re such a gentleman and such a good and kind person I think helps to reinforce that spirit of service. So on behalf of us all, let me just say that we are surely a kinder and gentler nation because of you and we can’t thank you enough.”

Just a dozen years ago, just to be publicly “thanked” seemed enough. And “active citizenship” as a member of this great nation was viewed by many – by most – as a duty and an honor – even to the point of sacrificing one’s life in defense of this nation.

That, after all, is what Memorial Day commemorates. Action is required, as is goodness and virtue by example and daily behavior.

We continue to struggle in the shadow of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We lack perfection, but we certainly could, and should, do better. Because, to be healthy in America, to realize our full potential, to be civilized, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “to make good the cause of freedom against slavery you must be… Declaration of Independence walking.”

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: 2025 > Barach Obama > George H. W. Bush > Hrriet Beecher Stowe > Memorial Day > uncle tom's cabin > VA > Veterans Administration

The “Pursuit of Blessedness” Is Running Out Of Time.

Posted on | May 19, 2025 | Comments Off on The “Pursuit of Blessedness” Is Running Out Of Time.

Mike Magee

Nine months ago, during the Presidential debate, Trump declared, when questioned directly about the Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership, “I know nothing about it.” Even for Trump, this was a strikingly bald-faced lie considering that the former President’s name was mentioned over 300 times in the 887 page document.

Described at the time by Pulitzer Prize winning economics columnist, Carlos Lozada, the work itself was an “off-the-shelf governing plan.” The carefully constructed manifesto was packed with conservative fan favorites, not simply “militarizing the southern border” and reversing what they call “climate fanaticism,” but also placing DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) efforts in the waste bin, banning abortion nationally, and pushing deregulation and tax cuts for the richest rich.

It is useful now to remind all freedom loving Americans, especially those who convinced themselves it was a good idea to vote for this guy, that we were warned – even if we were to ignore last week’s open-borders importation of white South Africans. Of course, if you have run into these characters on K street and beyond, none of this is surprising. This is who they are, and largely who they have always been.

This is political jiu-jitsu practiced at its highest level. Rather than dismantling the “deep state,” these operators are fast at work “capturing the administrative state” for their own self-serving purposes.

Understanding jiu-jitsu goes a long way toward understanding the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society’s puppet masters. The word “Jū” means “gentle, soft, supple, flexible, pliable, or yielding.” It’s companion, “jutsu” is the “art or technique.” Combine the two, and you have the ”yielding-art.” The intent in bodily (or political) combat is to harness an opponent’s power against himself, rather that confronting him directly.

Political jiu-jitsu may be deceptive and confusing in the absence of visible weaponry, but it is anything but gentle. In the physical version, you are instructed in joint locks and chokeholds, but also biting, hair pulling, and gouging. Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation and editor of Project 2025, is a master of the political version. While he and Trump outwardly employed a “nothing to see here” stance, demographic realities were cued up in the document. How to win the election? “Voter efficiency.” Or in the Project’s words: “Strong political leadership is needed to increase efficiency and align the Census Bureau’s mission with conservative principles.”

Roberts’ language was soft, but its impact hard indeed. In the introduction he suggested that the Declaration of Independence’s words “pursuit of happiness” were better understood to be “the pursuit of blessedness” while at the same time providing corporations a market free hand “to flourish.” Career civil servants were recast as “holdovers” without “moral legitimacy.” And the Justice Department needed a reshaping to eliminate “a bloated bureaucracy with a critical core of personnel who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical liberal agenda.”

Majority rules and demographic changes being what they were, alternative facts and voter suppression were added to the tools of “political jiu-jitsu” artists. Kelly Anne Conway certainly did her part by launching and legitimizing the concept of “alternative facts” way back in January of 2017. Amplified throughout the first Trump term, MAGA supporters were locked and loaded when Fox News with the defeated President’s support, reeved up the insurrection four years later, and then rode the misinformation campaign back into the White House four years after that.

What was not fully revealed in the 2050 play book was the critical role of Elon Musk. And yet, in retrospect, he was there in the shadows all along. At the September 12, 2024 All-In Summit 2024 hosted by RealClear Politics he said, “We do have an opportunity to do kind of a once in a lifetime deregulation and reduction in the size of government. Because the other thing besides the regulations. America is also going bankrupt extremely quickly. And nobody seems to… everyone seems to be sort of whistling past the graveyard on this one.”

