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I am one of the many who regretfully parted ways with The Washington Post after Jeff Bezos decided that the paper’s editorial pages would be writing “in defense of personal liberties and free markets.” Newspaper opinion pages, Bezos said [ [link removed] ], no longer needed to host a wide spectrum of views or make room for opinions not aligned with their editorial stance because “the Internet does that job.” It seems that Bezos, the Internet billionaire, is not very well-acquainted with the Internet.
Some of my regret in parting with The Post was that I would no longer be supporting the serious journalists still working there. A few of my favorites have left, but there are still some hard-working reporters at the paper. One of them is Lena H. Sun [ [link removed] ]. She reports on national health issues, which is less boring but scarier than it used to be. She must feel the occasional urge to bang her head on her desk or throw her laptop out the window while writing about things like the nearly eradicated measles [ [link removed] ] virus’s big comeback in the United States, or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. closing the only lab [ [link removed] ] in the U.S. capable of testing for and tracking “super gonorrhea,” or anything Kennedy has said about autism or vaccines or health or dead bear cubs [ [link removed] ].
My favorite Lena Sun story [ [link removed] ] is one I shared in a speech at last year’s North Dakota Democratic-NPL Governor’s Dinner. The story began with a black-and-white kitten adopted by an Omaha, Nebraska couple after a neighbor found the tuxedo-patterned kitty meowing in her driveway. I had not arrived at the dinner with any plan to talk about the kitten story and was a bit fuzzy on the details, so I referred to the couple who had adopted the kitten as Mr. and Mrs. Katz, which is what I will stick with for this post.
Mr. and Mrs. Katz named the kitten Stanley and did their best for him, but little Stanley did not thrive. At one point, Mr. Katz revived the kitten with chest compressions, and they rushed him to the veterinarian. Sadly, even the veterinarian’s best efforts and Mr. Katz’s cat-paramedic heroics couldn’t extend Stanley’s short nine lives. Tests later revealed that Stanley had died not from super gonorrhea, but from rabies, and further testing showed that it was a particular strain of raccoon rabies that had never been detected west of the Appalachians.
What followed was the reason I talked about the Katz family and their kitten at the Governor’s Dinner: local, state, and federal agencies responded in force. They tracked down and treated everyone who might have been exposed to Stanley. They investigated how the kitten had shown up in Omaha infected with an Eastern-Seaboard strain of rabies, and they worked to keep it from spreading beyond the immediate area. It was a multi-faceted effort to fix a potentially expensive problem for which there was no free-market solution.
It was an ounce of prevention worth far more than a pound of cure. In the United States, about 55,000 people receive post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) for rabies each year. The PEP treatment—four doses of vaccine and one of rabies immunoglobulin—costs around [ [link removed] ]$5000, so human post-exposure treatment alone costs Americans $275 million annually. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC [ [link removed] ]), government surveillance and prevention measures reduce the cost of health care for rabies in the United States by over $1 billion per year.
The biggest player in the fight to control rabies in wildlife is the USDA [ [link removed] ]. As part of the United States National Plan for Wildlife Rabies Management (USNP [ [link removed] ]), the USDA annually distributes about ten million oral rabies vaccine packets, mostly via air drop. Ninety percent of the vaccine baits target raccoons from Alabama to Maine. Around a million packets are placed along the Texas-Mexico border to prevent the reemergence of canine rabies in coyotes and domestic dogs—an effort estimated to save $4 to $13 for every dollar spent.
In Omaha, the raccoon vaccine packets were distributed over a large radius around the city. Wildlife biologists also trapped and vaccinated raccoons, skunks, and foxes, while mobile CDC labs tested roadkill for rabies. The strain of rabies that killed poor Stanley Katz was not found anywhere and has not since emerged in the area. It was a successful mission and a happy ending for everybody except Stanley.
The lab that determined which rabies variant had killed Stanley was able to do so because of a grant from the CDC. Federal grants and agreements with Universities from Washington State to Puerto Rico have also advanced rabies-related research. That research is motivated by curiosity and problem solving, not profit. It is the kind of basic research that tends to pay off far down the road for everybody, not in the short term for just a few. It is the kind of research that has made the United States a world leader in science, technology and innovation.
Indiscriminate cuts to government agencies and to grants for university research have put that leadership at risk and set the United States up for an unprecedented brain drain. Europe is actively recruiting [ [link removed] ] American researchers. Professors and research supervisors are encouraging talented young researchers to seek opportunities overseas where funding is more stable and the environment more friendly. The Trump administration’s war on higher education and capricious treatment of foreign students have also made the U.S. a less attractive destination for foreign citizens seeking advanced degrees or private-sector research opportunities.
I am absolutely sure that the DOGE kid who called himself “Big Balls” on the Internet does not have the cojones to vaccinate a live-trapped skunk. I am equally confident that federal grants for basic research in any single year are much more likely to pay for themselves than anything DOGE will do over the next three years. I would rather see my tax dollars fund wildlife biologists and university researchers than companies like SpaceX—companies that stand on the shoulders of those who did the basic research. Investment in basic research lead to the breakthroughs and innovations that made us the envy of other nations for decades. Already, that envy show signs of turning to pity.
I learned from Lena H. Sun’s story that suburban Omaha has 104 raccoons per square mile, and I am pretty sure the Souris River Valley where I live has an even higher concentration of raccoons than that. I also learned that wildlife biologists used anise oil and marshmallows to lure raccoons into their live-catch traps. So, I went to my wife and said, “I have a really cool idea: Let’s get some black licorice and marshmallows and see how many raccoons we can lure to the yard. It will make a great YouTube video.”
She didn’t think it was such a cool idea. “Think of the diseases,” she said.
“You mean like super gonorrhea?” I asked. “I don’t think that’s anything to worry about—not like koalas and chlamydia [ [link removed] ].”
I forgot that I had told her about raccoon roundworm [ [link removed] ] and how raccoons defecate in communal latrines, like proper soldiers. She didn’t want raccoons turning our garden into a wormy outhouse, she said. It was a good point. Her best points often run counter to my cool ideas, which is why squirrels don’t yet scurry across our back yard on a tiny rope bridge.
Somewhere in the United States, there is probably a raccoon chewing on a rabies vaccine packet coated with fish flakes. Meanwhile, a researcher in a college lab is experimenting with vaccine-delivery systems for bats, which are the vector for 70% of human rabies infections here. Someone else might be working on eradicating raccoon roundworm. Meanwhile, antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea could be racing through the dating population like chlamydia through a koala orgy. Thanks to RFK, Jr., we just don’t know.

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