#skepticism

[ghost-in-the-corner]

just as a general reminder

learn how to fact-check for yourself, cause soon enough, most online sources won't be reliable

[isitcorrect]

Claim: Did many cancers have cures discovered after the US left the WHO?

Claims like these are everywhere on X and Bluesky, and strangely enough not so much any other media. Let's figure out if cancer really was cured after the US (vaguely implied to have been suppressing the cure) left the WHO in January 2026

Pancreatic Cancer:

On January 27th Mariano Barbacid claimed to have cured pancreatic cancer in mice, but his study on this was published in December, before the US left the World Health Organization, and it was only in January that he asked for funding to pursue his cure (this El Pais article is one of the few sources digging into the claim and not citing the same clickbait, so it's my main source here)

Similar events occurred in 2011, when he claimed to have cured lung cancer, in mice, and immediately asked for funding. He was rebuked by the Spanish Ministry of Science for announcing results in mice as relevant to humans. The linked article includes scientists criticizing him for going to the press to call it a "cure for cancer" instead of a promising step. Indeed, a University of Pennsylvania team led by Ben Stanger discovered a similar therapy earlier in 2025 without the same amount of media attention.

All in all it paints a picture of something that happens very routinely, even before to the same scientist: a promising study of a potential treatment for cancer in mice that was blown up by the media into a imminent cure for cancer in humans. Regardless, it wasn't being conspiratorially suppressed until the US left WHO, because the study was announced beforehand, and an American team did similar research in 2025.

Colon Cancer

This is referring to South Korean scientists discovering a potential way to reverse colon cancer. Something first reported in 2024, well before the US left WHO.

Colorectal Cancer

This was apparently cured by Chinese scientists; this is a reference to Peixuan Guo, who found an RNA therapy to remove cancer...in mice. This is, once again, a promising treatment in mice that's yet to be tested in humans that the media seized upon.

As an aside, part of the reason conspiratorial claims that They are hiding the "cure for cancer" is because of sensationalist media coverage highlighting potential treatments way before they're ready for primetime. These stories happen all the time, and eventually either it becomes a treatment (not cure) we use or is discarded, but all the public sees is a stream of Cures for Cancer that seemingly vanish.

As for whether this was suppressed until the United States until they left WHO: Peixuan Guo conducted this research at...Ohio State University.

HPV

This is a reference to Eva Ramón Gallegos, who eradicated HPV in 29 women. In 2019. This is real research, but an older story that was brought up and framed as something new in order to cash in on the viral narrative after the pancreatic cancer claim took off.

Blood cancer

This refers to a study in Vietnam announced last year - again, before the US' departure from WHO was complete. But it is being inaccurately reported; it's not a cure on "blood cancers", it's a treatment using cell therapy that helped one patient with acute childhood leukemia. This is good and promising, but was never claimed to be a "cure for cancer" until the press got hold of it and twisted it to fit a current narrative

Anyway let's look at the ones in the other tweet

Breast cancer

I cannot find out what this is a reference to. I just find crank stories from the MAHA sphere

Lung cancer

I think this may be a reference to the colorectal cancer cure. Otherwise I just get a bunch of stories about ivermectin

Prostate cancer

This seems to be the same story as the one about colon cancer; otherwise I'm not finding a source story they're responding to

Stomach cancer

Yeah, for all these I'm just finding nothing but tweets insisting stomach cancer was "cured". Like, you would think that EVERY CANCER being cured would spawn a few news stories, at least, but no! It's just tweets claiming it was cured with no further information

Liver cancer

"Cancer cured" and ivermectin posts

Thyroid cancer

"Cancer cured" and ivermectin posts

Bladder Cancer

I found this study from 2025 for a treatment eliminating it in patients, but again, it's just "cancer cured" and ivermectin posts, with no citations of it, so I don't know if that spawned this

Esophageal Cancer

"Cancer cured" and ivermectin posts

So let's take tally:

Five real cancer treatments, none of which are cancer cures as far as we know yet, that went viral. The only one that was new was the colorectal cancer one, which was discovered in the United States. The others are largely from 2024 or 2025 and one as old as 2019.

Eight random ones thrown in without any clear source story. You would think the lack of any news stories about EVERY CANCER being cured would make some people get sus, but no

Let's just state what should be obvious: these types of stories happen all the time, and do not indicate a cure for cancer "being suppressed".

