MLK: “A Voteless People Is A Powerless People.”

Posted on | January 19, 2026 | 1 Comment

Mike Magee

Today is Martin Luther King Day. And in three days we’ll commemorate the 53rd anniversary of LBJ’s death. When MLK was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, LBJ asked Americans to seize a higher ground.

He said, in part: I ask every citizen to reject the blind violence that has struck Dr. King, who lived by nonviolence…I know that every American of good will joins me in mourning the death of this outstanding leader and in praying for peace and understanding throughout this land…It is only by joining together and only by working together that we can continue to move toward equality and fulfillment for all of our people. I hope that all Americans tonight will search their hearts as they ponder this most tragic incident.”

That’s quite a contrast to our current President’s remarks following the shooting death of Renee Goods’ by an ICE agent last week. Exonerating the killer, he decided to label the 37 year old dead mother of three as “very, very disrespectful to law enforcement.”

Predictably, that event has led to mass demonstrations in Minnesota’s twin cities, and further ICE escalation with 2000 federal agents (in contrast to a domestic police force of 500) in the region. And yet, on MLK’s holiday, the outraged citizens in cities throughout the nation have largely embraced non-violence.

In signing that original proclamation in 1983 for a national holiday bearing the name of our famous defender of civil rights, coming a short two decades after the signing of the Civil Rights Act, it is useful to remember what President Ronald Reagan said: “The majesty of his message, the dignity of his bearing, and the righteousness of his cause are a lasting legacy. In a few short years he changed America for all time.”

But MLK’s son reminds that his father knew very well that a day like today was not about glorifying him. What then is it for? Here are his words this past weekend: “My father was often traveling during the voting rights campaign. But my mother took the time to explain to my siblings and me what each of the Civil Rights movement campaigns was trying to accomplish. ‘The right to vote is a central goal of our freedom movement,’ she’d say. ‘Without it, we will continue to be oppressed. But with it, we can help change our society and make America better for everyone.’ The vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool that the citizens have at their disposal. As we see an unacceptable increase in political violence, voter intimidation and other barriers that make voting harder, we need to remind all Americans that our political differences must be decided at the ballot box and elections need to be free and fair. As my dad said, ‘A voteless people is a powerless people.’”

On the Ability to “Attend.”

Posted on | January 11, 2026 | 5 Comments

Mike Magee

Society is so concerned with the medicalized issue of “attention deficit” that many experts jump right over a more fundamental query: “What do you attend to?”

In a recent New York Times Guest Opinion piece, three attention activist members of the Friends of Attention (more on that in a moment) delve into the topic.

This comment caught my eye: “Does it need to be said? We are not machines. Our lives are not data problems that can be quantitatively optimized. And the actual human ability to attend is something much more expansive and much more beautiful than a tool for filtering information or extending our time on task. True attention lies at the heart of personhood: reason, judgment, memory, curiosity, responsibility, the feeling of a summer day, the burying of our dead. All of these require and activate our presence.”

That struck a note because we just spent a few days with children and grandchildren on vacation. And one of the active topics was a discussion of what our grandchildren (many college age) should focus on (or attend to) in their studies. All of the parents had graduated from Liberal Arts institutions (many of them run by the Jesuit order) which highly valued core curricula that included humanities, social and natural sciences, and the arts. But clearly that approach is under attack. Parents struggle to manage college costs that have spiraled out of control, and worry that a future job market that is highly AI-constricted may undercut their kids future financial independence.

The Friends of Attention say the problem is a mis-direction of what humans attend to that dates back to organizational theory research first launched more than a century ago. Their words: “Begun in the 1880s and spanning the long 20th century, quantitative thinking about attention was conceived in a spirit of bold inquiry and undertaken with the goal of civic and medical betterment. The scientists who led the research succeeded in making many human experiences safer and more efficient. They helped to advance innovation and win wars. By using increasingly complex instruments to optimize our capacities, however, they established a powerful paradigm that saw humans as attention-paying machines, paying attention to machines. That model helped give rise to the present era, when most of us spend more than half our waking hours on devices designed to keep us enthralled to the taps and swipes of the attention economy.”

The Jesuits are no slouches when it comes to “attending.” After all St. Ignatius Loyola, who founded the Society of Jesus – also known as the Jesuit Order – holed up in a natural cave by the Cardener River in Catalonia (a province of Barcelona) for a year in 1522, to focus on “attentive contemplation.”

