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Florida: State Attorney General Asks State Court to Strike Abortion Referendum Because Voters Won’t Understand It

By dianeravitch
February 4, 2024 //
58

The Orlando Sentinel editorialized about the DeSantis administration’s effort to kill a voter referendum that would put reproductive rights into the state constitution. Last year, Governor DeSantis signed a highly restrictive ban on abortion—that it was prohibited after six weeks of pregnancy, when few if any women realize they are pregnant.

Let it be noted that Republican legislators in Mississippi are also trying to block a state referendum on abortion. They are afraid it will pass, and they are not willing to take that chance.

The Orlando Sentinel editorial board wrote:

Next week, Attorney General Ashley Moody will come before the state Supreme Court and argue that Floridians can’t be trusted to understand a ballot initiative that would protect abortion rights in Florida — and because of that, they should be stripped of the right to demand them.

Moody is asking the state’s high court to crush an abortion rights initiative that’s already supported by nearly 1 million Floridians (and counting). If it makes the ballot, it’s likely to pass: Most polls show that voters support abortion rights, regardless of party. Without this amendment, the Legislature has already shown it will do everything in its power to destroy those rights.

Voters in six states, including solidly conservative Kentucky and Kansas, have already voted to project abortion rights. At least a dozen other states could vote on abortion this year.

That’s why Florida voters deserve to have their say — and why Florida’s anti-reproductive-rights leaders are so desperate to make sure they don’t.

Here’s what voters will see on the ballot:

No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.

The DeSantis administration insists that voters won’t understand this amendment so should not be allowed to vote on it.

One million Floridians have already signed a petition to put it on the ballot.

The DeSantis administration is afraid that voters will understand it and pass it.

Will the conservative state Supreme Court of Florida allow the people to decide?

Categories Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Gender, Health, Science

Michael Hiltzik: The Most Dangerous Quack in the Nation

By dianeravitch
February 2, 2024 //
3

Michael Hiltzik is a regular columnist for the Los Angeles Times who writes about business and whatever else he wants. In this column, he calls out Florida’s “Surgeon General” as “the most dangerous quack” in the country.

That would be Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, chief medical advisor to Governor Ron DeSantis. The governor selected Dr. Ladapo because of his strident opposition to COVID vaccines.

Hiltzik writes:

It used to be fairly easy to dismiss Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, as a clownish anti-vaccine quack posing a danger mostly to residents of his home state.

That has become harder to do as time goes on, as Ladapo has moved from promoting useless treatments for COVID-19, such as the drugs hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, to waging an ever-expanding fact-free campaign against the leading COVID vaccines.

This month, Ladapo established a new low for himself. In a public advisory issued Wednesday by the Florida Department of Health, he declared the vaccines “not appropriate for use in human beings” and counseled doctors to steer patients to other treatments. He explicitly called for a “halt in the use of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.”

For several reasons, this advisory ranks as the single most dangerous statement by a government health agency since the start of the pandemic, if not for all time.

First and foremost, it’s based on a claim in a paper co-authored by known anti-vaccine activists that was almost instantaneously debunked upon its publication in October.

Hiltzik pointed out that Ladapo’s advisory comes at a time when COVID cases are on the rise and also when hesitancy about vaccines threatens to encourage refusal to take other vaccines. He points to a measles outbreak in Philadelphia,

Finally, he writes:

One must consider the source. Despite his state post and a tenured position as a professor of medicine at the University of Florida — courtesy of his patron Ron DeSantis, the extremist anti-vaccine Republican governor — Ladapo has zero credibility within the medical establishment. Taking medical advice from Ladapo makes about as much sense as taking investment advice from Sam Bankman-Fried or your view of academic integrity from Christopher Rufo.

Ladapo has become a card-carrying member of the anti-vaccine mafia. Just before Christmas, he appeared on a podcast hosted by anti-vax agitator Del Bigtree, who stirs up his audiences with hysterical rants against vaccines and who was recently appointed communications director for the presidential campaign of notorious anti-vax figure Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

He also was interviewed by Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.

His colleagues at the University of Florida Medical School denounced Ladao’s claim that men between 18 and 39 should avoid the COVID vaccines because they posed a risk of cardiac failure.

Hiltzik noted:

In fact, the research indicated no such thing; rather, it showed that the risk of cardiac death from the vaccines was statistically nonexistent and, in any case, was lower than the risk of cardiac death resulting from catching COVID-19.

Dr. Ladapo then went full throttle, as you would expect, and insisted that no one should get the COVID vaccines. He maintained that they contained ingredients that damages one’s DNA.

In a Dec. 6 letter to the FDA and in the Florida Department of Health advisory, Ladapo raised “concerns regarding nucleic acid contaminants in the approved … vaccines, particularly in the presence of lipid nanoparticle complexes, and Simian Virus 40 (SV40) promoter/enhancer DNA. … The presence of SV40 promoter/enhancer DNA may also pose a unique and heightened risk of DNA integration into human cells.”

