250 years after Dr Rush and somehow the head doctor in our country believes in the miasma theory of disease, only marginally more modern (still ancient Greek).
RFK Jr. seems to be trying to answer the question, how misguided can one man be?
He uses the terms in a muddled way rather than disputing germs existence. Eg:
>Miasma exponents posit that disease occurs where a weakened immune system provides germs an enfeebled target to exploit.
It’s just difficult for many people to lose weight and keep it off.
Maybe I need reevaluate my interpretation here, but this reads heavily like you’re not only blaming doctors for failing to “cure” people’s obesity, but also for waiting too long to address it, instead (incorrectly) opting to treat or prevent the virus that the patient is seeing them for. Am I reading that right? Basically “doctors refuse to treat the real problem - obesity - and instead wait until the last second and (wrongly) treat the virus”?
That is a quite controversial claim and one I hope he did not make. Do you seriously mean we should not have developed a vaccine because fat people dying would have been preferrable? If we had not developed a vaccine I do not think people would have changed their habits, more overweight people would just have died.
The medical community has taken overweight very seriously and a lot of money has been put into developing weight loss drugs but it is not like CDC can magically make people eat better.
I really have no idea how you could read that from those words? He's saying he wishes we had been more proactive in tackling obesity prior to the pandemic.
As you say, yes, they already do a lot, so it's still quite misguided, but still very far from how you were framing it.
Even wrong theories can have a kernel of truth. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory
Also, by the standards of so-called "evidence based medicine" where we care less about the proposed mechanism a treatment works by, and more about whether it actually works, then miasma theory (or maybe it's more accurate to call it miasma practice, then?) doesn't look so bad. Florence Nightingale didn't bury horses because she believed in germ theory, she did it because they stank - and because she had developed statistical evidence that such hygiene interventions worked, whatever the mechanism. It took a long time for germ theory to get sophisticated enough that we can say it started saving more lives than sanitation (which was developed based on miasma theory).
The first incarnations of an ultimately correct theory often work worse in practice at the start.
Not that it excuses Kennedy.
If "bad air" convinced people to take measures then I'll take it as a win.
And viruses being airborne (carried on droplets) simply isn't what miasma theory is. Actual miasma theory is wrong and has no kernel of truth ... a fine example of how correlation is not causation.
And let's get back to the point:
> somehow the head doctor in our country believes in the miasma theory of disease
The man is an extraordinarily dangerous crank who is putting the health of Americans at grave risk ... he has already killed numerous children and it will soon get much worse. Any attempt to defend him in any way is vile.
In the US this was not true. Authorities strongly asserted that the virus did not have "airborne" transmission properties, despite numerous people contracting it while locked in their cruise ship cabins.
I was successful in convincing an elderly friend that this advice was wrong and she needed to wear an N95 when inside grocery stores even if she sanitized her hands after every time she touched anything and even if she stayed 6 feet away from people. It took about 12 months for the mainstream narrative to start to say that vulnerable populations should wear N95 masks when indoors with the public.
My take is that they fucked up but in an understandable way (rather than some evil conspiracy).
I remain convinced that Trump was against masks because it would mess up his bronzer and ruin the illusion it's intended to convey.
And if we're going to talk about Fauci's noble lies in the interests of public health, we ought to say something about the loon with a dead worm in his brain who sincerely believes, promotes, and enforces all sorts of nonsense that is going to result in a lot of illness and death.
>Early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization stated that SARS-CoV-2 was not transmitted through the air.