The founders of the greatest American companies (at least as measured by their stock-market caps) are Bill Gates of Microsoft, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Elon Musk of Tesla and Space X, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (Facebook), the late Steve Jobs of Apple, Sergey Brin of Alphabet (Google) and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.
All seven share one of two things in common: Six went to top U.S. universities (Harvard for Gates and Zuckerberg; Stanford for Huang and Brin; Princeton for Bezos; and Pennsylvania for Musk) and five either themselves are immigrants (Musk, Huang, and Brin) or they are first-generation immigrants (Jobs’s father was a Syrian immigrant and Bezos’s adoptive father was a Cuban immigrant).
This is nothing new. America always has relied upon its immigrants and its universities to lead the way for American supremacy. This was especially true during WWII when the U.S. developed the atomic bomb thanks to a team of scientists (most of whom were foreign-born and working at the University of Chicago) that was led by physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer would have made the above list for two reasons: He was both Harvard-educated and the son of a German immigrant.
According to the Nobel Prize website, since 1901, there have been 148 prize recipients who were foreign-born individuals who either had immigrated permanently to the United States or were at a U.S. institution of higher learning at the time they received the award. These 148 individuals account for 16 percent of all Nobel Laureates.
Yet it is precisely these two great pillars of America’s historic economic and technological strength — our world-renowned universities and our immigrants — that are on the verge of being destroyed. By attacking the former, we are discouraging the latter from coming to America.
The smartest and hardest-working individuals from across the globe — who always have viewed America as the foremost country in the world where they could develop their ideas at the world’s greatest scientific research institutions — are either leaving or not coming because the welcome mat has been pulled from our doorstep.
Nations in Europe and Asia, whose leaders are mystified by our sudden ignorance and xenophobia, are rushing to fill the vacuum by offering grants and opportunities to world-class scientists that previously had been monopolized by the United States.
We are entering the equivalent of the Dark Ages — and for the first time ever in our history, the United States is now facing the prospect of a brain drain, as opposed to being the beneficiary of a brain gain.
Will we have flu and COVID vaccines this fall?
The actions reportedly being taken by Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to impede the development of the flu and COVID vaccines for this coming year call into question whether these life-saving vaccines will be available for Americans this fall.
Annual flu and COVID shots are the best protection for all Americans from these two diseases, especially for senior citizens and those with compromised immune systems. Approximately 40,000 Americans die each year from the flu, of whom about 80% are over the age of 65. It is estimated that the annual vaccines prevent about seven million illnesses, three million doctor visits, 100,000 hospital stays, and 7,000 deaths. A substantial percentage of those who die from the flu are unvaccinated.
As for COVID-19, there were 76,446 deaths in the U.S. from COVID-19 in 2023, the vast majority among the elderly, the oldest of whom are 97 times more likely to die from a COVD-19 infection than a person under the age of 20. In addition, the lingering effects of COVID-19, known as long COVID, impact tens of thousands more Americans.
The flu vaccine is forward-looking. Scientists examine the data of the various strains floating around the world and then make a guess as to which ones will be most-prevalent in the coming winter season, and a vaccine is developed to target those strains.
However, the COVID vaccine looks only at the present, with the vaccines aiming to target the most prevalent variants at the time the vaccines are being developed. COVID always is mutating, so it is impossible to know what variant will come next. However, even though the COVID vaccines are outdated to some extent by the time most people receive them, the vaccine still offers substantial protection against the disease.
However, whether these life-saving vaccines, which must go through an approval process before the FDA, will be ready in time for the fall flu and COVID season is an open question given the gamesmanship being displayed by RFK Jr., who reportedly is creating new barriers in the approval process.
These vaccines literally are a matter of life and death for America’s ever-aging population, but it would seem that those in charge these days could care less — and that we are all just one big experiment for their dangerous and off-the-wall “theories.”