#anti-science

[liberalsarecool]

Project 2025 does call for “reduction and management of population levels.”

I doubt this is a coincidence.

Kids will die. Parents will suffer. Nothing good can come from this.

[contemplatingoutlander]

Bernie Sanders: Kennedy Must Resign

Photo: Mark Peterson for The New York Times

"The reality is that Secretary Kennedy has profited from and built a career on sowing mistrust in vaccines. Now, as head of H.H.S., he is using his authority to launch a full-blown war on science, on public health and on truth itself."

—Bernie Sanders

Once again, Bernie Sanders tells it like it is. Of course, RFK, Jr should resign. He and his anti-science, anti-vaccine beliefs are going to hurt or kill many Americans. This is a gift 🎁 link so there is no paywall. Below are some excerpts.

Opinion | The New York Times | Bernie Sanders | Aug. 30, 2025, 7:00 a.m. ET

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, is endangering the health of the American people now and into the future. He must resign.

Mr. Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and over, that they want to Make America Healthy Again. That’s a great slogan. I agree with it. The problem is that since coming into office President Trump and Mr. Kennedy have done exactly the opposite.

This week, Mr. Kennedy pushed out the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after less than one month on the job because she refused to act as a rubber stamp for his dangerous policies. Four leading officials at C.D.C. resigned the same week. One of those officials said Mr. Kennedy’s team asked him to “change studies that have been settled in the past” apparently to fit Mr. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views. This is not Making America Healthy Again. [emphasis added]

Despite the overwhelming opposition of the medical community, Secretary Kennedy has continued his longstanding crusade against vaccines and his advocacy of conspiracy theories that have been rejected repeatedly by scientific experts.

It is absurd to have to say this in 2025, but vaccines are safe and effective. That, of course, is not just my view. Far more important, it is the overwhelming consensus of the medical and scientific communities.

[See more under the cut.]

The American Academy of Pediatrics... calls immunizations “one of the greatest public health achievements,” which prevents tens of thousands of deaths and millions of cases of disease.

The American Medical Association... recently said that vaccines for flu, R.S.V. and Covid-19 are “the best tools to protect the public against these illnesses and their potentially serious complications.” [...] Against the overwhelming body of evidence within the medicine and science, what are Secretary Kennedy’s views? He has claimed that autism is caused by vaccines, despite more than a dozen rigorous scientific studies involving hundreds of thousands of children that have found no connection between vaccines and autism.

He has called the Covid-19 vaccines the “deadliest” ever made despite findings cited by the W.H.O. that Covid shots saved over 14 million lives throughout the world in 2021 alone.

He has ridiculously questioned whether the polio vaccine has killed more people than polio itself did even though scientists have found that the vaccine has saved 1.5 million lives and prevented around 20 million people from becoming paralyzed since 1988. [...] The reality is that Secretary Kennedy has profited from and built a career on sowing mistrust in vaccines. Now, as head of H.H.S., he is using his authority to launch a full-blown war on science, on public health and on truth itself.

What will this mean for the health and well-being of the American people?

Short term, it will be harder for Americans to get lifesaving vaccines. Already, the Trump administration has effectively taken away Covid vaccines from many healthy younger adults and kids, unless they fight their way through our broken health care system. This means more doctor’s visits, more bureaucracy and more people paying higher out-of-pocket costs — if they can manage to get a vaccine at all.

Covid is just the beginning. Mr. Kennedy’s next target may be the childhood immunization schedule, the list of recommended vaccines that children receive to protect them from diseases like measles, chickenpox and polio. The danger here is that diseases that have been virtually wiped out because of safe and effective vaccines will resurface and cause enormous harm. [...] Unfortunately, Secretary Kennedy’s actions are making a worrisome situation even worse by defunding the research that could help us prepare for the next pandemic. This month, he canceled nearly $500 million in research for the kinds of vaccines that helped us stop the Covid pandemic. At the same time, Mr. Kennedy is cutting funding to states to prepare and respond to future outbreaks of infectious diseases. This is unacceptable. [...] Secretary Kennedy is putting Americans’ lives in danger, and he must resign. In his place, President Trump must listen to doctors and scientists and nominate a health secretary and a C.D.C. director who will protect the health and well-being of the American people, not carry out dangerous policies based on conspiracy theories.

