jpedmd2026-10-06T13:21:26-05:00October 6th, 2026|

Alito, from Heather Cox Richardson’s October 5 substack:

“Alito went on to say that he does not anticipate that the court will overturn the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision recognizing the right to same-sex marriage. That case is different from Roe v. Wade, he said, because people have come to rely on Obergefell as they organize their lives.

“One of the important factors we take into account in deciding whether we should reexamine a past decision is the degree to which there has been reliance on the decision,” Alito said. “Obviously a great deal had changed in the country as a result of Obergefell. There was a lot of reliance in various ways on the decision in Obergefell.”

In fact, all but one of the justices who overturned Roe—Thomas declined to answer—said in their confirmation hearings that they considered Roe settled law. Crawford pointed out that people thought Roe was settled law and had organized their lives around it, just as people had organized their lives around Obergefell.

“After Obergefell, people of the same sex got married and entered into contracts…it was much more concrete,” Alito told Crawford. “Whereas with Roe, the argument was made that it had an effect on people’s ideas, women’s ideas about the kind of society that they were going to live in, that this would have an effect on the society. It was much more abstract than what would’ve been involved had we been asked to overrule Obergefell.””

Yes, being forced to carry a pregnancy resulting from a rape is truly an abstraction.  Forcing women to continue a pregnancy that increases their mortality risk compared to the alternative is an abstraction.  And women don’t organize their lives around unplanned pregnancies. Right.

And from RFK Jr.:

He likes to pretend Americans were much healthier 60 years ago: “I was raised in a time where we did not have a chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy testified during his confirmation hearing, suggesting that since his uncle’s presidency, the percentage of children with chronic illnesses had surged from 2% to 66%. But U.S. life expectancy has jumped from 69.7 years in 1960 to 79 years in 2024. Children are five times less likely to die in infancy or early childhood than when Kennedy was president, largely due to vaccines.

jpedmd2026-10-06T13:38:47-05:00September 15th, 2026|

Writing in the NYT, Thomas Edsall lays out the obvious evidence of a president in mental decline in his opinion piece Trump Has Untethered Himself From Reality.  An excerpt:

 “On April 30 of this year Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed, Democrats of Rhode Island, placed in the Congressional Record a statement by 36 prominent medical specialists questioning Trump’s mental fitness for office: ‘We are compelled to warn of a president of the United States who is increasingly a danger to the public.'”

As further evidence, see his DJYT’s social media post from today, September 15, one day after the Supreme Court ruled against his efforts to suborn the midterms in United States Postal Service v. California et al:

“It is a Court that will go down as having rendered some of the most destructive, hurtful, and damaging decisions in our Country’s history,” he wrote.

Yes, Donald, it will – but not for this ruling. Rather, see Trump v. United States, one giving him almost unlimited immunity for actions as president, and one that will surely go down in infamy as the principal enabler of this corrupt narcissist’s terrible actions.

• Worth reading: Eliot Cohen, writing in the Atlantic, “Hegseth’s One Percent“; an excerpt:

“What is even worse than biblical illiteracy and historical ignorance from this product of Princeton and Harvard Universities is a project about which he seems to be deadly serious: the cultural isolation of the military. His speeches subtly denigrate the general officer corps and focus on the most impressionable segment of the military, those old enough to have bought into the system but young enough to be naive about its merits…It is profoundly dangerous stuff, the antithesis of what soldiers such as George C. Marshall or Dwight Eisenhower believed, that the soldier is a citizen first, that one cannot adequately defend this society without believing in its values and its essential goodness, that an air of contempt is incompatible with a life of self-abnegation.”

• These, of course, are only a few of the broken promises from the Drumpf. Save Rattner and Taylor Maggiacomo document 11 of the larger ones in the NYT here.

• Leaving aside the evident ignorance (?idiocy) implicit in T***’s comments when presenting his executive order on immunizations (e.g. “bottle of soda”, “gallons”, “possibility they’re quite lethal”, “nothing bad can happen from what we’re doing”, “72 shots”, etc.), there was no discussion of any cost/benefit analysis.  Robert Shpiner MD does a good job explaining in his Medpage Today perspective Trump’s Vaccine Order Will Show Up in My ICU. Some excerpts:

“The order recommends that childhood vaccines be given at separate visits. The president was explicit at the signing: “at 1 year, you should have five separate visits for vaccines rather than getting them all in the same day.” It also says the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine should be split into separate shots for each disease, even though no such versions are licensed in the U.S. The order also reduces the number of universally recommended childhood vaccines, placing hepatitis A and B vaccines, meningococcal B and ACWY vaccines into the high-risk only category, and moving flu and COVID shots to shared decision-making.”

The costs:

“This is arithmetic any of us can run — and a calculation the government should have run. Based on the existing schedule, U.S. children need roughly 25 injectionsopens in a new tab or window by age 6 (not including annual flu shots), delivered today across seven visits or so. One at a time, they would need 25 individual visits. That would mean nearly four times the time spent traveling to and enduring doctor’s visits; four times the co-pays that too many families already can’t afford; four times the complaints from the child who fears needles. More visits would mean more missed visits. Hours for each visit — between travel, time in the pediatric waiting room, and the visit itself — are hours of pay that would not appear in a parent’s paycheck.

None of this appears in the order. Sections 1 through 5 say nothing about cost, Medicaid, or resources, and the supplementary White House fact sheet is similarly silent.”

Of course, right now it’s impossible to accurately compute the additional costs of controlling future outbreaks related to a decline in vaccine-induced herd immunity, or medical care for the many possible delayed medical issues related to decreased immunizations (liver failure from congenitally acquired Hepatitis B, brain damage or death due to meningococcal meningitis, congenital rubella syndrome, increased pediatric admissions for influenza and COVID, etc., etc.).

The benefits: The only one cited was fewer shots in one pediatric visit — which of course will likely result in increased costs rather than any benefit.