This speech was given by Evan Blake, Coordinator of the Global Workers' Inquest into the COVID-19 Pandemic, at the International May Day 2025 Online Rally, held Saturday, May 3.

Revolutionary greetings to all those attending today’s May Day rally from throughout the world.

In just over three months, Donald Trump and RFK Jr. have unleashed a fascist war on science and public health unlike anything in modern American history. They are carrying out a scorched-earth campaign to destroy all the gains won by generations of workers and scientists. It is a counterrevolution designed to drag global society back to the conditions of industrial slavery and barbarism not seen since the Nazi regime.

Let us be clear about what has taken place. In just three months:

• Over 20,000 scientists and public health workers have been fired from the Department of Health and Human Services, gutting the CDC, NIH, FDA and every other agency responsible for the health and safety of the population.

• 90 percent of the staff at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) have been terminated, ending research into workplace safety, chemical exposure and protective equipment.

• The CDC’s Global Health Center and Chronic Disease Prevention programs have been dissolved, crippling outbreak detection in over 40 countries and halting diabetes and heart disease tracking for tens of millions.

• Dozens of other programs and agencies have been eviscerated, including many related to climate change and environmental sciences.

• Thousands of pages of scientific information have been scrubbed from government websites, in a form of modern-day book burning, while gag orders silence scientists and prevent the public from accessing vital health information.

This is not “cost-saving.” It is a deliberate, fascist effort to destroy the infrastructure of scientific research and public health that underpin modern society.

These attacks have vast global ramifications. The planned elimination of PEPFAR funding will deny HIV/AIDS treatment to tens of millions, reversing decades of progress and condemning millions of people to death. A recent scientific model projects that if these cuts are not reversed, 25 million people will die preventable deaths over the next 15 years, including 15 million from HIV/AIDS alone, with sub-Saharan Africa hit particularly hard.

The US withdrawal from the World Health Organization and the dismantling of pandemic surveillance programs means the world is now flying blind in the face of new and emerging threats. These include H5N1 “bird flu,” which scientists warn requires only one mutation to develop the capacity for human-to-human transmission.

The reckless policies of the Trump administration are not simply the product of incompetence, though this is certainly in no short supply. But more fundamentally, these fascists are consciously implementing a eugenicist program, reviving the Nazi doctrine of Lebensunwertes Leben (or “life unworthy of life”), treating the vulnerable and all those who die from these policies as a worthy sacrifice at the altar of corporate profits.

Kennedy’s own statements dehumanizing autistic people echo the fascist propaganda that justified the extermination of the disabled through the Nazis’ infamous T4 program. His fraudulent “studies” on vaccines and autism, led by the notorious anti-vaccine quack David Geier, are not about protecting the vulnerable, but about scapegoating and eliminating them through neglect and deprivation. 

The Orwellian “Make America Healthy Again” commission, framed as a supposed fight against chronic disease, is a Trojan horse for dismantling Medicare, Medicaid and disability services while funneling billions to the financial oligarchy. Their real aim is to drive down life expectancy, sending workers to an early grave as soon as they retire.

This social counterrevolution cannot be understood until one grapples with the experience of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which over the past five years has killed more than 1.5 million Americans and disabled over 20 million more with Long COVID. Globally, there are now 30 million excess deaths due to COVID-19, and over 400 million continue to suffer from Long COVID. 

Officially proclaiming “the pandemic is over,” the HHS is attempting to stop all research into Long COVID and next-generation vaccines. COVID.gov, once a hub for public health resources, has been transformed into a propaganda outlet, erasing science and replacing it with lies and anti-China hysteria. 

The path to Trump and Kennedy was paved by the Biden administration. Having falsely pledged to “follow the science” in the 2020 elections, Biden instead normalized mass COVID infection and dismantled public health infrastructure. Throughout the pandemic, both capitalist parties in the US and their counterparts globally have subordinated public health to the profit interests of the corporate-financial elite.

Following the same logic, every capitalist political party in the world is facilitating the climate catastrophe, which deepens every year. Billions are now threatened with displacement through rising sea levels, starvation through droughts and death from wildfires, hurricanes and other so-called “natural disasters.”

The development of science and public health cannot be entrusted to the capitalist politicians or the trade union bureaucrats that have stifled workers’ opposition. The international working class must organize independently, building rank-and-file committees to unite with scientists and health workers around the world. We must demand the immediate reversal of all cuts, the rehiring of all fired workers, free and universal access to healthcare and the restoration of scientific integrity and public health data.

Above all, we must fight for a world socialist program to advance science and public health, based on democratic workers’ control of all scientific institutions, pharmaceutical monopolies, healthcare programs, energy corporations and more.

The fight for science and public health is inseparable from the fight for socialism. Only through the building of a mass socialist movement can we defeat the fascist danger and secure a future in which science serves humanity, not profit, war and extermination. 

Join us in this fight for the future.