Ministry of propaganda

Is it too much to ask that the Trump administration simply tells the damn truth?

That's all I ask.  Just stop lying.  I'm fine with having differences of opinion over policy.  For example, claiming that unhooking from fossil fuels and switching to renewable energy would be an unreasonable burden on our economy is not the same thing as saying climate change isn't occurring.

The first is a policy question we could discuss, and perhaps, come to consensus about.  The second is a lie.  And as long as you're simply lying about the facts, there is no discussion to be had.

Take, for example, the person who would have to be included in the top five most dangerous members of this regime; Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  He is an anti-science ideologue of the worst sort, and because of him the CDC is now limiting access to COVID-19 vaccinations and canceling funding for this year's flu vaccine -- including the potentially pandemic bird flu.

All part of his "Make America Healthy Again" campaign.  Because horrible policies are just fine as long as you give them a snappy name, right?

Of course right.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the U. S. Air Force]

It doesn't end with anti-vaxx nonsense, either.  Just this week, RFK stated that gender-affirming care for individuals with gender dysphoria should be discontinued -- once again, flying in the face of scientific study after scientific study.  Ignore the science, he says; instead, listen to the directives from the government.

And what is the government suggesting instead?

Why, "conversion therapy."

Yep, the same thing that was touted to "cure homosexuality," and which (once again) study after study has shown to be (1) ineffective, and (2) psychologically damaging.  RFK's letter to healthcare providers states that they should uphold their oaths to "do no harm" by following a strategy that has been conclusively shown to do harm.

Then there's his report on "gold-standard" scientific research that allegedly supports his viewpoints on holistic health and the sins of Big Pharma -- which contains (1) dozens of citations that were identified as mischaracterized by the actual authors themselves, and (2) at least seven citations for studies that appear to be nonexistent.  In other words, RFK pulled the middle-school bibliography-boosting stunt of making up plausible-looking sources, taking others and claiming they said things they didn't actually say, and hoping like hell no one notices.

Well, someone noticed.  But did he retract the report and apologize?

Ha.  Of course he didn't.  This administration never apologizes for anything.  Confronted by their own blatant lies, they just double down, stamping their feet and saying "it is so true!", and rely on the fact that their supporters have no scientific training and very short memories.

Oh, and also this week, he promised a ban on federally-funded medical researchers from publishing in top-flight journals like Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Journal of the American Medical Association.  Why?  Because they're "corrupt."  Instead, he wants them to publish in a journal he's going to run, after vetting researchers as "good, legitimate scientists" -- meaning, of course, that they agree with him.

Look, it's not (as I've said many times before) that I'm unaware of the problems inherent in the American medical system.  My wife is a nurse, so I hear about a lot of it from her, and I've witnessed the misery that friends and family members have gone through trying to navigate their way through predatory insurance companies, inefficient and understaffed medical care providers, and ridiculously overpriced pharmaceuticals.  I have one friend who's had a ton of chronic health problems, and has gone through the wringer with misprescribed medications and unmanaged side effects.

But RFK is making a bad situation much, much worse.  His outright lies and barrage of unapologetic misinformation are going to kill people, pure and simple.  But my guess is that no one is going to pull on the reins, because we can't stop a program called "Make America Healthy Again," right?  What, do you want to Make America Unhealthy Again?

Honestly, I put the lion's share of the blame here on the members of Congress who voted to approve his appointment to the Cabinet.  It's not like his views were some kind of a secret; we knew about incidents like his lies about the measles vaccine resulting in an epidemic in Samoa that killed eighty people.  The man goes way past "unqualified," into the territory of "outright dangerous."  He should never have been appointed, much less confirmed.

So this is episode #352,981 of "We Tried To Warn You."  And now we're seeing the results of that dreadful lapse of civic responsibility on the part of our elected officials.

All I can say is that insofar as you can, take care of your health.  Take precautions, get the vaccines that are available, and educate yourself using actual scientific research and not Ministry of Propaganda doublespeak.  Even so, my suspicion is that it's going to be a rough few years.

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The ideologue

I told myself that I wasn't going to do another political post so soon after Tuesday's, but dammit, my good intentions got blasted to smithereens by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (53427511876) (cropped), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Let me open by stating my bias up front.  My considered opinion, as a 32-year veteran science teacher with fifteen years of experience writing on science-related topics, is that RFK is a certifiable lunatic.  He combines the worst of the alt-med nonsense -- the kinds of things promoted by Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams and Vani "Food Babe" Hari -- with outlandish and debunked conspiracy theories, then dishes it all up as if it was peer-reviewed science.  Here are the three stories that destroyed my resolve to stay away from politics for at least a few days:

• In a town hall moderated by "Dr. Phil," he was asked by an audience member what he was planning on doing about "chemtrails."  You probably know that "chemtrails" are a completely discredited conspiracy theory claiming that The Bad Guys are putting stuff into jet fuel -- the "stuff" varies from heavy metals to radioactive isotopes to pathogens like anthrax -- so that when the exhaust is released into the upper atmosphere, it settles down on all of us and poisons us.  Notwithstanding that this has to be the absolute stupidest idea for a poison-delivery method I've ever heard of, it's been studied (I can only imagine the eye-rolling done by the scientists assigned to the research), and... nothing.  Contrails are almost entirely water vapor, with small amounts of soot from incomplete burning of jet fuel.  That's it.  But did RFK say that?  Of course not.  He's all in on chemtrails.  "It’s done, we think, by DARPA [the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency]," he said.  "And a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel -- so those materials are put in jet fuel.  I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it.  We’re bringing on somebody who’s going to think only about that, find out who’s doing it, and holding them accountable."