Followers of anti-vaccine propaganda will find familiar features in this statement. For one thing, it sounds science-y as hell, filled to bursting with abstruse terms and jargon. One would have to be an expert in the field to identify it as total balderdash. The statement also bristles with scary references to DNA contamination and cancer and to “billions of fragments [of DNA] per dose….”

The research paper on which Ladapo based his intimation that the vaccines breach the FDA’s DNA contamination standard is self-refuting. The paper, which was based on an analysis of 24 vials of the mRNA vaccines, actually found that in all cases the fragments were well below the concentration limits set by the FDA.

The FDA, in responding to Ladapo’s Dec. 6 letter, told him that studies of the vaccines showed “no evidence” that the shots damaged recipients’ DNA and that the experience of “hundreds of millions of individuals” who received the vaccines “indicate no evidence indicative of genotoxicity….”

Florida’s death rate from COVID of 375 per 100,000 people is among the worst in the country. (California: 283.) You can ignore the defense that the difference is due to Florida’s relatively older population; states with even older median ages have done much better: Vermont (170), New Hampshire (245) and Maine (252). The difference is the indifference of Ladapo and DeSantis to their own residents’ health.

Categories Disruption, Extremism, Florida, Health, Science

Study: Trump’s Favorite COVID Remedy Was Deadly

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2024 //
62

Politico reports on a new European study of the efficacy of hydroxycholoroquine, a drug recommended to the public by President Trump at the height of the pandemic. Note: Neither he nor his family took that drug. Instead they received FDA-approved vaccinations. .

Politico EU reports:

Nearly 17,000 people may have died after taking hydroxycholoroquine during the first wave of Covid-19, according to a study by French researchers.

The anti-malaria drug was prescribed to some patients hospitalized with Covid-19 during the first wave of the pandemic, “despite the absence of evidence documenting its clinical benefits,” the researchers point out in their paper, published in the February issue of Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy.

Now, researchers have estimated that some 16,990 people in six countries — France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the U.S. — may have died as a result.

That figure stems from a study published in the Nature scientific journal in 2021 which reported an 11 percent increase in the mortality rate, linked to its prescription against Covid-19, because of the potential adverse effects like heart rhythm disorders, and its use instead of other effective treatments.

Researchers from universities in Lyon, France, and Québec, Canada, used that figure to analyze hospitalization data for Covid in each of the six countries, exposure to hydroxychloroquine and the increase in the relative risk of death linked to the drug.

As President, Trump recommended the drug and said, “What do you have to lose? Take it.”

Categories Health, Lies, Science, Stupid, Trump

Biden Wants to Lower Prices on Drugs Developed with Public Funding

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2023 //
45

David Sirota’s blog “The Lever” is a source of excellent investigative reporting. It recently revealed that President Biden is taking on Big Pharma. Some advocates said he needed to go further, but this is a huge opening move to establish the principle that the federal government may cap the prices of drugs developed with public money. The following was written by Katy’s Schwenk.

White House Takes On Pharma Patents

The White House plans to exercise its authority to lower the price of costly medications that were developed with public funding — a potentially powerful new tool in the battle against sky-high medication prices.

The Biden administration announced last week that it had concluded, after a months long review, that it had the authority to break the patents of drugs developed with public funding if their cost was too high. This authority — dubbed “march-in rights” — has never been used, and is likely to encounter major pushback from Big Pharma.

Take, for instance, the case of the drug Xtandi, which is used to treat prostate cancer. The drug was developed at the public University of California, Los Angeles, using federal funding from the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Army. The university then licensed the drug to a pharmaceutical company called Medivation, which is now owned by Pfizer, and the Japanese pharmaceutical behemoth Astellas. Pfizer and Astellas have made billions selling the drug worldwide. In the U.S., Xtandi costs on average $190,000 a year, more than five times higher than in Canada and Japan.

The Bayh-Dole Act, which was passed more than 30 years ago, allows the federal government to use march-in rights to intervene if drugs developed with public money are not being made accessible to the public. Despite Xtandi being more or less a perfect case for the use of this authority — a cancer drug developed with public money being sold at an egregious premium — the Biden administration declined to use march-in rights in March to seize the patent and allow a generic competitor to enter the market, forcing down the drug’s cost.

Since then, though, federal officials have been reviewing march-in authority. And now, the White House’s announcement signals that they may begin using it to fight drug profiteering.

While the announcement is a critical step forward, the White House’s framework has still drawn some blowback from some advocacy groups for being less aggressive than it could be. In this week’s announcement, the Biden administration implied it would exercise march-in rights only in the most extreme cases of price gouging by Big Pharma. “Where most drug prices already are egregious and force rationing, few drugs will seem ‘extremely’ priced by comparison,” argued the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

But even the prospect of limited use of march-in rights has stoked fear in the pharmaceutical industry, which is spending more than ever to oppose drug pricing reforms. Industry groups have already declared their opposition to the measure. It’s a sign of how much is at stake for Big Pharma — and for those paying a premium for life-saving medication.