Apparently the time was well spent yielding two significant outcomes: 1) Conversion of Ignatius from a “worldly soldier” to a “dedicated spiritual leader” and, 2) the compilation of his Spiritual Exercises – meditations on his feelings of “gratitude and anguish, consolation and sadness” – which continue to be used in Jesuit’s formal training and daily life to this day.

The emergence of the Friends in 2018 roughly mirrors the appearance of AI. Who are they? “The Friends of Attention are a loose, informal network of creative collaborators, colleagues, and actual friends who share an interest in ‘ATTENTION’.”

Tell me more. Well, eighteen artists, scholars, and activists first gathered at the 2018 Sao Paulo Biennial, with a common interest in the study and practice of attention. Since then, they have been gathering virtually The distinctive vision—”to place the economies of attention at the center of our relationship to works of art… Attention lies at the nexus of perception and action, aesthetics and ethics, wealth and power.” They make a special point of stating that “there is no ‘membership’ in the Friends. There are friends.”

Which brings me back to our family discussion and the role of Liberal Arts in a modern college education. Our kids continue to support a broad, multidisciplinary approach for our grandkids education. As for AI, AI’s description of the components of a Liberal Arts education is reassuring. Here it is:

“Core Areas of Study”

Humanities: Literature, History, Philosophy, Languages, Art.
Social Sciences: Psychology, Sociology, Political Science, Economics, Anthropology.
Natural Sciences: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Environmental Science.
Mathematics: Algebra, Statistics, Logic.
Arts: Visual Arts, Performing Arts, Music.

“Key Goals & Skills Developed”

Broad Knowledge: Provides a foundational understanding across disciplines.
Critical Thinking: Analyzing complex issues from multiple perspectives.
Communication: Strong reading, writing, and persuasive expression.
Adaptability: Learning how to learn and apply knowledge in new contexts.
Problem-Solving: Identifying, analyzing, and solving complex problems

Full disclosure: I am a graduate of a Jesuit High School (Fordham Prep) and a Jesuit College (LeMoyne College).

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: adhd > attentive contemplation > atttention > fordham prep > Friends of attention > jesuits > LeMoyne College > society of jesus > spiritual exercises > st. ignatius of loyola

AI Potential In Medicine Is Unlimited

Posted on | January 7, 2026 | 5 Comments

Mike Magee

If you are wondering whether AI will take over the role of doctors in America, you may be surprised to learn that the numbers are going in the reverse direction.

A month ago, David J. Shorten MD, CEO of the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) proudly announced that “The growing number of applicants to medical school reflects the continued strong interest in medicine as a career.” And the numbers back him up. For the first time, over 100,000 students are already in Medical Schools across the U.S., and that number was about to increase by 1.3%.

One would think that American university students with an interest in Medicine, facing the uncertainties in the field, would be seeking out other options. Instead 2026 applications were up over 5%. This should not be surprising since history has demonstrated that periods of rapid advance in technology, communication, mobility, and innovation have always been the friend of the profession. Still change is never easy.

In 1851, on its fourth birthday, the AMA was almost ready to give up their quest for legitimacy. The results of their commissioned 1851 survey of 12,400 men from the eight leading U.S. colleges was shocking. The best and the brightest clearly were chasing other professions. There it was in black and white. Of those surveyed, 26% planned to pursue the clergy, 26% the law, and less than 8% medicine.

It wasn’t that doctors with training (roughly 10% of those calling themselves “doctor” at the time) lacked influence. They had been influential since the birth of the nation. Four signers of the Declaration of Independence were physicians – Benjamin Rush, Josiah Bartlett, Lyman Hall, and Mathew Thorton. Twenty-six others were attendees at the Continental Congress. But making a living as a physician, that was a different story.

During the first half of the 19th century, the market for doctoring went from bad to worse. Economic conditions throughout a largely rural nation encouraged independent self-reliance and self-help. The politics of the day were economically liberal and anti-elitist, which meant that state legislatures refused to impose regulations or grant licensing power to legitimate state medical societies. Absent these controls, proprietary “irregular medical schools” spawned all manner of “doctors” explaining why 40,000 individuals competed for patients by 1850 – up from 5000 (of which only 300 had degrees) in 1790.

The legitimate doctors in those early days saw 5 patients on a good day. Horse travel on poor roads, and the absence of remote systems for communication, meant doctors had to be summoned in person to attend a birth or injury. And patients lost a day’s work to travel all the way to town for a visit of questionable worth. The direct and indirect costs for both doctor and patient were unsustainable. As a result, most doctors had multiple careers to augment their income.