• An article in Ars Technica provides evidence -- in the form of RFK's own words -- that he doubts the basis of the medical science of infectious disease, the "Germ Theory of Disease."  Which claims that many diseases are (1) caused by pathogenic viruses, bacteria, fungi, or protists, and are therefore (2) communicable.  You'd think this'd be beyond question by this point, right?  Wrong.  RFK believes that any disease involving a pathogen is caused by having a weakened immune system -- i.e., all pathogens are opportunistic.  Get enough clean water, food, air, and sunlight, and you'll never get sick.  This is the basis of his anti-vaxx stance; if you live right, you shouldn't need 'em.  If this was a rational stance -- which it is not -- I'd ask him why, then, did childhood death rates go down so dramatically during the 1950s and 1960s, when mandatory vaccination programs against diseases like measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and polio were instituted?  Did all the kids suddenly start eating right, or something?

• He stated outright that it was reasonable that religious people would shun the MMR vaccine, because it contains "aborted fetus debris."  Needless to say, this is untrue.  Vaccines against viral diseases are cultured in cell lines grown in labs, not in aborted fetuses.  If this were true, it'd be kind of funny that some of the most anti-abortion people around -- the leaders of the Catholic Church -- have no problem with vaccines, and in fact, strongly recommend that children get all of the critical childhood vaccines on the schedule recommended by most doctors.

Look, it's not that I'm against the idea that we need good food and clean air and water.  I'm also well aware that Big Pharma has a lot to answer for in how it produces, vets, and prices drugs.  But going from there to something I saw posted on social media a couple of days ago -- a 32-point-font banner saying, "BIG PHARMA HAS NEVER CURED A SINGLE ILLNESS!" is blatant idiocy.  To give just one example, a friend of mine, who was diagnosed with leukemia at age eighteen and is now a happy and healthy young woman in her late twenties, would not be alive today without the chemotherapy developed and produced by "Big Pharma."  

But under RFK, cancer research -- and also research into Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, ALS, Parkinson's, and most recently, Ebola fever -- has been defunded in favor of spurious projects to "stop chemtrails" and "look into the connection between vaccines and autism."  (tl;dr: There isn't one.)

In short, RFK is a dangerous ideologue who shouldn't be allowed within hailing distance of our national health policy.  His continued occupation of the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services is going to result in irreparable damage to the American health care system.

But a man like him is never going to step down, because he can't conceive of the possibility that he could be wrong.  An attitude which, of course, is endemic in our government right now.

I wonder how many people will have to die before anyone will step in and fire him?

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Trojan horse

Well, I just ran into the single stupidest conspiracy theory in existence.

Don't even try to convince me there's a dumber one, because I don't want to hear it.  HAARP controlling hurricanes and tornadoes to target enemies?  Pshaw.  A global network of Illuminati in league with Reptilian aliens to control major world governments?  Amateur hour.  Big Pharma putting mind-control microchips in our meds to turn us all into soulless automata?  Little League.

Because now we have: the COVID vaccine is "installed with payloads" of the Marburg virus, which will be activated in October by a signal broadcast from 5G networks, triggering the zombie apocalypse and killing billions, starting with all of the people who were foolish enough to get vaccinated.  This will result in the Evil Democrats winning (for that, read stealing) the 2024 election.

*brief pause for you to regain your equilibrium*

Okay, some background first.

Marburg virus [Image licensed under the Creative Commons The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. https://www.utmb.edu/newsroom/article11484.aspx, 137488 web, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Marburg virus causes a deadly hemorrhagic fever similar to the better-known (and related) Ebola virus.  It's a bad one; there's no vaccine yet, and even with treatment the mortality rate is somewhere between sixty and eighty percent.  It's endemic in certain parts of Africa, and seems to be carried by bats and monkeys.  It's considered to be of significant concern with regards to epidemics, given how contagious it is.

However, there is no way to (1) put it into some kind of Trojan horse in a vaccine, and (2) activate it using a 5G signal (or any other kind of signal).  In order to believe this, you have to know essentially nothing about viruses, vaccines, or 5G.

Which is apparently the case with Todd Callender, who seems to have been the origin of this particular lunacy back in 2022.  He appeared in an interview with Jeffrey Prather on his program The Prather Point, and we're assured that Callender isn't "some hare-brained fringe theorist" because Prather vets all of his guests and he says so.

So that's good to know. 

"A broadcast from 5G cell towers at 18 MHz, for a specific duration and sequence, will cause affected cells to rupture," Callender said, "unleashing Marburg payload bioweapons into the blood of those who took the mRNA injections.  This, in turn, would instantly unleash a Marburg pandemic and produce a sudden rush of symptoms including bleeding out (hemorrhagic fever isn't pretty), cardiovascular deaths, seizures and more.  Some of the symptoms that could appear would even resemble classic zombies as depicted in pop culture; biting, loss of cognitive function, aggression, confusion and extreme alterations in the appearance of skin and eyes, among other similarities."

The ultimate outcome is that the Democrats (who, of course, engineered all this) will swipe the 2024 election.  "If this theory pans out, the obvious timeframe for the powers that be to release the binary weapon would be before the [next election]...  With a whole new pandemic hitting the scene -- with far more serious symptoms and a higher death rate compared to COVID -- the elections could either be cancelled or altered into a universal vote-from-home format which would favor the highly organized vote rigging and ballot counterfeiting of the Democrats (who are only in power because they stole the last election, of course)."

For all the doubters in the studio audience, we're told to stop being KoolAid-drinkin' sheeple.  "Critics might say this all smacks of science fiction.  But we are living through a science fiction dystopian scenario right now, with extreme censorship, an Orwellian global cabal trying to exterminate the human race, the rise of the robots and the mass injection of billions of people with exotic nanotechnology that seems to have a rather nefarious purpose, far from merely offering 'immunity.'"

The last bit reminds me of the wonderful quote by Carl Sagan: "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses.  They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers.  But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

In any case, we don't have long to wait, since the latest intel is that this is all going down in October.  Me, I'm kind of bummed by that, because my birthday's in October, and I was rather looking forward to having a nice quiet celebration with my wife, and not having to stumble around the village bleeding from the eye sockets and looking for brains to eat.