The US retreating from the World Health Organization and from medical research don't represent a win, of science finally getting out under the boot of repression, but a tremendous loss. The United States was the leader in clinical trials, number one in life sciences research. Or it was, until Trump slashed their funding for no reason. American medical researchers weren't greedy fatcats who were making cures for cancer just to hide them forever; they were responsible for much of the world's research and medical treatment! It should be obvious that the world is further away from a cure to any cancer after some of its biggest research institutions were decimated, and yet

[milliebobbyflay]

Imagine a world where creationism was unanimously central both to the ruling class's conception of self and to the logic that justifies their power. Darwin's work still exists, attempts to suppress it outright would only drive interest; curious and rigorous scholars who've sought out his work can testify to its quality and relevance, and often teach natural selection in their courses. Still, there remains an understanding that Darwin is not what the people with money and power want to hear, and so when proposing research grants or attempting to climb the academic ladder, Darwin is typically ignored in favor of alternative theoretical frameworks which, while less useful, are far more likely to receive funding.

This creates a cycle where, because Darwinism has been ignored in all of the most influential and groundbreaking research, it becomes inessential. Scholars can receive their PhDs without ever having read a single work on natural selection. Despite its utility as a theory, intuition and an implicit trust in the social reality created by and within these institions creates the sense that Darwinism is, to put it bluntly "crank shit," the sort of thing you study to amuse your own curiosity and stroke your ego rather than actually trying to change the world.

Of course, none of this changes the fact that Darwin was correct, that evolution by natural selection is the primary mechanism by which species develop and change over time. However, since using Darwinist theory (or any alternative routes taken to similar models and conclusions) as anything but a garnish will get you labeled as a crank, the entire discipline of biology becomes warped around its absence. Entire fields form to cobble together makeshift solutions to the gaps Darwinism fills, further cementing it's irrelevance. Thousands of scholars devote their lives to fleshing out the forest of asterisks and duct tape holding on a vastly overstretched lamarckian and at times implictly creationist framework.

From the outside, the discipline begins looking absurd. Clearly driven by internal politics, sprawling in a million directions without any consistent underlying theory, shy on results. Despite billions pouring in year after year trying to answer some of the most fundamental questions about humanity, history, health, all lines of inquiry seem to eventually terminate in a shrug of "life is complex, how could we hope to understand everything about it?"

Okay now switch Darwin with Marx. This is the state of contemporary western social science.

[quasi-normalcy]

Which of the following are you *most* likely to believe in?

Alien have recentlh visited / are currently visiting Earth

Sympathetic magic / Witchcraft

Ghosts

Mind-reading / telepathy

Precognition / dreaming the future

The Mandela Effect / crossover between universes

Astrology / Divination

Bigfoot / Sasquatch / Abominable Snowman

Nessie / Lake Monsters

Elfs/ Dwarfs/ Goblins/ Fae

The world is orchestrated by unfathomably powerful forces according to a plan

I believe in none of these at all.

Voting ended onMay 21, 2024

[creature-wizard]

Basically, you can't just go "this thing is fake because it's racist/ableist/whatever" because people will think you just don't believe in it because it doesn't fit your ideology, and not because the evidence genuinely doesn't support it. That's why you have to explain why it's factually wrong, why it doesn't logically add up, etc. It's important to talk about bigoted motives behind things, but you have to do that in addition to laying out the facts.

[unsolicited-opinions]

This is kinda a follow up to your previously answered anon. I also found your blog a couple months or so ago now and have read through several of your posts. While you (and others) have made me reconsider previous stances and have changed my mind on several key factors about the I/P conflict, admittedly there is a lot that i still wrestle with and somewhat disagree with. That being said, I do respect and appreciate your throughness and moral consistency which i find incredibly refreshing. So to continue with this wrestling of thoughts, I'd like to ask what resources you use in your own research. I have followed a few links of your more academic/historcal sources and have found them behind paywalls or to just be snippets of a larger text (as in the case with book previews). I know the most basic thing is to start with a history textbook but those tend to be vauge and lack nuance. Additionally, what online news sources do you use/trust since the MSM is untrustworthy. I find myself lost often in a maze of confusion and contradiction. Again, thanks for what you've done on this page, there are a lot of people out there who could stand to read through it and learn something.

While you (and others) have made me reconsider previous stances and have changed my mind on several key factors about the I/P conflict, admittedly there is a lot that i still wrestle with and somewhat disagree with.

Good!

You should be skeptical. You should wrestle with things that don't sit right with you. You should disagree - and you should do so with facts and reasoning! You're Doing It Right, Anon!

(Please consider sharing some of your disagreements, okay? There's nothing I like better than constructive disagreement.)

I'd like to ask what resources you use in your own research.

I was, decades ago, a librarian.

Librarians are trained to take what may seem like an odd position on information: it's all information.

It might be accurate, it might be sloppy, it might be biased, and it might be dishonest...

...but even dishonest propaganda can tell you important things about the time/place/person who produced it.