At the turn of the century, in 1800, only 6% of Americans lived in towns with a population of 2,500. With westward expansion, Manifest Destiny, forced relocation of native Americans, and slavery supported cotton and tobacco, that percentage reached only 15% by 1850. But the arrival of railroads and telegraph, canals, improved roads and steamboats transformed America.

By 1890, 37% lived in cities. And that included doctors. Beginning in 1870, there was an exodus of doctors to cities in excess of the general population. In 1870, there were 177 doctors per 100,000 in large cities. By 1910 the number had grown to 241 per 100,000.

Congregating doctors in cities was a mixed blessing for the profession. It made contact easier to execute, allowing numbers of patients seen in a day to double and triple. But it also meant that more doctors (of widely different quality) would be competing for the relatively few patients who possessed the resources to pay fees for services.

The invention of the telephone was equally transformative. The first recorded local telephone network was in New Haven, CT in 1877. Soon after the Capitol Hill Drugstore in Hartford, CT, was linked to 21 local physicians. Not to be outdone, two years later, Dr. William Worrell Mayo connected his farmhouse in Rochester, Minnesota to the Geisinger and Newton drugstore in town. This made remote prescribing, as well as patient communications for emergencies and scheduling possible.

In modern times, the arrival of the Internet was equally transformative. But adding AI to the mix changes everything for the profession which is fundamentally scientific and fact-based, but relies on human trust, fostered by compassion, understanding and partnership, to ensure its premier role in society. In threading that needle, AI will service the profession in three critical ways:

AI is a problem solver. From new discoveries, to accurate diagnosis, to business efficiencies, to team connectivity, to lessening opportunity for human error, AI is a performance enhancer.
AI empowers patients by providing access to information, research, and inclusion in professional care teams, providing rapid feedback and opportunity to enhance mutual team partnerships.
AI has the potential to create and support a wide array of public health initiatives, and trigger policy changes that may finally convince independent minded Americans that universal health coverage is not a luxury, but a necessity.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: AI > ama > health coverage > medical history > Medicine > scientific progress > universal health care

“America Was a Providential Fact” – Did Tocqueville Get It Right?

Posted on | December 26, 2025 | 3 Comments

Mike Magee

We find ourselves in the middle of America’s most important religious, political, and economic holiday. The current Administration has made a point of pushing the envelope toward state sponsored religion for example with this official Homeland Security greeting on their X platform: “Christ is Born! We are blessed to share a nation and a Savior.” The integration of church and state is advanced despite its explicit disapproval in the First Amendment to our U.S. Constitution.

The debate over whether this is appropriate or not is a longstanding one. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831, he was struck by our individualism, decentralized forms of governance, and (notably) our extreme religiosity. As we have seen now over a two century experience, each of these traits, when carried to an extreme can undermine the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Equality and tyranny remain two sides of the same coin.

Tocqueville was an idealist but also a partial critic (at best) of slavery and the mass relocation and near extinction of native Americans. He saw our citizen forebears as displaying extreme individualism and possessing an “immense opinion of themselves.” Not surprisingly, he came from privilege. His parents were servants of the French Royalty, nobility imprisoned and nearly executed by guillotine during the French Revolution.

His family history helps explain why he was both an elitist and a populist in writing and behavior. His two volume observations of our still freshly minted nation appeared in 1835 and 1840 under the title “Democracy in America.”

Our forebears under his constant glaze are too “relaxed” in our “love of present enjoyments.” In his view, contentment would eventually lead to contempt. His words: Our version of democracy “does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born.”

Tocqueville is anxious for us and our future. That is in part why he saw integration of Church and state as desirable in the extreme. To him our form of government was “providential.” Christian equality underpinned social equity. Religion was not a subsidiary of the aristocracy as in France. Rather American history was flesh on a theological skeleton. Or as he described, “It was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.”

He experienced with emotion our homegrown injustice on a large scale. At a little river town next to Memphis, he watched as a group of Choctaw Indians being delivered by federal agents (under the auspices of the Indian Removal Act of 1830) to a steamboat for the first leg of a relocation to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. He recognized the apocalyptic nature of the event stating later, he had witnessed “the expulsion—one might say the dissolution—of the last remnants of one of the most celebrated and ancient American nations.”

He also saw Christianity in America make peace with slavery, but with significant hedging justification. He wrote, the state endorsed religion allowed slavery “but they accepted it only as an exception in their social system, and they took care to restrict it to a single one of the human races. They thus made a wound in humanity less large, but infinitely difficult to heal.”

