#maha hypocrisy

[secondstar09]

Mississippi: “We’re declaring a public health emergency because our infant mortality rate is the highest it’s been in over a decade.”

Also Mississippi: closes rural hospitals, slashes healthcare programs, and acts confused when babies die.

9.7 babies per 1,000 births

didn’t make it to their first birthday in 2024. That’s not just a statistic, that’s a state-sized obituary.

Since 2014, over 3,500 Mississippi babies have died before turning one. But sure, let’s keep debating whether healthcare is a “luxury.”

Every dead infant = a devastated family.

Every devastated family = a broken community.

Every broken community = a policy choice dressed up as “oops, public health emergency.”

It’s not an emergency if you saw it coming for ten years. It’s negligence with a press release.

[secondstar09]

Trump is now claiming Tylenol causes autism and told pregnant women to avoid it.

Here’s the problem:

– Observational studies: some show correlations, but correlation is cheap and confounded by fevers, infections, genetics, etc.

– Sibling studies (the gold-standard for messy family data): found no association between prenatal Tylenol use and autism.

– Regulators (FDA, medical groups): cautious, updating labels, but nobody is calling it proven causation.

– ACOG: still recommends acetaminophen as the safest option for pain and fever in pregnancy, because fever itself can harm a fetus.

What happens when politicians oversell preliminary science? Pregnant people panic, fevers go untreated, and parents of autistic kids get hit with another round of blame.

In other words: science is complicated, Trump is not, and your OB-GYN is still a better medical source than a guy who stares at eclipses.

[secondstar09]

So, about the CDC meltdown you just heard about…”

Once upon a time (aka last month), Susan Monarez was confirmed by the Senate as CDC director. She came with this wild, outdated belief that science and law should matter. Cute, right?

Enter Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now Secretary of HHS, who’s been busy purging public health like it’s his own anti-vax fan forum. He wanted Monarez to fire her leadership team and follow his new “don’t recommend vaccines to kids or pregnant women” playbook.

Monarez’s response? “Uh, that’s illegal. And also dangerous

Kennedy’s response? “You’re fired.”

Problem: only the President can fire a Senate-confirmed CDC director. Solution? Pretend she “resigned.” Monarez’s lawyers: absolutely not.

The White House line: she just “didn’t align with Trump’s agenda.”

Translation: she refused to kill science with a smile.

Congress has now perked up like, “wait, did the CDC just collapse on live TV?” Senate Health Committee is scheduling a review while RFK Jr. smiles in front of flags like this is fine.

Meanwhile, thousands of CDC staff are laid off, vaccine advisory panels are disbanded, and vaccine guidance is being rewritten by people who think Facebook memes are peer-reviewed journals.

tl;dr: The CDC director was fired for refusing to delete science. Kennedy’s running the agency like it’s a subreddit. And the public health officials who actually know things? They’re leaving in droves.

[secondstar09]

Why this matters:

It matters because when the government’s flagship health plan looks like it was cobbled together by a glitchy AI with a caffeine addiction, public trust tanks.

If they can’t fact-check their own “science-based” report before release, how seriously can anyone take its recommendations—especially when it’s supposed to guide national health policy?

In short: credibility isn’t just a PR issue here—it’s the entire point.

[secondstar09]

So Maryland just became home to the first U.S. human case of flesh-eating screwworm in decades. Yeah, that’s right. Worms. That eat flesh. Not in a horror novel—just your regular Tuesday.

Don’t worry though, the patient is fine. Totally recovered. No outbreak. Nothing to see here. Except, you know, the part where this parasite literally burrows into living tissue. But hey, fun fact, it doesn’t like dead flesh—only the good stuff. Yum.

The government’s response? Oh, just casually building a $750 MILLION bug factory in Texas to mass-produce 300 million sterile flies a week. Because the only way to fight flesh-eating bugs… is with more bugs.

It’s giving “sci-fi apocalypse prequel.” Today it’s sterilized flies, tomorrow it’s “oops, some weren’t sterile” and now we’ve got Super Worms™.

Meanwhile, ranchers are furious they weren’t told sooner, since this little pest could cost the cattle industry billions. But hey—at least the press release assures us there’s “no public risk.” Totally reassuring when a parasite literally called SCREWWORM shows up in your state.