CDC officials’ resignation emails
insidemedicine.substack.com
insidemedicine.substack.com
I respect their decisions, but our country deeply needs scientists so committed to the Hippocratic oath that they’d rather resign than contribute to endangering public safety.
Those who do not seek power are most fit to hold it.
I have nothing really to say other than this is saddening to read.
I thought the understanding for base rates of autism was that people are living longer and starting their lives later. Becoming financially stable later, having children later. Having children later rather than earlier significantly increased the risk of autism.
After that then the question becomes about intensity of autistic symptoms, where the base rate of autistic children makes sense given the data, but the intensity and thus increased likelihood of seeking diagnosis may be increasing as a second factor which sits on top of expanded diagnosis standards.
For intensity, there are suggestions that maybe obesity, plastics/chemicals could be contributing, but it sounded like there wasn't enough data on it.
I'm not sure what other answer they found. RFK has said he doesn't think people should follow his personal health advice. He knows he's neither a scientist or a doctor and supposedly there was some team of scientists working on it. I'm not prejudging that they can't have arrived at some useful result, but it's obviously very politicized.
Maureen Durkin, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, just presented a paper [1] (currently in peer review) studying 8 year olds from 2000 to 2016, categorizing and counting autism severity over time. The most severe cases were unchanged, or decreased, and the largest change was in those with no measurable functional limitations.
This unpublished paper suggests that identification of children with milder symptoms is the strongest driver.
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/autism-the-real-reason...
[1] "Trends in the Prevalence of Autism By Adaptive Level between 2000-2016: Evidence from a Population-Based Sample of 8-Year-Old Children in the United States" S. M. Furnier and M. S. Durkin
On the podcast, Durkin frames improved detection as a positive, because it means people will get the care they need.
No, it's almost certainly about vaccine science and recommendations. Hence all the other resignations today.
(though who knows, maybe RFKjr will really go for it and bring back full-throated vaccines==autism next week)
But at least I have faith that if I get sick I will be able to afford it and that we will sustain this perk.
We also have a reasonable pride with education do there is hope we will still have educated people as we go on.
My real great is that economic pressure from the US and China will force us off these tracks.
Or a war.
Wouldn't it be better that he at least says shit like, "as we ramp up militarization, killing and removing all the foreigners will get less germs in the air, aheeyuk" Like he is trying at a bare minimum brain level at the job?
[1] Which due to the timing of its adoption and abandonment did avoid outright causing famines in the Soviet Union... And went on to kill tens of millions of people in China.
They believe that the set of values and beliefs that they hold true or false advantage them and perceive education as an attack on their values. Most if them are happy to degrade and diminish anyone who tries some are willing to murder.
The problem is rarely the ability to understand. It is the ability (or desire) to listen that many lack.
Feels like this whole thread is trying to pin this on individual preferences or whatever. But it’s a social effect, and individual personalities or intelligence have very little to do with it. If you lived in these communities, unless you are neurodivergent, you would be doing the same thing.
As someone who grew up in one of these communities, this has not been my experience. Many, many people move away, and for varied reasons. What you're left with are people who stay in economically declining areas and want to blame everyone else for it. It's selection bias, and it is absolutely based on personal choice.
Strangely enough, though, a billionaire slumlord from New York is never what people mean when they say 'elites'.
What's happening is that the Republicans have captured populist messaging pretty well, the Democrats just haven't.
Populism is usually stupid but it's extremely effective if you can flood information stream, particularly new ones. I mean, Radio pretty much made Hitler.
The timing here is perfect. Internet has just become mainstream and is still trusted and our brains haven't developed patterns of discernment. In addition, the economy for every day working people is bad. Its the perfect breeding ground for populism.
A genie says to a Russian, “I will grant you one wish.”
The Russian says, “I want a million dollars.”
The genie says, “… but whatever I give you, I will give your neighbor two of.”
The Russian responds, “Well in that case, I want a poke in the eye!”
The problem isn’t lack of intelligence but the information space they inhabit and the feeling that they have somehow been mistreated. There’s an entire genre of “why are leopards eating my face?” schadenfreude posts about MAGAs asking why Trump is doing some “surprising” thing he said he was going to do for years. Because they’re _not_ stupid, once they’ve thrown in with a side they’ll put a lot of effort into coming up with rationalizations or attacks to try to “balance” things out. The bitter grievances are really powerful because they let people talk themselves into seeing things as necessary sacrifices: sure, you’re losing Medicaid and paying more in taxes but the alternative is living in a world where Riley Gaines was forced to tie for fifth so I guess you just have to tighten your belt on behalf of female athletes.
The people who voted for Trump (or against Biden) because they hadn't been paying attention over the last decade and just thought the price of eggs was too high were stupid. The people who knew exactly what Trump was about and just didn't think the leopards would eat their faces were stupid. The people who voted because they just wanted to be entertained watching the world burn were stupid.
There's more than one kind of stupidity, and when they combine en masse into a big dumb avalanche it can absolutely be dangerous.
I live in DC so right now a lot of my neighbors are having surreal conversations with their extended family members who are saying things which would make sense if you started with certain false pretenses like all of the police statistics being faked. One of them was telling me about how they were talking with someone who had an Ivy degree, serious job, etc. but wouldn’t believe that our downtown wasn’t a movie gangland even though his own relative was telling him they take young kids in those area all the time and never see anything more unsafe than an out of control toddler on a bike. They kept coming up with complicated “maybe you missed” theories because they couldn’t bear to question that one starting premise. If you want to call that stupid, sure, but I think we might want a different term it.