Categories Biden, For-Profit, Health, Science

Marjorie Taylor Greene Warns Against COVID Vaccine

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2023 //
24

Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious diseases specialist, wrote on his blog about some of the GOP zanies who are at war with science and COVID vaccines. I want to know whether Rep. Greene had her children vaccinated for smallpox, measles, chickenpox, diphtheria, polio, and other infectious diseases.

He writes:

On February 13, 2024, National Geographic Press will be publishing a book I wrote called, TELL ME WHEN IT’S OVER: AN INSIDER’S GUIDE TO DECIPHERING COVID MYTHS AND NAVIGATING A POST-PANDEMIC WORLD. Before publication, I will be writing about issues described in the book.

In next three posts, I will focus on the misinformation business and the war on science.

On November 13, 2023, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Georgia) held a meeting to discuss COVID vaccines. Greene had already made a name for herself by claiming that Jewish space lasers had caused wildfires in California, that Donald Trump was fighting a worldwide sex-slavery ring, that Muslims don’t belong in government, that the shootings in Parkland, Sandy Hook and Las Vegas were staged, and that 9/11 was an inside job. Who better to educate the press and the public about COVID and COVID vaccines?

Greene began the meeting, which was held in a tiny room in the Capitol building, stating, “We will hear from expert doctors who have bravely sounded the alarm on vaccines.” Flanked by Clay Higgins (R, Louisiana), Ron Johnson (R, Wisconsin), Thomas Massie (R, Kentucky), Warren Davidson (R, Ohio), and Andy Biggs (R, Arizona), the meeting was poorly attended, poorly staffed, and poorly equipped. Because only one microphone was available to the congressmen and only one available to those who testified, the microphones had to be passed back and forth. Also, the hearing wasn’t really a “committee” hearing because no committee had sponsored it. Rather, as described by Greene, it was part of the “shadow Congress.” Matt Gaetz (R, Florida), who popped in and out of the meeting, explained that the real committee seats “were bought and paid for by Big Pharma.”

Three people testified before Greene’s “committee.” A lawyer, an obstetrician-gynecologist, and a scientist. In Part 1 of this three-part posting, we’ll start with the lawyer.

The first to testify was 46-year-old Thomas Renz, who passed the Ohio bar exam in November 2019 on his fifth attempt. Renz then joined fellow COVID conspiracy theorists like Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, and Roger Stone on a national speaking tour titled “ReAwaken America.” He has since made more than a hundred appearances on conservative talk shows like One America, Newsmax, and Infowars. During the Greene hearing, Renz made three claims, the last of which was the most explosive.

First, Renz declared, “The people that are dying are vaccinated.” Contrary to Renz’s claim, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that in 2021, unvaccinated adults were 12 times more likely to be hospitalized and in 2022, that they were 6 times more likely. COVID vaccines have been estimated to have saved the lives of more than 3 million Americans.

Second, Renz said that “COVID is not as bad as SARS or MERS but about as dangerous as a bad flu season.” The first pandemic coronavirus, called SARS-1, was identified in Asia in February 2003. That virus spread to 30 countries, infected more than 8,000 people, and killed about 800. By July 2003, the global outbreak was contained. The second pandemic coronavirus, called MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), appeared about ten years later, in June 2012, in Saudi Arabia. That virus spread to 20 countries, infected more than 2,500 people, and killed about 900. SARS-CoV-2, on the other hand, has killed almost 1.2 million people in the United States and 7 million people in the world. Unless Renz was referring to the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed more than 50 million people worldwide, COVID is worse than any other flu season in history.

Renz saved the best for last. With the help of an “unnamed whistleblower,” Renz claimed that something suspicious had happened in November 2014 at Fort Riley, Kansas, when the Department of Defense (DOD) and the CIA, in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, had created SARS-CoV-2 virus. To support his claim, Renz offered only conspiracy and innuendo. In fact, abundant evidence now proves that SARS-CoV-2 virus was an animal-to-human spillover event that occurred in the western section of the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market in late 2019.

No one was more excited by Renz’s revisionist history than Clay Higgins (R, Louisiana). “I didn’t trust Dr. Fauci from the moment I met him,” Higgins declared. “I generally don’t trust the government. This is a weaponized virus. It was sticky. It sickened and weakened but it did not kill, which takes more soldiers to take care of that person.” Renz later claimed that it wasn’t only Tony Fauci, the CDC, the FDA, and the DOD that had played a part in this massive cover-up, Hunter Biden was also involved (because why not?).

Next up was the testimony of an obstetrician-gynecologist from Florida. Stay tuned.

Categories Fake, Fraud, Health, Science

Ohio: Vote NO on Issue 1 on Tuesday to Preserve Majority Rule

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2023 //
4

Ohio Republicans are trying to ban abortion by limiting it to six weeks, before women know they are pregnant. The legislature passed a law prohibiting abortions after six weeks of pregnancy but a federal judge halted the implementation of the ban. However, people who support reproductive rights want to write them into the state constitution. They gathered more than 700,000 signatures, nearly double what the state requires. They succeeded in getting their referendum on the ballot in November.

