Archives for category: Science
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

The Five Threats to Public Health on Day 1 of Trump Administration

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2024 //
1

Lisa Gray, an editor at the Houston Chronicle, interviewed Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist and specialist in infectious diseases, about the major public health challenges facing the incoming Trump administration. Dr. Hotez shares the story of his effort to persuade Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of the importance of vaccines. This post is the first of two.

Gray wrote:

During the COVID pandemic, Americans came to rely on bow-tied vaccine scientist Peter Hotez for calm, scientific assessments of the virus and the vaccines being developed to fight it. With his team at Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, Hotez develops low-cost vaccines for low-income nations. He’s also the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine — and is arguably Houston’s most beloved doctor.

He still monitors the public-health landscape closely. To find out what public-health threats await the Donald Trump administration, Houston Chronicle videographer Sharon Steinmann and I interviewed him at his office at Baylor.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What are the public health challenges that the Trump administration will face on Day 1? Are you monitoring any major health threats?

A: We’ve got some big-ticket concerns regarding infectious disease and pandemic threats. The new administration is not going to have the luxury of time to organize and think about it. They’re going to be confronted with this from the very beginning.

One of the big threats I’m following is H5N1, an avian influenza. The virus is widespread now in migratory birds that fly from the north to the south.

It’s spilling over into domestic birds and poultry. We’re now seeing a big increase in infections of domestic birds and poultry in California and elsewhere in the western part of the United States, as well as across the northern part of the country. 

An H5N1 strain has also crossed over from birds into cattle. It’s gotten into our herds, including in Texas, as well as in the Great Plains and other parts of the United States.

I’m concerned that, eventually, this virus could spill over to people as well. We’re starting to see human cases. In the last few weeks, we’ve had six human cases. I think eventually H5N1 could become a major human public-health threat.

It’s not there yet. We’re not seeing human-to-human transmission yet. But monitoring it and being prepared for it has got to be a big priority for the new incoming administration. 

Q: Oof. Is that all that’s on the horizon?

A: Guess what? That’s just the beginning.

The other thing that’s happening is, we still have COVID with us. Our COVID-19 numbers are low again, but I expect them to rise. You can protect yourself from that, of course, by keeping your immunizations up to date. If you got a dose of the vaccine in September, like I did, you’ll be due again around January.

But here’s the thing: COVID-19 isn’t the only COVID threat. There are other coronaviruses.

Remember that the name for the virus that causes COVID is the SARS-2 coronavirus. There was a SARS-1, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome that came out of southern China in 2002. We had Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, also caused by a coronavirus, in 2012. And of course, we had SARS-2 cause COVID, the largest pandemic of them all, starting in 2019.

We should expect SARS-3 to come in the next few years.

Q: Why are we seeing these new coronaviruses in people?

A: Because these viruses are widespread in bats. Across China and East Asia, they’re jumping regularly to people. In some cases that’s through intermediate animal hosts. In some cases it’s directly from bats to people.

By some estimates, these new SARS coronaviruses are jumping from bats to people on the order of 66,000 times a year. Every now and then, one catches fire and ignites a pandemic.

So that needs to occupy the attention of the Trump administration. What kind of surveillance are we doing for SARS-3, which is brewing as we speak among bats in Asia?

Q: That’s a lot to take care of.

A: That’s not all we have to worry about. A third big-ticket item is the fact that we’ve seen a significant uptick in the number of virus infections transmitted by mosquitoes or other biting arthropods. We all know about the West Nile virus. Last year was a pretty bad year for infections in the United States, including Texas. But that’s just the beginning.

With these mosquito-transmitted viruses, which we call arboviruses, we know what to expect in the U.S. because we usually see it first in Brazil. In the Western Hemisphere, Brazil is the arbovirus epicenter.  And right now, dengue, Oropouche, Zika and even yellow fever are all expanding in Brazil. They’re even extending beyond the Amazon rainforest, where we typically see them, because of climate change and possibly because of deforestation. 

And unfortunately, what starts in Brazil doesn’t stay in Brazil. It will eventually make its way to the Gulf Coast of the United States, including Texas.  So for next summer, I’m worried about dengue. I’m worried about Chikungunya, and even the possibility of yellow fever. I wrote about the possibility of a yellow fever outbreak in the New England Journal of Medicine; it would be catastrophic. The virus affects pregnant women and could be transmitted to the fetus, causing horrible birth defects. And besides yellow fever, Oropouche virus [pronounced “o-ro-push”] is going to be yet another big-ticket item. It’s spreading fast in Brazil. 