[ir-tg-curvy-mature-feetworship]

Definition of a MAGAtard:

I KNOW I'M GONNA CATCH HELL FROM THE WHITE-SUPREMACIST TRUMP SUPPORTERS ON THIS SITE, BUT: BRING IT ON!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

What is going on right now at the FDA will cause thousands to die

Lucian K. Truscott IV

Nov 29, 2025

Most of the shenanigans and just plain idiocy involve this guy, Vinay Prasad, an RFK Jr. acolyte who currently heads up the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. It’s necessary to use the word “currently” in the above sentence, because you just never know what’s going to happen next with him. Earlier this year, Prasad was forced to resign his post after Laura Loomer – you just knew she’d be involved – went after him as a “progressive leftist saboteur” shortly after he placed a hold on a drug to treat muscular dystrophy “for safety reasons.” Prasad is “a Marxist Trojan Horse,” Loomer wrote in one of several posts attacking him.

Prasad stayed out of that job for two weeks, before being welcomed back to the RFK Jr. fold after unnamed “experts” determined that Loomer had been fronting for a drug manufacturer, Serepta Therapeutics, which manufactured the muscular dystrophy drug in question and stood to lose millions in sales because of Prasad’s decision to suspend usage of the drug. Conservative activists who pay attention to the fine-print ins and outs of who is funding who in their sphere of activism went after Loomer with boots on. Ned Ryun, one of the fine-tooth nitpickers on the Right, addressed Loomer directly on X, “The fact of the matter is you got funded by Sarepta Therapeutics to take Vinay out; probably thru a middleman for deniability but still pharma money funding it all.” Antonia Hitchens wrote in the New Yorker about a conversation she had with “a veteran political operative” at Ned’s Club, a members-only “lounge” frequented by Trump administration figures like Karoline Leavitt. Loomer, the right-wing operator, told Hitchens, is a “pay-to-play Tasmanian devil” who creates “total anarchy and a wide blast zone” with her attacks on figures such as Prasad.

It would almost be possible to feel sorry for Prasad until you have a look at his latest moves at the FDA, doubtlessly at the behest of his boss, Kennedy. Yesterday he announced a series of FDA decisions that will seriously affect access to childhood vaccines. Prasad is going to change the way vaccines are approved by requiring pharmaceutical companies to run much larger studies than are required now. The Washington Post reported that Prasad’s announcement will require that “pneumonia vaccine makers must demonstrate that their products reduce pneumonia rather than just generate antibodies to fight infections.”

This is in line with attacks on COVID vaccines that have been made by RFK Jr., that they do not prevent the disease from occurring but only reduce its severity once contracted. Which is like saying that the effectiveness of automobile brakes must be questioned because they don’t prevent crashes, they only serve to make them less likely and not as deadly when they occur.

Prasad has also ordered studies that will question whether multiple vaccines can be given at the same time, the common method for vaccinating children according to schedules that were previously approved by the FDA and pediatric specialists. Older Americans have been encouraged to receive vaccines for COVID, flu, RSV and pneumonia at the same time, cutting down the number of visits the elderly must make to doctor’s offices. That practice will come under scrutiny by the order Prasad issued yesterday.

What all of Prasad’s orders have in common is their connection to the anti-vaccine views long held by his boss, RFK Jr., who has been questioning the efficacy and safety of childhood vaccines for decades, as well as attacking the COVID vaccine as “the most deadly vaccine in history.” Prasad also announced that his office had conducted its own study of COVID vaccines and concluded that they had “contributed” to the deaths of 10 children between the years of 2021 and 2024. During these years, no fewer than one billion COVID shots were administered to Americans, saving millions of lives according to studies that the FDA is now busy questioning. At least 100 million COVID vaccine shots were given to children during that time.

