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Comment by goodluckchuck | Hacker News Reader

The article defeats itself by acknowledging that he uses the term in a different sense… which doesn’t deny the existence or effect of germs, but focuses on the fact that for example many of the worst effects from COVID-19 were in obese people. His point is we have 364 days a year to address obesity, but - in practice - the medical community waits until the last day and tries to develop a vaccine that will allow us to stay overweight and just kill the germ. He’s saying we miss the forest for the trees when we forget to focus on the underlying health of our bodies. Of course they wanted to write a hit piece… and what he’s saying isn’t actually controversial.

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Yeah. Here's the section for those interested https://justpaste.it/k4rqx

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.

> When a starving African child succumbs to measles, the miasmist attributes the death to malnutrition; germ theory proponents (a.k.a. virologists) blame the virus. This is in the second paragraph and is exactly what tfa represented. It also argues directly against the idea that “a weakened immune system provides germs an enfeebled target to exploit” using measles deaths in otherwise healthy yet unvaccinated American children as an example. This is only a “hit piece” in that it’s blatantly critical of RFK Jr. and his ideas - those ideas are complete garbage and deserving of ridicule, and the leader of HHS espousing them should make him a target of far more criticism than this.

Doctors have tried lots of ways to treat obesity—drugs, diet and exercise recommendations, various surgeries, hypnosis, peer support groups. It’s not a problem they ignore and obviously one you can be richly rewarded for treating, as we see with the GLP-1 drugs.

It’s just difficult for many people to lose weight and keep it off.

Yeah I feel like there’s this weird implication in the prior comment that obesity is something for a doctor to cure that they simply choose not to because of idk money or other incentives or whatever

> His point is we have 364 days a year to address obesity, but - in practice - the medical community waits until the last day and tries to develop a vaccine that will allow us to stay overweight and just kill the germ.

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.

> Do you seriously mean we should not have developed a vaccine because fat people dying would have been preferrable?

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.

In which case he's misusing the term "miasma", oversimplifying modern medicine by labelling the entire practice as "germ theory", and presenting a false balance on the issue. And it's kinda dangerous to dog-whistle like that; vaccines have saved far more lives than simple nutrition and healthy living would be able to replace. We've seen the outcome of RFK spewing misinformation about the measles vaccine in Samoa. People suffer and die.

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