Q: So we’ve got four big-ticket concerns.

A: Wait, wait: We’re not done yet. Anti-vaccine activism accelerated during COVID; we’ve spoken about it many times. Now it’s spilling over to childhood immunizations. We’re seeing unprecedented levels of vaccine hesitancy and of parents refusing to have their kids vaccinated. So guess what?

From 2023 to 2024, we had a nearly sixfold increase in pertussis, or whooping cough, cases. We went from four measles outbreaks in 2023 to 16 in 2024. We’ve even seen polio in the wastewater of New York state.

I’m expecting a big rise in illnesses that are preventable with childhood vaccines.

Q: And the Trump administration has to be ready for all five of these major threats?

A: All of that is going to come crashing down on them. It’s going to be important that they take all those threats seriously.

It’s not just public health that could be affected. We’ve learned that pandemics have all sorts of other aspects. There’s an economic impact. There’s the impact on our security. And if we have a serious epidemic here in the U.S., it could block our travel from the U.S. to other countries.

I don’t have the sense that these big-ticket infectious disease threats are being taken with the seriousness that they need to be.

Q: Is that based on the people Donald Trump has named to health positions?

A: I’m concerned that the Trump administration is picking individuals based on their ideologies rather than either their subject-matter expertise or their ability to get things done in government.

Lisa Gray is the op-ed editor and a member of the Houston Chronicle editorial board. During the pandemic, she was the Chronicle’s lead COVID reporter.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Health, Science

Politico Sanewashes Crackpot RFK Jr.

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2024 //
17

Politico posted an article today claiming that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was gaining approval by focusing on his criticism of Big Pharma and Big Ag.

The article claims that RFK is a normal politician! He wants people to eat healthy foods!He is against ultra processed foods, even if you saw the photo of him eating a Big Mac on Trump’s plane.

Despite initial resistance, Bobby is winning people over:

Less than a month later, however, some of Kennedy’s other views — especially on food — are surprisingly taking root on Capitol Hill. There’s still considerable resistance to Kennedy — and no certainty that he gets confirmed by the Senate. But his attacks on Big Ag and Big Pharma are resonating and RFK is finding allies among some populists who share the goal of taking on big corporate interests.

Ignore the fact that he is opposed to vaccines. Ignore the fact that dozens of children died in Samoa after he brought news that (in his view) measles vaccines cause measles.

Ignore the fact that he recently claimed that heroin improved his school performance.

Shame on Politico.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should not run our nation’s healthcare system. Maybe a food safety program. But NOT the Department of Health and Human Services!

He is an extremist who opposes science.

Categories Cruelty, Elections, Extremism, Health, Propaganda, Science, Trump

Bloomberg Blasts RFK Jr. as a Nutty Conspiracy Theorist

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2024 //
6

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg has devoted a significant part of his wealth to medical research and public health. So it should not be surprising that he denounced CDC red

as the selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS oversees all of the federal agencies concerned with medical research and public health.

Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, launched a lengthy broadside on Tuesday against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., using his opening remarks at a public health conference to warn that installing Mr. Kennedy as health secretary would be “beyond dangerous,” and tantamount to “medical malpractice on a mass scale.”

Mr. Bloomberg, speaking at the two-day Bloomberg American Health Summit in Washington, called on Senate Republicans to persuade President-elect Donald J. Trump to “rethink” his choice of Mr. Kennedy for health secretary. If Mr. Trump cannot be persuaded, he said, the Senate has “a duty to our whole country, but especially to our children,” to vote against confirming him.

Mr. Bloomberg also assailed Mr. Kennedy for discouraging measles vaccination during an outbreak in the island nation of Samoa, where 83 people died.

“Parents who have been swayed by vaccine skepticism love their children and want to protect them, and we need leaders who will help them do that,” he said, “not conspiracy theorists who will scare them into decisions that will put their children at risk of disease….”

Among other things, Mr. Bloomberg chided Mr. Kennedy for “nutty conspiracy theories,” including making the “outrageous false claim” that the Covid-19 shot was the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” He said Mr. Trump deserved credit for Operation Warp Speed, the fast-track initiative that produced coronavirus vaccines in record time, noting that studies have shown that the vaccines have saved an estimated 20 million lives around the world.