But I'll return to my original point, which is that if there is a stupider conspiracy theory out there, I don't want to know about it.  Writing about all this made me long for the good old days when the antivaxxers were content to inject bleach and swallow horse dewormer.

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Magnetic nonsense

Loony people are hardly a new invention.  Any claims that "people are crazier now than they used to be" generally springs from one of two things, the first of which is a bad memory.

The other, though, is more interesting, as well as more troubling.  In the past, when Great-Aunt Ethel started babbling in public about being visited at night by a sexy alien who wanted to take her up to his spaceship and bring her back to Zeta Reticuli to be his immortal love slave, we had the option of saying, "That's wonderful, auntie, but let's go inside and get you a nice cup of tea and watch The Beverly Hillbillies, okay?  Wouldn't that be fun?"

Now, the Great-Aunt Ethels of the world have computers with internet access, where they can connect with all the other Great-Aunt Ethels.  And influence people who are already on the borderline, so as to create the next generation of Ethels.  And because a lot of social media sites now allow you to monetize your content, they're able to make tons of money off it, extending their reach even further.

We're in a world where the Ethels have just as great a capacity for being heard as the scientists do.

And this brings us to Sherri Tenpenny.

Tenpenny is an anti-vaxx activist who was identified by the Center for Countering Digital Hate as one of the "Disinformation Dozen" -- the twelve people who, put together, are responsible for 65% of the vaccine misinformation out there online.  (Other shining lights on this list are Joseph Mercola, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Christiane Northrup.)  Tenpenny, though, brings things to a whole different level, way beyond the usual "vaccines cause autism" nonsense.  Here's one example:

The stated goal is to depopulate the planet and the ones that are left, either make them chronically sick or turn them into transhumanist cyborgs that can be manipulated externally by 5G, by magnets, by all sorts of things.  I got dragged through the mud by the mainstream media when I said that in May of last year in front of the House Committee in Columbus, [Ohio].  Well, guess what?  It’s all true.

The whole issue of quantum entanglement and what the shots do in terms of the frequencies and the electronic frequencies that come inside of your body and hook you up to the "Internet of Things," the quantum entanglement that happens immediately after you’re injected.  You get hooked up to what they’re trying to develop.  It’s called the hive mind, and they want all of us there as a node and as an electronic avatar that is an exact replica of us except it’s an electronic replica, it’s not our God-given body that we were born with.  And all of that will be running through the metaverse that they’re talking about.  All of these things are real...  All of them.  And it’s happening right now.  It’s not some science fiction thing happening out in the future; it’s happening right now in real time.

Sure it is, Great-Aunt Sherri.  Here, have a nice cup of tea.

The trouble is, Tenpenny and others like her are getting rich off this stuff.  Some social media sites -- notably Facebook and YouTube -- have taken steps to stop her from spreading her insane lies, but even so, her message is still getting out there.  Business management information provider Dun & Bradstreet reported that her clinic, the Tenpenny Integrative Medical Center, has an average annual sales total of a bit over four million dollars.

And that's despite the fact that the State Medical Board of Ohio recently revoked her medical license.

What gets me is that nothing she says, however ridiculous, seems to diminish her popularity.  In June of 2021 she stated that she had "spent over ten thousand hours studying the origins and effects of COVID since the pandemic began," despite the fact that at that point only eleven thousand hours had passed since the pandemic was declared.  She also claimed that the vaccine turns you into a human magnet:

I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures all over the internet of people who have had these shots and now they’re magnetized.  They can put a key on their forehead and it sticks…  There have been people who have long suspected there’s an interface, yet to be defined, an interface between what’s being injected in these shots and all of the 5G towers.

Well, I can state definitively that based upon an experiment I just ran with my car keys, this is incorrect. 

And this is considering that I've now had four COVID shots (the original two plus two boosters), and have been vaccinated against all the usual childhood diseases, as well as typhoid, yellow fever, shingles, hepatitis A and B, and a yearly flu shot since (if memory serves) 1995.  Despite all this, as the above highly scientific photograph shows, I am not even a tiny bit magnetic.

I have also not been turned into an electronic avatar or a transhumanist cyborg, which I honestly feel a little disappointed about, because that sounds badass.

Given the fact of the connectivity we have now for information of all sorts, we no longer have the option of hustling Sherri Tenpenny back into the house and getting her settled in the recliner in front of The Beverly Hillbillies.  The best thing we can do is to shine as bright a light as possible on her nonsense.  We can't let her go unchallenged, especially on such subjects as vaccination, where peoples' health and lives are at risk.

It'd be one thing if she was talking about sexy aliens from Zeta Reticuli.  She's not.  Her rhetoric is, literally, killing people.

We're not going to be able to stop her from shouting.  The important thing is that the sane people, the ones who actually know what they're talking about shout back -- louder.

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Untruth and consequences

In Dorothy Sayers' novel Gaudy Night, set (and written) in 1930s England, a group of Oxford University dons are the targets of an increasingly vicious series of threats and violence by a deranged individual.  The motive of the perpetrator turns out to be that one of the dons had, years earlier, caught the perpetrator's spouse in academic dishonesty, and the spouse had been dismissed from his position, and ultimately committed suicide.

Near the end of the novel, the main character, Harriet Vane, experiences a great deal of conflict over the resolution of the mystery.  Which individual was really at fault?  Was it the woman who made the threats, a widow whose grief drove her to threaten those she felt were smug, ivory-tower intellectuals who cared nothing for the love and devotion of a wife for her husband?  Or was it the don who had exposed the husband's "crime" -- which was withholding evidence contrary to his thesis in an academic paper?  Is that a sin that's worth the destruction of one life and the ruining of another?

