Break everything
In 13 years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Fiona Havers crafted guidance for contending with Zika virus, helped China respond to outbreaks of bird flu and guided safe burial practices for Ebola deaths in Liberia.
More recently, she was a senior adviser on vaccine policy, leading a team that produced data on hospitalizations related to Covid-19 and respiratory syncytial virus. To the select group of scientists, federal officials and advocates who study who should get immunizations and when, Dr. Havers is well known, an embodiment of the C.D.C.’s intensive data-gathering operations.
On Monday, Dr. Havers resigned, saying she could no longer continue while the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., dismantled the careful processes that help formulate vaccination standards in the United States.
That’s the ticket. Get rid of all the people who know what they’re doing and replace them with cranks. Set free the viruses!
Dr. Havers, 49, cited an escalating series of attacks on federal vaccine policy by Mr. Kennedy. Three weeks ago, the health secretary announced in a minute-long video on X that the agency would no longer recommend Covid-19 vaccines for healthy children or pregnant women.
Last week, he fired all 17 members of the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, saying without evidence that the group was beset with conflicts of interest and that a clean sweep was needed to restore public trust.
Mr. Kennedy went on to name eight new members, at least half of whom appear to share his antipathy to vaccines. Two have testified against vaccine makers in trials.
What I’ll never understand is how Kennedy and other cranks actively destroying public health can live with themselves. How does it not keep them awake all night? How do they not stop to think “Oh wait, I have no medical training, why am I second-guessing all these people who do? Why am I so eager to make more and more people dangerously ill? How many deaths will I cause? What am I doing this for?”
“It’s a very transparent, rigorous process, and they have just taken a sledgehammer to it in the last several weeks,” Dr. Havers said.
“C.D.C. processes are being corrupted in a way that I haven’t seen before,” she added.
The agency was not consulted about any of it, Dr. Havers said. The C.D.C. has languished without a director since the new administration began.
Because who needs disease control, right? Pandemics are good for us! They build character!
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human services, said, “Under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, H.H.S. is committed to following the gold standard of scientific integrity.”
No it isn’t. That’s a flagrant, criminal lie. Burn in hell, all of you.
As for how they can live with themselves, they are sure they are doing the opposite of killing people. They believe they are saving people. (I don’t think that’s the case with Trump; I think he doesn’t think at all, and doesn’t give a damn about anyone but himself.)
I met a lot of anti-vaxxers in the years I was part of the environmental science program in my doctoral program. For the most part, they were the youngsters, those born after we managed to solve so many problems of diseases. They had been raised on a media drumbeat of the evils of big Pharma, big Medicine, and science denialism, but they didn’t believe it was science denialism. They don’t remember what it was like to have half the class out with the measles, mumps, or other diseases, and the risk that came from these diseases. They grew up in a world where the diseases were not manifest in large numbers. If people are so healthy, why do we need vaccines?
A frightening number of students in the science program were anti-science based policies. It was even worse in the environmental philosophy program, with which I was required to engage for two graduate level classes. They outright believed all science was evil. They believed science was in the clutches of ‘big’ everything. They were woke before there was ‘woke’. They had avoided all science classes, and gave us (the scientists required to engage with philosophy) regular renditions of what exactly science said and did – and they were never right. They stuck by their beliefs even in the face of half the class being scientists who were capable of correcting their mistaken beliefs.
I think at the time I underestimated the numbers of science deniers in the program, because our program tended toward older. Most of the students were Baby Boomers who grew up with diseases and new the benefits of vaccines and other scientific advances. The only one of the older students who had any anti-science beliefs was actually a devout Catholic who believed that abortion was bad for women and society. He wasn’t anti-vax, though.
Kennedy has been awash in the environmental movement for some time. To most people, environmental movement and environmental science are synonymous, so they don’t realize that people like Kennedy have been associated with anti-scientific people who don’t know what the science says, don’t like it anyway, and are determined to bring ‘purity’ back to the Earth.
I don’t know if these groups and individuals shaped his beliefs, or if he helped shape theirs. I suspect more than anything they were all the result of multiple anti-science sources that sound more appealing to them than the rigorous science practiced by the environmental scientists.
Science is hard work. I suspect Kennedy is lazy, at least intellectually. A lot of the students who passed through my classes were intellectually lazy, and felt the science was too hard to understand. It was common practice for them to dismiss the actual science because the articles were filled with graphs and charts and large, unfamiliar words.
There is also the ubiquitous and ill-informed worship of the ‘natural’. Yes, natural can be good. It can be very good. But arsenic is natural. Rattlesnakes are natural. Earthquakes are natural. All of them can kill you. Meanwhile, Pepsi isn’t natural, and while it might kill you if you drank too much of it, a glass of Pepsi is not going to affect you in the same way that a glass of arsenic would.
Vaccines don’t seem ‘natural’. They seem to a lot of people like ‘playing God’. They are ‘chemicals’. (One of the first things I told my students, often the first day of class, is that everything is chemicals. Water is chemicals. Food is chemicals, no matter how ‘natural’. We are chemicals.) Hatred of ‘chemicals’ is also intellectually lazy thinking. There are chemicals that harm us, and chemicals that are essential to maintain our health. Some fall in both categories, depending on dosage or interactions. It can be hard work to sort that out.
Well said, ikn. And poignant.
A long time ago I was an advocate of “organic” farming and detested “unnatural” food, pesticides, and, of course, GMOs. Then I did some reading and talked to a toxicologist. Now I want a version of the “No Farming No Food” bumper sticker that says “No Pesticides No Food.” I also count myself a proud member of the genetically-modified community.
I studied some agricultural science when I was young, so GMO doesn’t scare me much. The basic process of selective breeding of vegetables and grains began many millennia ago. So along with how we as a species have evolved to require more and more calories to feed our hungry brains, the evolution of farming has also progressed in a way that there is more and better food available for our exponentially growing population. Corn for instance was a sparse and small plant in North America before human manipulation, and now it feeds many millions. Not sure I see the downside here, but yes some of the chemicals used to optimize production are questionable, namely pesticides and selective herbicides, but in the big picture, we are able to feed many who would otherwise go hungry thanks to advances in agricultural practices. Animal farming (for me) is quite a different picture, but I won’t go into that. I’ll just say that horticulture is preferable (again IMO).
This is the basic point I make to my students; the so-called natural foods the natural food movement eats are actually human created. Corn, wheat, rice, cows, everything – so modified they are not the same as wild species. And the sunflower! Those enormous flower heads giving enormous seeds were created from much smaller sunflowers.
Don’t forget non-poisonous almonds… Those mutant freaks would still be killing people most of the time without cultivating unhealthy members of their species.
I had a volunteer almond tree on my farm in California, but it was necessary to wait until the almonds were falling off the tree to collect them — as an early harvest would yield a bitter collection of cyanide laden, inedible nuts. Now here in Georgia, I have a beautiful mature pecan tree, but I don’t have the energy to beat the squirrels to them, so I’ve only had a handful in 9 years, maybe a dozen or so. Luckily, pecans are abundant and available here, and meanwhile my pecan shades the house during those hot, humid summers. Sometimes I find one or two that are edible, but going after them ahead of the squirrels is a dreary and unfruitful exercise involving ladders and bamboo canes. I prefer a nice long walk. :)
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