This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
Beautiful little babies born without arms, or without legs, or suffering other extreme deformities. I still remember, as a young boy, paging through the latest issue of Life magazine and seeing all these shocking and heart-breaking photos. An estimated 10,000 children had been born with such severe deformities in a short period of time, most of them in Europe, though a small number in the U.S.
Introduced as a sedative to help pregnant women with morning sickness, anxiety or sleeplessness, thalidomide has long been regarded as the cause of one of the greatest medical scandals in world history.
That was 1962. Two years later, in 1964, the surgeon general of the United States revealed with maximum publicity that smoking tobacco – at the time widespread, heavily advertised and glorified throughout the culture – causes cancer. Oops.
Fast forward to today, in a time of much greater scientific and medical knowledge, experience and supposedly far stricter drug-testing requirements … and everything is worse.
How can that possibly be?
A brief overview of Americans' alarmingly declining health demonstrates conclusively that "Make America Healthy Again," the new Trump administration agenda inspired and led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., couldn't be more vital – indeed, crucial. Consider:
* The U.S. is in the grip of a full-blown obesity epidemic, with well over 200 million Americans – including millions of children – being overweight or obese. According to the CDC, over 40% of adults in the United States are clinically obese – a serious medical condition – in stark contrast with the 1950s, when approximately 10% of U.S. adults were obese.
* The number of American children and adults with autism spectrum disorders has exploded, rising by 175% over just the last decade. One out of every 36 children in the U.S. has been diagnosed with autism, up from 1 in 44 as recently as 2021. In contrast, during the 1950s, autism was virtually nonexistent, afflicting between 0.01% and 0.05% of Americans born during that decade.
* Early-onset cancer cases rose almost 80% over the last three decades and show no signs of slowing down. One major 2022 study reveals the incidence of early-onset cancers – including breast, colon, esophagus, kidney, liver and pancreas – has been dramatically increasing since around 1990.
* A staggering 38 million Americans are suffering from diabetes, a number expected to increase to almost 55 million in the next five years. During the late 1950s, the prevalence of diabetes in the U.S. was estimated to be 9 cases per 1,000 people, for a total of 1 million cases.
What's going on? Why is the health of Americans degrading so radically? With the rapid growth of knowledge and technology, including medical technology, one might expect the exact opposite to be the case – that everyone's health would be ever improving.
Yet Americans are becoming less and less healthy, including, tragically, the nation's children. Statistics vary, but as many as half of America's children are dealing with some sort of chronic health issue, up from less than 1% five decades ago.
Obviously, with Americans' health in crisis, the goal to "Make America Healthy Again" is welcome and necessary. But there's one major obstacle to achieving this goal that needs to be addressed up front.
They all lied
As deadly and traumatizing as the COVID-19 pandemic was, it did bring about a mass awakening in at least one important area: Americans discovered they absolutely could not trust the government agencies tasked with safeguarding their health. From the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to the Food and Drug Administration, to the National Institutes of Health and other branches of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, they all lied to Americans, either explicitly or by willful suppression of the truth.
Most visible, of course – and setting the standard for all other government bureaucrats – was Dr. Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, under the NIH. Fauci acted the part of the kindly, grandfatherly presidential adviser on all things COVID. Unfortunately, he turned out to be a classic sociopath, smiling while lying about virtually everything – from mask-wearing (he initially admitted the truth, that masks are ineffective, only later doing a full 180 and insisting on universal masking, even outdoors!) to imposing the "six-foot rule" (later admitting this arbitrary rule was based on exactly zero science), to perversely denying that natural immunity provided ideal protection against COVID-19 just as it does for other viruses – a pivotal and unconscionable lie that flung open the doors to ruthless vaccine mandates.