Literary critic, James Wood, noted that Tocqueville believed that “Religion doesn’t have to be true, Tocqueville thought, but it is very important that people profess it… religion leads democratic man away from the narcissism and materialism endemic to non-aristocratic societies… Tocqueville is really writing a theological history of society’s rise, which culminates in the founding of America….America was a providential fact.”

History, and the current administration in the extreme, makes the opposite case – that leaning into religion is not always prudent or fortunate. Our Founding Fathers, in penning the First Amendment to our Constitution, knew what they were doing.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: choctaw indians > christmas 2025 > democracy in america > First amendment > James Wood > slavery > toqueville

A “Policy Induced Downturn” Hits The Hoosier State.

Posted on | December 20, 2025 | 1 Comment

Mike Magee

In his classic review of the famous movie, “The Hoosiers,” Roger Ebert writes, “This is a movie about a tiny Indiana high school that sends a team all the way to the state basketball finals in the days when schools of all sizes played in the same tournaments and a David could slay a Goliath. That’s still the case in Indiana.”

That final sentence came to mind last week, as the Midwestern state with a population of around 17 million (17th in the nation) punched above its political weight and landed headlines like this one on December 11, 2025 in The Hill – “Indiana Senate rejects new House map, defying Trump.”

Some facts were clear: Twenty-one Indiana state senators had joined all 10 Democratic state senators to defeat a proposed redistricting map that would have assured a gain of 2 additional House of Representative seats for Republicans in the 2026 mid-term elections. But most political pundits misread why they did it, and ignored a crucial economic report from 10 months earlier that informed their actions. More on that in a moment.

First a bit of history. A century ago, Eli Lilly Jr. (grandson of the founder of the famous pharmaceutical giant Lilly & Company) cut a deal with the University of Toronto to be the sole supplier of their life-saving drug – insulin. Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, they were ideally positioned because the state’s three economic pillars were manufacturing, agriculture, and health sciences.

To secure adequate supply of insulin was both a scientific and logistic challenge of historic proportions. Eli Jr.’s focus on line manufacturing helped. Raw material demands required the design of a refrigerated railway support system dead ending at Lilly manufacturing sites. This was made necessary since purifying 8 ounces of insulin required two and a half tons of beef or pork pancreas readily available from state farms. Sourcing the raw materials locally was not a problem. At the time, 86% of the state’s lands were controlled by 195,786 farming families committed to farming (including livestock management and slaughter houses).

Fast forward a century and the state remains heavily dependent on its tripartite pillars – manufacturing, agriculture and health sciences. That was the message broadcast with great political effect on April 15, 2025 in a first ever economic forecast update from Muncie, Indiana, the home of Ball State University and its’ well-respected Center for Business and Economic Research (CBER) led by Michael J. Hicks, PhD. For over 50 years CBER has published “data-rich, nonpartisan research relevant to communities and businesses throughout Indiana.” Their reputation is built on one word – trust.

On January 16, 2025, CBER released its heavily anticipated 2025 forecast for the state economy. Local politicians and the business community were encouraged by the projection of 2.5% GDP growth and the addition of 37,000 jobs with Dr. Hicks notation, “This the strongest forecast I have provided since arriving at Ball State.” But the small print included a warning: “The direction of domestic fiscal policy, especially tariffs, adds an unusually high level of uncertainty to this forecast.”

On April 15, 2025, bells began to ring off the hook south of Muncie in the capital, Indianapolis, minutes after CBER posted CBER Forecast Update: Indiana in 2025. In its opening, Hicks stated that Trump’s economic policy actions “merit a substantial revision of the 2025 forecast” for the state. They were now able to calculate an “eightfold increase in taxes on imports and production for Indiana’s manufacturing firms amounting to a trade weighted average tariff tax of 22.3%.”

To drive home how devastating this was for their state, three points were highlighted:

The total Trump tariff tax equaled the state’s projected general fund revenue for the entire year.
The project tax rate matched those tied to the Smoot-Hawley Act tariffs that triggered the Great Depression of 1930.
The uncertainty and risk to their state’s economy had already resulted in a 3-month decline in help-wanted ads of 26%.

Compared to the former analysis, the GDP growth showed a 4.5% downward swing, from +2.3% to -2.0%, and a 92,000 job shift from +37,000 to -55,000, including the loss of 19,000 manufacturing jobs. Unemployment, the report said, would rise to just under 6% by the end of the year.

