Nicole Shanahan, the billionaire selected by Robert Kennedy Jr. as his running mate, suspects that childhood vaccines may have caused her daughter’s autism. Glenn Kessler, the Fact Checker for the Washington Post, asked for the reactions of several autism experts, who disagreed with Shanahan. Kessler gives her four Pinnochios, the highest ranking for falsehood.
Archives for category: Science
The political landscape of American politics gets weirder by the moment, if you pay attention to what one former President is saying on the campaign trail.
In a campaign appearance in Richmond, Virginia, Trump promised that “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.” He is obviously appealing to the anti-vaxxers who refused to take the vaccine that Trump himself rushed to completion and that Trump and his family did take while in the White House.
Assuming that he is serious about his threat, he is promising to eliminate public health measures that are now the law in every state. It is now commonplace (and has been for decades) to require children to be vaccinated for various diseases before they enter school—measles, chickenpox, mumps, polio, diphtheria, etc.
Even Florida, which is officially opposed to vaccine mandates, requires students to be vaccinated before they start public school. As of July 12, 2023:
What immunizations are required for a child to attend school in Florida?
- 5 doses DTaP (diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis).
- 4-5 doses Polio (Kindergarten). …
- 2 doses MMR (measles-mumps-rubella).
- 3 doses Hepatitis B.
- 2 doses Varicella (chickenpox).
Despite this mandate, Florida is currently experiencing an outbreak of measles. The surgeon general of the state has told parents that it’s up to them to decide whether to send their sick child to school.
A number of contagious diseases are reappearing, according to WebMD. Among them are tuberculosis, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, and whooping cough. Some come back because the vaccines are not as effective as the bacteria evolves, and some return because people are not vaccinated.
Michael Hiltzik, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, wrote that Trump and RFK Jr. are competing for the anti-vaccine vote. If Trump is re-elected and follows through on his threats, we can expect to see a resurgence of diseases like polio that were eliminated decades ago.
Hiltzik’s column is titled: “Trump and RFK Jr. want to make the world safe again for polio and measles. You should be terrified.”
People will die from diseases that were conquered by science decades ago.
Hiltzik wrote:
Trump’s words elicited febrile cheers from his Virginia audience, which may be a sign of what I earlier identified as the phenomenon of “herd stupidity” connected with the anti-vaccine movement.
Did these people have any conception of what they were cheering? (We can assume that Trump didn’t.) Did they cotton on to the fact that Trump was advocating depriving all Virginia public and private K-12 schools, nursery schools, child care centers and home schools of federal funding?
We know that would be the consequence of his pledge, because we know that Virginia requires children attending any of those institutions to be vaccinated against 15 diseases, with boosters where appropriate. Virginia’s mandated schedule, like those of every other state, follows the recommendations of the CDC, which calls for some vaccinations within a month or two of birth.
Trump issued his ukase against vaccine mandates right after declaring at the Richmond rally that he would “sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and any other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto our children,” thus covering pretty much the entire right-wing culture battleground, almost all of which is based on manufactured outrage.
In context, Trump’s opposition to vaccine mandates falls into the category of glorifying individual “freedom” over the communal interest. As I’ve written before, opposing vaccine mandates as a substitute for opposing vaccination itself is a fundamentally incoherent position — little more than garden variety small-government Republican ideology almost invariably invoked to protect the interests of the “haves” over the “have-nots.”
What makes it incoherent is that mandates do work. They’ve saved the lives of millions of schoolchildren who would otherwise be exposed to deadly diseases at school and play.
Jess Piper is a Democratic activist in rural Missouri. She is a fierce advocate for rural communities and public schools. She lives on a farm where she and her husband raise hogs and chickens. She blogs, she makes videos for TikTok, she tweets, she hosts a podcast called Dirt Road Democrats and is executive director of Blue Missouri. She taught American literature for 16 years. She often writes about the absurdity of vouchers and school choice. In this post, she goes to towns in her district to gather signatures to restore abortion rights in Missouri..