The perpetrator, when found out, snarls at the dons, "... (C)ouldn't you leave my man alone?  He told a lie about somebody who was dead and dust hundreds of years ago.  Nobody was the worse for that.  Was a dirty bit of paper more important than all our lives and happiness?  You broke him and killed him -- all for nothing."  The don whose words led to the man's dismissal, and ultimately his suicide, says, "I knew nothing of (his suicide) until now...  I had no choice in the matter.  I could not foresee the consequences... but even if I had..."  She trails off, making it clear that in her view, her words had to be spoken, that academic integrity was a mandate -- even if that stance left a human being in ruins.

It's not, really, a very happy novel.  One is left feeling at the end that the incident left only losers, no winners.

The central theme of the book -- that words have consequences -- is one that seems to escape a lot of today's political pundits here in the United States.  Or, more accurately, they seem to feel that the fact that words sometimes have unforeseen consequences absolves them of any responsibility for the results.  A particularly egregious example is Fox News's Tucker Carlson, who considers himself blameless in the recent surge of Delta-Variant COVID-19 -- a surge that is virtually entirely amongst the unvaccinated, and significantly higher in the highly conservative Fox-watching states of Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana.  Carlson told his viewers on the air that they should accost people wearing masks in public, saying that mask-wearers are "zealots and neurotics" who are "the true aggressors, here."  Anyone seeing a child wearing a mask should "call 911 or Child Protection Services immediately" -- that if you see masked children you are "morally obligated to do something."

Then, as if to drive home his stance that you should be entitled to say anything you want, free of consequence (as long as what you're saying conforms to the Trump-GOP party line, of course), he was outraged when a couple of days ago he was confronted by an angry guy in a fly-fishing store in Montana, who called Carlson "the worst human being in the world" for his anti-vaxx stance.

So, Mr. Carlson, let me get this straight: after telling your viewers they're morally obligated to accost people who disagree with them, you object to the fact that someone accosted you because he disagrees with you?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, Tucker Carlson (50752390162), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Not only does this give new meaning to the words "sanctimonious hypocrite," it also shows a fundamental lack of understanding of what the principle of free speech means.  Yes, you're entitled to say what you want; but you are not entitled to be free of the consequences of those words.  To use the hackneyed example, you can shout "Fire" in a crowded theater, but if there's a stampede and someone gets hurt or killed, you will (rightly) be held responsible.  You can call your boss an idiotic asshole, but if you get fired, no judge in the world will advocate for your reinstatement on the basis of free speech.

You said what you wanted, then got the consequences.  End of story.

So the Trump-GOP members are now trying to figure out how to spin the surge of Delta-Variant COVID-19 amongst the unvaccinated after having played the most serious public health crisis we've seen in fifty years as a political stunt, and efforts to mitigate its spread as the Left trying to destroy fundamental American liberties.  Even Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, long one of the most vocal anti-mask, anti-vaxx elected officials -- just a few weeks ago his website had for sale merchandize with the slogan "Don't Fauci My Florida" printed on it -- has made an about-face, and is urging people to get vaccinated.

The result?  Conservatives in Florida are furious with DeSantis for "selling out," some even suggesting he had taken bribes from vaccine manufacturers to change his message.  What the fuck did he expect?  He's spent the past year and a half claiming that the pandemic is overblown and any attempt to push vaccines is a conspiracy against freedom by the Democrats.  Did he think that the people who swallowed his lies hook, line, and sinker would simply forget what he'd said, and go, "Oh, okay, I'll run right out and get vaccinated now"?

Another mealy-mouthed too-little, too-late message came from Governor Kay Ivey of Alabama, the state with the overall lowest vaccination rate (39.6%) in the country.  Alarmed by the dramatic upsurge in new cases in her state, she said, "It's time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks."

So, Governor Ivey, let's just go one step backward in the causal chain, shall we?  Why exactly are so many Americans unvaccinated, when the vaccine is available for free whether or not you have health insurance?  Why is it that if you drew up a map of Trump voters, a map of Fox News watchers, and a map of the incidence of new cases of COVID-19, the three maps would show a remarkable similarity?

You can say what you want, but you can't expect to be free of the consequences of what you say.

I'm appalled not just because political hacks like Tucker Carlson have callously used this tragedy to sledgehammer in their own views with an increasingly polarized citizenry, nor because re-election-minded governors like Ivey and DeSantis jumped on the anti-vaxx bandwagon because they didn't want to alienate the Trump-worshipers who form a significant proportion of their base.  The most appalling thing is that they have done this, blind to the end results of their words, just like the Oxford don in Gaudy Night whose dedication to the nth degree of academic integrity made her blind to the human cost of her actions.  Words are tools, and these hypocrites have used them with as much thought and responsibility as a five-year-old with a chainsaw.

And now they are expecting us to hold them faultless when the people who trusted them are, literally, dying by the thousands.

I suppose I should be glad that even DeSantis and Ivey are pivoting.  Carlson, of course, hasn't, and probably never will; his motto seems to be "Death Before Admitting Error."  Perhaps a few lives will be saved from a horrible and painful death because some conservative leaders are now changing their tunes.

But honestly; it's far too late.  A study released in February in The Lancet ascribed forty percent of the 610,000 COVID deaths in the United States directly to Trump's policies.  "Instead of galvanizing the U.S. populace to fight the pandemic," the authors state, "President Trump publicly dismissed its threat."

And unless there is a concerted effort to hold accountable the ones who caused this catastrophe -- legally, if possible, or at least at the ballot box -- we are allowing them to get away with saying, "I had no choice in the matter, I could not foresee the consequences" and doing nothing while every public health expert in the world was begging them to take action.

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One of the characteristics which is -- as far as we know -- unique to the human species is invention.