I don't rule out any source. Al Jazeera English, even while lying, tells you a great deal about what Qataar wants anglophonic people to think. Ha'aretz tells you a great deal about what the international left wants to hear.

All sources have some value - the work of understanding the context and intent of each is on you.

I have followed a few links of your more academic/historcal sources and have found them behind paywalls or to just be snippets of a larger text (as in the case with book previews).

When I wrote for academic publications, I'd produce the citation and move on - that's how academic publishing works. The reader can verify with or without a librarian's help, and the burden is on them to confirm the cited work actually supports the assertion - but most readers were in my field and were familiar with the works I cited.

Writing for non-academics on social media on topics most readers have barely studied is a different thing entirely.

I don't want to assert something and ask readers to trust that the citation supports it, or require them to go hunting for it if another option is available.

We've all seen the dishonest tactic (on Wikipedia and elsewhere) where the writer makes a claim the cited source doesn't actually support. So I try to find sources I can link to with the explicit supporting text visible.

Sometimes it'll be excerpted in a book review. Sometimes I manage to link a pirated copy. Sometimes I'll snag a screencap or snap a photo of a source. When I can, I post links that bypass paywalls. Sometimes a DOI link is the best I can do.

It's all imperfect, but it's better than "trust me, bro" ...which is appallingly the norm right now.

We all need to be more skeptical. Read the links. Check the citations. Require sources for factual assertions. Linking things that are immediately checkable helps builds trust - and if I want readers to see me as credible, nothing matters more than that.

That being said, I do respect and appreciate your throughness and moral consistency which i find incredibly refreshing.

That's more important to me than agreement - thank you. I'm not always right, but I'd like to always be trustworthy.

...what online news sources do you use/trust since the MSM is untrustworthy.

I use all of them. I trust none of them.

Bias is inescapable. I think humans learn from and are driven primarily by narrative - and narrative will always have a perspective. Bias isn't a bug, it's a feature - and it isn't your enemy.

From a previous post on Bias:

You don't need to trust a source completely to learn something from it. In fact, the most valuable sources are often obviously biased. 1. Identify the Bias Before even reading, know what kind of outlet you're dealing with. Look at its about page, ownership, funding/revenue model, recurring columnists, and core audience. Does it lean left? Right? Is it globalist? Nationalist? Religious? Secular? Knowing this lets you anticipate the angle and spot distortions more easily. The more you do it, the easier it gets. After a little practice, you'll see clearly (for example) the huge right wing bias of the Jerusalem Post, the huge left wing bias of Ha'aretz, and how The Times of Israel is mostly pretty disciplined (in their news gathering and framing) about minimizing left/right political biases. None of these three is perfect, but seeing their usual, institutional biases lets you read them against each other. 2. Use It for Contrast Biased outlets often highlight stories others avoid or ignore. Fox News may underplay climate change but overplay immigration crime. Al Jazeera will underplay Hamas human rights abuses but spotlight in depth the most embarrassing moments in Israeli politics. The Jerusalem Post will underplay corruption charges against Netanyahu and spotlight the most depraved behaviors committed in the name of Hamas. Use this to your advantage. Compare coverage across ideological lines. The contrast tells you volumes about outfit AND audience. 3. Look for Hard Facts Don't quote the adjectives. Quote the data. What happened? When? Where? Who said it? What did the video actually show? Stop taking an analyst's word as truth - see it as a lens to try on at look at the facts through. If the lens helps it make sense, put it in your back pocket for later use. Strip away the spin, extract the structure. 4. Cross-Reference Across Angles Treat each biased source as one side of a triangle. To understand the shape of a thing, you need multiple sides. Balance a left-wing story with a right-wing one. Add an international perspective. Compare them. Over time, you start seeing the shape of the event instead of the biases of each outfit.

It's time consuming and it's hard work - but it's worth doing.

If you like, you can check out the Signal > Noise tag for bite-size lessons in media literacy.

...since the MSM is untrustworthy.

"Mainstream Media," is too broad a term to be meaningful.

There are charlatans and truth-tellers everywhere. We should trust people based on their records of intellectual honesty and responsible journalistic behavior.

I think the NYT has become a sloppy, lazy, ideologically bent advocacy operation instead of a source of journalism, but there are still things to learn from the NYT and there are still people working there whose voices are worth hearing.

I'm not going to assume everything in its pages is shit.

The world just isn't that simple.

Embrace complexity. Read and listen to smart, honest people with whom you disagree. It's time consuming, challenging, and often annoying - but it'll let you see the world far more clearly than splitting all information sources into a false binary of "trustworthy" and "deceptive."

Read everything - skeptically and critically.

There really aren't any shortcuts.

[thatsbelievable]