Some great news came out of Texas this week. Great, that is, if you happen to be one of the better-known viral diseases. Measles is going gangbusters, and in cases at the Covenant Children’s hospital in Lubbock, now comes as a twofer with liver poisoning caused by elevated levels of Vitamin A.
The reason? Hello, Robert F Kennedy jr, US Health Secretary, conspiracy theorist, notable brainworm host and promoter of cod liver oil as a therapy for a disease declared extinct in America 25 years ago.
For an organism without a vote, measles has a multitude of reasons to be grateful to the new US administration. On April Fool’s Day, Trump’s man laid off 10,000 employees at the Department of Health and Human Services. For him, this constituted a milestone on his mission to make America healthy again. For Peter Marks, a senior vaccine official who resigned before he could be defenestrated, it was evidence that his new boss did not desire “truth and transparency … but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”
If you know your Russian history, you may hear an echo. In 1948, the Soviet Union declared that genetics was a bourgeoise lie and installed a new orthodoxy - the Marxist pseudoscience of Trofim Lysenko, a charlatan who faked his experiments and claimed to be able to turn wheat into rye. Dissenters were dismissed, imprisoned or executed.
US scientists who recoil from RFK jr’s fringe views face only the first of these penalties, but their feelings are already on the record. A Nature magazine poll conducted just before the bloodbath at the HHS found that 75 per cent of respondents were thinking of emigrating, mostly to Canada or Europe.
This is a sad number – particularly for those patients in Lubbock, Texas. In it, however, lies a germ of good news for more than just the measles virus. If an American brain drain flows our way, it might produce one of those moments when the right thing to do is indistinguishable from naked self-interest.
Imagine a British politician – the Prime Minister, the Mayor of London – offering the American intelligentsia a home in exile. The speech would be a doddle to write. It would envision London’s doctor recruitment crisis solved, institutions energised by American cleverness, pioneers in the MRNA field to which RFK jr is hostile putting us at forefront of a medical revolution. It could ask us to think of a banner at the mouth of the Thames: Give me your tired neuroscientists, your poor researchers, your huddled virologists yearning to breathe free.
Add a couple of further attractions and the UK will be magnetised
The nostrils of William Hague, former leader of the Conservative Party, new Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, already smell opportunity. This week he argued for a reform of the UK visa system for high-skilled applicants. It could be carried out, he suggested, “in days, not months.”
He is wrong. It could be done in an afternoon. The government already has a system for fast-tracking leading scholars and scientists into the UK. The Global Talent visa scheme dispenses with the usual caveats about income and jobs and offers five-year visas to both applicants and their dependents.
In most cases the Royal Society advises the Home Office on which candidates to endorse. However, winners of a very short list of international prizes – the Nobel, the Lovelace Medal, the Isaac Newton medal – receive an automatic yes. Expand that list and add a couple of further attractions – waiving the £716 application fee and the health surcharge on NHS services – and the UK is magnetised.
There is a precedent. Émigré talent fleeing Nazism enriched the British film business, summoned several London publishers into being, gave us Pevsner’s Guides. In the 1950s, the efforts of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee brought blacklisted screenwriters and filmmakers to Walton on Thames, where they created The Adventures of Robin Hood, the first British TV show to conquer America.
We might argue that such comparisons are in bad taste; that despite the straight-armed salutes, Trumpism is not Fascism. (It doesn’t, for instance, seem to give a damn about whether the trains run on time.) We might say – as the National Review argued – that Nature’s 75 per cent filled out that survey in a spirit of hysteria. Conversely, we might say that those already leaving – such as the three Yale professors who defected this week to Canada – should have stood and fought their ground.
Or we could put those arguments to one side, illuminate the welcome sign, and make it clear that we will support them, whatever their decision.
And if RFK jr makes American healthy again, those scientists can go home, apologise to him — and the worm that once lived inside his head — and buy him a world’s greatest boss mug — with some of the cash they earned here.
Matthew Sweet is a broadcaster and journalist