I live at the tippy top of NWMO on a small 7 acre farm in a 125 year old farmhouse with a few dogs, a couple cows, a gaggle of kids and grandkids, and a miniature donkey. Everyone perks up when I mention the donkey…he’s 36 inches high and his name is Augustus.
I drive across the state often these days and I am usually headed to a small town and this week was no different—I visited Chillicothe (the home of sliced bread), Carrolton, and Marceline and you’ll never guess why. I was getting rural folks and their Bible groups to sign the petition to restore abortion rights in Missouri.
Dirt Road organizing.
Missouri is in the process of putting abortion on the ballot and I have the petition—I have to tell you it’s kind of hard to get a petition, so I was excited to get them and also overwhelmed. I have to get this out to rural folks, and it’s not as easy as it would seem.
First, there is the opposition to the petition—the Missouri Right to Life (Right to force others to gestate and deliver) has a literal snitch line to report folks accepting signatures. Now, I have no idea what they plan to do if they find us accepting signatures. I was raised to take care of myself and they shouldn’t mess with me, and I’m not the least bit intimidated, but I don’t want them to harass other rural folks who are signing quietly.
Second, folks have written off my congressional district—even some progressives who need signatures on a ballot initiative. They assume that we are too red to get enough signatures, so what’s the point, right? I’ll tell you the point: it creates excitement and solidarity in rural spaces. It acts to uplift us living in among MAGA extremists. It gives us hope.
Chillicothe was my first stop, and it is a pretty big town at over 9K folks. Chilli is also known for having a “patriot” group who have been successful in putting their extremists on the local health board — they also regularly object to school library books. Folks were on long text chains to get others to the event. I was able to gather about 30 signatures on a Tuesday at 9am.
I was directing folks to the petition and how to fill it in correctly. One woman filled it out, stood up, and started texting. She told me, “I’m reminding my Bible group to come sign.”
Wait…what?
The second place I drove was Carrolton, with a population of about 3,400. Still not tiny, but small. I sat in the basement of the library for almost 2 hours with…wait for it…a local pastor. A woman pastor. She signed the petition and then stayed the length of the signing event and visited with every single person who came in. Several folks attended her church or a neighboring church.
Are you seeing a theme here?
My last stop of the day was in Marceline, population 2,100. I sat in the fire station with a local Dem organizer and we accepted signatures a few feet from the active train crossing. I met with a local candidate running for state house and again, folks signed, stood up, texted friends and relatives and their church community, and then headed back out to their farms and rural life.
This is why I organize in rural spaces across the state. This is why I drive 5 or 6 or 10 hours to meet with rural folks. They matter—we matter.
When we cede ground because it’s too red, because it’s too evangelical, because it’s too far of a drive, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s become more red, more uncontested. When we tell rural folks that their votes and signatures don’t matter because there aren’t enough of them, they agree and stop showing up. When we say Democrats and progressives support everyone, yet fail to have a presence in rural spaces, they notice…they know it’s a lie.
We can’t win Missouri if we avoid rural parts of the state. Missouri is 1/3 rural…33% of the state is outstate.
I’m here and so are thousands of my friends. If state-level organizers will remember us, we can bring sanity back to the entire state.
Dirt Road Democrats are here.
~Jess
Certain counties in Florida are experiencing an outbreak of measles, a highly contagious and sometimes lethal that was supposedly under control due to widespread vaccination.
Florida’s top doctor, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, has thus far failed to instruct students in the affected schools to get vaccinated because he and Governor DeSantis took a strong stand against getting vaccinated for COVID.
The Miami Herald editorial board criticized Dr. Ladapo for putting students at risk:
Is there one mainstream piece of public health advice — no matter how long-standing — that Florida’s top doctor won’t buck?
Joseph Ladapo, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ anti-vaxx surgeon general, has spread misinformation about COVID-19 and has advised against coronavirus vaccines, citing debunked claims.
Perhaps Ladapo saw, in the novelty and divisiveness of the pandemic, an opportunity to become the go-to, Ivy League-educated doctor for vaccine deniers. Now, he’s turned his focus to a long-known virus — up until now, largely non-controversial, but highly contagious and dangerous for children: measles.
