Who benefits from the MAHA anti-science push?
apnews.com
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Once the DSHEA passed, snake oil was back on the menu. It has now become a multi-billion dollar industry. If science and facts win out, a lot of people stand to lose a lot of money.
I'm only kind of joking.
> "Disaster Spending Has Become an $8 Trillion Engine for US Growth"
For example: Medium Memories is introducing an AI-enabled coffin personalized to the relationship between you and your late-loved one. Medium provides you an always-on cloud-connected camera to ensure you won’t have to lose sight of those who matter to you. Medium Plans start at $2.99/mo for 60 minutes of AI-enabled talk time a month. Here’s our interview with founder Bamuel Saltman.
Once power is consolidated, you can then get paid by any snake oil salesman to say their snake oil is the best.
I see your point, but is it an achievement? Is there not some amount of civil rights abuse or a breakdown of society that would warrant discussion on all possible spaces?
I say this as someone that feels conflicted to see a daily twitter feed of tech leaders celebrating the performance of their favorite LLM breaking some new record when citizens and residents are being detained or discriminated against in violent and appalling ways... sometimes just meters from a fancy tech office!
Shining a light on current affairs, sure. It’s nice to engage with those on this site. I get just as tired of seeing the same posts about LLMs and the Ai BuBbLe as you do. And there are some political stories that are probably worth the real estate here.
But where I’ll draw a distinction is that there will always be a political story grabbing attention on social media. And someone will always be outraged enough about it to deem it important enough for your outrage as well.
For example, I’m sure there are people who would say this is important news: “politician responds to other people who respond to Trump’s ballroom construction”[1].
If we don’t have some line on politics specifically (because that has proven to be engagement-bait high-sugar content for the internet), we will end up with a lot of low quality content here and less interesting / focused discussion with the people that make this site interesting.
Someone will always think every political story is important enough for discussion, but I think it’s healthy to keep HN free of most of it. Most of the low hanging, high-sugar fruit, at least.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5566872-donald-trump-whi...
I'm talking the mandates pushed by "experts" to force young K-12 students (Like my sister) into remote schooling that had profound impacts on their social life and education. Or when California arrested people for going to a beach or a public park based on the advice of their respective health experts. Or when Nevada closed Churches, but not Liquor Stores and Pot Dispensaries, because the experts had decided Constitutional Rights weren't an essential activity.
Perhaps when those mistakes are acknowledged things can go back to normal.
People die from alcohol withdrawal, and dispensaries are medical care for a lot of folks.
This is the exact type of argument that merely helped to inflame the debate.
The real distinction is that church services are mass gatherings of people, whereas liquor and pot are retail establishments that only serve a few people at a given time. Stores can institute policies to make people come into even less contact - whereas for churches the mass of people coming together is intrinsic.
The original argument fallaciously skips over that actual reality, and frames it as if public health administrators are godless heathens more interested in people getting their weed and booze than people going to church. Your counter argument, despite being technically correct, actually buttresses support for the original one.
“It’s a mass gathering” arguments met the same resistance. Any argument would have.
Maybe that's just my fatal flaw of being eternally hopeful that people will actually use their intelligence. But if this isn't the case, then what are we even doing?
(as for your actual argument, one can make the same argument that people will die without being able to get their fix of social church interaction. so then we're talking about numbers for hypotheticals, and right back to the dynamic where it's not even about logic)
It's a fraction of a drop in an ocean of online hostility and malevolence, but is still a contributor nonetheless.
But just think how good of a talking point this is!
Bad government stop CHURCH allow LIQUOR and DRUGS! Want to corrupt your CHILDREN, steal them from GODS arms and deliver to SATAN!
That's why the Governor of California wined and dined at the French Laundry restaurant in violation of his own COVID protocols at the height of the pandemic. Or why public figures encouraged people to attend large protests. It's pretty obvious in retrospect that they were playing fast and loose with the science for entirely political reasons.
