Why despair over our descent into a failed democracy, when you can worry about the odds of being hit by an asteroid instead? The International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), a global collaboration started in 2013 to monitor and track space objects that could impact Earth issued its first-ever Potential Asteroid Impact Notification for the asteroid, known as 2024 YR4. The football field-sized rock is estimated to have a larger than 2% chance to hit earth in 2023. (Ref.) Give or take a few percent, predictions seem to fluctuate….

There are several reasons why I am bringing up asteroids today.

The benign reason: I recently located my long lost photographs from a trip to Mexico and am eager to share the colors, so prevalent in the entire city scape, on a grey Monday morning. We’ll take cheer where we can find it! The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and caused the extinction of approximately 75% of all species, including non-avian dinosaurs, also hit in Mexico. The Chicxulub impactor struck Earth about 66 million years ago near the Yucatán Peninsula, or so I learn from ScienceAlert.

The re-assuring reason: that new celestial interloper is not assumed to be an extinction event, even though it could do extensive local damage if it would hit populated areas.

The enraging reason: will we have the relevant scientists engaged in monitoring and protection against natural phenomena in 8 year’s time, heck, six months from now? Will we have means of gathering information about scientific data, developments and warnings from official websites, unless we go to international sources outside of the U.S.?

Unless you live under a rock, you will have noticed that scientific websites are disappearing left and right, at the same time that scientists are fired en masse and also threatened not to communicate privately about the state of affairs or else. It might make you think of that movie “Don’t look up” that described the authoritarian mindset of a future US regime insisting that what you don’t see or count, doesn’t exist. That way you can exploit an un-aggrieved population until the last minute before the asteroid hits. We had an inkling of that with regard to the expressed desires by the 2016 iteration of this administration, to disappear Covid-19 statistics when 2020 arrived.

But now it has hit for real: entire organization websites, from weather predictors (NOAA weather and climate science websites have disappeared), to general health access, from reproductive rights information to vaccination information, all gone. As of last Friday, the CDC was ordered by HHS to take down all flu related campaign materials from its website – during the worst flu season in decades. Add to that the growing fear that mass vaccinations are going to be actively discouraged, if not entirely prohibited.

It is not just about public health information and appeals disappearing – whole data sets are purged, a kind of digital book burning. Science cannot proceed without building on established data. And medicine cannot treat without access to available diagnostic tools and treatment options – this is particularly evident in neonatal care: very occasionally newborn babies have unusual, hard to identify symptoms. Access to data bases at the Center for Disease Control or the National Institute for Health can provide quick answers what to expect and what to do. Can? Could. Data have been taken down, more than 8000 pages have been taken off-line, rare disease information included, leaving neo-natal units scrambling to come up with answers in a race against time.

Here is a table with just some of the disappeared or altered data sets. Not a complete sample, since vaccine info removal only happened last week.

Scientists, both on an individual basis and in organizational settings, are trying to rescue whatever data they can with downloading marathons. According to Wikipedia, the Internet Archive has been successful in archiving many health datasets. Internet Archive is also a contributor to the consortium effort of developing the End of Term Web Archive, which attempts to copy every government publication at the end of every presidential term.The Harvard Law School Library hosts the Data.gov Archive,  Harvard’s Chan School mirrored public health records. A coalition of data organizations launched the Data Rescue Project “as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts”.

With regard to climate science, or astronomy, to get back to our asteroid projections, the End of Term Web Archive have captured snapshots of millions of government webpages and made them accessible through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The group has done this after each administration since 2008. (Ref.) But archived data are harder to access, and eventually of no use, if they are not updated. Today’s (alarmed!) New Republic has a detailed overview of the Republican war on information (their phrasing.)

For me, the question I’d like to have answered is: why? Why deprive a nation of the public good of scientific data? I guess one could follow the money and claim that the absence of publicly available information means we have to pay for it from private providers. Disappearing the language around Diversity, Equity and Inclusion by off-lining any scientific research around vulnerable population might feed into the attempt to eradicate those concepts (and people) from public discourse altogether.

But what use has the undermining of public health by enabling the spread of contagious diseases, or by preventing the diagnoses and potential cures for rare diseases? Is it a religious, anti-science bent that requires acceptance of deadly strikes? Is it eugenic lust for eradication of all who are weak, physically or economically? Is it prediction of future scarcity due to climate effects, scarcity which would be lessened by gradual depopulation? I am not saying it is any of these, I am seriously searching for answers, because the purges of both scientists and scientific data make no economic sense whatsoever for the country as a whole, once a true public health crisis emerges. So “follow the money” simply doesn’t work here. I welcome suggestions!

Music today has the appropriate theme: Prayer Central…. a movement from Terry Riley’s ˆSun Rings” with the Kronos Quartett.