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Extremism, Health, Science

Trump’s Director of FDA Warns Senate Not to Confirm RFK Jr.

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2024 //
7

One of Trump’s appointees in his first administration urged the U.S. Senate not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy as Secretary of Health and Human services because of his ignorant hostility to vaccines. He warned that a variety of contagious diseases would break out, and people would die. It’s worthwhile to recall that before RFK endorsed Trump, RFK was generally viewed by the press and by medical experts as a crackpot.

Scott Gottlieb, who led the Food and Drug Administration during the Trump administration, on Friday warned that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could “cost lives” if confirmed as the next secretary of Health and Human Services.
“You’re going to see measles, mumps and rubella vaccination rates go down,” Gottlieb said on CNBC, referencing Kennedy’s longtime criticism of federal recommendations for childhood immunizations, and noting a recent decline in childhood vaccination rates. The nation is approaching a “tipping point,” Gottlieb said, where a continued decline in childhood vaccines could soon lead to measles outbreaks and deaths of children.
“We’re going to start seeing epidemics of diseases that have long been vanquished, and, God forbid, we see polio reemerge in this country,” he said.
Gottlieb said he had been warning senators against confirming Kennedy to run the federal health department, although he did not identify with whom he had spoken. He added that Kennedy, who founded one of the country’s most prominent antivaccine groups, had “smart people” around him who could take immediate steps to affect Americans’ access to vaccines, such as changing federal vaccine recommendations.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Health, Science, Trump

Dr. Oz Has Investments in Health Sector, Conflicts of Interest

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2024 //
15

Dr. Mehmet Oz has significant investments in the healthcare industry that Trump appointed him to regulate. The hits just keep coming.

His investments predispose him to promote for-profit Medicare Advantage plans and to reduce the number of enrollees in Medicare.

The LA Times reported:

President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to run the sprawling government agency that administers Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act marketplace — celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz — recently held broad investments in healthcare, tech and food companies that would pose significant conflicts of interest.


Oz’s holdings, some shared with family, included a stake in UnitedHealth Group worth as much as $600,000, as well as shares of pharmaceutical firms and tech companies with business in the healthcare sector, such as Amazon. Collectively, Oz’s investments total tens of millions of dollars, according to financial disclosures he filed during his failed 2022 run for a Pennsylvania U.S. Senate seat.


Trump said Tuesday he would nominate Oz as administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The agency’s scope is huge: CMS oversees coverage for more than 160 million Americans, nearly half the population. Medicare alone accounts for approximately $1 trillion in annual spending, with more than 67 million enrollees.


UnitedHealth Group is one of the largest healthcare companies in the nation and arguably the most important business partner of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, through which it is the leading provider of commercial health plans available to Medicare beneficiaries.

UnitedHealth also offers managed-care plans under Medicaid, the joint state-federal program for low-income people, and sells plans on government-run marketplaces set up via the Affordable Care Act. Oz also had smaller stakes in CVS Health, which now includes the insurer Aetna, and in the insurer Cigna.


It’s not clear if Oz, a heart surgeon by training, still holds investments in healthcare companies, or if he would divest his shares or otherwise seek to mitigate conflicts of interest should he be confirmed by the Senate. Reached by phone on Wednesday, he said he was in a Zoom meeting and declined to comment.


An assistant did not reply to an email message with detailed questions.


“It’s obvious that over the years he’s cultivated an interest in the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance industry,” said Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a watchdog group. “That raises a question of whether he can be trusted to act on behalf of the American people.” (The publisher of KFF Health News, David Rousseau, is on the Center for Science in the Public Interest board.)

Categories Accountability, Ethics, For-Profit, Health, Science, Trump

Brian Deer: RFK Jr. Spreads Misinformation and Lies

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2024 //
17

Brian Deer is a journalist who recently published a book about anti-vaccine activists. In an opinion piece in the New York Times, he described how very dangerous Robert F. Kennedy is. If he should be confirmed as leader of the department of Health and Human Services, Deer predicts, he will surround himself with other quacks and vaccine deniers. Recently, he writes, Kennedy has been trying to obscure his radical views against vaccines by talking about food safety. Don’t be fooled. He does not trust science, and his stance on vaccines is dangerous.