Given a problem, we will invent a tool to solve it.  We're not just tool users; lots of animal species, from crows to monkeys, do that.  We're tool innovators.  Not that all of these tools have been unequivocal successes -- the internal combustion engine comes to mind -- but our capacity for invention is still astonishing.

In The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, author Ainissa Ramirez takes eight human inventions (clocks, steel rails, copper telegraph wires, photographic film, carbon filaments for light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips) and looks not only at how they were invented, but how those inventions changed the world.  (To take one example -- consider how clocks and artificial light changed our sleep and work schedules.)

Ramirez's book is a fascinating lens into how our capacity for innovation has reflected back and altered us in fundamental ways.  We are born inventors, and that ability has changed the world -- and, in the end, changed ourselves along with it.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A chat with grandma

The controversy and misinformation surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines have brought the anti-vaxx movement back into the spotlight, and once again raises the question of why people are more willing to believe folksy anecdote than they are sound scientific research.

Take, for example, an article over at the website Living Whole.  This site bills itself as "a landing spot for all things parenting, common sense, and healthy living," so right away it sent up red flags about veracity.  But the article itself, called "I Was Told To Ask the Older Generation About Vaccines... So I Did," turned out to be a stellar example of anti-science nonsense passed off as gosh-golly-aw-shucks folk wisdom.

In it, we hear about the author's visit to her hundred-year-old great-grandma, who still lives in her own house, bless her heart.  But we're put on notice right away what the author is up to:

I’m not sure why people in my family live so long.  It could be the organic diet, the herbs, or the fact that all of my century-old relatives are unvaccinated.  If my grandmother dies in the near future, it will only be because she’s started eating hot dogs and no one has told her that hot dog is mystery meat.  Do they make a vaccine for that?

Or it could be, you know, genetics.  As in, actual science.  My own grandma's family was remarkably long-lived, with many members living into their 90s, and my Great-Aunt Clara making it to 101.  More on them later.

We then hear about how her great-grandma got chicken pox, mumps, and German measles, and survived 'em all.  So did bunches of the other family members she knew and loved.  The author says;

Mumps, measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, and even the flu were rights of passage that almost every child experienced which challenged and groomed the immune system and protected them from more serious diseases as adults.  Deaths from these diseases were rare and only occurred in the really poor children who had other “things” as well.

Oh, you mean like my two great-aunts, Aimée and Anne, who died of measles five days apart, ages 21 and 17, and who were perfectly healthy up to that time?

Hopefully this last-quoted paragraph will shoot down the author's credibility in another respect, though.  How on earth does surviving mumps (for example) "groom your immune system" to fight off other diseases?  Any tenth grader in high school introductory biology could explain to you that this isn't how it works.  Your immune response is highly specific, which is why getting chicken pox only protects you against getting chicken pox again, and will do bugger-all for protecting you against measles.  And sometimes it's even more specific than that; getting the flu once doesn't protect you the next time.  The antibody response is so targeted that you are only protected against that particular flu strain, and if another crops up, you have to get revaccinated -- or get sick.

Then, there's the coup-de-grâce:

In the last decade I have had to explain to my grandmother what Crohn’s disease is, autism, type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, ADHD, peanut allergies, and thyroid conditions.  She never saw those health conditions growing up.  “Vaccine preventable diseases” were replaced with “vaccine-induced diseases.”  Can we even compare chicken pox to rheumatoid arthritis?

No.  No, you can't.  Because they have nothing to do with one another.

But you know why great-grandma didn't know about all of those diseases listed?  Because there was no way to diagnose or treat them back then.  Kids with type-1 diabetes simply died.  Same with Crohn's.  (And that one is still difficult to manage, unfortunately.)  Autism has been described in medical literature since at least the 1700s, and thyroid conditions long before that.  So sorry, but this is just idiotic.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons U.S. Secretary of Defense, COVID-19 vaccination (2020) B, CC BY 2.0]

But let me point out what should be the most obvious thing about all of this, and which seems to have escaped the author entirely: your great-grandma's reminiscences aren't relevant.  Neither is the survival of my own grandmother, and many of her brothers and sisters, into old age.  You know why?  Because it would be a little hard to have a friendly chat with the tens of thousands of people who did die of preventable childhood diseases, like my grandma's brother Clarence (died as an infant of scarlet fever) and sister Flossie (died as a teenager of tuberculosis).  Of course the survivors report surviving.

Because they survived, for fuck's sake.  What did you think she'd tell you?  "I hate to break it to you, dear, but I actually died at age six of diphtheria?"

But that didn't seem to occur to most of the commenters, who had all sorts of positive things to say.  Many said that they weren't going to vaccinate their children, and related their own stories about how their grandparents had survived all sorts of childhood diseases, so q.e.d., apparently.

I'm sorry.  The plural of "anecdote" is not "data."  There is 100% consensus in the medical community (i.e. the people doing the actual research) that vaccines are safe and effective, serious side effects are rare, and that leaving children unvaccinated is dangerous and irresponsible.  You can go all motive-fallacy if you want ("of course the doctors say that, it keeps them in business"), but it doesn't change the facts.

But unfortunately, there seems to be a distinct anti-science bent in the United States at the moment, and a sense that telling stories is somehow more relevant than evaluating the serious research.  Part of it, I think, is laziness; understanding science is hard, while chatting about having tea with great-grandma is easy.

I think it goes deeper than that, however.  We're back to Isaac Asimov's wonderful quote, aren't we?  It seems a fitting place to end.

***************************************

I'm in awe of people who are true masters of their craft.  My son is a professional glassblower, making precision scientific equipment, and watching him do what he does has always seemed to me to be a little like watching a magic show.  On a (much) lower level of skill, I'm an amateur potter, and have a great time exploring different kinds of clays, pigments, stains, and glazes used in making functional pottery.

What amazes me, though, is that crafts like these aren't new.  Glassblowing, pottery-making, blacksmithing, and other such endeavors date back to long before we knew anything about the underlying chemistry and physics; the techniques were developed by a long history of trial and error.