Four months into the Musk-funded technocratic dismantling of our federal government, the confusion and chaos from attacks on HHS funding, academic institutions, due process, and a FOX only cabinet has largely shielded the continued work of Kevin Roberts and his followers. Their “nothing to see here” curtains are fully drawn as they get closer and closer to their envisioned autocracy.

Is there room for hope? All signs signal, “Yes.” Here are three advanced indicators:

Local elections thus far have rewarded Democratic candidates primarily.
Trump’s Tariff Policy has few clean exit options for its’ leader who is content to persist as long as he owns the daily news cycle.
Professional incompetence and in-fighting are undermining Project 2025 milestones in a political environment where opportunity to dismantle our democracy is clearly “time-limited.”

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Tags: all-in summit 2024 > Blessedness > insurrection > kellyanne conway > MAGA > political jiu-jitsu > Project 2025 > trump

The Pope’s Algebra Lesson – Health, Politics, and Religion.

Posted on | May 12, 2025 | 2 Comments

Mike Magee

Algebra came to life last week when Trump/Musk’s dismantling of our federal health services collided with the dramatic election of our first ever American Pope. As Health, Politics, and Religion collided, we saw the Transitive Property of Equality (If A=B, and B=C, then A=C) spring back to life for the first time since the early days of Algebra I.

As it applies here:

A = Health

B = Politics

C = Religion

I first argued that A = B on March 23, 2005 at the Library of Congress before leaders of the World Health Organization. Why is health political? I answered in part, “Health is a collection of resources unequally distributed in society. Health’s ‘social determinants’ such as housing, income, and employment, are critical to the accomplishment of individual, family, and community wellbeing and are themselves politically determined. Health is recognized by many throughout the world as a fundamental right, yet it is irreparably intertwined with our economic, social, and political systems. And growth in health, health care, and health systems requires political debate and political consensus.”

As for B = C, New York Times religion columnist, David French says, when it comes to Evangelical Christians, politics is their new religion. Trump won the white evangelical vote by a 65 point margin. More on that in a moment. French’s commentary was triggered by our “Entertainer-in-Chief” deciding to undercut the passing of Pope Francis and the serious process of selecting his new successor, by placing a dress-up of himself as a Gold Laden Pope on his Truth Social site.

Why did Trump lash out this way. By all accounts he was disgruntled over having to share the limelight with Pope Francis, and then his successor – the Chicago born, Villanova trained, devotee to the works of Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, the former Cardinal Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV.

The new Pope was a long shot. Nonetheless, the Conclave, on its fourth round of voting, chose this 69-year old product of Liberation Theology as the 267th occupant of the throne of St. Peter. This first-ever American Pope easily knocked Trump out of the news cycle – a fact neither the President nor his deeply conservative religious supporters could tolerate.

When it comes to Politics and Religion in America, Catholic numbers are problematic. Even after devastating abuse scandals left pews in most parishes empty on Sundays, roughly 1/5 to 1/4 of all U.S. adults (some 50 to 60 million) identify as Catholic. And some notable Catholic voices expect those numbers to rise significantly under this first American Pope who showed little hesitation in slapping down recent Catholic convert JD Vance 3 months ago for invading the religious doctrine air space with this direct statement: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”

In Pew’s latest research, 54% of US Catholics are White, 36% Hispanic, 4% Asian, and 2% Black. More than four-in-ten are immigrants or children of immigrants. These congregants tend to be younger in a Church that had been aging fast with nearly 6 in 10 age 50 or older. Contrary to public opinion, Catholics are everywhere geographically now – 17% live in the Northeast, 21% in the Midwest, 38% in the South, and 24% in the West.

When it comes to B = C, time’s have changed, says French. In his piece last week titled “Trump Is No Longer the Most Important American.” He wrote, “I’m not Catholic. I’m an evangelical from the rural South who grew up so isolated from Catholicism that I didn’t even know any Catholics until I went to law school. But I’m deeply influenced by Catholicism, in both its ancient and its modern forms.”

French was a fan of Pope Francis, joining 3/4 of Catholics who also viewed him favorably. Before French’s well-publicized outing by his small (1/2 million) Calvinist conservative denomination, Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), French’s free-thinking riled his own congregants.He responded by turning to the enemy for guidance. “No book has influenced my approach to abortion and human life more than Pope John Paul II’s encyclical ‘Evangelium Vitae.’ It was in this study and reflection that I understood the true importance of the historical stream of Christian thought.”