According to state economists, Indiana was a sitting duck for outsize negative economic impacts of a Trump second term. The combination of Trump tariffs and the One Big Beautiful Bill that Republicans were forced to accept and push thru, would destabilize its tripartite economy in the following ways:

Manufacturing: Beyond tariff related increased costs in parts for automobiles, machinery and construction, disruption of supply chains and interruptions in inventory management would be difficult to reverse. Delays and rising prices would likely lead to retaliatory tariffs and declining demand for Indiana products shifting to overseas customers.
Agriculture: Export markets for Indiana’s three major agricultural commodities – corn, soybeans and pork – had already been severely impacted the state’s farm community. ICE immigration policy negatively impacted workforce availability, compromising productivity and competitiveness.
Health Care: Indiana residents were outsized consumers of ACA benefits in the form of Medicaid expansion and federal ACA Marketplace policies with subsidies up to 400% of the Federal Poverty rate. Loss of those subsidies in January, 2026, was now projected to raise ACA insurance premium rates for nearly 300,000 Hoosiers an average of 31.14%

It’s summary warning wasn’t subtle: “Indiana is now entering economic conditions that are recessionary, and will be so until sometime after tariffs are substantially reduced, and freer conditions for trade are reestablished. . . This is a policy induced downturn.”

This toxic brew of bad financial news bubbled along over the next seven months as Republican leaders in the state house grew increasingly resentful that their Republican Congressional leaders were marching in lock-step with the President they had helped elect by a whopping 20% margin just 13 months earlier.

Adding insult to injury, President Trump was personally demanding that they pass an unpopular redistricting plan to gain an additional two House seats in the 2026 elections. The day before the December 10th vote, at 8:27 PM he threatened the state’s Republican lawmakers on Truth Social with these words: “Anybody that votes against Redistricting, and the SUCCESS of the Republican Party in D.C., will be, I am sure, met with a MAGA Primary in the Spring.”

Not lost on anyone was the fact that this was the state of Vice-President Mike Pence who had come to the rescue on January 6, 2020, as presiding officer of the Joint Session of Congress, to confirm the legitimate results of the 2020 election. His actual words had included this scold directed at their current tormenter: “I am proud of my role. . . almost no idea is more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president…The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone.”

The state house vote on December 11, 2025, rejected redistricting and was defined by news outlets nationwide as a “major blow to President Trump.”

Reporters across the nation rushed in to try to explain “Why take a stand now?” The following day, the Huffington Post did its best to explain why with an article titled, “These are the Indiana Republicans who voted to crush Trump’s redistricting plan.”

In true Hoosier fashion, Sen. Sue Glick from LaGrange, Indiana spoke for her colleagues when she offered her slant, “Hoosiers are a hardy lot, and they don’t like to be threatened. They don’t like to be intimidated. They don’t like to be bullied in any fashion.”

But the real answer lies closer to the capital of Indianapolis – in Muncie, the home of Ball State University’s CBER. As Director Michael Hick’s had projected so clearly months earlier, “This is a policy induced downturn.”

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: Ball State University > CBER > Hoosiers > Indiana > insulin > Lilly > Michael Hicks > Pence > Redistricting Indiana > trump

Why President George H. W. Bush “froze out” Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.

Posted on | December 15, 2025 | 3 Comments

Mike Magee

For the past seven years the AIDS epidemic had raged throughout America. One year earlier, an AIDS activist group had coalesced in Greenwich Village, New York. They called themselves ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). They were largely HIV-positive individuals who were fed up with being given the cold shoulder by government health officials in New York City and Washington. They decided that if they were going to die, they would go down fighting.

They believed that step one in helping themselves was to better understand the science, especially the drug development process. If solutions weren’t coming off the pipeline, they decided it was time to find out why. Once they knew what to do, their step two was an “in your face” assault on the individuals and the institutions they felt were responsible, and that included the President, the Vice-President, the NIH, and the FDA for starters.

On October, 11, 1988, at the end of a Columbus Day weekend of protests that had included a march on the Health and Human Services Offices in Washington, DC, they showed up in mass on the FDA campus. Approximately 1500 fully energized protesters drew broad national media coverage.

Their list of demands were clear and focused:

1. Quicker drug approvals. They wanted access to any new discovery as soon as basic safety and toxicity studies had cleared Phase I studies.

2. No use of placebos or double blind studies. Doing so with this deadly disease, they viewed, was unethical.

3. Studies must include a diverse population of patients including young and old, male and female, and all races and sexual orientations.

