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The Trump Administration’s Most Dangerous Misstep  (David Ignatius, Washington Post)
The CIA chief wants more spycraft. So why is he showing officers the door?

Why the COVID Deniers Won  (David Frum, The Atlantic)
Ahead of COVID’s fifth anniversary, Trump, as president-elect, nominated the country’s most outspoken vaccination opponent to head the Department of Health and Human Services. He chose a proponent of the debunked and discredited vaccines-cause-autism claim to lead the CDC. He named a strident critic of COVID‑vaccine mandates to lead the FDA. For surgeon general, he picked a believer in hydroxychloroquine, the disproven COVID‑19 remedy. His pick for director of the National Institutes of Health had advocated for letting COVID spread unchecked to encourage herd immunity. Despite having fast-tracked the development of the vaccines as president, Trump has himself trafficked in many forms of COVID‑19 denial, and has expressed his own suspicions that childhood vaccination against measles and mumps is a cause of autism.
The ascendancy of the anti-vaxxers may ultimately prove fleeting. But if the forces of science and health are to stage a comeback, it’s important to understand why those forces have gone into eclipse.

NATO Can Help Tackle the U.S. Border Crisis  (Kathleen J. McInnis, Foreign Policy)
A shared security challenge is a chance for the alliance to shine.

When “Just Asking Questions” About Science Turns Into 300,000 Dead  (Gregg Gonsalves, New York Times)
The Senate has just confirmed as health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a science denialist who once said there is no vaccine that is safe and effective, who has suggested that Covid might have been genetically engineered to spare Jewish and Chinese people and who spent more than 100 pages in his recent book reviving the idea that H.I.V. does not cause AIDS.
In the mid-2000s, South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki was also no stranger to the ideas of AIDS denialists. With the AIDS epidemic exploding in the late 1990s, Mbeki stumbled, most likely in late-night surfing of the internet, onto the fringe view that H.I.V. doesn’t cause AIDS and that the antiretroviral drugs used to keep it in check — the same type of drugs I take every morning and have for almost 30 years — were poison.
Mbeki banned antiretroviral therapy from being used in the country’s health system. His health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, recommended healthy eating, with lots of beets, ginger and garlic, to ward off sickness.
A Harvard study later found that at least 330,000 people died, and over 35,000 children were born with H.I.V. as a result of Mr. Mbeki’s reign of error on AIDS treatment policy.