• CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldOP
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    5 days ago

    Assuming they are his kids? One of those kids had their lives made remarkably better by a treatment for cystic fibrosis. Vought is likely behind the forced retirement of that person - Francis Collins.

    I mean, it is absolutely insane how sick and gross Vought is. Imagine being that much of an ideologue, simmering with rage, that you would do this amount of destruction on something that helped your kid so very much.

    https://slate.com/culture/2026/10/trump-elon-musk-doge-us-government-spending-federal-workers-blockers-michael-lewis-book.html

    Collins’ story also underlines the appalling reckless of the second Trump administration’s hatchet work. Russell Vought—director of the Office of Management and Budget and fingered by Lewis as a likely suspect in Collins’ “whacking”—has a daughter with cystic fibrosis. “As he considered his child,” Lewis writes, “Vought had to know—and might have allowed himself to care—that he owed her life to Francis Collins and, more broadly, to work sponsored for fifty or more years by the National Institutes of Health.” When he got the ax, Collins asked for a pass that would allow him to continue working at his lab at the NIH (without pay), researching a disease that causes premature aging in children. He was told by a Trump flunkey named Matt Memoli that if he didn’t clear out entirely, he’d be publicly blamed for funding research at a lab in China where the COVID virus was allegedly “cooked up.”

    • NekoKoneko@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      He was told by a Trump flunkey named Matt Memoli that if he didn’t clear out entirely, he’d be publicly blamed for funding research at a lab in China where the COVID virus was allegedly “cooked up.”

      How do we know this administration is staffed by the worst people, when the adage says there’s always someone worse? It’s because they keep outdoing themselves. Somehow there’s always one more story about what they’ve been doing that’s so unimaginably evil it keeps surprising you.

      • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldOP
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        5 days ago

        The book Blockers is good, and I recommend it, but fair warning: it will piss you off. Assuming the reader is a normal human being.