Wednesday, September 3, 2025

Dr. Strangelove Lives! Jack D. Ripper is Surgeon General!



"Your body is a gift from God," Dr. Ladapo tells us. 

Vaccine mandates, which is to say vaccines (which cannot work unless nearly 100% are vaccinated) are evil. "Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery."


So, there we have it. The surgeon general of the state of Florida has staked his claim to make Florida patient zero for the entire country. 

Texas was giving them a run for the most medieval stance on public health, but Florida will not be undone.


 Lunatic Fringe: Jack D. Ripper & Gov Strangelove



It will take some years, but we will surely see measles killing kids, gestational rubella presenting with deaf and deformed babies--rubella is part of the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine, the MMR, so no measles vaccine and you get the other two as a bonus--rising influenza and COVID 19 deaths in infants and young children.

 



Here's the best story in public health, though. It has nothing to do with vaccines, but it's all about sacrificing an individual's rights for the public health, the common good.



2025: Mad Cow  2040: Jacob Creutzfeld 



A farmer in Oregon has a cow who tested positive for Mad Cow disease. He owns 300 head of cattle and it is unclear how his cow got Mad Cow Disease, but likely it was feed contaminated with the causative agent, which is something called a prion, which is not a virus, not a bacteria. 

You cannot do a blood test for Mad Cow Disease--only see it on autopsy of the brain. So there's no way of selecting which cows of the herd of 300 have it; you have to sacrifice all 300. 

If one cow ate the wrong feed, they may all have done that. So all 300 have to be killed. 

If the cows are not sacrificed, there might be 30,000 hamburgers made from their infected meat. If their infectious agent is transmitted to human beings, the result is something called Jacob-Creutzfeld disease. But that doesn't happen for 15-20 years. It will definitely happen, just not immediately


This is the farmer's livelihood. You are violating his property rights. You are telling him to do something he does not want to do for the sake of the community, for the sake of all those 30,000 Americans out there who will eat hamburgers made from his mad cows. Not every single hamburger eater will get Mad Cow/Jacob Creutzfield disease, but nobody can say how many. 


Prion disease causes Mad Cow disease in cattle, but when human beings eat hamburgers or other stuff from infected cattle, 15-20 years later they get  Jacob-Creutzfeld  disease which presents as a person who develops rapid onset of dementia and spasmodic muscle movements and quickly become bedridden and dies, drooling and twitching in bed. A horrific death. Caused by an infectious agent. Undetectable by blood tests. Potentially thousands of unsuspecting victims.

But that doesn't happen for 15-20 years.


All our current politicians will be dead or gone by then. (Including Dr. Ladapo and Gov. Desantis.)


But if public health officials insist on culling that herd, is that "slavery" as Dr. Ladapo calls it? Is this a violation of civil rights as Governor Desantis calls it? 

We are clearly insisting this individual, this farmer do something he does not want to do--kill all his cows. We call that acting for the common good, but we are trampling all over individual rights to do it.

Or is it protection for the nation?

That thing we call "public health?"



Tuesday, September 2, 2025

President Makes War Against Blue States

 

So now President Trump has declared war on the state of Colorado.



He is moving the Space Command, with all its jobs to Alabama.

Could it be because Colorado is where South Park is?

No, the President says it's because Colorado voted against him 3 times, which was very unfair and corrupt.

And Alabama, where he is moving the Space Command voted for him by 47 points.

So, that's only fair. If your state votes for Trump, you get whatever he can think to throw your way. If you vote against him, you are on his bad list and are a pariah state.

Personally, Mad Dog thinks he just did not like Steve Carell in "Space Force" that Netflix TV series which was set in a Colorado mountain and made the whole idea of a Space Command look like something of a joke. And if there's one thing Mr. Trump cannot abide is being a joke. Because, you know, everyone takes him if not literally, at least seriously.



New Hampshire, it should be noted, voted for Hillary in 2016, Biden in 2020 and Kamala in 2024. 

We can only imagine what Trump will do to us.

Maybe he'll move the Portsmouth Navy yard to Mississippi. (The joke would be on Maine, of course, as the Portsmouth, NH Navy yard is actually, across the river from Portsmouth, NH,  in Maine.) And one of Maine's senators is Susan Collins who has pretended to be independent but has never voted against Trump on anything.



Of course, it goes without saying that Trump will drop a bomb on New York, where he was convicted of 39 felonies and Maryland, oh Maryland, are you ever in for it. Trump thinks "The Wire" was a documentary, and he is not far wrong there, but he is definitely going to send in the Marines to Baltimore and Montgomery County.

We are in for so much fun now. 

Imagine if King George III had decided to send in troops to towns which annoyed him, like Boston, New York and Philadelphia. And Yorktown, Virginia.

Oh, wait. 



Smarter Than Anyone



Paul Offit, MD, the University of Pennsylvania pediatrician and vaccinologist, reminds us about RFK JR:

Secy Jack D. Ripper


1/ RFKJR does not believe in germ theory, i.e. that viruses and bacteria cause specific diseases.

2/ He believes (along with certain African dictators) that HIV does not cause AIDS. What exactly does cause AIDS in his mind is not entirely clear, but Mad Dog cannot imagine whatever RFKJR thinks does cause AIDS is something anyone ought to worry about.

3/ RFKJR believes vaccines are at best, not beneficial and, at worst, vaccines are harmful. Fortunately, for Americans since Sam Adams had his family inoculated against small pox around the time of the American revolution, to the mid twentieth century when the polio vaccine finally freed America of the specter of polio, RFKJR was not in charge.