Following an outbreak at Manatee Bay Elementary in Weston, where six measles cases have been confirmed, Ladapo sent a letter to parents that pediatricians, immunologists and infectious disease experts have criticized. The letter acknowledged what has been common practice to contain measles outbreaks — that unvaccinated children or those without immunity should remain home during the incubation period of the virus, or up to 21 days.
Ladapo, then, however, wrote that, “due to the high immunity rate in the community,” the Department of Health “is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance.”
This should have been Ladapo’s opportunity to tell parents, “Get your children vaccinated — now!”
The MMR vaccine, approved by the federal government more than 50 years ago, offers 98% protection against measles after two full doses. That’s a widely known statistic that not even Ladapo can deny — he acknowledges it in his letter but stops short of recommending the vaccines.
Instead, Florida’s top doctor is telling parents it’s OK to send kids to school sans immunization, even though they could contract a potentially lethal virus or spread it to others who are also not immunized. Worse, the Broward County school outbreak could spread to other communities…
The vaccine skepticism that gained force during the pandemic, thanks in part to public figures like DeSantis and Ladapo, is a threat to not only public-health efforts to keep COVID at bay but other diseases we thought belonged in a bygone era.
Many states (most?) require children to get vaccinated against a long list of diseases before they can start school. Apparently, Florida is not one of them. The state lets parents decide. Public health, be dammed!
The editorial board of the Orlando Sentinel spoke out against a bill that would declare fetuses to be persons from the instant of conception. Not only would this extend Florida’s draconian six-week ban on abortion, it would outlaw abortion for any reason—rape, incest, the life of the mother. Even if a woman learns early in her pregnancy that the fetus will be born without a brain or has some other fatal defect, she will not be able to terminate the pregnancy. At this time, the Florida Supreme Court is deciding whether to allow a referendum on abortion to proceed; its sponsors have collected over one million signatures. Will the people of Florida have a chance to express their views?
The editorial board wrote:
For Floridians who are already deeply uneasy about women losing the right to control their own bodies, what happened Wednesday in the House Judiciary Committee was truly terrifying. One by one, lawmakers voted yes on legislation that would, for the first time, declare fetuses to be people from the moment of conception — turning wombs into war zones before most people even know they are pregnant.
Bill sponsor Jenna Persons-Mulicka, R-Fort Myers, did her best to hide the radical nature of her legislation, which creates civil liability for anyone who causes the “wrongful death” of a fetus in utero. But everyone in that committee hearing room — and those watching remotely — knew exactly what was at stake. Conveying full rights on a fetus would be a shattering blow to reproductive independence for Floridians capable of becoming pregnant, reaching past debates over viability and bans on abortion at a specified number of weeks. HB 651 would kick in at the very start of a pregnancy, and create an easy stepping stone from wrongful deaths (including from abortions) to anything that threatens the health of a fetus, even if it is meant to benefit the mother’s health.
Floridians should bombard their state senators and representatives with messages letting them know that this potential law is far too radical for anyone who cares about freedom. Then they should turn to their congressional representatives and call on them for legislation to nip this hazardous movement in the bud.
They can start by letting lawmakers know they see through the pretense here. Persons-Mulicka pointed out, more than once, that the language of her legislation (HB 651) specifically excludes a pregnant person. But that’s a nearly negligible speed bump, especially if Florida’s Supreme Court picks up this theme and uses it to obliterate abortion rights in Florida.
Think they won’t? Think again. Justice Carlos Muniz was already hinting in that direction last week, during oral arguments over a ballot question that would (with voters’ approval) explicitly protect abortion rights in Florida.
But advocates of so-called “fetal personhood” think they’ve found a way around that language. By declaring a fetus to be a person, the Legislature and/or court would at best set up a collision course between two competing interests that just happen to share a body — along with the well-being of medical personnel being asked to care for both.