The state Republicans want to stop them but they know that abortion rights have prevailed in other red states (think Kansas). So the legislature came up with a new ploy: there will be a special election on Tuesday August 8, to require that any change in the state constitution get not a simple majority, but at least 60% of the vote. Furthermore, any proposal to change the constitution would require signatures from all 88 counties, not the current 44. Obviously they want to blunt the pro-abortion campaigners by making it nearly impossible to get on the ballot.

Republican strategists are hoping that turnout will be low and that the abortion rights side will fail to block the referendum. Polls have shown that some 58% support abortion rights, so they will never pass an amendment if Issue 1 succeeds and raises the threshold to 60%.

Politico wrote:

Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights, a nonpartisan coalition of abortion-rights groups, submitted the ballot language earlier this year, kicking off a four-month dash to collect signatures and campaign across the state. Proponents, including state Democrats, ACLU of Ohio and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio, anticipate spending upward of $35 million on the effort heading into November.

Opponents have pushed against the measure by arguing that it would allow for gender-affirming care without parental consent, even though such a provision is not in the initiative’s language.

Aside from the abortion issue, there is a question about whether it’s right to impose a 60% requirement to get a referendum on the ballot. Why not let the majority (50% plus 1) decide?

Paul Waldman wrote on MSNBC’s site that the issue is stark: Now Ohio Republicans are trying to duck the will of the voters with some clever maneuvering. The state’s voters will decide on two ballot initiatives in two separate elections in a matter of months. One is explicitly about abortion, while the other is only implicitly about abortion but would go even further, to the very question of whether democratic accountability should exist at all…

Lest there be any doubt, the Legislature scheduled the vote on Issue 1 for a special election in August, when it could be assured a lower turnout. So if it succeeds, the abortion amendment on the ballot in November would have to get 60% to pass. Ohio Republicans are so committed to this farce that the Legislature ignored the law it passed in December banning almost all August special elections. When liberals pointed out the obvious contradiction, the Republican-majority on the state’s Supreme Court ruled the Legislature could simply break the law it passed less than a year ago.

Meanwhile, doctors in Ohio have mobilized against the abortion ban, according to ProPublica.

In her eight years as a pediatrician, Dr. Lauren Beene had always stayed out of politics. What happened at the Statehouse had little to do with the children she treated in her Cleveland practice. But after the Supreme Court struck down abortion protections, that all changed.

The first Monday after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling was emotional. Beene fielded a call from the mother of a 13-year-old patient. The mother was worried her child might need birth control in case she was the victim of a sexual assault. Beene also talked to a 16-year-old patient unsure about whether to continue her pregnancy. Time wasn’t on her side, Beene told the girl.

“What if it were too late to get her an abortion? What would they do? And I just, I felt sick to my stomach,” Beene said. “Nobody had ever asked me a question like that before.”

Beene felt she had to do something. She drafted a letter to a state lawmaker about the dangers of abortion bans, then another doctor reached out with an idea to get dozens of doctors to sign on. The effort took off. About 1,000 doctors signed that letter, and they later published it as a full-page ad in The Columbus Dispatch.

Beene felt momentum building within the medical community and decided to help use that energy to form the Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights coalition. Now, Beene and the coalition are working to pass a citizen-led amendment to enshrine reproductive rights into the state constitution. The state’s six-week ban on abortion was blocked by a judge in October 2022.

The group is a part of an emerging political force: doctors on the front lines of the reproductive rights debate. In many states, the fight to protect reproductive rights is heating up as 14 states have outlawed abortion. Doctors who previously never mixed work with politics are jumping into the abortion debate by lobbying state lawmakers, campaigning, forming political action committees and trying to get reproductive rights protected by state law.

Reasons to vote NO on Issue 1:

ARGUMENTS AGAINST ISSUE 1

The following argument was prepared by senators Paula Hicks-Hudson and Vernon Sykes along with representatives Dontavius Jarrells, Bride Rose Sweeney and Dani Isaacsohn…

This amendment would destroy citizen-driven ballot initiatives as we know them, upending our right to make decisions that directly impact our lives. It takes away our freedom by undermining the sacred principle of ‘one person, one vote’ and destroys majority rule in Ohio.

Last year, Ohio politicians eliminated August special elections saying, “Interest groups often manipulatively put issues on the ballot in August because they know fewer Ohioans are paying attention.”

And yet here we are, voting in August on just one question: should Ohio permanently abolish the basic constitutional right of majority rule?

Special interests and corrupt politicians say yes. They don’t like voters making decisions, so they’re trying to rewrite the rules to get what they want: even more power.