4. The experimental drugs must be covered by Medicaid and private insurers.

5. The FDA must support community outreach, and involve those with AIDS directly in the process.

The demonstration was titled, “Seize Control of the FDA”, and the elaborate outfits and placards delivered a simple message, “You are either with us or against us.” Tony Fauci of the NIH, who in June of 1988 had been publicly tarred as an “incompetent idiot” by ACT UP leader Larry Kramer in the San Francisco Chronicle, arranged meetings with leaders of the group, and discussions around their objectives.

In June of 1989, in a meeting with activists, he wandered into FDA territory and endorsed a parallel tract for HIV drug approval. The New York Times headlined it. The FDA was not thrilled with Fauci going “off the reservation”, but now they were aboard as well. Within 1 year of the protest, ACT UP’s proposal for a fast track, or parallel process, that would make new AIDS treatment available after clearing Phase I studies, was approved.

Now, in addition to AZT, a second AIDS drug, dideoxyinosine, was made available. President Reagan had approved the creation of the “National Committee To Review Current Procedures For Approval Of New Drugs For Cancer And AIDS”. The task force included the top AIDS scientists, FDA and NIH staff, and the lead HIV activists. Fauci had survived, and would live to fight another day.

For Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, life was never the same. After he mailed 110 million copies of his “Understanding AIDS”pamphlet right under Senator Jesse Helm’s nose, he received mountains of hate mail, but it only seemed to embolden him. He took his campaign to Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and appeared on Pat Robertson’s “700 Club”. He told Pat, “No conservative Christian leader, no conservative Christian publication, to my knowledge, has been critical of the Surgeon General’s report or of me, but many constituents of those denominations and movements have been… I’ve gotten a tremendous amount of hate mail. It’s vituperative. It again assumes, you know, that I’ve departed the faith, whatever that means.”

As the end of Reagan’s second term approached, Koop was once again asked by the President to generate a report. This time the President tossed him what he thought was a conservative soft ball. His enraged Moral Majority supporters, including Gary Bauer, had been looking for a way to signal to their constituents that Reagan was still in their camp. They had convinced themselves that there was good scientific evidence that abortion had a lasting negative physical and psychological effect on mothers. Reagan asked Koop to study it and report back.

With his usual diligence and thoroughness, he completed his work, and attempted to arrange a meeting with the President to share his findings. The meeting was blocked by Bauer as the President closed in on his final days of office. With few options, Koop released the news on January 9, 1989, that there would be no report, no conclusion. His investigation had determined that there was not sufficient evidence to warrant a conclusion, one way or the other.

The double-cross was now almost complete. The new President, George H.W. Bush, now found the iconic Surgeon General too hot to handle and took steps to move him out 3 1/2 months into his new presidency. As the Washington Post reported on May 5, 1989, “Friends say the controversial surgeon general was deeply angered when Bush did not nominate him to be secretary of health and human services or make any effort to keep him in his current job. . . he was frozen out.”

One year later, Koop published “The Agony of Deceit: What Some TV Preachers Are Really Teaching”. In it Koop leveled an attack on televangelists who see sickness as a sign of sin, and who claim that resistance to healing reflects a lack of faith. While Falwell and Robertson, Koop reasoned, might sometime in the future “forgive,” he knew in his heart that they and their accomplices would never, ever forget.

When Chick Koop died at age 96, on February 25, 2013, Tony Fauci recalled him saying, “Tony, you do the science, I’ll do the education for the public.”

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: Act Up > Christial televangelists > hiv/aids > Jerry Falwell > Koop > Pat Robertson > President HW Bush

Koop’s Ghost of Christmas Past Haunts RFK Jr.

Posted on | December 8, 2025 | 3 Comments

Mike Magee

The Ghost of Christmas Past, in the form of Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, has returned this season to torture one RFK Jr who refuses to fully share life saving vaccines with children. In the encounter, the ghostly Koop reviews a time 37 years ago when citizens came together to celebrate separating scientific fact from fiction with life-saving effects.

Beginning in 1988, the United States, along with the rest of the world, had formally acknowledged and celebrated World AIDS Day on December 1st each year – that is until 2025. At President’s Trump’s direction the State Department, and with HHS support, turned their back on an inconvenient truth – the Republican early record on HIV/AIDS. Let’s channel the truth-telling Surgeon General from Christmas past and remember this telling story.

On June 5, 1981, the CDC reported 6 cases of Pneumocystis carinii associated with a strange immune deficiency disorder in California men. Drs. Michael Gottlieb and Joel Weismann, infectious disease experts who delivered care routinely for members of the gay population in Los Angeles, had alerted the CDC. Inside the organization, there was a debate on how best to report this new illness in gay men.

