CA Update - Marcia Ehinger

Marcia Ehinger is a retired physician who writes in many genres, poetry and prose. A member of the Sacramento Branch of the California Writers Club, she has had poems and short stories published in several CWC anthologies and the regional medical society journal.

Awake in a Nightmare

It’s Friday the 13th, 2025, and as a retired pediatrician and native Angeleno, my heart is heavy with events from the last week. After Donald Trump’s second inauguration, major random cuts to government programs and staff took place. Most foreign aid was eliminated, and access to accurate news reporting at home and abroad is under threat. There is even a “Rescissions Package” to claw back money already paid.

Now Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is being considered in Congress after passing the House by one vote. Also known as an “anti-Robin Hood” initiative, it will rob from the poor via Medicaid and other social service programs to fund ongoing tax cuts for the rich. Twenty percent of Americans and thirty-eight percent of Californians rely on Medicaid (MediCal in California) for their health care.

This week’s living nightmare: immigration and immunization policies.

One week ago, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers began snatching people from immigration and citizenship hearings, courtrooms, garment factories, and home improvement store parking lots, where men seeking day labor gather.

Even more unsettling was the President’s move to deploy National Guard troops to Los Angeles, twice, without regard to local governance. When Governor Newsom protested, Trump declared ICE agents needed protection and local law enforcement was incapable of doing their job, and sent in seven hundred Marines.

I know these places. I was born in downtown Los Angeles, a bustling city with visitors and immigrants from everywhere. Paramount, just south of where I went to high school, is a nondescript working-class community of small houses. My mother taught special education classes in Huntington Park, and we lived there when my brothers were born.

If these efforts continue in and expand beyond this sanctuary city, the United States (U.S.) will feel the economic loss, especially in construction, hospitality, farming and food processing. In 2004, a movie mockumentary, A Day without a Mexican, conveyed the social and economic disaster that would follow the disappearance of all Mexicans in California – then thirty percent of the population.

My medical training was at the county hospital. Built as a public works project during the Great Depression, it provides health care for all, and a safety net for low-income and indigent Angelenos. It has evolved into the Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center, with a world-renowned faculty and staff, and serves as a center of excellence for treatment and research of rare disorders and infectious diseases.

Now I hear our head of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., spew misinformation about vaccines. He has already mishandled a spreading measles outbreak in Texas by advising the use of Vitamin A. Measles can only be prevented with a vaccine; there is no cure. It is extremely contagious and may be fatal or cause pneumonia or brain inflammation, resulting in cognitive deficits, blindness, or deafness. During a measles outbreak in Los Angeles when I was an intern, due to cutbacks in public health funding and the closure of clinics, people lined up around the block to get the vaccine.

On March 13, a meeting of the committee which chooses influenza strains for the fall “flu shot” was cancelled. This was part of a worldwide effort to provide the most protective vaccine. On June 9, Kennedy “fired” all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which recommends new vaccines and revises older recommendations for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) immunization schedules. These vaccines are usually mandated for school children, recommended for adults and recently covered by Medicare. The federal Vaccines for Children (VFC) program provides reimbursement so that all children in the U.S. can be immunized.

For a decade, I wrote immunization policies and updates and participated in tabletop exercises for handling possible pandemics in California. Then, I was offered my “dream job” as head of our twenty-five-year effort to monitor and research causes of birth defects. Shortly after, I watched helplessly as a new administration ripped the program apart.

The first vaccine was created to prevent a dread disease, smallpox, in 1796. Our head of pediatrics at LAC-USC, Dr. Paul Wehrle, was on the international team that eliminated the disease in 1972.

What will happen if we lose knowledge of the past, and fail to prepare properly for the future?

Will our leaders learn from their mistakes, or from the upcoming “No Kings” and “Kick Out the Clowns” rallies, or will the beatings continue until morale improves?

~ Marcia Ehinger