Here’s why we’re confident Ohio citizens will resoundingly vote NO:

  • Issue 1 Ends Majority Rule: It means just 40% of voters can block any issue, putting 40% of voters in charge of decision-making for the majority.
  • Issue 1 Shreds Our Constitution: It would permanently undo constitutional protections that have been in place for over 100 years to check politicians’ power at the ballot box.
  • Issue 1 Takes Away Our Freedom: It would destroy citizen-driven ballot initiatives as we know them, guaranteeing that only wealthy special interests could advance changes to our constitution.
  • Issue 1 Applies to All Issues: If this amendment passes, it will apply to every single amendment on any issue Ohioans will ever vote on – you name it, just 40% of voters will decide.

We all deserve to make decisions that impact our lives. We must protect our freedom to determine our future, not permanently change our constitution to give up our rights. Vote NO.

Categories Elections, Gender, Health, Ohio, Science

Paul Offitt: The Real RFK Jr. and Dr. Fauci

By dianeravitch
August 4, 2023 //
38

Paul Offitt is a Professor of Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. This post appeared on his blog “Beyond the Noise.”

On July 5, 2023, RFK Jr. appeared on Lex Fridman’s podcast, which boasts more than 3 million listeners. Regarding Fauci, Kennedy said, “He’s done a lot of things that I think are really bad for humanity. I think he is a genuinely bad human being.” In The Real Anthony Fauci, which has sold more than 1,000,000 copies, RFK Jr. claimed that Dr. Fauci is a figurehead for an elite cadre of wealthy insiders, dark money, and corporate interests. Kennedy’s vitriol invites a comparison of the careers of these two men.

Anthony Fauci was born on December 24, 1940, in Brooklyn, New York. His father owned a pharmacy; his mother and sister worked the register; Tony delivered prescriptions. Fauci attended Holy Cross, later earning his medical degree from Cornell Medical School. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was born on January 17, 1954. His father was Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and his uncle was President John F. Kennedy. RFK Jr. graduated from Harvard University in 1976, later earning his law degree from the University of Virginia.

Both men would eventually head organizations with the word “Health” in the title. After completing his medical residency in 1968, Dr. Fauci joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a clinical associate in the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). In 1984, he was appointed director of NIAID. In 2011, after a stint as an environmental lawyer, RFK Jr. created and headed an organization called Children’s Health Defense.

During his tenure at NIAID, Dr. Fauci: (1) developed treatments for several previously fatal autoimmune diseases, later recognized as among the most important advances in the previous 20 years; (2) described the mechanisms by which human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) caused AIDS; (3) developed treatments to restore the immune competence of AIDS sufferers; (4) supervised the work of Barney Graham and Kizzmekia Corbett among others that led to the development of mRNA vaccines to prevent COVID; and (5) helped create and design Operation Warp Speed, which delivered mRNA vaccines that have saved the lives of about three million Americans. For these efforts, Dr. Fauci received the Lasker Award, the highest award for medical research in the United States.

As head of Children’s Health Defense, RFK Jr. has also been involved in COVID vaccines, publicly stating that they were “the deadliest vaccines ever made.” In July 2020, to dissuade African Americans from being vaccinated, Kennedy claimed that “people with African American blood react differently to vaccines than people with Caucasian blood; they’re much more sensitive.” When baseball legend Hank Aaron died at 86 of natural causes, Kennedy called it part of a “wave of suspicious deaths among the elderly following administration of COVID vaccines.” In 2021, Kennedy debuted a propaganda film targeting African Americans called Medical Racism: The New Apartheid, which claimed that COVID vaccines were “just one huge experiment on Black Americans.” For these efforts, RFK Jr. was kicked off Instagram, videos of his vaccine interviews were removed from YouTube, and Children’s Health Defense was kicked off Facebook.

Both men were also involved in the public health of developing countries. Dr. Fauci was the main architect of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which is estimated to have saved 20 million lives in Africa. For this work, Dr. Fauci was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. RFK Jr.’s work in the developing world focused on the Pacific Island nation of Samoa. In July 2018, two nurses in Samoa prepared a measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine for two 12-month-old children. Instead of diluting the vaccine powder in water, they inadvertently diluted it with a muscle relaxant. Both infants immediately stopped breathing and died as a result. One nurse tried to cover up her error by taking the empty bottle of the muscle relaxant home after retrieving it from the garbage. Both were later sentenced to five years in prison.

RFK Jr. seized upon the story as proof that the MMR vaccine was deadly, spending months highlighting the two deaths on Facebook. After it had become clear that the MMR vaccine hadn’t caused the infant deaths, RFK Jr. visited Samoa, appearing alongside prominent local anti-vaccine activists and meeting with senior officials. Influenced in part by RFK Jr., the Samoan government suspended its measles vaccination program for 10 months. Immunization rates plummeted from 74 percent in 2017 to 31 percent in late 2018, precipitating a massive outbreak of measles. Between September and December 2019, at least 5,700 people suffered measles and 83 died, most of the deaths were in children less than four years of age.