 Luckily for Pasteur's patients in 1895, there was no RFKJR in France, where Pasteur successfully treated people bitten by rabid dogs saved them from certain death from the rabies virus. And luckily, at least for the time being, we still have rabies vaccines.  One can only imagine what combination of diet and clean living RFKJR would prescribe for your kid if she were bitten by a rabid animal.

4/ RFKJR does not like Pasteurization of milk or other liquids which might spoil, and extolls the health benefits of unpasteurized milk, and would not just make America Healthy Again, but would take us back to the 19th century in American public health. Actually, RFKJR would take us back to before the 19th century, because Pasteur was already saving lives in the 19th century. Actually, RFKJR would take us back to before the 18th century, as small pox vaccines were successfully used even then.

5/ RFKJR  thinks swimming in bacterial ladened fresh water is good for your immune system, which is good news for certain microorganism:  leptospirosis, crytospiridium, cholera bacilli,  polio virus, hepatitis A and B viruses, giardia parasites and  COVID virus all of which are removed by water treatment plants in large cities and small towns. 

Alexandre Yersin


6/ RFKJR also likes the measles virus, which he says wards off malignant disease somehow prevents heart disease and autoimmune disease. 

Maybe, if measles kills people young, they never live old enough to develop heart disease, cancer and autoimmune disease. 

More children have died of measles since RFKJR took office and got himself a pulpit since the turn of the century.

It used to be you had to be a child living in an ultra Orthodox Hasidic community, where they don't believe in vaccines,  to die from measles. Now, you can be a typical WASPy kid from Texas and meet that fate because your parents don't believe in experts but they have faith in Trump and RFKJR.

 Measles vaccine is usually combined with rubella vaccine. Rubella contracted by pregnant women results in deafness and other fetal malformations, so we are not yet even close to being able to tally up the damage RFKJR will do to the next generation, not to mention current citizens.

7/ Another RFKJR target: fluoridated water, which prevents childhood and adult dental cavities. If you are old enough, you remember Colonel Jack D. Ripper of "Dr. Strangelove" who launched a nuclear war while complaining about  how fluoride was "poisoning our precious bodily fluids." 

We all laughed at Jack D. Ripper because he was just so absurd. 

Now, Jack D. Ripper has come to life, no longer a fictional super villain, like the Joker, but a real life Joker.


RFKJR promised Donald Trump he would be a wrecker of establishment norms in healthcare, and he has kept that promise as a one man train wreck.

Of course, we only have RFKJR because he fits Donald Trump's most important sales pitch: Experts are wrong and that includes scientists. The only people you can believe are Donald Trump and his mob.

On the bright side, eventually as thousands die from these preventable diseases, germ theory may make a come back.

But, of course, it's also possible that whatever damages RFKJR  and Mr. Trump cause, they will simply blame on Democrats and Woke ideology, and the average American will never actually know what hit him.

It will be the Trump/Roy Cohn thing: Whatever you are guilty of, accuse your opponent of that. Me, Caused epidemics to erupt? No, you!

RFKJR likes to think of a himself as a contrarian, who is standing up to entrenched scientific belief and speaking the truth to all those ossified "experts" who belief things like viruses cause disease.

Of course, the history of medicine is the history of men who were contrarians. 

That's what science is, you know?  Make an observation and then try to prove it, even if it contradicts current dogma.

Doctors have made observations, often before they had a theoretical basis to explain why those things observed happened. Ignaz Semmelweiss, in Hungary, observed that women who gave birth on the midwifery ward never got post delivery infections whereas those delivered by physicians, who delivered their babies after having visited the autopsy rooms and other wards without washing their hands, often got "childbirth fever" and died.  He was working before Pasteur's germ theory.  He insisted all doctors wash their hands in chlorinated lime solution but he did not know what the hand washing actually did to prevent these deaths. He insulted a lot of respected physicians and they did not like it. He was drummed out of the medical profession for his efforts. He was a contrarian, but he had some numbers to prove his point. He didn't just make a claim; he tried to do a study to prove it.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, Lister was insisting on surgeons washing their hands in carbolic acid, but he had some knowledge of Pasteur's germ theory and he fared better and while his approach ruffled feathers, he was eventually embraced as results got tabulated and science, which is all about proving what you say is true, not simply announcing your faith in some idea.

RFKJR is, of course, an anti-scientist. He operates on faith. He just says something is true and because he believes it, he insists it is true, no matter what studies, experiments, scientific observations tabulated in double blind studies say. He often alludes to "all the studies" or "there are enough studies," but he never actually gives the actual study, the actual reference in the scientific literature. Or, one should say, when he does giver a reference it is always to some joker who has been so thoroughly discredited his name is a joke--like the guy who said vaccines cause autism.

Science depends on results: So when polio infections nearly disappeared after widespread polio vaccines, it was scientific to connect those two things.

When Alexandre Yersin discovered a bacillus in the buboes of patients dying of the Black Plague and raised antibodies to it and treated patients with his vaccine and stopped an outbreak of Plague in Vietnam, results spoke for themselves.

All those centuries of belief about the Black Death evaporated: The Plague was not caused by bad diet, by the moral turpitude of European villagers, and it was not God's wrath against sinners in European nations. It turned out it was a micro organism you could not see with the naked eye.

Imagine that.

And a scientist figured that out. He was trained by Pasteur and he believed in germ theory and he proved germ theory was right.

But now we don't have Yersin or Pasteur or Lister.

We have Donald Trump, who wants us to feel we are better than all those scientists. We have RFKJR who wants to protect our precious bodily fluids and forget about germs and viruses.  Alexandre Yersin, actual scientist.

And we are all just as smart as anyone from some laboratory, or from some snooty university.  

We just know stuff. 

Don't that just make you feel smart and strong?