Both French and the new Pope are Pro-Life, which places them at odds with most US Catholics, 59% of whom say abortion should be legal, including 42% of Republican Catholics. 61% believe Roe V. Wade should not have been overturned based on women’s bodily autonomy and access to reproductive health services.

What saves Catholics from devolving into a food fight? French says Catholicism is “an ancient faith, one that has endured through rulers and regimes far more ignorant and brutal than anything we’ve ever confronted in the United States.”

Not so his own former sect, Presbyterian Church in America, whose origin story dates to a 1973 split from a slightly larger (1.1 million) Presbyterian Church of the United States over their “theological liberalism which denied the deity of Jesus Christ and the inerrancy and authority of Scripture…and the traditional position on the role of women in church offices.”

Summing up his experience French writes, “We belong to churches that measure their existence in months or years, not centuries or millenniums. Our oldest denominations have existed for only the tiniest fraction of time compared with the Catholic Church. That lack of perspective ends up exaggerating the importance of politics. It narrows our frame of reference and elevates the temporal over the eternal.”

The table appears to have been set for an epic battle over who represents the values Americans hold most dear. The battle sees Health, Politics and Religion on collision course. The winner may be the leader who is best able to integrate A, B and C.

David French is betting on the newcomer. As he wrote last week, “In the case of Leo, the church’s witness to the world also becomes part of America’s witness to the world. Millions of Americans have been lamenting that the most prominent American in the world is a person who embodies cruelty and spite.”

I’m betting on Pope Leo XIV’s algebra skills.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: Augustine > Liberation Theology > PCA > PCUSA > Pope Leo XIV > Thomas Aquinas > trump

The Day a Republican Senator Stood Up For Democracy and Against a Malignant Bully.

Posted on | May 6, 2025 | Comments Off on The Day a Republican Senator Stood Up For Democracy and Against a Malignant Bully.

Mike Magee

This past week, Trump’s posting of himself as The Pope surfaced once again David French’s classic Christmas, 2024, New York Times column titled “Why Are So Many Christians So Cruel?”

As I wrote at the time, “French and his wife and three children have experienced the cruelty first hand since he openly expressed his opposition to Donald Trump during the 2016 Presidential campaign. That resulted in threats to his entire family by white supremacists who especially targeted his adopted Ethiopian daughter.

Over the past week, American politicians of every stripe have debated what exactly was Trump’s motive in debasing the Papacy as Pope Francis was being laid to rest. Three main theories have emerged.

As a malignant narcissist, Trump could not bear the fact that Pope Francis was stealing his limelight.
Trump was appealing to conservative Christian Evangelicals who are strongly opposed to the Papacy on theological grounds.
Trump was appealing to conservative Catholics like New York Post columnist Charles Gasparino who says, “… we respect Trump more than the socialist Pope.”

Of course, there likely are elements of truth in each of these. But I prefer to fall back on my New York City high school training and believe that this is the product of a dull witted school yard bully who thought this was funny.

This is not to say he has the courage to claim ownership. (Obviously this doesn’t get posted without his approval.) No. He lies to your face, saying:

“I had nothing to do with it, Somebody made up a picture of me dressed like the pope, and they put it out on the internet. That’s not me that did it, I have no idea where it came from — maybe it was A.I. But I have no idea where it came from.”

With his blessing, the image was posted at 10:29 PM on May 02, 2025 on his Truth Social account. David French likely sees accomplices in the shadows.

As he explained in 2024, “It’s remarkable how often ambition becomes cruelty. In our self-delusion, we persuade ourselves that we’re not just right but that we’re so clearly right that opposition has to be rooted in arrogance and evil. We lash out. We seek to silence and destroy our enemies.”

He may be right. But when it comes to Trump, I recall another bully, and another heroine. On June 1, 1950, a 53-year old Republican Senator from Maine rose in the Senate floor to confront Senator Joe McCarthy. Four months earlier, in Wheeling, WV, McCarthy had unleashed a populist attack on what he claimed to be a conspiracy of “205 card-carrying communists in the State Department.”