“This is a profound revelation,” Prasad wrote. “For the first time, the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children.”

Ten American children. Over three years.

Prasad’s dramatic statement is not accurate, because his study concluded only that the COVID vaccine may have contributed to children’s deaths, not caused them.

Meanwhile, 157 children died from accidental gunshots during 2023, and 114 children died from the same cause in 2024, the most recent years for which statistics are available. The numbers come from analysis of figures from the Centers for Disease Control – another government agency now under the control of RFK Jr. – and Everytown for Gun Safety, a group that advocates for gun safety. There are reports of chaos at the CDC, which is operating under an acting director, the previous Senate-approved director having been fired by RFK Jr. after she refused to sign-off on vaccine policy directives he ordered. The announcement yesterday by Prasad is exactly the kind of policy change that former CDC Director Susan Monarez objected to, resulting in her being fired.

Funding for the division of the CDC that keeps records for and studies gun violence has been severely cut back under directives by RFK Jr. But then, who wants to study hundreds of gun deaths of children when ten children have allegedly died from a COVID shot?

RFK Jr. has been wanting to take apart the children’s vaccine schedule ever since he joined the board of Children’s Health Defense in 2015. The anti-vax group alleges that vaccines cause autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autoimmune diseases and even cancer. That the purpose of vaccines is to prevent diseases that for centuries were deadly to children and adults both does not matter to advocates from Children’s Health Defense, the most prominent of whom has been RFK Jr., who is now, as HHS secretary, in charge of vaccine policy.

Here, I would like to make a personal point as the father of three children. Every decision you make as a parent, and I mean every decision, is fraught. The act of strapping an infant or toddler into a car seat and driving a child to a doctor’s appointment is more dangerous than anything a pediatrician can do with or to that child in his or her office. A driver or a child in the backseat of a car is more likely to be seriously injured or die in a car accident than they are to get sick or die from a vaccination given by a pediatrician or a family doctor treating a father or mother of children.

Whether to allow a child to play pee-wee football or train to become a gymnast is another example of a decision parents often make. A boy of 7 or 8 can suffer head trauma playing football as a child. Head trauma is cumulative, meaning that multiple impacts to the head as you play football can contribute to neurodegenerative diseases later in life, even if no individual head impact as a child or young man results in a concussion.

Gymnastics, even with all the safety measures that are taken in training, can cause injuries that can become debilitating. So, what do you do if a son or a daughter wants to become involved in gymnastics? Do you bar your child from football or gymnastics and err on the side of safety on the theory that an injury in childhood could lead to more severe problems in adulthood?

What of the children who die on the football field or while practicing for cheerleading or gymnastics? Because there are ten deaths over a three-year period from children playing football or being a gymnast, do you just decide for your child that he or she cannot play those sports? Who would advocate cancelling the sports of football and gymnastics because ten children died?

We know from figures kept by the National Institutes of Health that as many as 15,000 children died from COVID during the pandemic. If in fact it turns out that a number of children did die from a COVID shot, that is indeed a tragedy. But how many children out of the tens of millions who received a COVID vaccination would have died without it?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a fanatic who has hired other fanatics such as Vinay Prasad to carry out an ideological assault on the healthcare of more than 300 million Americans because Donald Trump empowered them. The fact that Trump is the person who made the decision to develop the vaccine that saved millions from dying due to contracting the deadly COVID virus is an irony that is fast turning into a tragedy.

[Lucian Truscott Newsletter]

[redshift-13]

"The United States is now an anti-science country, explicitly comparable to the Soviet Union under Lysenko, who, like Kennedy, spouted absurd theories and claims, denying scientific reality to satisfy the regime's ideological imperatives."