On November 19, 2019, in the midst of the measles outbreak, RFK Jr. wrote a 4-page letter to the Samoan prime minister, stating, “To safeguard public health during the current infection and in the future, it is critical that the Samoan Health Ministry determine, scientifically, if the outbreak was caused by inadequate vaccine coverage or alternatively, by a defective vaccine.” Fortunately, no one was listening to RFK Jr. anymore. The Samoan Health Ministry launched a vaccination campaign in late November 2019 and, within five days, had immunized more than 17,000 people. The outbreak subsided.

Anthony Fauci and RFK Jr. do share one thing in common. Both attended Jesuit high schools. Dr. Fauci attended Regis High School in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. RFK Jr. attended the Georgetown Preparatory School in Bethesda, Maryland. Both were taught the Jesuit philosophy “to be men for others.”

Categories Extremism, Health, Science

Dan Rather and Elliott Kirschner: The Thrilling Promise of Science

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2023 //
136

Dan Rather and Elliott Kirschner divert us from our daily concerns with a thrilling image transmitted from outer space by the James Webb Space Telescope. You have to open the link to see the image. If science can produce such wonders, how might it be deployed to slow and reverse the severe damage to the earth now caused by climate change? It’s hard to believe after a year of extreme events—storms, fires, flooding, drought, extreme temperatures—that there is a significant number of people who deny that climate change is a reality.

They write at their blog Steady:

With so much riveting us here on Earth, it is easy to forget that up there, out there in the High Frontier — outer space, the far cosmos, whatever you choose to call it — exciting, promising accomplishments are happening that will profoundly affect our future.

There is a reminder today as NASA marks the first birthday of the James Webb Space Telescope. Like any proud parent, NASA is sharing pictures. And these are literally out of this world (our apologies for the silly dad/grandad jokes, but we couldn’t resist).

When we look at the photo above, we see awe-inspiring beauty and mystery. But we also see the wonder and ingenuity of science. We’ll leave it to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson to put what we’re seeing into better context:

In just one year, the James Webb Space Telescope has transformed humanity’s view of the cosmos, peering into dust clouds and seeing light from faraway corners of the universe for the very first time. Every new image is a new discovery, empowering scientists around the globe to ask and answer questions they once could never dream of.

Empowering new questions. Isn’t that the very essence and promise of science? And that’s part of what makes this so exciting. It’s not just what we now have the ability to see — it’s all the unpredictable insights that will follow.

Putting a powerful extension of our human senses into space requires harnessing tremendous amounts of intellect. It requires planning, commitment, and funding. It requires a belief that our innate inquisitiveness as a species should be cultivated. And it requires cooperation. Dr. Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, called the Webb Telescope “an engineering marvel built by the world’s leading scientists and engineers.” Indeed.

So what are we looking at exactly? Once again, we will let the rocket scientists at NASA explain. Basically, it’s “star birth like it’s never been seen before.” And if you want a bit more detail:

The subject is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. It is a relatively small, quiet stellar nursery, but you’d never know it from Webb’s chaotic close-up. Jets bursting from young stars crisscross the image, impacting the surrounding interstellar gas and lighting up molecular hydrogen, shown in red. Some stars display the telltale shadow of a circumstellar disk, the makings of future planetary systems.

The vast majority of the millions of people around the world who will encounter this beautiful picture will not understand its astronomical implications. Even so, we can be comforted that there is a community of researchers — all across the globe — who see with the trained eye of science.

We can also be proud that we live in a country that supports this work. And we can celebrate a quest for knowledge, the yearning to cross horizons, and the intricate dance of data and discovery.

Yes, this image is breathtaking. And that is a reason to smile. But we can also find joy in all that it took to make this celestial camera possible and the future generations who will benefit from the knowledge it unleashes.

Categories Creativity, Environment, Science

Michael Hiltzik: GOP in Search of COVID Conspiracy Theory

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2023 //
27

Michael Hiltzik, a regular columnist for the Los Angeles Times, is also a source of common sense and wisdom. In this column, he describes the House Republicans’ efforts to find a conspiracy theory cloaking the origins of COVID. Republicans think it was created in a Chinese lab in Wuhan. The scientists who were asked to testify thinks the evidence points to transmission from an animal market in Wuhan. The villains of the conspiracy, Republicans believe, are Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins.

Hiltzik writes:

Opening Tuesday’s House subcommittee hearing on the origin of the COVID virus, the panel’s chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), promised an impartial inquiry.

“This is not an attack on science,” he said. “And it’s not an attack on an individual.”

He and his GOP colleagues proceeded over nearly three hours to accuse Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — one of the most respected such scientists in the world — of having masterminded the creation of the virus, with the connivance of Dr. Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health.

Misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories…have resulted in significant harassment and threats….Online there are so-called kill lists and I have found myself on those lists.

— Virological expert Kristian G. Andersen

The Republicans’ main “evidence,” such as it is, involves a seminal paper in the scientific study of the virus.