Because the fetal personhood bill does not protect the doctors, nurses and other people who perform abortions, even if the procedure is otherwise legal. Taken in context, that looming threat is clearly a large portion of the intention behind this bill…
Alexandra Petri is a humorist for The Washington Post. She wrote today about the crazy decision by the Alabama Supreme Court that a frozen embryo (a fertilized egg) is a child. Destroying the frozen embryo is murder.
She begins:
Having kids is nothing like they tell you it will be! How tiny they are, and how you can hardly see them without a microscope. How you can’t hold them, not even once. How they don’t have anything that could be regarded, even optimistically, as a laugh, or a face. Isn’t being a parent the best? Isn’t it laughably cruel that the Alabama Supreme Court says that this is already a child? That this cluster of hopeful cells that you have been dreaming could become a baby is actually a person already? You would be laughing, if you could stop crying.
What an appallingly cruel thing to say to people already going through so much to have a child, people who were prepared to endure the grueling in vitro fertilization process of treatments and injections and embryo development before their pregnancy could even begin. What a ridiculous thing to say to anyone with a modicum of sense.
Don’t believe the evidence of your senses. Embryos are children. Flour is cake. These acorns are an old-growth forest. This half-baked insulting nonsense of a ruling is justice.
You know what they always say about people: They are invisible to the naked eye and can be stored conveniently in vials in a hospital freezer. They are discernible only to God and the Alabama judiciary. You don’t need to feed them, ever. They don’t need books. They don’t need clean water or fresh air or sunshine — in fact, they couldn’t survive a minute outside the glass dish.
How did the Alabama judges know? God told them.
Trump came out against the Alabama decision, and most Republicans are rapidly backtracking. They say they want motmre children to be born, and IVF is good. Now that Trump has given his blessing to IVF, watch the Republicans pivot. only poor Nikki Haley is left out in the cold, because her snap reaction was to praise the decision.
Do you think that the judges on the Alabama Supreme Court ever saw a storage room in an IVF Clinic that was holding tens of thousands of “extrauterine” children in containers?
The New Republic provided context for the Alabama ruling that frozen embryos are children.
For the first time, a frozen embryo has been recognized by the law as a person with rights. This decision by the Alabama Supreme Court last week is a huge victory for anti-abortion groups, who have long sought to pass fetal personhood laws. This time, by declaring not just a fetus but a fertilized egg in a lab the equivalent of an “unborn child,” the courts have done them one better. If this keeps up, anti-abortion groups may succeed at outlawing both abortion and in vitro fertilization, or IVF.
This case was about whether couples whose embryos have been inadvertently destroyed in a lab can sue for wrongful death. The embryos in question are eggs that have been fertilized outside the uterus and cryopreserved by a fertility clinic for later implantation. The couples’ attorneys cast embryos cryopreserved in liquid nitrogen as “embryonic children” and “human lives.” They seem to have found a receptive audience on the Alabama Supreme Court, with the decision referring multiple times to what the majority called “extrauterine children.”
This case was the culmination of explicit anti-abortion campaigning. The judges based their ruling in part on a recent amendment to the state constitution, enshrining the “rights of unborn children” in law. When voters considered this amendment in a 2018 ballot initiative, the political director of the anti-abortion group Alliance for a Pro-Life Alabama told the Associated Press that the amendment would “position Alabama in the future for public policy decisions on abortion if Roe. v. Wade was overturned.” Indeed, the Christian-right legal advocacy organization that brought the case overturning Roe, Alliance Defending Freedom, celebrated the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision in the IVF case, the group’s senior counsel adding they hoped “that this ruling encourages voters, lawmakers, and courts to recognize that life is a human right, no matter the circumstances.”
The article goes on to explain that the next frontier for the anti-abortion movement is embryo adoption.
Two elderly men are running for President this year. One is 81, the other is 77. Both of them make verbal mistakes, confusing one name for another or mixing up dates. Most of us, regardless of our age, have done the same. We usually call our mistakes “gaffes.”
Being President of the United States is not a television game show; what matters most is not instantaneous recall, but the ability to choose seasoned staff and to make wise decisions. For a President, judgment is what matters most.