What happened next is proudly recalled in the official historical records of the Senate as “A Declaration of Conscience.” The tale speaks directly to all those who enable Trump in the current era. It took four years (after this speech) to finally rid America of its menace. It remains to be seen who will emerge as our modern day Margaret Chase Smith, and how much time will pass before we rid ourselves of this modern day tyrant

Here is the official account of Senate Chase’s efforts that day as recorded by the U.S. Senate historians:

‘Mr. President,’ she began, ‘I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition…. The United States Senate has long enjoyed worldwide respect as the greatest deliberative body…. But recently that deliberative character has…been debased to…a forum of hate and character assassination.’ In her 15-minute address, delivered as McCarthy looked on, Smith endorsed every American’s right to criticize, to protest, and to hold unpopular beliefs. ‘Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America,’ she complained. ‘It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.’ She asked her fellow Republicans not to ride to political victory on the ‘Four Horsemen of Calumny–Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.’ As she concluded, Smith introduced a statement signed by herself and six other Republican senators–her ‘Declaration of Conscience.’” . . .

“Smith’s Declaration of Conscience did not end McCarthy’s reign of power, but she was one of the first senators to take such a stand. She continued to oppose him, at great personal cost, for the next four years. Finally, in December of 1954, the Senate belatedly concurred with the ‘lady from Maine’ and censured McCarthy for conduct ‘contrary to senatorial traditions.’ McCarthy’s career was over. Margaret Chase Smith’s career was just beginning.”

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: Catholics > Charles Gasparino > David French > evangelical christians > Margaret Chase Smith > Papacy > Pope Francis > trump

“What would FDR do if faced with Trump and Vance and Musk?”

Posted on | April 30, 2025 | Comments Off on “What would FDR do if faced with Trump and Vance and Musk?”

Mike Magee

Children of this era, decades from now, will recall a pandemic and their experiences with vaccines, in the same manner as citizens of my age recall the polio vaccine campaigns in the 1950’s.

While my generation was less informed on the science than our counterparts today, we had three advantages:

National administrative leadership of vaccines and their distribution.
A focus on mass immunization rather than preferential individualized encounters.
A unified community school-based (vs. hospital or pharmacy based) campaign, fully engaging local families and their physicians in validating the safety and efficacy of a vaccine, and immunizing the general public.

Management came in the form of Basil O’Connor, was an attorney and close friend of FDR. Their friendship predated FDR’s polio and included O’Connor serving as his legal adviser and for a brief period of time as his partner in the practice of law. He would serve loyally in that capacity for more than three decades as head of FDR’s National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP).

O’Connor did not have an NIH or CDC to direct his efforts, nor RFK Jr. to compromise his success. He took charge himself, setting up an organizational structure with reach across the country to support services and fundraising. Ultimately, 3100 chapters would be established and $233 million distributed in patient services for children with polio by 1955.

On the research side, Jonas Salk was recruited to the University of Pittsburg in 1947. In 1948, he received a grant from the NFIP to identify the various types of polio. But Salk’s goals were much more expansive. He intended to develop the first successful vaccine for the disease and devoted the next seven years to that effort.

Fully funded by the NFIP at $7,500,000, and therefore requiring no need to be distracted by fund raising, Salk initiated a trial on 15,000 children in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania in 1953. The decision to stay close to home vastly simplified the logistics and avoided extra red tape. It didn’t hurt that he also tested himself, his wife and his children or that he achieved startling results on his first try out.

Blood drawn from his subjects revealed antibody levels to polio that were 4 to 16 times the levels in non-treated children. These results were reported out in the Journal of the American Medical Association on March 25, 1953.

Following this announcement, which received worldwide attention, Salk took two additional steps that clearly demonstrated both his political and scientific prowess. First he went to Basil O’Connor at the NFIP and secured 100% funding for the largest scientific study that would ever be run in the US. In addition to securing that funding, he enlisted the vast marketing expertise and distribution system of the NFIP.

Secondly, rather than design the trials himself, at a time when scientific competitors were nipping at his heels, Salk enlisted his very popular and highly respected former mentor, Thomas Francis, to design and run the trials. Besides his scientific reputation, Francis had a distinguished record of public service having been the director of the Commission on Influenza for the Army Epidemiological Board. By 1953, he was a renowned virologist and chair of the epidemiology department at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health. Once Basil O’Connor with Salk chose Dr. Francis, they carefully created a firewall between themselves and the scientific trials.

Francis was fully aware of the deficiencies in the design. Did every parent clearly read the permission material? Clearly not. Was defining the trial’s purpose “to determine the effectiveness of a vaccine in preventing paralytic poliomyelitis” understating the trial’s experimental nature? What sufficed as a “valid parental signature”? Why were the terms “permission” and “human experiment” found nowhere on the consent form?

Residual trust in FDR and his team of managers and scientists, now nearly a decade past his death from Congestive Heart Failure, created an enormous reservoir of good will. The end results were startling and have never been replicated since.