He writes:

In November 2019, when an epidemic of measles was killing children and babies in Samoa, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who in recent days became Donald Trump’s pick to lead the department of Health and Human Services — sent the prime minister of Samoa a four-page letter. In it, he suggested the measles vaccine itself may have caused the outbreak.

He claimed that the vaccine might have “failed to produce antibodies” in vaccinated mothers sufficient to provide infants with immunity, that it perhaps provoked “the evolution of more virulent measles strains” and that children who received the vaccine may have inadvertently spread the virus to other children. “Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of any assistance,” he added, writing in his role as the chairman of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group.

At the time of his letter, 16 people, many of them younger than 2, were already reported dead. Measles, which is among the most contagious diseases, can sometimes lead to brain swelling, pneumonia and death. For months, families grieved over heartbreaking little coffins, until a door-to-door vaccination campaign brought the calamity to a close. The final number of fatalities topped 80.

I was in Samoa during that outbreak as part of my more than 16 years of reporting on the anti-vaccine movement. The cause of the outbreak was not the vaccine, but most likely an infected traveler who brought the virus from New Zealand, which that year had had the biggest measles outbreaks in decades, especially among that country’s Indigenous and Pacific Islander communities. Migration and poverty were likely factors in a sudden spread of measles in Samoa and New Zealand. But, as an editorial in The New Zealand Medical Journal reported, so too was a factor that Mr. Kennedy specializes in: “increasing circulation of misinformation leading to distrust and reduced vaccination uptake.” Samoa’s vaccination rates had fallen to fewer than a third of eligible 1-year-olds.

Vaccine skepticism has ballooned worldwide, and Mr. Kennedy and others who back him have encouraged it. Americans may be well aware that their possible future health leader holds dangerous beliefs about vaccines. The consequences of his views — and those of his orbit — are not merely absurd but tragic.

In my reporting, parents have mentioned fearing vaccines after watching “Vaxxed,” a 90-minute documentary, which had also toured countries such as New Zealand. The film, focused on unproven allegations, was released more than three years before the Samoa measles outbreak. Among much else, it claimed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had committed fraud.

Two of the filmmakers — Del Bigtree and Andrew Wakefield — are buddies of Mr. Kennedy. The director, Mr. Wakefield, is a former doctor whose medical license was revoked in his native Britain in 2010 amid charges of ethical violations. One of the producers, Mr. Bigtree, became Mr. Kennedy’s presidential campaign communications chief.

In the years before the documentary was released, I revealed, in a series of articles, evidence that Mr. Wakefield’s research in the 1990s had been rigged at a London hospital to make it look as if the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine was linked to autism. This research was retracted in 2010. Mr. Kennedy certainly didn’t seem fazed by Mr. Wakefield’s professional downfall. “In any just society, we would be building statues to Andy Wakefield,” he yelled, for instance, from a platform he and Mr. Wakefield shared at an event in Washington, D.C., a few days before he sent his letter to Samoa.

Reports say Mr. Kennedy is reviewing résumés for his possible Health and Human Services Department empire. He’s reportedlyeyeing Dr. Joseph Ladapo, a Florida health official who has questioned the safety of Covid vaccines. I’d say Mr. Bigtree may get a role; Mr. Wakefield is trickier, given how discredited he is, even in the United States. But there are plenty of others in Mr. Kennedy’s circle whose claims ought to concern everyone.

Consider Sherri Tenpenny, a doctor who has been declared by Mr. Kennedy as “one of the great leaders” of the anti-vaccine movement. She has falsely claimed that a “metal” attached to a protein in the Covid shots was making their recipients magnetic. “They can put a key on their forehead and it sticks,” she told Ohio state lawmakers in June 2021. “They can put spoons and forks all over them and they can stick.” I could pluck plenty more outrageous characters from Mr. Kennedy’s circle over the years, including veteran AIDS denialists.

In recent days, Mr. Kennedy appears to have tried to change the conversation around his vaccine views to focus on America’s junk food diets. But his views on vaccines shouldn’t be forgotten. In January 2021, speaking to a gathering of loyalists in Ohio, he outlined a three-point checklist that had to be met for him to consider a Covid vaccine. First, he said, “you take one shot, you get lifetime immunity.” Second, side effects are only “one in a million.” Third, “herd immunity” is achieved at 70 percent public uptake — after which, he stipulated, “nobody in this society” ever gets the disease again.

“If they came up with that product,” he said, “I’d be happy to look at it.”