Recently, a neuroscientist wrote about memory and aging in the New York Times and tried to clarify the issues. Charan Ranganath is a professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California.
Dr. Ranganath wrote:
Special Counsel Robert K. Hur’s report, in which he declined to prosecute President Biden for his handling of classified documents, also included a much-debated assessment of Mr. Biden’s cognitive abilities.
“Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
As an expert on memory, I can assure you that everyone forgets. In fact, most of the details of our lives — the people we meet, the things we do and the places we go — will inevitably be reduced to memories that capture only a small fraction of those experiences.
It is normal to be more forgetful as you get older. Broadly speaking, memory functions begin to decline in our 30s and continue to fade into old age. However, age in and of itself doesn’t indicate the presence of memory deficits that would affect an individual’s ability to perform in a demanding leadership role. And an apparent memory lapse may or may not be consequential depending on the reasons it occurred.
There is forgetting and there is Forgetting. If you’re over the age of 40, you’ve most likely experienced the frustration of trying to grasp hold of that slippery word hovering on the tip of your tongue. Colloquially, this might be described as ‘forgetting,’ but most memory scientists would call this “retrieval failure,” meaning that the memory is there, but we just can’t pull it up when we need it. On the other hand, Forgetting (with a capital F) is when a memory is seemingly lost or gone altogether. Inattentively conflating the names of the leaders of two countries would fall in the first category, whereas being unable to remember that you had ever met the president of Egypt would fall into the latter.
Over the course of typical aging, we see changes in the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, a brain area that plays a starring role in many of our day-to-day memory successes and failures. These changes mean that, as we get older, we tend to be more distractible and often struggle to pull up the word or name we’re looking for. Remembering events takes longer and it requires more effort, and we can’t catch errors as quickly as we used to. This translates to a lot more forgetting, and a little more Forgetting.
Many of the special counsel’s observations about Mr. Biden’s memory seem to fall in the category of forgetting, meaning that they are more indicative of a problem with finding the right information from memory than actual Forgetting. Calling up the date that an event occurred, like the last year of Mr. Biden’s vice presidency or the year of his son’s death, is a complex measure of memory. Remembering that an event took place is different than being able to put a date on when it happened, the latter of which is more challenging with increased age. The president very likely has many memories of both periods of his life, even though he could not immediately pull up the date in the stressful (and more immediately pressing) context of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Other “memory” issues highlighted in the media are not so much cases of forgetting as they are of difficulties in the articulation of facts and knowledge. For instance, in July 2023, Mr. Biden mistakenly stated in a speech that “we have over 100 people dead,” when he should have said, “over one million.” He has struggled with a stutter since childhood, and research suggests that managing a stutter demands prefrontal resources that would normally enable people to find the right word or at least quickly correct errors after the fact.
Americans are understandably concerned about the advanced age of the two top contenders in the coming presidential election (Mr. Biden is 81 and Donald Trump is 77), although some of these concerns are rooted in cultural stereotypes and fears around aging. The fact is that there is a huge degree of variability in cognitive aging. Age is, on average, associated with decreased memory, but studies that follow up the same person over several years have shown that, although some older adults show precipitous declines over time, other “super-agers” remain as sharp as ever.
Mr. Biden is the same age as Harrison Ford, Paul McCartney and Martin Scorsese. He’s also a bit younger than Jane Fonda (86) and a lot younger than Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett (93). All these individuals are considered to be at the top of their professions, and yet I would not be surprised if they are more forgetful and absent-minded than when they were younger. In other words, an individual’s age does not say anything definitive about their cognitive status or where it will head in the near future.
I can’t speak to the cognitive status of any of the presidential candidates, but I can say that, rather than focusing on candidates’ ages per se, we should consider whether they have the capabilities to do the job. Public perception of a person’s cognitive state is often determined by superficial factors, such as physical presence, confidence, and verbal fluency, but these aren’t necessarily relevant to one’s capacity to make consequential decisions about the fate of this country. Memory is surely relevant, but other characteristics, such as knowledge of the relevant facts and emotion regulation — both of which are relatively preserved and might even improve with age — are likely to be of equal or greater importance.