This is the subject of Anna Ploszajski's new book Handmade: A Scientist's Search for Meaning Through Making, in which she visits some of the finest craftspeople in the world -- and looks at what each is doing through the lenses of history and science.  It's a fascinating inquiry into the drive to create, and how we've learned to manipulate the materials around us into tools, technology, and fine art.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Veterinarians and anti-vaxxers

Let's get something straight from the outset.

Vaccines don't cause autism.  They never have.  The "research" of Andrew Wakefield, which started that whole myth, was shown to be fraudulent years ago, and every study since then -- and there have been many -- has supported that vaccines have few side effects, the vast majority of which are mild and temporary, and their benefits outweigh any risks they might engender.

And yes, that includes the two vaccines most often cited as being dangerous, MMR (Measles/Mumps/Rubella) and HPV (Human Papillomavirus).

This whole thing should have been laid to rest ages ago, but there's no idea so baseless and stupid that there won't be loads of people who believe it.  Which, I believe, largely explains the bizarre resurgence of the "Flat Earth" model, a claim so stupid that anyone who believes it apparently has a single Froot Loop where most of us have a brain.

But back to vaccines.  I've dealt with this topic here at Skeptophilia often enough that you might be wondering why I'm returning to it.  Well, the answer is that the anti-vaxx movement has now expanded its focus to a different target...

... pets.

[image courtesy of photographer Noël Zia Lee and the Wikimedia Commons]

I kid you not.  Veterinarians, especially in urban areas of the United States, are reporting an increasing number of pet owners who are refusing to get their pets vaccinated.  Only one vaccine is mandated for dogs in the U.S. -- rabies -- but the others are critical to prevent devastating diseases.  The reason you hardly ever hear about a dog getting (for example) canine distemper is because responsible dog owners have their dogs vaccinated against it.  The vaccine is nearly 100% effective, and (like virtually all vaccines) safe and side-effect free.

If your dog actually contracts distemper, however, he has a 50-50 chance of surviving it, even with the best veterinary care.

There's no question which option I take for my own dogs.

The anti-vaxxers, however, don't see it like this.  Recall that this is the group of people who believe that it's better to develop "natural immunity," meaning immunity from exposure to the actual pathogen.  If a child (or a pet) has a good diet and is otherwise healthy, they say, these infectious diseases aren't dangerous.  Thus the book Melanie's Marvelous Measles by Stephanie Messenger, which tells the story of little Melanie who is just thrilled to get measles and develop "natural immunity" rather than having to go through the ordeal of getting a vaccination.

For the record, I'm not making this book up.  Although I do find it heartening that of the 511 reviews it's gotten so far on Amazon, 74% of them are one-star.

The problem is twofold.  First, this "natural immunity" carries with it the risk of horrible complications from the disease itself, a few of which are shingles (chicken pox), sterility (mumps), blindness (measles), and birth defects (rubella).  That's if they don't kill you outright.  I have mentioned before my grandfather's two sisters, Marie Emelie and Anne Daisy, who died nine days apart of measles -- at the ages of 22 and 16, respectively.

The second problem is that it doesn't take all that many people choosing not to vaccinate to give infectious diseases a foothold.  Measles and mumps are both making comebacks; to return to the original topic of pets, so is distemper, to judge from a 2014 outbreak in Texas that resulted in 200 cases of the once-rare disease.

And why are people making this decision?  As with the anti-vaxxers who are refusing to vaccinate their children, these people are trying to protect their pets against some unspecified set of ostensible risk factors.  Stephanie Liff, a Brooklyn-based veterinarian, has reported that she has clients who elected not to vaccinate their dogs -- because they were afraid the dogs would become autistic.

"We've never diagnosed autism in a dog," Liff said.  "I don't think you could."

The bottom line here is that our pets, like our children, depend on us to make responsible decisions with regards to their health, safety, and welfare.  The fact that people have loony ideas sometimes is unavoidable; but when those loony ideas start to endanger others, including animals, who have no say in the matter -- then it becomes reprehensible.

Deadly pseudoscience

In 2012, a 19-month-old boy named Ezekiel Stephan spiked a fever and was obviously in distress.  His parents, a British Columbian couple named David and Collet Stephan, decided not to seek medical attention for their child, instead treating him with "natural" and "alternative" treatments such as extracts of hot pepper, garlic, onion, and horseradish.

The little boy had bacterial meningitis.  By the time they decided to get the boy to the emergency room, he had lapsed into a coma, and hours later he died.

The Stephans were arrested and tried for "failing to provide necessities of life for their child."  David Stephan was said to be "completely unremorseful" and was sentenced to four months in jail.  Collet was put under house arrest for three months.  Both were ordered to perform 240 hours of community service.

And now, the Stephans have gone to Prince George, British Columbia to promote "natural remedies" for Truehope Nutritional Support, Inc., a company founded by his father.  Truehope's EMPowerPlus is one of the "remedies" that "assists with brain function" that they gave to their child shortly before he died.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Dave Fuller, owner of Ave Maria Specialties, a "holistic health" store that carries Truehope products, seems to give nothing but a shoulder shrug with respect to the Stephans' actions.  "Who am I to say that just because something happened that was an accident the guy regrets — his son died — that he shouldn't have a job?" Fuller said.

Let's be clear here.  This was not an accident.  Bacterial meningitis is a horrible disease, but caught early enough, is treatable.  This couple deliberately ignored their little boy's increasingly severe symptoms in favor of quack "remedies," rejecting modern medicine for alt-med bullshit.  And as a result, their child died.

Unfortunately, this abandonment of science in favor of pseudoscience is becoming increasingly common.  The medical researchers are labeled as shills for "Big Pharma," and their data is rejected as inaccurate or outright fabrication, designed to "keep us buying drugs" or "keep us sick," and any information about low efficacy or side effects is allegedly covered up.

