Bob Park’s What’s New: June 20, 2025
No, Bob Park — the physicist who wrote the What’s New newsletter for years — did not write this. Instead, I am imagining what Park would have said were he alive today. The opinions are mine and not necessarily those of Bob Park (but they should be).
What’s New, by Bob Park
Friday, June 20, 2025
1. IS THE CORN BELT MOVING TO CANADA?
A new paper in the journal Nature (Volume 642, Pages 644–652) argues that global warming will reduce the world’s capacity to grow food, even after accounting for adaptation by farmers. In the US, the corn belt (that’s you, Iowa) may be hit especially hard (yield down 40%). Canada, on the other hand, may see a corn boom. Oh well, we can always switch to wheat or soy beans. Just joking, those crops are predicted to be down in the US too.
2. ONLY THE SENATE CAN SAVE US FROM DEVASTATING CUTS IN FUNDING
Liz Boatman published an article this week in the APS News titled “Physicists Working on Breakthrough Medical Treatments Face an Uncertain Future.” Boatman quotes Amanda Peiffer, a post doc at MIT: “‘The whole machine stops without the federal funding mechanism in place,’ says Peiffer, who is waiting to hear from NIH about multiple grants. ‘If we cannot get funding in, it will be absolutely devastating to the graduate students. The postdocs will inevitably have to leave.’” But Boatman provides a note of hope at the end of her article. “The Trump administration’s budget proposal cannot take effect unless Congress approves. The final budget will emerge from negotiations between both congressional chambers, and it can look very different from what the president initially requested.” In other words, the Senate could save us. But will it?
3. FIRED MEMBERS OF ACIP SPEAK OUT
The recently fired members of the Center of Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices wrote an opinion piece published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). They write that “as former ACIP members, we are deeply concerned that these destabilizing decisions, made without clear rationale, may roll back the achievements of US immunization policy, impact people’s access to lifesaving vaccines, and ultimately put US families at risk of dangerous and preventable illnesses.” Who’s responsible for this action? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, who the Encyclopedia of American Loons describes as “a traditional crank and deluded conspiracy theorist who is thoroughly anti-science… He is enormously influential, and must be considered one of the more dangerous people in the US today.” Or in other words, our Secretary of Health and Human Services.
4. THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION CALLS FOR AN INVESTIGATION
The American Medical Association — the largest professional association of medical doctors in the United States — has issued an emergency resolution, calling for the “immediate reversal of the recent changes to the [CDC’s] Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.” It also intends to send a letter to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions to request an investigation into the actions of the RFK Jr. Finally, it plans to initiate “sustained public advocacy in support of the current [ACIP] structure.” Good news, but I doubt RFK Jr will change his mind, given that he calls the AMA a “pharma lobbying group.”
5. A LOT OF AMERICANS ARE GOING TO DIE
Dr. Fiona Havers resigned from the CDC this week. She was responsible for the collection of data about covid hospitalizations. She said in an email to her former colleagues that she no longer believed that the data she was collecting would be “evaluated with appropriate scientific rigor to make evidence-based vaccine policy decisions.” Ouch! This brave scientist warns us that because of RFK Jr’s policies “a lot of Americans are going to die as a result of vaccine-preventable diseases.”