-Michael Tomasky, "The Real State of the Union: Millions of Americans Are Just Disgusted,." The New Republic, Feb. 23, 2026

[tomorrowusa]

Yellow fever: Colombia declares health emergency after dozens die

Health authorities are urging people to get vaccinated before travelling to risk areas for Easter.

There's a yellow fever outbreak in Colombia which has killed 34 people so far.

A yellow fever vaccine is available, but people need to actually get it for it to do any good.

Colombia has declared a nationwide health emergency after at least 34 people died of yellow fever, according to official figures. Yellow fever is caused by a virus transmitted to humans by infected mosquitoes. It can be prevented by a vaccine which in most cases provides lifelong protection. The government has urged people to get vaccinated ahead of the Easter weekend, a time when many Colombians travel to warmer areas where the mosquitos that spread the disease are more prevalent. Health Minister Guillermo Alfonso Jaramillo said those going to high-risk areas would be required to show proof of vaccination. The health minister said that there had been 74 confirmed cases of yellow fever in Colombia so far during this outbreak and urged people to get the vaccine, which in Colombia is free of charge.

It's easy to prevent but a tricky disease to diagnose.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), most people recover after the first phase of infection which usually involves fever, muscle and back pain, headache, shivers, loss of appetite, and nausea or vomiting. But the WHO warns that about 15% of people face a second, more serious phase involving high fever, jaundice, bleeding and deteriorating kidney function. Half of those who enter this "more toxic" phase usually die within 10 to 14 days, WHO figures suggest.

That can't be good.

Thanks to vaccine hesitancy encouraged by MAGA morons like RFK Jr., fewer Americans are likely to get vaccinated when necessary. And because of climate change, mosquitos carrying the yellow fever virus may find the climate up here more hospitable.

Yellow fever has a long history in the US dating back to the colonial era.

History of Yellow Fever in the U.S.

It was 1793 in Philadelphia and the summer was proving to be one of the hottest on record. A blanket of humidity covered the city, fed by putrid swamps that served as breeding grounds for the Aedes aegypti mosquito. While smaller outbreaks of yellow fever had occurred in the U.S. since 1693, this year would prove to be different. The capital city would be decimated. In just a matter of months, 10% of Philadelphia’s population was dead and a greater proportion had fled the city in fear for their lives.

Interestingly, the yellow fever virus may have been brought to the New World on slave ships.

Yellow fever is caused by a virus in the family Flaviviridae, and it is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. The yellow fever virus most likely originated in Africa and arrived in the Western Hemisphere in the 1600s as a result of slave trade. The mosquito vector was likely introduced to the U.S. via water barrels on trade ships arriving from countries with endemic yellow fever. The virus followed when slaves from areas with endemic disease arrived. The hungry mosquitos then spread the virus from infected to uninfected in the New World.

You probably won't find that factoid in MAGA-censored history books.

Yellow fever outbreaks have happened as far north as Boston (1798). The absolute worst was centered around Memphis in 1878.

1878 Epidemic

While we shouldn't panic because of the epidemic in Colombia, we do need to be more vigilant on a state and local level because the anti-science Trump-Musk régime is drastically cutting funding for fighting pandemics and public health in general.

[moontyger]

After Sowing Distrust in Fluoridated Water, Kennedy and Skeptics Turn to Obstructing Other Fluoride Sources

Florida and Utah have banned fluoridation, with multiple other states looking to do the same. Critics of fluoride in drinking water point to

Last year, when Utah lawmakers passed the nation’s first statewide ban on community water fluoridation, they included a provision making it easier for people to get fluoride supplements without having to visit a dental provider.

This would make fluoride available through individual choice, rather than “mass public dosing,” as a Utah House of Representatives webpage put it — part of the rising rhetoric of skepticism that’s led to rollbacks of water fluoridation, a proven method to reduce tooth decay.

“It’s what I like to refer to as the win-win, right?” Speaker Mike Schultz said on a June episode of the “House Rules” podcast from the Utah House. “Those that want fluoride can now get fluoride easier, and those that don’t want fluoride in their drinking water don’t have to have that.”