Beginning April 26, 1954, within a year’s time, 1.8 million children in 15,000 schools in 44 states were recruited for the experiment. 300,000 health professional volunteers, including my father and the majority of the physicians in the United States, participated without pay. 750,000 of the children – all 2nd graders form public and private schools – were part of a rigorous double blind study.

It was Dr. Francis who stood up on April 12, 1955 at 10:20 AM in Rackham Lecture Hall at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and declared in his characteristic direct style, “The vaccine works. It is safe, effective and potent.” The public trusted him at his word and complied with mass inoculations.

Seven decades later, with our scientific apparatus in shambles, and a vaccine denier at the helm of HHS, while measles spreads far and wide, it’s fair to ask, “What would FDR do if faced today with Trump and Vance and Musk?”

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: basil o'connor > FDR > HHS > polio > RFK Jr. > Salk > Thomas Francis > vaccine

The Birth of Immunology

Posted on | April 29, 2025 | Comments Off on The Birth of Immunology

Mike Magee

The field of Immunology is little more than a half-century old and still shrouded in a remarkable degree of mystery. Even describing what we do know is a complex challenge. One way to proceed is to climb the scaffolding provided by the wide array of Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine over the last half of the 20th century.

What has been clear for centuries is that humans are vulnerable to contagious plagues and epidemics. For most of our history, these were attributed to toxic vapors or “miasmas.” The threat literally arose out of thin air it was believed. That was what Benjamin Rush thought as he and others struggled with the epic outbreak of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793.

But European medical detectives including Vienna General Hospitals head of maternity services, Ignaz Philip Semmelweis, in 1847, and John Snow in London nine years later, proved indisputably that human behavior, whether from lack of hand washing in a hospital, or accessing dirty water from a public pump, could place humans in harm’s way.

The “Germ Theory,” fleshed out by Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, Joseph Lister (The Famous Trio) and others made it clear the microorganisms of all shapes and sizes were the culprits, and that public health adjustments could lessen the risk, while scientific discoveries might retroactively target specific offenders.

Not surprisingly, we humans see the “battle against disease” as a complex, uphill, centuries-long engagement. It’s a bitter and highly personal battle as Mary Putnam Jacobi and Abraham Jacobi, two physicians instrumental in overcoming raw milk laden diphtheria in turn of the century New York City learned when they lost their only child, 7-year old Ernst Jacobi, to the disease.

Our modern day view of immunology builds on and incorporates centuries old learnings including acquired immunity and vaccination. Inoculation for protection from disease was aggressively promoted back in 1716, when the wife of the British Ambassador to Constantinople, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, after observing the practice among Turkish religious sects, had her only daughter, Mary Alice, innoculated against smallpox.

Later in that century, British physician Edward Jenner crossed species when he noticed that a young dairymaid, Sarah Nelms, had typical cowpoke pustules on her hands (spread from infected cow udders) but no generalized spread to her face or elsewhere. This led him to two insights: 1)The lesions were very similar to human smallpox, 2) the cowpox infection was less severe than small pox. He surmised then that exposure to mild cowpox lesions might protect those inoculated from future smallpox contagion. His ethically compromised experiment on an 8-year old son of his gardener, James Phipps, inoculating him first with cowpox, and later with smallpox, happily resulted in a mild infection and the child survived. Jenner labeled what he had created a “vaccine” after the Latin word for cow – vacca.

Immunity too has Latin roots from the word immunitas which in Roman times was offered to denote exemption from the burden of taxation to worthy citizens by their Emperor. Protection from disease is a bit more complicated than that and offers our White Blood Cells (WBCs) a starring role in “recognizing, disabling, and disposing” of the bad guys. These cells are produced in the bone marrow, then bivouacked in the thymus and spleen until called into action.

They are organized in specialized divisions. WBC macrophages are the first line of defense, literally gobbling and digesting bacteria and damaged cells through a process called “phagocytosis.” B-cells produce specific proteins called antibodies, designed to learn and remember specific invaders chemical make-up or “antigen.” They can ID offenders quickly and neutralize target bacteria, toxins, and viruses. And T-cells are specially designed to go after viruses hidden within the human cells themselves.

The first ever Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to German scientist, Emil von Behring, eleven years after he demonstrated “passive immunity.” He was able to isolate poisons or toxins derived from tetanus and diphtheria microorganisms, inject them into lab animals, and subsequently prove that the animals were now “protected” from tetanus and diphtheria infection. These antitoxins, liberally employed in New York City, where diphtheria was the major killer of infants, quickly ended that sad epidemic.