In fact, we're one of the healthiest societies the world has ever seen.  Most of the diseases that killed our great-grandparents' generation are now unheard of (how many people do you know have had diphtheria?).  And yet there are people who want to reject everything that modern medical research has given us in favor of the same kinds of remedies our ancestors used -- that didn't work very well back then, and still don't work now.

It's this same idea that is driving Donald Trump's links to the anti-vaxx movement, most recently his request of a meeting with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an anti-vaxxer who hides behind the "we just want safe vaccines" half-truth -- and Kennedy is now apparently going to head up a "vaccine safety board" to further investigate such nonsense as the link between vaccines and autism, which has been studied every which way from Sunday and always results in no correlation whatsoever.

All of this gives the impression that we need oversight because at the moment vaccines and other medications are simply thrown out willy-nilly by the medical researchers with no vetting at all, and that now we'll finally have someone making sure we're protected from the evils of Big Pharma.  Of course, nothing could be further from the truth; there is already the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (which has been around for fifty years) which oversees the testing and evaluation of vaccines and provides data to the CDC regarding efficacy and potential side effects.  The same is true for other medications; there is a rigorous set of tests each drug has to undergo, first on animal models and then (if they look promising) on human volunteers, before they are approved by the FDA.

That doesn't mean the process is foolproof.  Humans are fallible, data can be misinterpreted, experiments can fall prey to unintended sample bias.  There's no doubt that the profit motive in the pharmaceuticals and health insurance industries has led to price inflation for medications.  But the drugs themselves are, by and large, safe and effective, and sure as hell are better than horseradish extract for treating meningitis.

But the step from "the system has some flaws and could use reform" to "reject all modern medicine in favor of roots and berries" is all too easy a step for some people, and in the case of the Stephans, it resulted in their son's death.  And, more appallingly, they're still hawking the same stuff despite a very real test case establishing that it's worthless.

The bottom line: science isn't perfect, but as a means of determining the truth, it's the best thing on the market.  And also, the trenchant comment from Tim Minchin's performance piece "Storm:"  "There's a name for alternative medicine that works.  It's called... medicine."

The dose makes the poison

One of the most fundamental concepts in pharmacology and/or toxicology is the dose-response curve, which gives a graphic representation of how the human body responds to varying doses of chemicals.  Something that is often poorly understood by laypeople, but becomes obvious if you study the topic at any length, is that there are some substances (e.g. lead) which are unsafe at any dose, and others that are necessary at low doses but toxic at high ones (e.g. table salt).  Further complicating the matter is that some substances bioaccumulate -- small doses over a long period of time can cause a toxic increase in the body tissues.  Elemental mercury, for example, doesn't get excreted readily, so even small amounts over a long period can result in harm (giving rise to "mad hatter syndrome" if sufficient quantities are ingested).  Others are water-soluble and quickly cleared by the kidneys, so it takes a great deal more to result in harm (e.g. vitamin C).

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So the subject isn't simple.  But if you're going to read anything on toxins and (especially) vaccines, you damn well better do your homework, or you're likely to get suckered by articles like the incredibly bullshit-dense "The 7 Most Dangerous Vaccines Injected Into Humans and Exactly Why They Cause More Harm Than Good" that appeared over at Natural News a few days ago.

The article, written by S. D. Wells, would be the same tired old "chemicals = bad" nonsense trotted out by damn near everyone in the alt-med world, from Vani "Food Babe" Hari to Mike "Health Ranger" Adams, except for the fact that Wells starts going into specifics about which chemicals in vaccines are bad, why, and at which doses.  Which is unfortunate for Wells, because any time these people slide over into analysis of the facts, they immediately start making claims that anyone who passed high school chemistry would know immediately are false.

Let's start with my favorite line in the whole thing, which is how the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine contains sodium chloride, which "raises blood pressure and inhibits muscle contraction and growth."  Yes, sodium chloride, i.e., plain old table salt.  He also tells us that another vaccine, Gardasil, contains this dreaded toxin at nearly 10 micrograms.  If you can imagine.

For comparison purposes, the Recommended Daily Allowance for salt is 4 grams.  To save you from doing the math, this means that the Gardasil vaccine contains 1/400,000th of the salt you ordinarily get from your food.

But in the words of the infomercial, "Wait!  There's more!"  Gardasil also contains 35 micrograms of sodium borate, which Wells tells us is a chemical used to kill cockroaches.  What he doesn't tell us is that borate is another micronutrient in the human diet, and is only toxic at huge doses -- at least huge compared to what's in Gardasil.  Again consulting the Recommended Daily Allowance tables, the RDA for boron is 1 to 6 milligrams -- about a hundred times what you get from Gardasil.

Wells doesn't just mislead and/or lie outright about the chemical constituents of vaccines, he lies about their side effects.  Gardasil, we're told, has horrific results; he says, "many girls who get the HPV vaccine beginning at age 9 for a sexually transmitted disease (diseases they dont [sic] have) go into immediate anaphylactic shock and some into comas and die."  Which is simply untrue; a study in 2012 of 189,000 girls who had been inoculated with Gardasil showed that the most common side effect was same-day syncope (i.e., they fainted), and even that was uncommon.  If that's not enough, a study of a million girls in Denmark was so side-effect free that the authors concluded that there was “no evidence supporting associations between exposure to qHPV vaccine and autoimmune, neurological, and venous thromboembolic adverse events."

But back to Wells.  Another horror he trots out is monosodium glutamate in the MMR vaccine.  If you're wondering if this is the same chemical that's used for a flavoring in Chinese food, yup, that's it.  It's also the sodium salt of one of the most common naturally occurring amino acids, and is found in tomatoes and cheese, not to mention General Tso's chicken, in quantities that are orders of magnitude more than are in the vaccination.  Then we have polysorbate 80, which Wells claims causes sterility even though it's used as an emulsifier in ice cream and a study on rats who were fed polysorbate 80 at a quantity of 0.5% of their body weight per day showed no adverse effects whatsoever.