Individuals are fallible, politicians are hypocritical, news at 11. Rather than aim for consistent application of rules and justice, your movement seems to have overextrapolated these failings into a rejection of having any kind of society in the first place.
This logic makes 0 sense. Churches have the same capabilities to reconfigure, if not more most of them are just one big room. The same capabilities to limit patrons if it was required. They could split services and space the people out, or only let in N numbers of people as you suggested
A liquor store or dispensary functions just fine with as low as 3-5 customers in the store. A church with only 3-5 patrons allowed at a time is effectively closed for most purposes.
It is literally a gathering space.
Remember this?
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/13/us/coronavirus-washington-cho...
And to sing hymns loudly together in that enclosed space (which almost certainly helps spread a respiratory disease just that much more easily).
No its not, its weird to talk about politics without science, but its not weird to be interested science without wanting to care about politics.
Now the culture wars and loyalty tests of the current government occur just about everywhere. There is no limit to the scope of topics that are part of the test, no objection will be tolerated. Any objection means you're <insert buzzword here>.
We're nearing the point where your point of view might even limit your choice of college (or maybe any college) if the president gets his way.
But I believe the premise that financial interests aren't being challenged
If you don't understand the science behind pasteurization, you should absolutely "trust the experts", aka scientists, or if you prefer, trust the old wisdom of previous generations who knew the value of pasteurization and watched people die of preventable illnesses before it came along.
> Powerful anti-vaccine advocates and people selling potentially harmful goods such as raw milk are profiting from the push to write anti-science policies into law across the U.S.
But we don't regulate milk for the people who boil it.
We regulate it because of the ones who don't.
Same reason we have airport security even if I personally don't want to hijack a plane.
If the fear is actually the drinking of raw milk then they should ban that, not the buying/selling of it.
There are very few things with serious health impacts that are completely unregulated. The closest we get is probably guns.
> To go after something as niche as raw milk is weird in my view.
It wasn't niche when we regulated it. It's niche now because we did.
> Heart disease leads to quite a few deaths and we don't ban McDonalds.
We take plenty of regulatory steps to reduce heart disease. McDonalds is required, for example, to provide nutrition facts. The burger meat gets USDA inspected. The restaurants get health inspections. (And we do try to do more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drinks_portion_cap_rule)
Guns are more regulated than most everything else? Background checks, age verification, licensed dealers, rules on transporting and storing guns, etc.
> It wasn't niche when we regulated it. It's niche now because we did.
Just not true. It is niche in places where it is not regulated as well and some portion of those who buy raw milk pasteurize it themselves so we don't even know how many people drink raw milk.
> We take plenty of regulatory steps to reduce heart disease. McDonalds is required, for example, to provide nutrition facts.
Almost nobody reads that at a McDonalds...
> The burger meat gets USDA inspected. The restaurants get health inspections. (And we do try to do more.
And yet you can go to a McDonalds and die from a heart attack. Many places do not let you take that risk with raw milk.
Despite all these regulations you mentioned, McDonalds has more stores than ever before. With your reasoning that should be turning McDonalds into a niche place.
Kind of related I was really shocked when I saw people eating raw pork mince in Germany when I lived there. My first reaction is that I would never do that based on my upbringing but if natural selection is a thing it's working fine for them I guess.
The act of making cheese is processing the raw milk. Fun fact Pasteurized milk was also once raw.
Same with meat but basically no one advocates eating raw chicken.
Why am I explaining that things change from a raw to a processed state and becomes safe to consume...
pasteurization and vaccination are the crown jewels of modern civilization
Which is also why in the other direction cheese was invented for time stability of milk.
I would even appreciate government making sure that companies selling raw milk to me are taking additional (but reasonable) precautions. But anyone just trying to ban raw milk for being unsafe and "unscientific" is just stupid.
The HHS Secretary of the United States does. https://www.wsj.com/health/rfk-jr-what-is-terrain-theory-66b...