Published as a letter in the journal Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, under the title “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” the paper weighed the two major theories of COVID’s origin: that it reached the human population from infected wildlife (known as zoonosis) or that it leaked from a government lab in Wuhan, China, the teeming metropolis where the first COVID outbreak occurred in late 2019.

The paper’s authors noted that all the features of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, are observable in nature, coinciding with the zoonosis hypothesis. They added, “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

For years, Republicans have asserted without a scintilla of evidence that Fauci and Collins manipulated the scientific consensus away from the lab-leak hypothesis.

Why have they seized on this theory? Its provenance may offer a clue: It flowered during the Trump administration among political appointees in the State Department, who saw it as a cudgel with which to beat the Chinese government, which they viewed as an economic threat to the U.S. It was also useful to undermine the authority of Fauci, whose skepticism about Trump’s COVID policies was manifest.

Soon enough, it became Republican orthodoxy.

Lab leak proponents in government and Congress have smeared and vilified Fauci and Collins, among other scientists, in the service of purely partisan claims, ignoring the utter absence of any scientific evidence for a lab leak and the mounting evidence that it first reached humans through interactions with susceptible animals being sold illegally at a wildlife market in Wuhan.

The foils for this phase of the GOP effort to construct an evidence-free narrative of COVID’s origin were two of the five authors of the “Proximal Origin” paper, Robert F. Garry of Tulane and Kristian G. Andersen of Scripps Research in La Jolla.

Garry and Andersen sat patiently at the witness table in the committee room as the Republican members used cherry-picked quotes from their emails, misrepresented their research findings and ignored their painstaking explanations of how science is done in the real world. They listened stoically to committee members — some of whom have medical degrees but none any evident expertise in scientific research — harangue them about supposed flaws in their scientific methods.

“We do know something for certain,” Westrup said: “that the drafting, coordination and publication of ‘Proximal Origin’ and downplaying the lab leak was antithetical to science. “

One low note among many others during the hearing came from Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), who charged that “Dr. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins realized that they had been implicated in the creation of production or the creation of this virus and they were doing everything they could including both of you to come on board as tools or vehicles to undermine that theory.”

Truth to tell, however, the committee majority’s purpose was no secret from the start. The hearing was titled, after all, “Investigating the Proximal Origin of a Cover Up.”

It may be useful to examine the path the subcommittee’s GOP majority traveled to come to its assertions that the Proximal Origin paper was a sham.

As laid out in written testimony submitted to the subcommittee by Garry and Andersen, it started in January 2020, when almost nothing was known about the virus and not much about its genomic family.

The first examinations of its structure revealed several features unfamiliar to virologists. At first glance, they looked like nothing occurring in nature. Many thought this pointed to some sort of laboratory engineering.

When Andersen brought this concern to Fauci during a call on Jan. 31, Fauci urged him to write a scientific paper about the issue, and suggested that if confirmed, the matter should be referred to the FBI and the British intelligence service MI5.

Jeremy Farrar, an infectious disease expert who is currently the chief scientist of the World Health Organization, convened a conference call on Feb. 1 among nine scientists, including Andersen and Garry. Fauci and Collins joined the call, but by all accounts merely listened in without contributing any opinions.

New data came to the scientific community in a torrent over the next few days and weeks. The unfamiliar features turned out to be more common in nature than many virologists had known, and the process by which they might become incorporated in SARS-CoV-2 progressively better understood.

By the end of February, when the authors of the Proximal Origin paper submitted an initial draft to Nature Medicine, they still did not have enough data to rule out either major theory but had become more certain that a laboratory role was plausible.

The subcommittee Republicans profess to be thunderstruck that a theory about COVID’s origin could be posed and discarded in the space of a few days, but Andersen and Garry tried to explain that they’re wrong.

The scientists started with no data, and incorporated new information into their viewpoints as it arrived. In any event, Andersen testified, the period between the conference and the publication of the paper wasn’t three days, as the Republicans kept insisting, but 45 days. Neither Fauci nor Collins played any role in guiding the authors’ conclusions, the witnesses said.

The published paper, moreover, made clear that the state of SARS-CoV-2 research was in its infancy. “More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another,” the authors wrote.

But its general conclusion that a lab leak is implausible and the virus probably emerged by natural spillover from animals “has only been further supported by additional evidence and studies,” Andersen told the subcommittee. He and Garry said that if evidence emerged supporting a lab leak, they would examine it objectively and be guided by their findings. As of this moment, there is none.

Under prompting by subcommittee Democrats, the witnesses pointed to the long-term consequences of the Republican efforts to foment mistrust of science by mainstreaming conspiracies.

“Misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories around the paper have resulted in significant harassment and threats,” Andersen said. “Including everything from typical targets on social media to emails, to telephone calls to my office … to death threats…. Online there are so-called kill lists and I have found myself on those lists together with my co-authors.”

The thrust of the subcommittee’s claims, he said, “is that the virus was created and that American scientists played a role in that and have been covering that up…. All of which, as the record clearly shows, is false…. The focus has been that there’s a need to blame someone.”