The vehicle that the CDC chose was a weekly report called the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report or MMWR. So as not to offend, the decision was made to post the new finding, not on page 1, but on page 2, with no mention of homosexuality in the title. Almost no one noticed.

On April 13, 1982, nine months after the initial alert, Senator Henry Waxman held the first Congressional hearings on the growing epidemic. The CDC testified that tens of thousands were likely already infected. On September 24, 1982, the condition would for the first time carry the label, AIDS – acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

The new Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop’s focus at the time, along with the vast majority of public health leaders across the nation, was not on a new emerging infectious disease, but rather on the nation’s chronic disease burden, especially cardiovascular disease and cancer being fed by the post-war explosion of tobacco use. He had already surmised that the power of his position lie in communications and advocacy.

One month after his swearing in, he appeared on a panel to release a typically boring Surgeon General update report on tobacco. He was not intended to have a big role. When Koop rose to deliver what all thought would be brief, inconsequential remarks, he wasted no time disintegrating the lobbyist organization, the Tobacco Institute. For print journalists in the audience, he was clear, concise and quotable. For broadcast journalists, he was a dream come true – tall, erect with his Mennonite beard, in a dark suit with bow tie, exuding a combination of extreme confidence and legitimacy mixed with “don’t mess with me” swagger.

As Koop would later say, after that, “I began to be quoted as an authority. And the press from that time on was all on my side… I made snowballs and they threw ‘em.” The other thing that Koop noticed early was that the Reagan Administration didn’t shut him down. That was surprising since Koop’s major supporter in a year long confirmation battle (the AMA opposed his appointment) was NC arch-conservative Senator Jesse Helms.

Add to Jesse’s wrath, R.J. Reynold’s CEO, Edward Horrigan, complained directly to Reagan about Koop’s “increasingly shrill preachments. Cigarette consumption in the US was in free fall. By 1987, 40 states would have laws banning smoking in public places; 33 states had bans in public transportation; and 17 already had eliminated workplace smoking.

Still Reagan didn’t shut him down. Now everyone from public schools to medical groups to women’s associations to civic enterprises wanted him. And beginning in late 1982, he arrived in full regalia, in a magnificent Public Health Service, Vice-Admiral’s uniform with ribbons and epaulettes. And his aide, also in uniform, always carried with him a bag of buttons for distribution which read, “The Surgeon General personally asked me to quit smoking.”

But in the most pressing public health challenge of the day, HIV/AIDS, the department was AWOL. Koop was actively sidelined by top Administration officials. Not surprisingly, the situation deteriorated rapidly. Everyone was feeling the heat, including the CDC, who removed funding for AIDS education after being accused of promoting sodomy by conservatives.

As more and more people died – now not only gays, but also heterosexuals, hemophiliacs, drug users, newborns of infected mothers – Reagan’s silence became deafening. To relieve the pressure, in 1986, the President finally freed Koop’s hands and directed him to coordinate a report on AIDS for the American public.

In October, 1986, Reagan first uttered the word, AIDS. By then, over 16,000 Americans were already dead. Inside his Administration, Reagan gave voice earlier to people like Education Secretary Bill Bennett who discouraged providing AIDS information in schools and Domestic Policy Adviser and Christian evangeliser Gary Bauer, who Koop said, was “my nemesis in Washington because he kept me from the President. He kept me from the cabinet and he set up a wall of enmity between me and most of the people that surrounded Reagan because he believed that anybody who had AIDS ought to die with it. That was God’s punishment for them.”

On May 31, 1987, Reagan, at the urging of his wife Nancy and their friend and actress Elizabeth Taylor, delivered his first major address on the topic at the American Foundation for AIDS Research event. It was six years late. 21,000 Americans were now dead, and 36,000 more lived with a diagnosis of the disease.

His prior inaction could not be blamed on ignorance or lack of exposure. Koop had done his best to keep the President informed. But the doors of the White House remained wide open to the Christian Conservative elite. Policies were being pushed, as promised, to reinstitute traditional Judeo-Christian values. All the while, a pandemic was raging, which some believed was “the hand of God at work”. And yet, there was the wild card. Koop, now self proclaimed the “Nation’s Doctor”, had evolved.

A critical turning point for the pediatric surgeon turned Surgeon General had come earlier, on December 17,1984, when a young hemophiliac from Kokomo, Indiana, undergoing a partial lung removal for severe consolidated pneumonia, was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. His name was Ryan White. He was 14 years old at the time. He became infected while receiving an infusion of a blood derivative, Factor VIII, for his hemophilia. When he was cleared to return to school, 50 teachers and over a third of the parents of students from his school signed a petition asking that his attendance be barred.