But even as critics point to fluoride supplements as an alternative — along with fluoride toothpaste, rinses and varnishes — many are creating barriers to these same products.

Under U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s oversight, the Food and Drug Administration said it issued notices to four businesses about their ingestible fluoride supplements for children and also put out new guidance for health professionals.

In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton launched investigations into two large companies over their marketing of fluoride toothpaste to parents and children.

And changes to Medicaid in President Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act threaten to make it harder than it already is for the most vulnerable people to access any oral health care at all, let alone fluoride treatments at a dentist’s office.

More than anything, experts say, alarmist language from high-profile officials is trickling down to the public, leading more people to question whether any form of fluoride — in drinking water or in other treatments — is a good idea.

Scott Tomar, a professor and associate dean at the University of Illinois Chicago College of Dentistry, is among those who have watched with dismay as the conversation about fluoride has been affected by arguments likely to scare people.

“I’m certain that the net result of all of this is going to be a greater reluctance on the part of parents and providers to prescribe fluoride supplements,” Tomar said.

Low, consistent exposure to fluoride is widely credited for dramatic declines in decaying teeth. But long-simmering skepticism about its use gained more influence in recent years, especially with Kennedy’s credibility and influence as the nation’s chief health officer.

“The evidence against fluoride is overwhelming,” he said as he stood alongside Utah lawmakers at a press conference in Salt Lake City last April.

Even though the science to support his conclusions is limited, he claimed that fluoride “causes IQ loss, profound IQ loss,” and he linked water fluoridation to ADHD, hypothyroidism, osteoarthritis, and kidney and liver issues.

Lee Zeldin, who leads the Environmental Protection Agency, spoke at the Utah event, too, crediting Kennedy for helping to spur the agency’s review of its standard for fluoride in drinking water. An EPA spokesperson, in a statement to ProPublica, said that the agency’s “next analysis of new scientific information on potential health risks of fluoride in drinking water was not due until 2030, but this agency is moving at Trump Speed.”

Meanwhile, the FDA is partnering with other federal agencies to develop what it called “a fluoride research agenda.” And, as part of a series of drastic cutbacks last spring, the Division of Oral Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was eliminated.

In a statement emailed to ProPublica, an HHS spokesperson argued that fluoride’s “predominant benefit to teeth comes from topical contact with the outside of the teeth, not from ingestion. There is no need, therefore, to ingest fluoride.”

Fluoride’s opponents cite a hotly debated “state of the science” report from the National Toxicology Program in 2024, saying that it shows an association between fluoride exposure and a lowered IQ in children.

But those findings are not widely embraced because of the review’s limitations. It analyzed studies conducted outside the U.S., with different water conditions, and involving fluoride levels at more than twice the standard for drinking water here. The report itself states, in bold type, that it does not address “whether the sole exposure to fluoride added to drinking water” at the recommended level in the United States and Canada “is associated with a measurable effect on IQ.”

In this atmosphere, as ProPublica has reported, there’s been widespread wavering on water fluoridation, even in Michigan, where the treatment debuted more than 80 years ago.

Florida joined Utah in banning fluoridation statewide. Bills to do the same were introduced in at least 19 other states last year, and that momentum is carrying forward, with statewide bans recently proposed in Arizona and South Carolina. Meanwhile, local debates over fluoridation are turning raucous.

Utah’s dental professionals are concerned about how to stave off an expected hit to oral health, as other communities experienced when they cut off fluoridation.

“We get heartburn over the situation,” said James Bekker, a pediatric dentist and past president of the Utah Dental Association.

Bekker and others are piecing together ways to provide other forms of fluoride treatment to Utahns. But he’s worried, he said, about “all these susceptible, vulnerable children in underserved populations that don’t have a choice and don’t have a voice, but they are going to suffer.”