Excerpts:
> “The ubiquity of pasteurization and vaccinations are only two of the many indicators of the domineering ascendancy of germ theory as the cornerstone of contemporary public health policy,” he wrote in the book. “A $1 trillion pharmaceutical industry pushing patented pills, powders, pricks, potions and poisons and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology … fortifies the century-old predominance of germ theory.”
> As his political profile grew, Kennedy made his war on germ theory part of his public platform. As a presidential candidate in 2023, he promised to tell the National Institutes of Health to “give infectious disease a break for about eight years,” NBC reported. On a 2023 episode of Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, Kennedy said “it’s hard for an infectious disease to kill a healthy person with a rugged immune system”—an assertion that runs counter to modern medical consensus. When Rogan said that wasn’t true of the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed more than 50 million people globally, Kennedy replied: “Well, the Spanish flu was not a virus.”
I'm not sure how to share a society with people who think it's OK for the HHS Secretary to be a quack.
If banning the sale of raw milk saves a life is it still stupid and unscientific? What if it saves 10,000? A million?
People act like these things are a personal attack on them and their freedoms. Like they happened in a vacuum. Like a bunch of bros got together in the 40s - 70s and thought to themselves, "how can we deny future raw milk aficionado dpc_01234 his druthers decades from now". Pay no mind to the thousands of lives that could be saved from terrible diseases like tuberculosis.
This type of thinking and commentary (propaganda?) just constantly being thrust into the world is not only ignorant but it's dangerous. Good luck to you and yours man, I hope the worst that happens to you from this willful lack or regard for both science and history is the inevitable food poisoning you'll get from blindly ignoring food safety because "germ milk yummy".
The problem is that the stringent production standards that would be required to make raw milk "safe" are incompatible with factory production and the profit motive. Unless you're personally vetting the sterilization of everything the milk comes into contact with and its immediate cooling to a temperature non-conducive to bacterial overgrowth, you probably shouldn't drink it.
However pasteurized milk allows for factory production and raw milk does not. That’s the real reason why it’s banned.
The same government that banned raw milk allows Doritos to be sold in the billions and even bought with Snap/EBT, btw.
Their farms can’t get away with the same conditions we put American cows in. Because of regulation.
Same reason chicken sashimi can be safe in Japan.
It seems pretty anti-science to me, going against such foundational food and health science.
It also seems directly related to anti-vax anti-science efforts because Louis Pasteur was also a critical early scientist involved in vaccines (through efforts against Cholera and beyond).
The problem with this kind of thing is that the story looks different at the level of a government than at the individual level.
The FDA article mentioned 2,645 illnesses and 228 hospitalizations in a 20-year period, and that was a period during which raw milk was heavily regulated, so would be likely to be significantly higher otherwise.
Still, the odds of you as an individual getting sick from raw milk would be relatively low. Does that mean it shouldn't be regulated? It's not a purely scientific decision.
Perhaps another way to go would be warning labels on raw milk. Still, I bet that would produce much higher illness numbers than the ones quoted above.
In the end the question is whether the government should be trying to help people stay healthy or not. If the goal is actually "Make America Healthy Again," then requiring milk to be pasteurized is an obvious choice.
Destroying vaccines, for example, is something they've wanted for a long time.
They're not masterminds. They really are this crazy.
Reagan was a bit before my time as an adult, so I don't have a solid opinion of the emotional content of his speeches. But I don't think it was a bunch of everything about the US is broken and wrong, and we need to tear it down. I feel like the cognitive dissonance was much more narrowly scoped to those specific social issues you're talking about.
Also note that conservatism is necessarily a product of the times. A position that was considered conservative in the 1980's is likely not conservative a generation and a half later.
If you want a really jarring example of this, watch Bush (Sr.) and Reagan debate immigration during the 1980 primaries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsmgPp_nlok
They sound like Democrats today. (And that's in the primaries, where people tend to be more party-line!)
I think there are a hugely under appreciated percentage of people who are essentially fantasy based too. They've been encouraged to pick a cause, some of them decide that they know the secret that scientists are using vaccines to control the population or something.