Koop clearly understood that continued inaction on his part would be unacceptable. This was what could happen when scientific fact and fictions deliberately distorted. In the absence of his leadership and the provision of proper health education, ignorance and prejudice would rein supreme.

Ryan White (after the state’s health commissioner and the New England Journal of Medicine reinforced that the child’s disease could not be spread by casual contact) was readmitted to school in April, 1985. He would die 5 years later, and legislation, in his name, would open up much needed federal funding to care for those affected by the disease.

By then, President Reagan, feeling the pressure, finally did direct Koop to create a report, he was more than prepared to respond. He interviewed AIDS activists, representatives from the medical and hospital associations, Christian fundamentalists, and politicians from both sides of the aisle. Few knew fully what he was up to. One exception was his colleague and personal physician at the National Institute of Health, Infectious Disease specialist, Tony Fauci, who headed up the AIDS Research effort for the NIH.

Fauci had a troubled history with AIDS activists. This dated back to a serious misstep by him on May 6, 1983. On that date, the Journal of the American Medical Association generated a press release, liberally quoting Fauci, titled “Evidence Suggests Household Contact May Transmit AID’s”. In the piece, the NIH scientist says, “We are witnessing at the present time the evolution of a new disease process of unknown etiology with a mortality of at least 50% and possibly as high as 75% to 100% with the doubling of the number of patients afflicted every six months…If routine close contact can spread the disease, AIDS takes on an entirely new dimension.”

The release, not surprisingly caused a massive wave of public hysteria. The Religious Right came out of the woodwork. The executive vice-president of Moral Majority said, “We feel the deepest sympathy for AIDS victims, but I’m upset that the government is not spending more money to protect the general public from the gay plague.”

Fauci was much more careful after that, taking good council from Koop on public information techniques. At the same time, Koop learned everything he could about the virus, its’ behavior and transmission from Fauci, which he intended to share with the public in the future. Fauci also was the first to actively include the vocal AIDS activists in the government’s scientific advisory boards in their effort to combat the disease. At first the target of their anger and frustration, as more and more died in the face of a clearly disinterested government and hysterical public, Fauci subsequently earned the praise and admiration of leaders of the AIDS activist community.

Koop would consult with Fauci, day by day, as he formulated his drafts in secret. Fauci would later note, “He would come home from hearings downtown as things started to accelerate with HIV. As he was walking home, he had to pass my office. Around 7:30 at night, he would come knock at my door. He would say this thing about AIDS is very troubling, and I want to make the right impression on public awareness. He got it in his mind that we as the federal government need to be explicit about this — oral and anal sex, commercial sex. He was hell-bent on doing it. When it came out, it shocked a lot of people because of its explicitness.”

The report drew immediate criticism from the Conservative Right, but nothing compared to the furor that arose nineteen months later.

In the period following the initial report’s release, Koop quietly employed the Public Relations firm, Ogilvy and Mather, to make certain he had the messaging, language and imaging right. He then created an 8-page pamphlet for mail distribution under the title “Understanding AIDS,” after raising adequate funding on the side, from various branches of government, to support the mass mailing costs of delivering 107 million copies of the publication to every household in America.

His message was a call to action. His dramatic image was attached to the title: “A Message From The Surgeon General”. Understanding AIDS was not an innocent read. It was frank and factual, covering anal and vaginal intercourse, injectable drug transmission, and condoms for starters. It promoted sex education beginning in elementary school and pierced the current messaging of the most popular Christian televangelists of the day with this comment: “Who you are has nothing to do with whether you are in danger of being infected with the AIDS virus. What matters is what you do.”

The huge 1988 print run had required government printing press activities 24 hours a day for several weeks. Delivering the load for mailing utilized 38 boxcars. And approval for the mailing skirted normal procedure. When the eight page pamphlets began to arrive, the phones in the Senate offices of conservatives like Jess Helms rang off the hooks. Televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and their followers were apoplectic. Attempts to halt it were futile. The mass mailing had been completed in bulk. There was no going back.

His ghostly presence these days should disturb the sleep of RFK Jr. As Jacob Marley expressed to his ghost, “I wear the chain I forged in life.” At least for the moment, eternal torment appears this Kennedy’s reward.

Not so for C. Everett Koop. Whether personal religious or political motivation, his actions were guided by a fierce commitment to scientific integrity. When criticized Koop took no prisoners. His reply: “I’m the nation’s doctor, not the nation’s chaplain.”