I did get a good belly laugh at Wells's horrified statement that the swine flu vaccine contains "inactivated H1N1 virus."  After I finished laughing, I shouted at the computer screen, "How the fuck do you think vaccines are made, you nimrod?  What do you think they contain?  Holy water and magic berries?"

Then we have the wizened old claims about vaccines and mercury, even though the only vaccines that still contain thimerosal (a mercury-based stabilizer) are multivalent flu vaccines, and the stabilizer breaks down quickly to ethylmercury which is quickly cleared from the body by the kidneys.  (A lot of the confusion over mercury toxicity comes from mistaking this compound for methylmercury, which is toxic, bioaccumulates, and causes progressive nerve damage.)

And so on and so forth.  It's the same old, same old, really, but this was such an amazingly dumb example of anti-vaxx rhetoric that I thought it worth debunking.  As for me, I'm going to go look up the dose-response curve for bullshit, because I think reading Wells's article may have given me a fatal dose.

Pandering to anti-science

Is it too much to ask for that we have some political candidates who unequivocally respect science?

In casting about for who else might be out there running for president other than The Big Two, I initially considered Jill Stein, nominee of the Green Party.  Stein has attractive ideas about fracking (against) and renewable energy (for), and I thought she might be worth supporting, not that she has a snowball's chance in hell of winning.  But a closer look indicated that either she's pandering to the anti-science cadre on the far left, or else she's an anti-science loon herself.

Dr. Jill Stein [image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

Let's start with her attitudes toward vaccines.  Here's a direct quote from Stein on the topic:

I don’t know if we have an “official” stance, but I can tell you my personal stance at this point.  According to the most recent review of vaccination policies across the globe, mandatory vaccination that doesn’t allow for medical exemptions is practically unheard of.  In most countries, people trust their regulatory agencies and have very high rates of vaccination through voluntary programs.  In the US, however, regulatory agencies are routinely packed with corporate lobbyists and CEOs.  So the foxes are guarding the chicken coop as usual in the US.  So who wouldn’t be skeptical?  I think dropping vaccinations rates that can and must be fixed in order to get at the vaccination issue: the widespread distrust of the medical-indsutrial complex. 

Vaccines in general have made a huge contribution to public health.  Reducing or eliminating devastating diseases like smallpox and polio.  In Canada, where I happen to have some numbers, hundreds of annual death from measles and whooping cough were eliminated after vaccines were introduced.  Still, vaccines should be treated like any medical procedure–each one needs to be tested and regulated by parties that do not have a financial interest in them.

Which sounds like waffling to me.  How about coming right out and saying, "Vaccines are safe, effective, and have saved thousands of lives.  End of discussion."  Worse still, as was pointed out over at SkepticalRaptor, she's wrong about the regulation of vaccines:

The FDA advisory committee for vaccines contains 17 members, all but two are academics with impeccable research and science credentials.  The other two, admittedly are from Big Pharma, but they also have impressive scientific backgrounds, and to impugn their character or any of the 17 others, is borderline libel. 

Does Jill Stein have any evidence whatsoever that those 17 scientists are all handed bribes by Big Pharma to vote against the safety of American children?  Well, does she? 

Then, there's the Green Party's official platform, which explicitly supports homeopathy and other useless treatment modalities:

Chronic conditions are often best cured by alternative medicine.  We support the teaching, funding and practice of holistic health approaches and, as appropriate, the use of complementary and alternative therapies such as herbal medicines, homeopathy, naturopathy, traditional Chinese medicine and other healing approaches.

But in the words of the infomercial, "Wait... there's more!"  In a recent forum, Stein went on record as saying that wifi should be removed from schools because of its effects on children's brains:

We should not be subjecting kids' brains to that.  We don't follow that issue in this country, but in Europe where they do, they have good precautions around wireless.  Maybe not good enough.  Because it's really hard to study this stuff.  You make guinea pigs out of whole populations and then we discover how many of them die.  This is the paradigm for how public health works in this country.  This is outrageous.  This is why we need to take back not just our schools, but take back the whole system of how we create health, how we protect health, and our research institutions as well, to be publicly funded and publicly accountable as well.  We've lost trust in our regulatory agencies, when the vice president of Monsanto is in charge of the... not the DEA, which is it... the FDA.

Well, no, it's actually not hard at all to study this stuff.  There have been dozens of well-controlled studies of the dangers of wifi, and all of them have found... nothing.  According to the World Health Organization:

From all evidence accumulated so far, no adverse short- or long-term health effects have been shown to occur from the RF signals produced by base stations.  Since wireless networks produce generally lower RF signals than base stations, no adverse health effects are expected from exposure to them...  Considering the very low exposure levels and research results collected to date, there is no convincing scientific evidence that the weak RF signals from base stations and wireless networks cause adverse health effects.

 And once again, her defense for her views jumps to claiming that Evil Corporations Run Everything, so q.e.d., and (of course) finishes up with the argumentum ad Monsantum -- which in this case isn't even correct.  The current commissioner of the FDA is Dr. Robert Califf, who does have ties (as a paid consultant) to the pharmaceuticals industry, but has no connection whatsoever to Monsanto.

Worse still, did I mention that Jill Stein is a doctor herself?

Look, it's not that I expect a political candidate to be perfect, or to line up exactly with my own views on how things should go.  All of politics is a compromise.  But one thing I'm not willing to compromise is that anyone I support needs to respect science.  The fact that Dr. Jill Stein is not willing to go on record as declaring support for scientific findings that have been verified over and over smacks either of pandering to a vocal minority of far-left anti-science types, or of willful ignorance.  And in neither case can I vote for her in good conscience.