His audience laughed. But it’s not funny.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Fraud, Health, Science, Trump

NYCPSP: The Anti-Vaxxer Appointed by Trump to Lead NIH

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2024 //
25

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is one of the premiere government agencies responsible for research in medicine and public health. NIH is the largest biomedical research institution in the world. Maintaining its scientific integrity is important for the U.S. and the world.

Trump appointed a leading opponent of vaccines to lead the NIH. Others in the medical profession have considered his views to be “fringe,” “extreme,” “out of the mainstream.” Of course, Trump’s choice of Robert Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, has garnered many critics, who refer to him as an unqualified and dangerous quack. And then there is Dr. Oz, the hawker of vitamins on TV, as director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He is said to be a proponent of privatizing Medicare by pushing Medicare Advantage plans owned by private companies.

Why is Trump unleashing his fury on the nation’s public health services? If you know, please share.

Our esteemed reader, who posts under the name, “New York City Public School Parent,” has researched Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH.

She wrote:

Bhattacharya, like Bondi, like William Barr, gets a pass by a liberal media that ignores the worst of their political hackery and their history of dishonesty. Instead of characterizing their actions as corrupt, or demonstrating the utter lack of integrity these folks have, the so-called liberal media instead normalizes their worst actions and mischaracterizes those worst actions as simply “something that rabid partisans on the other side don’t like.” 

When the so-called liberal media was helping the right wing media amplify Bhattacharya’s hyped “evidence-based findings” – that covid was no more deadly than the flu, in spring of 2020, a real journalist, Stephanie M. Lee at Buzzfeed, was reporting on this “evidence” – the very problematic Santa Clara antibody study – financially supported by an airline owner who wanted the public flying again – where Bhattacharya’s doctor wife was caught lying to recruit affluent parents at her kids’ school to participate in a “random” study. Unlike the rest of the journalistic establishment, Lee did more than act as a stenographer, and in 2022 won the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting. From their press release:

“She investigated a study by John Ioannidis and his colleagues [Bhattacharya and another hack] at Stanford that made a splash early in the coronavirus pandemic when it claimed to show COVID-19 was no more dangerous than the flu. Lee uncovered serious flaws in the study; her stories also showed that Ioannidis had organized an effort to lobby the White House against pandemic lockdowns before collecting any data and that the study had been secretly funded by David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue and a vocal lockdown opponent.”

Bhattacharya is so lacking in integrity that he made Lee’s life hell for daring to report the truth — he accused her of going after his family (directly causing her to be threatened) because she told the truth – that his doctor wife had improperly solicited parents at her kids’ affluent school to be part of her husband’s “random” antibody study to help prove that covid was no more dangerous than the flu.

He also has a lot in common with Emily Oster – two economists guilty of unprofessionally hyping their very flawed data and getting lots of publicity because they were willing to use that flawed data to make claims that just coincidentally happened to support a dishonest Republican narrative. In both cases, far more credible researchers were correctly pointing out how problematic their “evidence” was – but the media ignored critics and amplified these two folks who were more than happy to hype the lie that indisputable evidence and data supported the Republican narrative about covid being no big danger. 

Later, quietly, these political hacks would make revisions to their data, because their critics were correct that they had hyped flawed data that supported right wing narratives.

Despite the fact that no credible researcher would have ever made the claims of certainty (their “data” proves it!), these two never lost an ounce of credibility despite their errors. 

Typical double standard – if you are helping the Republican narrative, your improper actions are barely mentioned and always spun as irrelevant, thus your reputation as a widely respected truth-teller remains intact in the liberal media. If you are telling the truth and the truth doesn’t support the right wing narrative, the so-called liberal media (in the interest of “balance”) will scrutinize your actions to find some misstep they amplify into a major scandal that suggests you should never be trusted.

Lee now writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Bhattacharya is still disparaging her for not acting like the more prominent reporters in the so-called liberal media who specialize in uncritically rewriting press releases amplifying the undisputed “data” and “evidence” supporting right wing narratives.

The media also hyped the Great Barrington Declaration, which had very few credible researchers in epidemology, medicine or science among their signees, but included fake doctors and doctors who were also dead serial killers.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/09/herd-immunity-letter-signed-fake-experts-dr-johnny-bananas-covid

Categories Elections, Extremism, Fraud, Health, Research, Science, Trump

Trump Chooses Critic of Vaccines and Lockdowns to Lead NIH

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2024 //
12

President-Elect Trump made another off-the-wall nomination, which is sure to demoralize the scientists and doctors who work in public health for the federal government.