This doesn't matter when the intelligent people are working within the confines of reality and their opposition lies gratuitously. The stupid people are choosing the option they want to believe and apparently no amount of education or framing is going to change that.
"disease very bad. disease may kill. inject this. you less likely to get disease."
=> "How dare you infringe upon my bodily freedom!"
Realistically, how farther down can we dumb things from here?
The actual argument is that by everyone getting injected, society as a whole crosses a threshold where viruses fail to spread exponentially and don't cause pandemics.
It's a more nuanced, more complex reason that some (incredibly selfish) people are just unable to grasp.
"Why would I ever a tiny personal risk to stop other people getting sick!?" was a very common argument during the COVID pandemic.
its a very american take, but unfortunately that particular mind virus has spread very far and wide
you have to respect people, you have to care about their agency even to their detriment or else who are you saving?
Civilization.
The easy way to spread a pro-health message to the people who really need to comply with it is to say "letting disease spread is Nergal worship (2 Kings 17:30), and America is a Christian nation." Just spam that, nonstop, until it is as embedded in their minds as whatever derangement Trump has come up with this time - because this is the kind of thing they respond to.
The second thing is more complicated: to admit that a lot of "sexual health" only applies to people engaging in highly risky behavior, and should be handled separately both in messaging and in practice from general health. You can still make them support it, but with an explicit "do good even to the sinner" messaging. Throw in a few "We are currently promoting abortion because free school lunches have been canceled" and you WILL see movement.
Both of these are considered abominable among the current Democrat party, because it involves speaking the language of people with different values.
It doesn't matter how much you cite Matthew 19:24 to someone who already had their brain rotted by, say, prosperity gospel. They don't give a shit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia#Conservative_Bib...
It met a good amount of backlash, though.
I've seen intelligent people fall for crazy conspiracy theories. Once all those antivaxers became pro-Russia, which basically has nothing to do with each other, it became clear were all this disinformation was coming from (talking mainly about Central Europe here, but I'm sure it applies to US too)
Not necessarily the case, as Russia has a longstanding record of propagating public-health misinformation. See https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39419560 for instance.
This has been a part of their national agenda since the Communist revolution. "If we can't improve our own country, at least we can fuck up everybody else's."
As to what it actually was... that's less clear to me. I'm sure it was a multiplicity of factors, some of which reflect poorly on us as Americans. (All of us.) I think we accept the "inflation" explanation because it's easier than confronting those.
Here's a more on-the-ground perspective: The price of food went up 50% during COVID, and you caused it since you were in power. You will make it go back down to how it was before, or I will vote for someone else.
(The average voter runs on simpler emotions like this and does not take into account that Trump will most likely cause much more inflation, which is what he has done)
Those voters (who needless to say had never heard of Lysenko) were told by trusted, well-spoken, authoritative, legitimate seeming sources that this was a mainstream position and a very reasonable one. The people who needed to say it was bullshit were deliberately excluded.
And yeah, that applies specifically to Fox News and Facebook, but also to Rogan and the manosphere, and to 4chan.
And to HN, quite frankly. If you want to know why people turned away from science just go back and watch the discourse around late COVID or whatever. And note how it was utterly dominated by the loons in throwaway accounts. Some of us tried fighting back and ended up incessantly flagged and rate-limited, so we gave up. "Reasonable" HN posters fled the field in favor of bland tech discussion (or retreated in the face of "moderation"), and someone looking at the issue without context might assume that the modern Lysenkos must have had a point.
The loons loved it indeed, and it was all over the front page. Right here. Blaming that on the rest of us seems ridiculous, but sort of besides the point. I don't care about blame, I'm saying that whoever you want to blame, it is us, right here, on HN, not some abstract "voters". We made this problem. We told people that masks didn't work and vaccines were poison. If not you and I personally, people writing prose in proxy for us did.
On balance, Hacker News stood solidly on the side of RFK2 and against the CDC in this particular war. It just did.
Many people here were (and still are) solidly anti-vaccine but in the grand scheme Hacker News was just one of innumerable maelstroms on the internet, and far from the biggest. More realistically, Hacker news is just full of people who aren't any more immune to propaganda than anyone else.
My general sense is that the tut-tut set is very much an overlap in the Venn diagram with the libertarians who deliberately enabled this nonsense originally and refuse to treat with their own complicity.
But I've spent most of my limited budget on posting about this, so I'll stop now.
1: https://bsky.app/profile/donmoyn.bsky.social/post/3lxfamzutk...
Another communist parallel: MAGA is aimed in the general direction of a Great Leap Forward [0] to screw over the American economy and industry with incompetent autarky, and also a Cultural Revolution [1] for persecuting "woke elites" (subject-matter experts) leading to international brain-drain.
I really hope the American people can put the brakes on that, because it took China decades to recover.
And you literaly insult peoples that actually lived in Warsaw Pact, check your body count numbers.
Seriously. If you voted for this, you owe civilization a debt that you will probably never be wealthy enough or long-lived enough to repay.
But sure yes I'm sure Trump doesn't the understand it either.Heck tons of practicing therapists don't even understand it.