What has been going on here has been nothing less than a partisan witch hunt. Westrup made clear that the Republican narrative was predetermined: “We’re examining any conflicts of interest, biases or suppression of scientific discourse regarding the origins of COVID-19,” he said. The record shows, however, that what occurred was the scientific method in action.

If the subcommittee members are truly devoted to protect Americans from a future pandemic, they couldn’t find a worse way to reach that goal. “If I was a future scientist, looking at the attacks directed at us, for example, maybe I wouldn’t go into infectious disease research…. It’s incredibly damaging,” Anderson said.

Categories Extremism, Fake, Health, Republicans, Science, Stupid

The Witch Hunt in Tennessee

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2023 //
19

Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer in the South for the New York Times. In this article, she notices that access to civil rights increasingly depends on which state you live in. Red state legislatures exert extreme control over private decisions. Those who live in Tennessee are not free to make their own decisions about medical care.

NASHVILLE — Two weeks ago, while the rest of America was absorbed by the hunt for a doomed submersible, people in Tennessee discovered that their attorney general was conducting a witch hunt.

As part of a “run-of-the-mill” inquiry into possible billing fraud — as officials described their investigation — the attorney general’s office demanded that Vanderbilt University Medical Center hand over a vast array of documents from its clinic for gender-affirming care. According to Tennessee Lookout, a nonprofit journalism site, those documents include, among others:

  • complete medical records for an undisclosed number of patients
  • Resumes of clinic physicians
  • information about the clinic’s Trans Buddy volunteers
  • emails sent to and from a public portal for questions about L.G.B.T.Q. health
  • the names of people referred to the gender-affirming clinic for care

Tell me this isn’t a witch hunt. Tell me this isn’t an open campaign of terror against already vulnerable citizens who had every reason to believe that their medical records — their medical records! — were confidential and every reason to believe that the medical clinic of a major university hospital was a safe space.

During the Juneteenth holiday weekend, Vanderbilt notified patients whose confidential medical records were now in the possession of the state attorney general. The hospital has not detailed which documents it provided the state. When two Tennessee Lookout reporters, Sam Stockard and Anita Wadhwani, asked whether Vanderbilt had complied with every state request in connection with the investigation, a hospital spokesman said, “The short response to your question is no.”

State officials contend that they are investigating only the hospital and certain providers, not the patients they serve, and that all the data they’ve gathered will be kept private. But given the sweeping nature of the documents and the obsessive and relentless way that the Republican supermajority in this state — and in virtually every state governed by a Republican supermajority — has persecuted trans people, it’s impossible to trust such claims…

Though the courts have generally sided with transgender families when these laws have faced legal challenges, the behavior of red-state lawmakers and officials remains in lock step with intimidation campaigns conducted against transgender people by right-wing media figures like the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, who staged an anti-trans rally in Nashville last fall…

Increasingly, this is exactly what it’s like to live in a red state, and not just for vulnerable minorities. The age at which it is possible to marry, the testing required to drive a car, the conditions under which it is possible to carry a firearm — such matters have always varied a bit from state to state. But this is a whole new reality.

Now that Republican-appointed justices dominate the U.S. Supreme Court, we can’t count on the courts to protect us from the most extreme agendas being enacted in Republican-dominated statehouses. Essential civil liberties that citizens of other states can take for granted are no longer liberties that we in the red states enjoy.

Maybe you can count on being able to make health care decisions yourself, following the advice of your doctor. No such luck here, whether you’re seeking transgender care or the safe end to an unsafe or unwanted pregnancy.

Maybe you’re a physician, trained and board-certified in an area of expertise that exactly zero legislators in your state share. You may be under the impression that your education and experience give you the right to recommend medical treatment for your patients. Not in many places here. Even in the case of life-threatening situations, your hands are tied.

Maybe you feel relatively confident that your children are safe in their schools because you live in a state that has enacted measures to keep firearms out of the hands of dangerous people. My state has done nothing of the kind.

Maybe you are represented in Congress by an elected official whose political positions align with the political positions of a vast majority of people who live in the city they represent. In Nashville, as in other blue cities whose voting districts were determined by a Republican legislature, we don’t.

Maybe classrooms and school libraries in your community offer books and other materials that experienced teachers and librarians have chosen for their excellence and their relevance to children’s lives. In the red states, that’s not something parents can count on, for our school boards are being bullied by a minority of conservative parents, and our Republican legislators believe they know better than education professionals which books students are ready to read.

Maybe the full range of birth control options is now available to you in planning whether, or when, to have a baby. Many anti-abortion activists erroneously define birth control measures like intrauterine devices and the medication known as Plan B as abortifacients. If you live in a state where such groups have the ear of legislators, you’d better start paying attention to what’s happening in your statehouse because these folks are coming for you.

We live in two countries now: one in which basic civil and human rights are recognized and enshrined in law, and another in which ideological extremists can decide how everyone else lives.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Extremism, Gender, Health, Republicans, Science, Tennessee
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