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? 

 

Off With Their Heads: Trump Shoots Harvard on 5th Avenue

We are not the first, nor likely the last, nation to be burned by revolution. The French, of course, went after their aristocrats--even their scientists. Lavoisier, the man who discovered oxygen, among other important things, went to the guillotine because he was an aristocrat and people just then didn't care much about oxygen, but they knew they resented aristocrats. The Chinese had their cultural revolution under Mao, which targeted the intellectuals, college professors, and dragged intellectuals before rural peasants to be denigrated, if not beheaded. 

Eventually, both countries realized they needed somebody who knew how to build factories, and a navy, fashion munitions,  and lead armies.

Now, we have President Trump pulling every lever he can pull to defund Harvard, cutting it off from students from abroad, a source of income, but also a source of ideas and cross pollination, in a world which depends on the free flow of information, ideas and innovation. 

American scientists will be in the same position Hitler's nuclear scientists found themselves--cut off from rapidly advancing technology. Hitler dismissed the idea that America might be working on a nuclear bomb as absurd, the product of "Jewish science," which it was, in part, but it was science that worked, and which produced the atomic bomb, which, had Hitler not died in April, would have been dropped on Germany by August.

And then we have RFK JR saying measles vaccine is more dangerous than and does as much harm as the disease itself, saying that Europe has more measles than we do and they vaccinate, which is of course an end run around the truth: Which Europe is he talking about? 

Yes, Kazakhstan has 3,000 cases a year, but then again, they are not vaccinating their kids. 

As Paul Offit has noted, not only does RFK JR prevaricate about measles, he says polio vaccine did more harm than good. And yet, one has to ask, whatever happened to polio?

The EU countries, like the US (once) vaccinate against measles, and as a result, measles has been unheard of in those places.  In the US, the only places we saw measles were among cults which refused vaccinations. Until now--now we've got the gullible and the willful and the uneducated and those distrustful of authority hearing from an unimpeachable source, RFK JR, and Trump, that vaccines really are dangerous and don't trust those elites who are trying to inject you with nefarious stuff.

Paul Krugman notes that he, even Paul Krugman, a Noble prize winner, harbored some underlying resentment against Harvard because they rejected him at age 17 for undergraduate college--Harvard's loss, clearly. They missed a good one, and likely Harvard misses thousands of kids destined for glory every year as they try to process 50,000 applications from kids whose school grades from 14 to 17 years old are supposed to reveal talent and potential. 

And even when they guess right, as in the case of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, those two guys arrived at Harvard and only stayed a year, concluding Harvard really had nothing to offer them worth staying for, and they had higher mountains to climb. Harvard often frames the rejection by these two successful people as evidence that, well, we know how to recognize genius, but the truth is, these geniuses chose Harvard, not the other way around. 

They did the version of that Tony Fauci story--which he has never directly denied--that when Cornell medical school offered Dr. Fauci a faculty position, he said thanks but no thanks, stunning the faculty. How could he turn down such an honor? And he said, "Someday I'm going to be either very rich or very famous--but if I stay at Cornell, I'll be neither." Which means, some people of great ambition look around at institutions like Harvard and Cornell and realize they would be constrained by those places, not enabled, and they say, "Keep your honor; I'll fashion my own fortune."

As Thoreau said, it is a man's opinion of himself which determines his fate, not the esteem of others.

But, all that said,  Harvard is a major employer in Boston and in Massachusetts, and it's health care system is innovative and vast, and its accomplishments in wide swaths of medical research are too numerous for an accounting in a mere blog. 

Harvard may be insufferably arrogant, but so what?

Kids from Harvard College talk about holding back from "dropping the H bomb" on prospective employers, dates, parents of friends and potential lovers, until the strategically right moment, when they expect it to have the maximum effect in establishing their superiority. The "H bomb," is, of course, that single sentence, "I went to Harvard."

So what? Let them cling to that. Some people cling to guns and religion. Others cling to Harvard.

Personally, I never wanted to go to Harvard. The kids from my high school who went to Harvard were such excruciating nerds I could hardly imagine how depressing it would be to have to spend four years with them.

Yale looked better--but I did not look good enough to Yale.

Do I want to burn down Yale? No. I did okay without Yale, and without Harvard. Let their alumni sit around their clubs and dinner tables congratulating themselves for being among the elect. Their good fortune didn't hurt me. Given my own limitations, I did okay  for a mope.

Who wants to be a cheerleader for Harvard? It's the place we love to hate. It's the neighbor who can afford his Mercedes and parks it in his driveway just to let everyone see it. But if his restaurant employs fifty locals, and attracts people to the movie theater next door, well, I say, let him enjoy his Mercedes. Doesn't hurt me to have to look at it. 

Actually, my Toyota has heated leather seats and having ridden in both cars, I actually prefer my own.

Truth be told, Harvard University as a whole, especially in healthcare, does much more good than harm.  

Trump however, knows that attacking Harvard is good politics. His base loves it. And then he says he'll build trade schools with all the money the federal government once spent on Harvard; maybe he'll build trade schools  right in Harvard yard. So that's the thumb in the eye. We'll tear down your school and build our own school in its place.

And, of course, we should be building more trade schools. We need more plumbers, HVAC, electricians. Just try getting any of those skilled workers to your house any time soon--and those jobs cannot be outsourced to India, the way a radiologist's job can be.

Fact is, we can do all that, and still keep Harvard. 

So, killing the elite university feels good to Trumplings everywhere--they all cheer when the bloody head is held high from the guillotine. 

The question is, are we better off with that severed head, or were we better off with it still attached?

So, now, we have the dream come true: 

Headline:  Trump Shoots Harvard In Broad Daylight on Fifth Avenue

Subheadline: Homeland Security Arrests Yale and Princeton as Co-conspirators. No charges pressed against Trump.