There is a terrible irony in the cuts that the White House has been imposing on the US medical research system, especially the funding of research centers into Alzheimer’s disease, which are reported to be facing a funding gap of $65 million. The irony begins in the fact that decades of research have failed to discover the causes of the disease or to come up with a cure. But it goes much deeper than that.

According to a new book by the science journalist Charles Piller, Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s, some of the scientific findings associated with this research have come under suspicion, and scientists have been found falsifying their lab studies by doctoring the images used to demonstrate the data.

Not, however, that this has anything to do with the current suspension of funding by the Trump administration. Although Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, referred in passing to “fraudulent” Alzheimer’s research during his confirmation hearing, he is not trying to reform a flawed research system. The funding cuts are just part of a wider campaign of vandalism that Kennedy has launched with the president’s blessing.