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Comment by fabian2k | Hacker News Reader

The media and the scientific community are not set up for the situation where cranks with absurdly unscientific views are at the top of the major scientific and health authorities. RFK Jr. still gets too much benefit of the doubt for his initiatives when it is obvious that he is opposed to science and has views about health that are just outright dangerous.

And we have the usual problem with this administration that there are so many different dangerous things happening that it's hard to concentrate efforts on fighting them. It got a bit quieter, probably due to some internal pushback, but RFK Jr. is still working on dismantling the US vaccination programs. And similar to the seed oil panic in the article, all the demonization of vaccines will result in a terrible price that some children will pay in the future.

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The reason RFK resonated with people is because the highly credentialed experts were not producing favorable outcomes. Results have to matter, right? We’ll see how successful (or not) RFK’s policies are, but let’s not revise history to where things were great right before he came in and ruined everything.

“We told people what not to eat based on the research, and they ignored us, so instead we should tell them what not to eat based on the ravings of random podcasters” is not a reasonable approach.

There are approaches which seem to work (some combination of taxation, advertising bans, and mandatory warnings seems to basically have worked for tobacco, say), but they’d obviously be extremely unpalatable to industry. And they’re painfully slow; took decades for tobacco.

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Modern medicine saves lives. Of course natural selection doesn't fully apply anymore in our society. But you're suggesting that letting children die from preventable diseases is a bad thing. It's not.

> Of course natural selection doesn't fully apply anymore in our society.

It doesn't matter how authoritatively you state it, but wanting it not to matter is not the same as it not applying. It still applies modulo some distortion by "egalitarian healthcare". Every time you have a cold or whatever is a moment you are statistically less likely to reproduce. When a potential mate approaches you but sneezes all over itself, it has an influence on your attraction towards this mate. If only things were so simple as state them in a voice of authority...

Is it in the interest of the group, and of future children that they inherit deficiencies at higher rates simply because we apply healthcare?

What exactly is "civilized" about our healthcare behavior?

So what? Technology gives us free lunch after free lunch. And in the not so distant future we can just gene-edit our offspring, the ultimate free lunch.

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