Ultimately, we are due for a national conversation about what we should expect in terms of the cognitive and emotional health of our leaders.
And that should be informed by science, not politics
Well, that was fast!!
At 9 a.m. I posted about a New York Times article published yesterday revealing that Trump wanted a 16-week ban on abortions. Since 93% of abortions are performed by the 13th week of abortion, that would essentially render the Dobbs decision ineffective.
But Trump’s anti-abortion pals got wind of his intention and let it be known that they will play every trick in the book—including reviving an 1873 law—to make abortion illegal everywhere.
The New York Times reports today:
Allies of former President Donald J. Trump and officials who served in his administration are planning ways to restrict abortion rights if he returns to power that would go far beyond proposals for a national ban or the laws enacted in conservative states across the country.
Behind the scenes, specific anti-abortion plans being proposed by Mr. Trump’s allies are sweeping and legally sophisticated. Some of their proposals would rely on enforcing the Comstock Act, a long-dormant law from 1873, to criminalize the shipping of any materials used in an abortion — including abortion pills, which account for the majority of abortions in America.
“We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” said Jonathan F. Mitchell, the legal force behind a 2021 Texas law that found a way to effectively ban abortion in the state before Roe v. Wade was overturned. “There’s a smorgasbord of options.”
Mr. Mitchell, who represented Mr. Trump in arguments before the Supreme Court over whether the former president could appear on the ballot in Colorado, indicated that anti-abortion strategists had purposefully been quiet about their more advanced plans, given the political liability the issue has become for Republicans.
“I hope he doesn’t know about the existence of Comstock, because I just don’t want him to shoot off his mouth,” Mr. Mitchell said of Mr. Trump. “I think the pro-life groups should keep their mouths shut as much as possible until the election….”
In policy documents, private conversations and interviews, the plans described by former Trump administration officials, allies and supporters propose circumventing Congress and leveraging the regulatory powers of federal institutions, including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Justice and the National Institutes of Health.
The effect would be to create a second Trump administration that would attack abortion rights and abortion access from a variety of angles and could be stopped only by courts that the first Trump administration had already stacked with conservative judges.
“He had the most pro-life administration in history and adopted the most pro-life policies of any administration in history,” said Roger Severino, a leader of anti-abortion efforts in Health and Human Services during the Trump administration. “That track record is the best evidence, I think, you could have of what a second term might look like if Trump wins.”
The New York Times reported that Donald Trump has been telling friends privately that he supports a national ban on abortion at 16 weeks, with exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the mother.
A 16-week national ban would eliminate the authority of some 30 states that do not have abortion bans, but it would cancel the highly restrictive laws of states like Florida that have enacted a six-week ban, that is, before women know they are pregnant, and Texas, where abortion has been outlawed.
Very clever! A 16-week ban would restore abortions wherever it has been prohibited.
A 16-week ban would not end many abortions: nearly 94 percent of abortions happen before 13 weeks in pregnancy, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control. Nor is such a ban grounded in medical research. Even 15 weeks falls before the point when significant screens take place in a pregnancy to examine the fetus for rare — but potentially fatal — conditions. Instead, it has become a position that some Republicans, based on polling, believe will be the most politically palatable to voters.
Trump makes clear that this is a political calculation. It would please many in red states who support abortion rights, and he could still say he was against abortion.
For most of his life, Trump has been pro-abortion but turned against it when he realized he needed the support of Catholics and Evangelicals.
He has boasted to his right flank that he delivered what he promised: a Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade.
But he recognizes that voters are angry about the loss of abortion rights, and Republicans are losing elections because of abortion restrictions.
So now, at his transactional best, he proposes a 16-week ban that enables almost every abortion to proceed at the same rate as before the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe. He would openly revive abortion, bypassing the Supreme Court.
I have this visual image of Trump looking at his anti-abortion followers and cynically smirking, “Fooled you! Hahaha.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 