Viral Collapse and the Dismantling of Public Health: A New Mexico Lens

From Medicaid cuts to vaccine denial, New Mexico’s special session must confront more than budgets — it must confront survival itself.

Packed waiting rooms

“We’re fucked.”

That blunt, sober assessment from Dr. MarkAlain Déry, an infectious disease physician from New Orleans, echoes louder each day. Déry has spent his career working in epidemics, disasters, and trauma. His diagnosis isn’t meant to shock for shock’s sake — it is a reality check that denial is no longer an option. He insists that while anger and depression are understandable responses to this moment, they cannot lead to apathy. Instead, we must turn grief into collective action.

In conversation with Wajahat Ali, Dr. Déry laid bare how MAGA-aligned leadership — and now RFK Jr. at the helm of HHS — are deliberately dismantling the very public health infrastructure built to keep us alive. It’s not just that RFK Jr. pushes debunked conspiracies; it’s that he has been empowered to purge the CDC and NIH of scientists and doctors and replace them with cranks. His forthcoming “autism report” — absurdly blaming Tylenol use during pregnancy — illustrates the extremity of the new regime.

This is not “Idiocracy.” It is necropolitics — a system where power decides who lives and who dies.

Necropolitics Comes Home

Cultural critic Henry Giroux and philosopher Achille Mbembe describe necropolitics as the state’s weaponization of death. That’s not hyperbole. When vaccines are withheld, when hospitals go understaffed, when lifesaving medications like blood thinners are priced out of reach, the state is actively creating “death worlds.”

I lived that reality this past week. As a high-risk patient, I was denied a COVID vaccine while others with identical coverage and needs received theirs. Pharmacies confirmed electronic prescriptions were possible, yet my insurer, Presbyterian, insisted otherwise. The result? I am left vulnerable, forced to fight through bureaucratic denial in order to travel for critical care.

If this is happening now, with COVID, it will only intensify with the next pandemic wave or with avian influenza, which the Trump Administration has already undermined by killing a $700 million Moderna vaccine contract.

We are watching the collapse of public health in real time.

The New Mexico Special Session: Too Little, Too Late?

Against this backdrop, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has called lawmakers into special session on October 1. The stated purpose: to respond to the catastrophic cuts in federal Medicaid and SNAP funding triggered by Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

At first glance, the governor’s package appears responsive:

1. Stabilization grants for rural healthcare providers

2. Measures to reduce health insurance premiums

3. Food assistance for families, children, and seniors

4. Additional resources for the Health Care Authority to manage Medicaid enrollment changes

But here’s the problem: while the state scrambles to patch holes, the entire ship is sinking. Senator George Muñoz warns that agencies should temper expectations. Representative Christine Chandler has already deprioritized banning immigration detention centers, postponing justice while claiming to focus on “financial impacts.” The governor’s office promises methodical discussions on public safety and behavioral health.

It is politics as usual at a moment when politics-as-usual guarantees collapse.

Living in Collapse

I came face to face with the Medicaid cuts this week. The cost of one medication that keeps me alive is $500 a month. Equipment upgrades for surgeries are already delayed in local hospitals. Staff shortages are worsening, not improving. This is not theoretical — it is daily survival.

Dr. Déry calls this generational damage, and he is right. When safety nets are gutted, when vaccines are rationed, when chronic illness is left untreated, the ripple effects are felt for decades. Children grow up sicker. Families collapse under medical debt. Communities hollow out.

We saw it in Katrina. Government abandonment is not new, but it is accelerating. The richest country in the world is normalizing a system where survival depends on luck, privilege, and geography.

Grief as Fuel

Wajahat Ali pressed on something essential in his talk with Dr. Déry: how do we process the grief of watching systems collapse?

We are in the stages of grief: denial, anger, depression. But we cannot stop there. We must move toward collective mourning that becomes resistance. As the proverb goes, we must plant seeds for shade we may never sit under. That means organizing locally, creating alternatives, and building community-level resilience.

Some states are already moving to create vaccine funding mechanisms independent of federal authority. Health alliances are forming to serve as alternatives to a dismantled CDC. These are the seedlings of survival.

But grief also requires honesty. We cannot soft-pedal the truth. We are in a state of crisis. We are being governed by people who are willing to let us die. And we are up against systems — political, economic, ideological — that normalize that death.

Locked Out ..

What Needs to Change

Tech writer Gil Duran has warned that we are drifting toward what he calls the Network State — a system where corporate power, authoritarian ideology, and digital platforms merge to create parallel sovereignties that supersede democracy itself. In this model, public institutions are hollowed out until only private networks decide who is worthy of survival. Pair this with the deliberate dismantling of public health, and you see the outlines of a slow-motion genocide: vulnerable populations marked for abandonment while profit-driven systems thrive. That is why we cannot afford isolation or despair. To resist a Network State built on exclusion and death, we must build networks of care, solidarity, and mutual aid that protect the living, even as governments and corporations normalize abandonment. Working together is not optional — it is the only path to survival.

New Mexico’s October special session must go further than incremental fixes. Lawmakers should:

• Guarantee universal vaccine access funded at the state level if federal programs collapse.

• Expand emergency Medicaid coverage and fund community health clinics before rural hospitals shutter.

• Cap prescription drug costs for essential, lifesaving medications.

• Redirect subsidies away from fossil fuel industries and toward public health infrastructure.

• Reinstate protections for immigrants and the detained, who are often the first victims of systemic neglect.

Without these bold steps, we are only rearranging deck chairs while the ship sinks.

Taking Care of Ourselves, Together

Dr. Déry warned that the federal dismantling is purposeful, generational, and devastating. But he also insists there are things we can do: build local networks, demand state protections, support one another in survival.

The question is not whether collapse is coming — it is here. The question is whether we allow despair to paralyze us, or whether we use grief as a catalyst for resistance.

For me, the lesson of this week is clear: no one is coming to save us. Not the federal government, not insurers, not broken systems. We must advocate for ourselves and for each other.

We cannot allow the sycophants for fossil fuels to lead New Mexico into the Network State — a dystopia built on the dismantling of the public health system.

As high-risk patients, as families, as communities, we cannot afford silence.

Because silence is death.

End Notes

1. MarkAlain Déry, M.D., infectious disease physician, comments from interview with Wajahat Ali, September 2025. The Left Hook: The Viral Collapse Is Upon Us.

2. Henry Giroux, Necropolitics in the Age of Fascist Politics, and Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019).

3. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services staff letter calling for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s resignation, August 2025 (reporting in Politico and STAT News).

4. Florida Department of Health announcement, August 2025: rescinding requirements for school vaccine mandates, documented in Miami Herald.

5. Termination of federal contract with Moderna for avian flu vaccine, July 2025, reported in Washington Post.

6. Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s announcement of an October 1, 2025 special session of the New Mexico Legislature: Santa Fe New Mexican, Sept. 2025, “Governor calls lawmakers for special session starting Oct. 1.”

7. Statements by Sen. George Muñoz, Sen. Peter Wirth, Speaker Javier Martínez, and Rep. Christine Chandler on the special session agenda, Santa Fe New Mexican, Sept. 2025.

8. Data on Medicaid and SNAP cuts under the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (H.R.1, signed into law July 4, 2025), including projected multi-billion-dollar reductions to state funding through 2034.

9. Personal account: vaccine access denied by Presbyterian Health Plan, New Mexico, September 2025.

10. Reference to Hurricane Katrina as precedent for systemic neglect in disaster and health response: The Nation, Aug. 2005; New England Journal of Medicine, Oct. 2005.

The Viral Collapse Is Upon Us: RFK and MAGA's Dismantling of Our Healthcare System