If you talk to them they won't give you any more of a rational defense than the tooth bug guy. RFK Jr is just another resource Trump and the Republicans use to distract and degrade anyone in their way.
It’s just a bunch of power games by individuals with NPD engaging in elite overproduction.
Now having said that, it's perfectly fair to criticize some of their assumptions and methods. The article, for instance, talks about raw milk. Pasteurization seems like a smart idea to me, but to assert that anyone who drinks raw milk is "anti science" is wrong. They're just approaching science differently.
But science is about questions demanding proof and rigor, verification, reproducible results. It's not about blindly saying "Yeah my questioning makes a bunch of unsupported claims equally valid".
Asimov's take[0] on stuff like this is just as relevant as ever:
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” ― Isaac Asimov
Although it seems to concisely describe more and more (and far too much, IMHO) of our public discourse these days. And more's the pity.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/84250-anti-intellectualism-...
There's a lot more to science than just questioning, and the MAHA folks have little interest in questioning their own unfounded beliefs.
You question mine, and I'll question yours completes the cycle but if you don't let me question yours because you already did that, where's the science in that?
Beliefs become religion when you have that choice to make and then you should absolutely not publish against your better judgment for any sum of money but work on your belief system. What I'm saying is that it still is not a requirement to science to challenge your beliefs because when you miss or omit that part your experiments and observations are still of scientific nature ergo challenging your beliefs is not a requirement to science [my original claim]. You're free to challenge them down the line with your own experiments and observations for me, giving me a chance to reevaluate my beliefs.
You should at least be open to the possibility that further experiments and observations may come down the pipe.
Newtonian physics was great, until we invented better tech to spot things where it breaks down… and thus, Einstein was needed.
It's important to understand that some people use "healthy skepticism" and "I'm just asking questions" as a cover screen to promote their desired policy. That isn't the scientific method.
1. Ask a question 2. Form a hypothesis 3. Experiment to test it 4. Analyze results 5. Draw conclusions 6. Repeat
The MAHA folks essentially disregard this as a valid process for gathering knowledge. They occasionally talk about experiments and studies, but they are selectively chosen to support their conclusions in a posthoc way, ignoring both evidence to the contrary and basic methodological issues. When people describe them as "anti-science," I believe this is the kind of thing they have in mind.
RFK, Jr.'s assessment of medical evidence is bad, and he doesn't seem to have spent a second on ending public advertising of prescription drugs. I personally don't like him and have never liked him. But also, medical evidence is bad and wrong, the modern anti-vax movement was started by the low standards of The Lancet, and big pharma really does run our media (through that advertising) and consistently suborns all medical research.
Watching that fake Alzheimer's drug get repeatedly reintroduced as a miracle for a change of 1.5 questions on a subjective checklist, even after a bunch of experts at the FDA who had a moral center quit over it, was depressing. Putting this quack rich kid at the head of the agency will at least have some effect on it other than the effect of big pharma cash.
I think the proof for the effectiveness of the MMR and HPV vaccines is indisputable. I also think that big pharma lobbying for vaccine indemnification against lawsuits, and the consequent explosion in the number of vaccines, was an opportunity to push a lot of stuff in that the "science" defenders never seem to bring up. They always defend the entire class of "vaccines," and avoid the harder to defend specifics. This is something you have to be paid to do, because it is a deliberate rhetorical distraction.
Also, the classes of drugs that make the most money (not vaccines) have the least evidence of effect. Not just the real evidence, but even the claimed effects are tiny and take a bunch of suspicious math to find. This is a sign of a system that runs on corruption. Not that you need signs, because the companies are making direct payments. Just like we legalized bribery in our politics, we normalized bribery in medical literature, practice, and journalism.
[*] like Ioannidis taught us before he got canceled for being more right (or at the worst equally wrong in the other direction) about covid than everyone else. Remember when HN worshiped the science, rather than "the science," and posted every Ioannidis paper?