Where Jenner, and later Pasteur’s (anthrax) weak exposures prevented subsequent disease, von Behring’s antitoxin cured those already infected. More than that, it unleashed the passion and excitement of investigators (which continues to this day) to understand how the human body, and specifically its cellular and chemical apparatus, pull off this feat?

The body’s inner defense system began to reveal its mysteries in the early 1900s. Brussel scientist Jules Bordet, while studying the bacteria Anthrax, was able to not only identified protein antibodies in response to anthrax infection, but also a series of companion proteins. This cascade of proteins linked to the antibodies enhanced their bacterial killing power. In 1919 Bordet received his Nobel Prize for the discovery of a series of “complement” proteins, which when activated help antibodies “drill holes” through bacterial cell walls and destroy them.

Scientists now focused as well on the invaders themselves, termed as a group, “antigens,” and including microorganisms and other foreign bodies. How did the body know the threat and respond? Occasionally a brilliant breakthrough dreamer and the thinker would appear with a wild theory that turned out to be proven right.

That was the case with UK scientist Nils Jerne in 1955. Three decades later his theories were proven out and he received the 1984 Nobel Prize. As his award outlined, “He asserted that all kinds of antibodies already have developed during the fetus stage and that the immune system functions through selection. In 1971, he proved that lymphocytes teach themselves to recognize the body’s own substances in the thymus gland… An immunological reaction arises when an antigen disturbs the system’s equilibrium.”

By then, those Jerne’s WBCs had been termed “B lymphocytes” by an Australian scientist named Macfarlane Burnet, a 1960 Nobel laureate, who also saw antibodies already established in the fetus. Arguably, dreamers were well established at the turn of the century. For example, Robert Koch’s main assistant was Paul Ehrlich, who imagined the inner workings of the cell this way, “In his eyes, cells were surrounded by tiny spike-like molecular structures, or ‘side-chains’, as he called them, and that these were responsible for trapping nutrients and other chemicals, and for drawing them inside the cell.”

The “side chains” were in fact antibodies, large protein molecules made up of two long and two short chains. Roughly 80% of the four chains are identical in all antibodies. The remaining 20% varies, forming unique antigen bonding sites for each and every antigen. Already scientists began to wonder whether they could reconfigure these large proteins to create “monoclonal antibodies” to fight cancers like melanoma.

Imagination has occasionally carried the day. But more often direct problem solving uncovers answers. That was the case when French scientist, Jean Dausset, investigated a blood transfusion reaction in a patient who received blood type and Rh type compatible blood, a process defined by the Australian biologist Karl Landsteiner in 1930. What 1980 Nobel Laureate Dausset determined is that the incompatiblity lay not with RBCs, but with WBCs. The donor WBCs had incompatible attached antigens which were later termed human leucocyte antigens (HLAs). These are so individualized that they are often referred to as an “HLA fingerprint.”

One question always leads to another. In this case, “Why do HLAs exist?” What was eventually uncovered was that certain microorganisms (viruses) take up residence inside human cells gaining protected status. To deal with the problem, humans possess a specialized WBC – termed “T-cell.” We are familiar with them since they have been much publicized in our epic battle with the HIV virus. But for the T-cell to destroy an intracellular virus, it must “recognize and respond” to two messaging signals. First, the virus’s antigen. Second, a permissive signal that informs that the virus is housed in a host cell that deserves protection. The fingerprint HLA is that signal.

The downside of course is that the body’s own cells under certain circumstances can trigger an over reactive immune response. Most of us have experienced a bee sting or peanut allergy gone bad. This alarming cascade of symptoms called “anaphylaxis” derives from the Greek ( ana– against, philaxis-protection), and clearly involves HLAs. The same is true of auto-immune diseases which may involve genetic variants of HLAs. Finally, successful organ transplantation relies on compatibility of donor and recipient HLAs.

So to sum it all up, Immunology is a mysterious, complex, and evolving field of study. Host and predators (including everything from a microorganism invader to a roque cancer cell, to a wooden splinter left unaddressed could be fatal. But to respond the host must first identify the threat, and activate a specific and effective response, without inadvertently injuring the host itself. As our understanding has grown, harnessing the immune system to chase down metastatic cancer cells, or suppress a deadly response to a transplanted organ, or self-modify to avoid auto-immune diseases are clearly within our grasp in the not to distant future.