Shortly after Utah banned fluoridation, the FDA took aim at the kind of supplements that lawmakers had presented as a key alternative. The agency announced that it was working to remove certain ingestible fluoride products for children from the market. Its press release described associations with changes to the gut microbiome, thyroid disorders, weight gain “and possibly decreased IQ.”

More than 4,600 public comments poured into the FDA, including many from people worried about losing access to supplements while simultaneously losing water fluoridation.

“Now that fluoride has been removed from much of Utah’s water, it is imperative to provide supplementation through other means,” one orthodontist wrote. A dentist in South Florida criticized the scare tactics and bad science leading states like hers to ban fluoridation and said that prescribing fluoride drops and lozenges is one of the few alternatives for pediatric patients.

On Oct. 31, the FDA announced efforts to “restrict the sale of unapproved ingestible fluoride prescription drug products for children.” The agency said it sent notices to four companies about marketing the supplements for children under 3 and older children with moderate or low risk for tooth decay. It also said it issued letters to health care professionals “warning about the risks associated with these products.”

Even though the FDA landed short of a ban, Stuart Cooper, executive director of the Fluoride Action Network, called the agency’s shift a “major victory.” He said he believes it’s just the start of federal action to limit the use of fluoride products that FAN has long campaigned against.

Fluoride supplements, which emerged in the 1940s alongside water fluoridation, never went through an FDA review. A decade ago, Cooper said, FAN submitted a citizens petition that called for the agency to pull ingestible fluoride supplements from the market. “What we’re seeing is that come to fruition,” he said, “because we finally have FDA employees who were willing to look at the issue.”

The FDA’s stance on supplements is now at odds with several health organizations, including the American Dental Association, the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Several of them jointly support a graduated fluoride supplementation schedule that starts at six months for high-risk children.

Johnny Johnson, a retired pediatric dentist in Florida, questions the FDA’s risk parameters. “If you don’t have fluoride at appropriate levels in your water, by definition, you are at high risk” of tooth decay, said Johnson, who heads the nonprofit American Fluoridation Society.

The FDA’s letter to health professionals recommends topical fluoride as an alternative, such as toothpaste. But even that method faces scrutiny. The Texas attorney general’s office launched investigations into Colgate-Palmolive and Procter & Gamble, which sell Colgate and Crest fluoride toothpastes.

Their marketing to parents and children is “misleading, deceptive and dangerous,” Paxton’s office said in a press release. Referencing the NTP report on fluoridation, the release said the investigation came “amid a growing body of scientific evidence demonstrating that excessive fluoride exposure is not safe for children.”

In September, Paxton’s office announced a “historic agreement” with Colgate-Palmolive. When its packaging and promotional material for children’s fluoride toothpaste shows the paste on a brush, the company will display a pea-sized amount, rather than the traditional swirl. This month, Paxton’s office reported a similar settlement with Procter & Gamble.

A representative from Colgate-Palmolive said in a statement to ProPubica that Paxton’s press release acknowledged that “we already provide directions on our packaging that complies with U.S. FDA requirements for how our children’s fluoride toothpastes should be used.” Procter & Gamble said in a statement that “the Texas Attorney General acknowledged in the settlement that our products comply with all laws and regulations regarding directions for use.”

Another tool for fluoride treatment is varnish applied during a dental checkup, which may be provided at free or reduced cost through insurance programs. But even with health coverage, there are barriers that often make it difficult to see the dentists and pediatricians providing such treatment. Recent research found that insurance denials for fluoride varnish applications can add another layer of complication for patients and providers.

Supplemental fluoride treatments are limited, compared with the effectiveness, reach and cost of fluoride in drinking water, said Johnson, the retired pediatric dentist, but “it is the only option that we have in Florida and in Utah.”

“Nothing replaces fluoridated water,” he added. “Nothing comes close.”

[wtf-fun-factss]

People with negative sentiments about science tend to be overconfident about their scientific knowledge. Click to read the full fact.