The Boston Globe reported:

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a critic of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates, to lead the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s leading medical research agency.

Trump, in a statement Tuesday evening, said Bhattacharya, a 56-year-old physician and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, will work in cooperation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, “to direct the Nation’s Medical Research, and to make important discoveries that will improve Health, and save lives.”

“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America’s biggest Health challenges, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease,” he wrote.

The decision to choose Bhattacharya for the post is yet another reminder of the ongoing impact of the COVID pandemic on the politics on public health.

Bhattacharya was one of three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, an October 2020 open letter maintaining that lockdowns were causing irreparable harm.

The document — which came before the availability of COVID-19 vaccines and during the first Trump administration — promoted “herd immunity,” the idea that people at low risk should live normally while building up immunity to COVID-19 through infection. Protection should focus instead on people at higher risk, the document said.

“I think the lockdowns were the single biggest public health mistake,” Bhattacharya said in March 2021 during a panel discussion convened by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The Great Barrington Declaration was embraced by some in the first Trump administration, even as it was widely denounced by disease experts. Then- NIH director Dr. Francis Collins called it dangerous and “not mainstream science.”

Categories Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Health, Science

Florida: Surgeon General Recommends Eliminating Fluoride from Water

By dianeravitch
November 24, 2024 //
15

Governor DeSantis hired Dr. Joseph Ladapo as Florida’s Surgeon General because he wanted a doctor who took a contrarian view on COVID: to support those who were anti-vaccine, anti-mask, and unwilling to follow public health guidelines. In other words, in the world of people who care about science, a quack.

Now, Dr. Ladapo is calling for the end of fluoridating the drinking water of Florida. He’s taking cues from the nation’s leading medical crackpot, Robert F. Kennedy.

The Washington Post reports:

The top health official of the nation’s third-largest state called Friday for a halt to adding fluoride to Florida’s water, citing controversial studies that suggest the widely hailed public health practice poses a risk to developing brains.

Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo issued a recommendation citing “the neuropsychiatric risk associated with fluoride exposure, particularly in pregnant women and children,” and noting the availability of alternative sources of fluoride intoothpaste and mouthwash.

“It is clear more research is necessary to address safety and efficacy concerns regarding community water fluoridation,” Ladapo said in a statement.“The previously considered benefit of community water fluoridation does not outweigh the current known risks, especially for special populations like pregnant women and children.”

Ladapo’s announcement comes three weeks after Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, said the Trump administration plans to issue a similar recommendation nationwide next year. Kennedy’s remarks drew rebukes from public health experts who say that the practice has helped protect Americans’ teeth, particularly in vulnerable communities where children might not regularly brush their teeth.

“It’s madness,” said Kurt Ferré, a retired Portland, Oregon, dentist and longtime pro-fluoridation activist. He said Florida’s seniors especially benefit from fluoride because of the oral health issues that come with age and medical care for older adults.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has long recommended putting fluoride in Americans’ drinking water, hailing it as one of the 10 great public health achievements of the 20th century and citing data that the practice reduces cavities by about 25 percent in children and adults. The water systems of more than 200 million Americans are fluoridated, according to CDC data.

Fluoridation has been a key public health strategy for decades, and proponents have pointed to studies showing oral health problems declining in cities that added the mineral and rising in communities that removed it.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Health, Science

Laura Helmuth: RFK Jr. Is a Public Menace

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2024 //
15

Laura Helmuth recently resigned as Chief Editor of Scientific American after expressing her outrage online about Trump’s election. I can understand her anger because she knew that Trump would appoint completely unqualified people to take charge of federal agencies overseeing the health of the American people. But I wish she hadn’t expressed it online!

She posted this information on BlueSky about the importance of vaccines:

The measles vaccine has saved 94 million lives over the past 50 years, and it plus vaccines against 13 other pathogens have cut infant mortality by 40 percent and saved 154 million lives.
154 MILLION LIVES 🧪
Anti-vaxxer RFKJ is a menace to global health

If RFK Jr. has his way, vaccines will be voluntary. Among the unvaccinated, disease will run rampant. Even the vaccinated may be at risk. It will be dangerous to attend public events or go anywhere that is crowded.

Categories Elections, Evil, Extremism, Health, Science, Stupid, Trump
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »