肯尼迪的庸医联盟想让美国人吃下谎言
Kennedy's Coalition of Quacks Wants to Feed America a Diet of Lies
Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. | 15 Nov 2024
在华盛顿，健康影响者和反对者正在试镜，以在特朗普的白宫制度化伪科学。
小罗伯特·F·肯尼迪被许多巨大的橡皮鸭包围。
Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. | 2024 年 11 月 15 日
在华盛顿，健康影响者和反对者正在试镜，以在特朗普的白宫制度化伪科学。
小罗伯特·F·肯尼迪被许多巨大的橡皮鸭包围。
Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. | 2024 年 11 月 15 日
当美国打喷嚏时，世界就会感冒。唐纳德·特朗普在白宫的续任，反疫苗者罗伯特·F·肯尼迪在他耳边低语，承诺的不仅仅是打喷嚏。它预示着疫苗可预防疾病的回归，而这些疾病不会止步于国境。
反科学运动距离在美国宣誓就职仅剩几个月的时间。在特朗普的空位期，一群医学反对者和健康斗士聚集在罗伯特·肯尼迪 (RFK Jr) 的周围，他现在被特朗普选为即将上任的政府卫生与公众服务部部长。虽然水晶球和塔罗牌都无法预测我们即将目睹的对公众健康和对科学的信任的损害的范围和程度，但对罗伯特·肯尼迪 (RFK Jr) 萌芽中的联盟的考察揭示了一个可怕的情况。特朗普的“让美国再次伟大”（MAGA）一再被媒体称为“邪教”。这当然是一种个人崇拜。罗伯特·肯尼迪和他的竞选团队利用了这一口号，创造了“让美国再次健康”或 MAHA。
肯尼迪本人应该引起人们的震惊。自 2005 年以来，他一直是现代反疫苗运动的领军人物，当时一位心理学家将她儿子的自闭症归咎于疫苗中的汞，并在肯尼迪家的前廊上扔了一叠声称存在这种联系的文件。肯尼迪是一名熟悉汞对环境影响的环境律师，他相信这种联系是真实的，并开始了疫苗指责运动，现在他正在将这场运动带到华盛顿。他创立了儿童健康防御组织，该组织的“电视频道”助长了人们对科学和机构的恐惧和不信任，他 2019 年对萨摩亚的访问在一定程度上导致了麻疹的爆发，导致 5,700 人患病，其中 83 人死亡。大多数死亡者都是幼儿。新西兰向萨摩亚运送了儿童棺材，以帮助解决短缺问题。
肯尼迪恶毒的反疫苗信息现在被媒体理智地洗白，试图提升他的声誉，但不要误会。他不想要“更安全的疫苗”，他根本不想要疫苗。就像中世纪城堡脚下的城墙更难防守一样，肯尼迪在被逼迫时经常撤退到山上更安全的塔楼——土丘。在反疫苗者中，他称针对儿童的含汞疫苗是“大屠杀”；在特朗普赢得大选后，他向 NBC 新闻表示：“我不会取消任何人的疫苗。我从来都不反对疫苗。”我不确定这是否仍然是土丘和城墙谬论，或者他现在是否在撒谎。
但肯尼迪并不孤单，因为两个兄弟姐妹迅速被提升为肯尼迪 MAHA 运动的牧羊人：姐姐凯西和弟弟卡利·米斯。他们的书《好能量》让他们登上了塔克·卡尔森的节目，以及一系列右翼和另类医学播客，如《乔·罗根体验》、《鲁宾报告》和《医生的药房与马克·海曼博士》。凯西随后将媒体的关注转化为政治黄金，将这群人聚集到华盛顿特区，参加一场由参议员罗恩·约翰逊主持的现场直播、西装革履的伪科学剧，题为“美国健康和营养：第二种观点”。
这次活动是一场假面舞会，反对者披着科学的外衣，假装是房间里的批判性思考者。他们共同的不满是，有人声称美国人正受到食物供应的毒害，导致慢性病的末日流行。大学和监管机构已成为机构控制的牺牲品：企业金钱使他们的证词变得无可救药地腐败。只有出席活动的人才值得信赖，他们能拯救美国。他们想抽干科学沼泽，但考虑到他们与被定罪的罪犯特朗普的立场以及他们自己对科学过程的误解，他们更有可能让美国人陷入流沙，而不是结束腐败。
以下是他们在拉塞尔参议院办公大楼宣称的一些谎言：
罗伯特·肯尼迪本人声称自闭症的发病率有所上升，尽管“诊断没有变化，筛查也没有变化”，这显然是错误的：两者都发生了众所周知的变化。他还大胆地表示，年轻人和老年人的癌症发病率正在飙升。这根本不是正在发生的事情。
外科医生马蒂·马卡里博士于 2021 年 2 月为《华尔街日报》撰写了一篇评论文章，题为“我们将到 4 月实现群体免疫”，并在疫情期间不断做出错误预测，声称“杀虫剂正在降低我们的生育率”，尽管没有证据表明这一点。
Casey Means 博士是这个群体的粘合剂，她在担任头颈外科医生的最后一年住院医师实习期结束后，离开了医院，去学习功能医学的伪科学。她表示，她在培训中从未学到“医疗失误和药物是美国第三大死亡原因”。因为事实并非如此，而提出这一误解的分析报告的共同作者正是 Marty Makary 本人。她还声称，医学专业之所以存在，是因为“把人送到那里是有利可图的”。
她的兄弟 Calley 销售可疑的健康产品，如膳食补充剂和红外桑拿，他声称臭名昭著的 Flexner 报告的基本医学逻辑后来被证明是错误的。这绝对不是事实，正如我最近所写，但这是医学批评者的一个流行论点，他们祈求对虚假疗法采取开放政策。
为什么他们对疾病都如此无知？有些人很难抗拒成为健康专家的愿望。反体制主义和抱怨贩卖，如果充斥着阴谋论，就可以在健康领域催生出一份利润丰厚的职业，将感觉置于事实之上。这个房间里的大多数人都准备在明年影响美国政治，他们有书要卖，有公司要受益，还有赞助协议要为他们的播客谈判。
看看其中一位小组成员，瓦尼·哈里，更广为人知的名字是“食物宝贝”，她正在经历职业生涯的复活。在她的化学恐惧症运动被许多科学家（包括我们办公室的乔·施瓦茨）彻底揭穿后，她现在又回到了肯尼迪的会众中。她谴责美国销售的产品中含有据称有毒的食用色素，而这些产品在其他国家显然是被禁止的，尽管她给出的许多例子根本不是事实。
当然，她也在销售自己的健康产品系列 Truvani，包括无氟牙膏，因为在她的圈子里，妖魔化氟化物很流行。正如 Conspirituality 联合主持人 Derek Beres 经常说的那样，先看他们说什么，再看他们卖什么。别忘了现在就抢购你的 Make America Healthy Again 圆领羊毛运动衫！
根据 Casey Means 的说法，美国的诊断是代谢功能障碍，这是她认为所有（慢性）疾病的真正原因。据她所说，我们的细胞由于化学物质和毒素而无法再产生良好的能量。她不是代谢健康专家，声称找到所有疾病单一原因的理论从未成功，这些都无关紧要；这听起来不错。米凯拉·彼得森·富勒是臭名昭著的心理学家乔丹·彼得森的女儿，她来这里是为了推广她自己的灵丹妙药：牛排和盐，这是参议员约翰逊提出的一种荒谬的疗法，被称为“一种治疗性和无植物的生酮饮食”。
这些被排斥的人不想修复这个系统；他们想把它全部烧毁，用独角兽角做成的机构取而代之。他们被海市蜃楼所吞噬，痴迷于他们看不见的毒素和化学物质，但想象它们正在贬低我们的身体，损害我们的思想。我们正在目睹伪科学的制度化。
然而，指出这次会议的谎言和虚假，对那些没有看过这些人的演讲，没有看到他们收到的掌声（有时是起立鼓掌）的读者来说是一种伤害。它忽略了他们听起来可信的一点。超加工食品存在着真正而重要的问题。农产品通常比营养价值低得多的包装食品更贵。许多慢性病越来越普遍，行业和政府监管之间的旋转门是一个众所周知的问题。这些影响者设法指出了一个重大问题，但他们过于简单的头脑总是错过真正的解决方案。这与综合医学的营销胜利如出一辙，综合医学谴责传统医学的缺陷，并将灵气疗法和精油等神奇思维作为解决方案。
真正的解决方案将涉及解决社会经济不平等问题。它需要促进人们获得医生、执业护士、牙医和营养师的服务。它需要降低健康食品的价格，让身兼两三职的人有时间烹饪营养餐。要找到解决美国饮食问题的真正良方，就需要邀请真正的专家参加这个小组。然而，麦克风后面没有注册营养师、毒理学家或公共卫生专家。怎么可能有呢？小组会认为他们是腐败的。相反，我们看到的是像马克斯·卢加维尔 (Max Lugavere) 这样的人，他是一名播客，拥有电影学位
心理学博士，她的节目由一长串膳食补充剂赞助，还有 Alex Clark，一位没有正式食品科学背景的美食宝贝，她将关于营养的古怪观点视为她节目的“参与”。
不过，这个联盟并没有忘记医生，Marty Makary 博士带来了很大一部分资历。Makary 是一群直言不讳的 COVID 最小化者中的一员，Jonathan Howard 博士——他认真记录了他们的崛起——称他们为“我们希望他们被感染”的医生。这个名字来自特朗普第一届政府的一名官员，他在 2020 年 7 月提出，年轻健康的人应该感染新型冠状病毒以建立群体免疫力。几个月后，Jay Bhattacharya 博士、Martin Kulldorff 博士和 Sunetra Gupta 教授发表了《大巴灵顿宣言》，这是朝着大规模感染迈出的又一步。目前尚不清楚有多少这些持相反观点的医生将被邀请为特朗普的健康计划做出贡献。
像约翰逊参议员的座谈会和拯救共和国这样的活动都是试镜，在这场活动中，罗伯特·肯尼迪和他的同事们扮演了乔治·华盛顿和他的军队穿越特拉华河的场景。只有一些人会入选，并在特朗普即将播出的真人秀节目中获得决策权，直到他们不可避免地被解雇。特朗普的不可预测性和骄傲让人很难预见这些政策中有多少会被实施，有多少会被推翻，但混乱中肯定会造成损害。
美国传统基金会发布了一份近 1,000 页的文件，名为“2025 项目”，旨在成为下一任美国总统的政策模板。它要求将环境问题（即气候变化）从饮食指南中删除；它声称性别认同是政治问题，来自“激进分子”；它声称疾病控制和预防中心 (CDC)“可能是联邦政府中最无能和最傲慢的机构”。它推动了一项反对堕胎药、反对青春期阻滞剂、反对疫苗和反对在 COVID-19 疫情期间戴口罩的议程。与此同时，特朗普自己的言论自由政策倡议提到了“审查卡特尔”，必须“拆除和摧毁”。它将禁止社交媒体平台审核错误信息，解雇敢于反击虚假信息的联邦雇员，并惩罚“从事审查活动”的大学。这是奥威尔式的扭曲言论自由以平息异议，甚至呼吁起诉在工作中使用“错误信息”和“虚假信息”标签的人。如果我们的办公室在美国本土，我们的生存就会受到威胁。
随着肯尼迪和他的盟友被允许在政府最高层对卫生政策发表意见，我们将目睹整个美国医疗机构的新陈代谢功能障碍。食品安全将受到威胁，健康差距将扩大，传染病将肆虐。然而，这并不是他们看待未来的方式。他们正忙着回顾美好的过去：身材苗条、身体健康的儿童，对生活感到满意。他们想重现导致这种情况的情况，但他们不懂科学。在 X 上的一篇热门帖子中，罗伯特·肯尼迪证实他全力支持伪科学。“FDA 对公共卫生的战争即将结束，”他写道。“这包括对迷幻药、肽、干细胞、生牛奶、高压氧疗法、螯合物、伊维菌素、羟氯喹、维生素、清洁食品、阳光、运动、营养保健品以及任何其他促进人类健康且不能被制药公司申请专利的东西的积极抑制。”我不知道 FDA 正在追查瑜伽教练。
第二次世界大战期间，日军和盟军在美拉尼西亚建立了基地，美拉尼西亚是澳大利亚东北部的一组岛屿，包括巴布亚新几内亚。许多原住民从未见过外来人，对这些士兵带到岛上的飞机、枪支和药品感到敬畏。一些士兵假装是美拉尼西亚人受人尊敬的祖先，也助长了对美拉尼西亚人的崇敬。战争结束了，“祖先”带走了他们的货物。
当地富有魅力的领导人随后警告说，大灾变即将来临，随后这些祖先将带着他们短暂展示的财富归来。美拉尼西亚人所要做的就是模仿他们看到士兵们进行的仪式。他们用假步枪进行演习。他们用木头雕刻耳机并搭建控制塔。他们在临时跑道旁点燃火把，希望飞机能够回来。这种现象在 1945 年获得了一个名字：货物崇拜。
人类学家现在认识到，这种观点可能过于简单，掩盖了美拉尼西亚人的一些反殖民主义情绪。但它却被物理学家理查德·费曼在科学怀疑论圈子里永久保留下来，他用它来指伪科学为“货物
邪教科学。”不合理的手段被用来追求合理的目的。人们在不了解科学的核心原理和细微差别的情况下就完成了科学的程序。
如果说 MAGA 是一种邪教，那么 MAHA 就是货物邪教。
“让食物成为你的药物”是医学之父希波克拉底的一句伪言。事实上，希波克拉底的医生知道食物和药物的区别。但当我们所做的只是在虚构的跑道旁点燃火把，祈祷古代偶像和它们珍贵的货物归来时，谁会在乎呢？
Kennedy's Coalition of Quacks Wants to Feed America a Diet of LiesCasey Means 博士是这个群体的粘合剂，她在担任头颈外科医生的最后一年住院医师实习期结束后，离开了医院，去学习功能医学的伪科学。她表示，她在培训中从未学到“医疗失误和药物是美国第三大死亡原因”。因为事实并非如此，而提出这一误解的分析报告的共同作者正是 Marty Makary 本人。她还声称，医学专业之所以存在，是因为“把人送到那里是有利可图的”。
她的兄弟 Calley 销售可疑的健康产品，如膳食补充剂和红外桑拿，他声称臭名昭著的 Flexner 报告的基本医学逻辑后来被证明是错误的。这绝对不是事实，正如我最近所写，但这是医学批评者的一个流行论点，他们祈求对虚假疗法采取开放政策。
为什么他们对疾病都如此无知？有些人很难抗拒成为健康专家的愿望。反体制主义和抱怨贩卖，如果充斥着阴谋论，就可以在健康领域催生出一份利润丰厚的职业，将感觉置于事实之上。这个房间里的大多数人都准备在明年影响美国政治，他们有书要卖，有公司要受益，还有赞助协议要为他们的播客谈判。
看看其中一位小组成员，瓦尼·哈里，更广为人知的名字是“食物宝贝”，她正在经历职业生涯的复活。在她的化学恐惧症运动被许多科学家（包括我们办公室的乔·施瓦茨）彻底揭穿后，她现在又回到了肯尼迪的会众中。她谴责美国销售的产品中含有据称有毒的食用色素，而这些产品在其他国家显然是被禁止的，尽管她给出的许多例子根本不是事实。
当然，她也在销售自己的健康产品系列 Truvani，包括无氟牙膏，因为在她的圈子里，妖魔化氟化物很流行。正如 Conspirituality 联合主持人 Derek Beres 经常说的那样，先看他们说什么，再看他们卖什么。别忘了现在就抢购你的 Make America Healthy Again 圆领羊毛运动衫！
根据 Casey Means 的说法，美国的诊断是代谢功能障碍，这是她认为所有（慢性）疾病的真正原因。据她所说，我们的细胞由于化学物质和毒素而无法再产生良好的能量。她不是代谢健康专家，声称找到所有疾病单一原因的理论从未成功，这些都无关紧要；这听起来不错。米凯拉·彼得森·富勒是臭名昭著的心理学家乔丹·彼得森的女儿，她来这里是为了推广她自己的灵丹妙药：牛排和盐，这是参议员约翰逊提出的一种荒谬的疗法，被称为“一种治疗性和无植物的生酮饮食”。
这些被排斥的人不想修复这个系统；他们想把它全部烧毁，用独角兽角做成的机构取而代之。他们被海市蜃楼所吞噬，痴迷于他们看不见的毒素和化学物质，但想象它们正在贬低我们的身体，损害我们的思想。我们正在目睹伪科学的制度化。
然而，指出这次会议的谎言和虚假，对那些没有看过这些人的演讲，没有看到他们收到的掌声（有时是起立鼓掌）的读者来说是一种伤害。它忽略了他们听起来可信的一点。超加工食品存在着真正而重要的问题。农产品通常比营养价值低得多的包装食品更贵。许多慢性病越来越普遍，行业和政府监管之间的旋转门是一个众所周知的问题。这些影响者设法指出了一个重大问题，但他们过于简单的头脑总是错过真正的解决方案。这与综合医学的营销胜利如出一辙，综合医学谴责传统医学的缺陷，并将灵气疗法和精油等神奇思维作为解决方案。
真正的解决方案将涉及解决社会经济不平等问题。它需要促进人们获得医生、执业护士、牙医和营养师的服务。它需要降低健康食品的价格，让身兼两三职的人有时间烹饪营养餐。要找到解决美国饮食问题的真正良方，就需要邀请真正的专家参加这个小组。然而，麦克风后面没有注册营养师、毒理学家或公共卫生专家。怎么可能有呢？小组会认为他们是腐败的。相反，我们看到的是像马克斯·卢加维尔 (Max Lugavere) 这样的人，他是一名播客，拥有电影学位
心理学博士，她的节目由一长串膳食补充剂赞助，还有 Alex Clark，一位没有正式食品科学背景的美食宝贝，她将关于营养的古怪观点视为她节目的“参与”。
不过，这个联盟并没有忘记医生，Marty Makary 博士带来了很大一部分资历。Makary 是一群直言不讳的 COVID 最小化者中的一员，Jonathan Howard 博士——他认真记录了他们的崛起——称他们为“我们希望他们被感染”的医生。这个名字来自特朗普第一届政府的一名官员，他在 2020 年 7 月提出，年轻健康的人应该感染新型冠状病毒以建立群体免疫力。几个月后，Jay Bhattacharya 博士、Martin Kulldorff 博士和 Sunetra Gupta 教授发表了《大巴灵顿宣言》，这是朝着大规模感染迈出的又一步。目前尚不清楚有多少这些持相反观点的医生将被邀请为特朗普的健康计划做出贡献。
像约翰逊参议员的座谈会和拯救共和国这样的活动都是试镜，在这场活动中，罗伯特·肯尼迪和他的同事们扮演了乔治·华盛顿和他的军队穿越特拉华河的场景。只有一些人会入选，并在特朗普即将播出的真人秀节目中获得决策权，直到他们不可避免地被解雇。特朗普的不可预测性和骄傲让人很难预见这些政策中有多少会被实施，有多少会被推翻，但混乱中肯定会造成损害。
美国传统基金会发布了一份近 1,000 页的文件，名为“2025 项目”，旨在成为下一任美国总统的政策模板。它要求将环境问题（即气候变化）从饮食指南中删除；它声称性别认同是政治问题，来自“激进分子”；它声称疾病控制和预防中心 (CDC)“可能是联邦政府中最无能和最傲慢的机构”。它推动了一项反对堕胎药、反对青春期阻滞剂、反对疫苗和反对在 COVID-19 疫情期间戴口罩的议程。与此同时，特朗普自己的言论自由政策倡议提到了“审查卡特尔”，必须“拆除和摧毁”。它将禁止社交媒体平台审核错误信息，解雇敢于反击虚假信息的联邦雇员，并惩罚“从事审查活动”的大学。这是奥威尔式的扭曲言论自由以平息异议，甚至呼吁起诉在工作中使用“错误信息”和“虚假信息”标签的人。如果我们的办公室在美国本土，我们的生存就会受到威胁。
随着肯尼迪和他的盟友被允许在政府最高层对卫生政策发表意见，我们将目睹整个美国医疗机构的新陈代谢功能障碍。食品安全将受到威胁，健康差距将扩大，传染病将肆虐。然而，这并不是他们看待未来的方式。他们正忙着回顾美好的过去：身材苗条、身体健康的儿童，对生活感到满意。他们想重现导致这种情况的情况，但他们不懂科学。在 X 上的一篇热门帖子中，罗伯特·肯尼迪证实他全力支持伪科学。“FDA 对公共卫生的战争即将结束，”他写道。“这包括对迷幻药、肽、干细胞、生牛奶、高压氧疗法、螯合物、伊维菌素、羟氯喹、维生素、清洁食品、阳光、运动、营养保健品以及任何其他促进人类健康且不能被制药公司申请专利的东西的积极抑制。”我不知道 FDA 正在追查瑜伽教练。
第二次世界大战期间，日军和盟军在美拉尼西亚建立了基地，美拉尼西亚是澳大利亚东北部的一组岛屿，包括巴布亚新几内亚。许多原住民从未见过外来人，对这些士兵带到岛上的飞机、枪支和药品感到敬畏。一些士兵假装是美拉尼西亚人受人尊敬的祖先，也助长了对美拉尼西亚人的崇敬。战争结束了，“祖先”带走了他们的货物。
当地富有魅力的领导人随后警告说，大灾变即将来临，随后这些祖先将带着他们短暂展示的财富归来。美拉尼西亚人所要做的就是模仿他们看到士兵们进行的仪式。他们用假步枪进行演习。他们用木头雕刻耳机并搭建控制塔。他们在临时跑道旁点燃火把，希望飞机能够回来。这种现象在 1945 年获得了一个名字：货物崇拜。
人类学家现在认识到，这种观点可能过于简单，掩盖了美拉尼西亚人的一些反殖民主义情绪。但它却被物理学家理查德·费曼在科学怀疑论圈子里永久保留下来，他用它来指伪科学为“货物
邪教科学。”不合理的手段被用来追求合理的目的。人们在不了解科学的核心原理和细微差别的情况下就完成了科学的程序。
如果说 MAGA 是一种邪教，那么 MAHA 就是货物邪教。
“让食物成为你的药物”是医学之父希波克拉底的一句伪言。事实上，希波克拉底的医生知道食物和药物的区别。但当我们所做的只是在虚构的跑道旁点燃火把，祈祷古代偶像和它们珍贵的货物归来时，谁会在乎呢？
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-critical-thinking-health-and-nutrition-pseudoscience/kennedys-coalition-quacks-wants-feed-america-diet-lies
In Washington, wellness influencers and contrarians are auditioning to institutionalize pseudoscience in Trump’s White House.
Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. | 15 Nov 2024
When America sneezes, the world catches a cold. Donald Trump’s renewed tenancy in the White House, with anti-vaxxer-in-chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr whispering in his ear, promises more than just sneezes. It heralds the return of vaccine-preventable illnesses, which do not stop at the border.
The anti-science movement is mere months away from being sworn into office in the United States. During Trump’s interregnum, a flock of medical contrarians and wellness warriors has coalesced around the figure of RFK Jr, who has now been chosen by Trump as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in his upcoming administration. While neither crystal balls nor Tarot cards can predict the scope and extent of the damage we are about to witness to public health and trust in science, an examination of RFK Jr’s budding coalition reveals a dire situation. Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) has repeatedly been called a “cult” by the media. It certainly is a cult of personality. RFK Jr and his campaign riffed on the slogan, creating Make America Healthy Again or MAHA.
Kennedy himself should inspire consternation. He has been a leading figure of the modern anti-vaccine movement since 2005, when a psychologist ascribed her son’s autism on the mercury found in vaccines and dropped a stack of papers alleging this link on Kennedy’s front porch. An environmental lawyer familiar with mercury’s effect on the environment, Kennedy believed the link was real and began his vaccine-blaming crusade, which he is now taking to Washington. He founded the Children’s Health Defense, whose “TV channel” fuels fear and mistrust of science and institutions, and his visit to Samoa in 2019 was partly responsible for an outbreak of measles, which made 5,700 people sick and killed 83 of them. Most of the deaths were in young children. New Zealand shipped children’s coffins to Samoa to help with the shortage.
Kennedy’s virulent anti-vaccine messaging is now being sanewashed in the media in an attempt to bolster his reputation, but make no mistake. He does not want “safer vaccines;” he wants no vaccines at all. Much like the bailey at the foot of a medieval castle is harder to defend, Kennedy often retreats to the safer tower on the hill—the motte—when pushed. Among anti-vaxxers, he calls mercury-containing vaccines aimed at children “a holocaust;” to NBC News, after Trump won the election, he states, “I’m not gonna take away anyone’s vaccines. I’ve never been anti-vaccine.” I’m not sure if this is still a motte-and-bailey fallacy or if he is straight up lying now.
But Kennedy is not alone, as two siblings have rapidly been promoted as the shepherds of Kennedy’s MAHA movement: sister Casey and brother Calley Means. Their book, Good Energy, got them a spot on Tucker Carlson’s show, as well as a bevy of right-wing and alternative medicine podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience, The Rubin Report, and The Doctor’s Farmacy with Mark Hyman M.D. Casey then leveraged this media attention into political gold by bringing the flock together to Washington, D.C. for a live-streamed, suits-and-ties bit of pseudoscience theatre hosted by Senator Ron Johnson and entitled “American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion.”
The event was a masquerade, with contrarians donning the garbs of science and pretending to be the critical thinkers in the room. Their shared grievance was the claim that Americans are being poisoned by their food supply, leading to an apocalyptic epidemic of chronic disease. Universities and regulatory agencies have fallen prey to institutional capture: corporate money has rendered their testimonies hopelessly corrupt. Only the people present at the event can be trusted to save America from itself. They want to drain the science swamp but given their alignment with convicted criminal Trump and their own misunderstanding of the scientific process, they are more likely to trap Americans in quicksand than to end corruption.
Here are a few of the falsehoods they proclaimed in the Russell Senate Office Building:
RFK Jr himself claimed that rates of autism have increased even though “there has been no change in diagnosis and no change in screening either,” which is patently false: both have famously changed. He also boldly stated that cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the old. This is not at all what is happening.
Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon who wrote an opinion piece in February 2021 for the Wall Street Journal titled “We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April” and who continued to make bad prediction after bad prediction during the pandemic, declared that “pesticides are driving our fertility rates down,” even though there is no evidence of this.
Dr. Casey Means, the glue of this group, who stepped away from her final year in residency as a head-and-neck surgeon to learn about the pseudoscience of functional medicine, stated that she never learned in her training that “medical error and medications are the third leading cause of death in the United States.” That is because it’s not, and the co-author of the analysis that originated this misconception is none other than Marty Makary himself. She also claimed that medical specialties exist because “it’s profitable to send people” to them.
Her brother, Calley, who sells dubious wellness products like dietary supplements and infrared saunas, claims the infamous Flexner Report’s underlying medical logic was later proven to be wrong. This is absolutely not true, as I have written about recently, but it is a popular argument among critics of medicine who pray for an open-door policy on make-believe remedies.
Why are they all so ill-informed about illness? The desire to become a health guru is hard to resist for some. Antiestablishmentarianism and grievance-mongering, when fed on a diet of conspiracy theories, can sprout a lucrative career in wellness, prioritizing feelings over facts. Most of the people in this room, who are poised to influence American politics in the next year, have books to sell, companies to benefit from, and sponsorship deals to negotiate for their podcasts. Look at one of the panelists, Vani Hari, better known as The Food Babe, who is experiencing a career resurrection. After her chemophobic crusade was soundly debunked by many scientists (including our own Office’s Joe Schwarcz), she is now back as part of Kennedy’s congregation. She denounces the presence of allegedly toxic food dyes in products sold in the U.S. which are apparently banned in other countries, even though many of the examples she gives are simply not true. She is, of course, selling her own line of health products called Truvani, including fluoride-free toothpaste, because demonizing fluoride is popular in her circles. As Conspirituality co-host Derek Beres often says, watch what they say, then watch what they sell. And don’t forget to snag your Make America Healthy Again crewneck fleece sweatshirt now!
America’s diagnosis, according to Casey Means, is metabolic dysfunction, her one true cause of all (chronic) diseases. According to her, our cells can’t produce good energy anymore because of chemicals and toxins. It doesn’t matter that she is not a metabolic health expert or that theories claiming to have found a single cause for all diseases never pan out; it sounds good. Mikhaila Peterson Fuller, daughter of infamous psychologist Jordan Peterson, was there to promote her own would-be panacea: steak and salt, a ludicrous regimen introduced by Senator Johnson as “a therapeutic and plant-free ketogenic diet.”
These outcasts don’t want to fix the system; they want to burn it all down and replace it with institutions made of unicorn horns. They have become consumed with mirages, obsessed with toxins and chemicals they cannot see but imagine are debasing our bodies and impairing our minds. We are witnessing the institutionalization of pseudoscience.
Pointing out the lies and falsehoods of this meeting, however, does a disservice to the reader who has not watched these people’s speeches and seen the applause (and sometimes standing ovations) they received. It misses the point that they sound credible. There are real and important problems surrounding ultra-processed food. Produce is often more expensive than packaged items that are far less nutritious. Many chronic diseases are getting more common, and the revolving door between industry and government regulation is a well-known issue. These influencers have managed to put their finger on a significant problem, but their simplistic minds keep missing the real solution. This echoes the marketing victory of integrative medicine, which denounces failings of conventional medicine and spotlights magical thinking in the form of Reiki and essential oils as a solution.
Real solutions would involve addressing socioeconomic inequalities. It would require facilitating access to doctors, nurse practitioners, dentists, and dietitians. It would necessitate the price of healthy food to go down, and for people who hold two or three jobs to somehow find the time to cook nourishing meals. To arrive at a real prescription for America’s dietary woes would have required inviting actual experts to this panel. Behind the microphones, however, there were no registered dietitians, no toxicologists, no public health experts. How could there be? The panel would view them as corrupt. Instead, we were presented with folks like Max Lugavere, a podcaster with a degree in film and psychology whose show is sponsored by a long list of dietary supplements, and Alex Clark, a Food Babe in the making with no formal background in food science who sees crank opinions about nutrition as “engagement” for her show.
Medical doctors have not been forgotten in this coalition, though, with Dr. Marty Makary bringing in a large share of those credentials. Makary is part of a vocal group of COVID minimizers, who are referred to by Dr. Jonathan Howard—who has conscientiously documented their rise—as the We Want Them Infected doctors. The name comes from an official in the first Trump administration who, in July 2020, proposed that young and healthy people should be infected by the novel coronavirus to build herd immunity. Months later, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Prof. Sunetra Gupta released the Great Barrington Declaration, another step in the direction of mass infections. It is unknown at this point how many of these contrarian doctors will be invited to contribute to Trump’s health plan. Events like Senator Johnson’s panel and Rescue the Republic, which portrayed RFK Jr and his associates as George Washington and his army crossing the Delaware, are auditions. Only some will make the cut and be given the power to make decisions in Trump’s upcoming reality TV show, until they are inevitably fired. Trump’s unpredictability and pride make it hard to foresee how many of these policy ideas will be enacted and how many will be rolled back, but there will be damage in the chaos.
The Heritage Foundation released a nearly-1,000-page document called “Project 2025” which aims to be a policy template for the next U.S. president. It demands that environmental concerns (read: climate change) be removed from dietary guidelines; it claims that gender identity is political and comes from “radical actors;” and it asserts that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is “perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government.” It pushes forward an agenda that is anti-abortion-pills, anti-puberty-blockers, and anti-vaccine and anti-mask in the case of COVID-19. Meanwhile, Trump’s own Free Speech Policy Initiative speaks of the “censorship cartel,” which must be “dismantled and destroyed.” It will ban social media platforms from moderating misinformation, fire federal employees who dared push back against falsehoods, and punish universities who have “engaged in censorship activities.” This is the Orwellian warping of free speech to quell dissent, going so far as to call for the prosecution of people who have used the labels “misinformation” and “disinformation” in their work. If our Office were on American soil, our very existence would be jeopardized.
With Kennedy and his allies being allowed to weigh in on health policy at the highest level of government, we will witness the metabolic dysfunction of the entire American healthcare apparatus. Food safety will be endangered, health disparities will increase, and infectious diseases will rage on. That is not how they see the future, though. They are busy looking in the rearview mirror at a rose-tinted past: trim and fit children, happy with life. They want to recreate the circumstances that led to this, but they don’t understand science. In a viral post on X, RFK Jr confirmed he is all-in on pseudoscience. “FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” he wrote. “This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.” I wasn’t aware the FDA was going after yoga instructors.
During the Second World War, Japanese troops followed by Allied forces established bases in Melanesia, a group of islands northeast of Australia which includes Papua New Guinea. Many of their Indigenous peoples had never met outsiders and were awed by the planes, guns, and medicines these soldiers brought to their islands. Veneration was also helped by some soldiers pretending to be revered ancestors of Melanesians. The war ended, and the “ancestors” took their cargo with them.
Charismatic local leaders then warned of a cataclysm, followed by the return of these ancestors bringing back the wealth they had briefly displayed. All Melanesians had to do was mimic the rituals they had seen the soldiers engage in. They practiced drills with fake rifles. They carved headphones out of wood and erected control towers. They lit torches alongside makeshift runways, hoping the planes would return. This phenomenon earned a name in 1945: cargo cult.
Anthropologists now recognize that this view may have been simplistic and obscured some of the Melanesians’ anti-colonialist sentiment. But it became immortalized in scientific skepticism circles by physicist Richard Feynman, who used it to refer to pseudoscience as “cargo cult science.” Irrational means are used to pursue rational ends. People go through the motions of science without understanding its core principles and nuances.
If MAGA is a cult, then MAHA is a cargo cult.
“Let food be thy medicine” is an apocryphal quote attributed to Hippocrates, the father of medicine. In reality, Hippocratic doctors knew the difference between food and medicines. But who cares when all we’re doing is lighting torches alongside make-believe runways and praying for the return of ancient idols and their precious cargo?
The anti-science movement is mere months away from being sworn into office in the United States. During Trump’s interregnum, a flock of medical contrarians and wellness warriors has coalesced around the figure of RFK Jr, who has now been chosen by Trump as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in his upcoming administration. While neither crystal balls nor Tarot cards can predict the scope and extent of the damage we are about to witness to public health and trust in science, an examination of RFK Jr’s budding coalition reveals a dire situation. Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) has repeatedly been called a “cult” by the media. It certainly is a cult of personality. RFK Jr and his campaign riffed on the slogan, creating Make America Healthy Again or MAHA.
Kennedy himself should inspire consternation. He has been a leading figure of the modern anti-vaccine movement since 2005, when a psychologist ascribed her son’s autism on the mercury found in vaccines and dropped a stack of papers alleging this link on Kennedy’s front porch. An environmental lawyer familiar with mercury’s effect on the environment, Kennedy believed the link was real and began his vaccine-blaming crusade, which he is now taking to Washington. He founded the Children’s Health Defense, whose “TV channel” fuels fear and mistrust of science and institutions, and his visit to Samoa in 2019 was partly responsible for an outbreak of measles, which made 5,700 people sick and killed 83 of them. Most of the deaths were in young children. New Zealand shipped children’s coffins to Samoa to help with the shortage.
Kennedy’s virulent anti-vaccine messaging is now being sanewashed in the media in an attempt to bolster his reputation, but make no mistake. He does not want “safer vaccines;” he wants no vaccines at all. Much like the bailey at the foot of a medieval castle is harder to defend, Kennedy often retreats to the safer tower on the hill—the motte—when pushed. Among anti-vaxxers, he calls mercury-containing vaccines aimed at children “a holocaust;” to NBC News, after Trump won the election, he states, “I’m not gonna take away anyone’s vaccines. I’ve never been anti-vaccine.” I’m not sure if this is still a motte-and-bailey fallacy or if he is straight up lying now.
But Kennedy is not alone, as two siblings have rapidly been promoted as the shepherds of Kennedy’s MAHA movement: sister Casey and brother Calley Means. Their book, Good Energy, got them a spot on Tucker Carlson’s show, as well as a bevy of right-wing and alternative medicine podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience, The Rubin Report, and The Doctor’s Farmacy with Mark Hyman M.D. Casey then leveraged this media attention into political gold by bringing the flock together to Washington, D.C. for a live-streamed, suits-and-ties bit of pseudoscience theatre hosted by Senator Ron Johnson and entitled “American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion.”
The event was a masquerade, with contrarians donning the garbs of science and pretending to be the critical thinkers in the room. Their shared grievance was the claim that Americans are being poisoned by their food supply, leading to an apocalyptic epidemic of chronic disease. Universities and regulatory agencies have fallen prey to institutional capture: corporate money has rendered their testimonies hopelessly corrupt. Only the people present at the event can be trusted to save America from itself. They want to drain the science swamp but given their alignment with convicted criminal Trump and their own misunderstanding of the scientific process, they are more likely to trap Americans in quicksand than to end corruption.
Here are a few of the falsehoods they proclaimed in the Russell Senate Office Building:
RFK Jr himself claimed that rates of autism have increased even though “there has been no change in diagnosis and no change in screening either,” which is patently false: both have famously changed. He also boldly stated that cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the old. This is not at all what is happening.
Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon who wrote an opinion piece in February 2021 for the Wall Street Journal titled “We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April” and who continued to make bad prediction after bad prediction during the pandemic, declared that “pesticides are driving our fertility rates down,” even though there is no evidence of this.
Dr. Casey Means, the glue of this group, who stepped away from her final year in residency as a head-and-neck surgeon to learn about the pseudoscience of functional medicine, stated that she never learned in her training that “medical error and medications are the third leading cause of death in the United States.” That is because it’s not, and the co-author of the analysis that originated this misconception is none other than Marty Makary himself. She also claimed that medical specialties exist because “it’s profitable to send people” to them.
Her brother, Calley, who sells dubious wellness products like dietary supplements and infrared saunas, claims the infamous Flexner Report’s underlying medical logic was later proven to be wrong. This is absolutely not true, as I have written about recently, but it is a popular argument among critics of medicine who pray for an open-door policy on make-believe remedies.
Why are they all so ill-informed about illness? The desire to become a health guru is hard to resist for some. Antiestablishmentarianism and grievance-mongering, when fed on a diet of conspiracy theories, can sprout a lucrative career in wellness, prioritizing feelings over facts. Most of the people in this room, who are poised to influence American politics in the next year, have books to sell, companies to benefit from, and sponsorship deals to negotiate for their podcasts. Look at one of the panelists, Vani Hari, better known as The Food Babe, who is experiencing a career resurrection. After her chemophobic crusade was soundly debunked by many scientists (including our own Office’s Joe Schwarcz), she is now back as part of Kennedy’s congregation. She denounces the presence of allegedly toxic food dyes in products sold in the U.S. which are apparently banned in other countries, even though many of the examples she gives are simply not true. She is, of course, selling her own line of health products called Truvani, including fluoride-free toothpaste, because demonizing fluoride is popular in her circles. As Conspirituality co-host Derek Beres often says, watch what they say, then watch what they sell. And don’t forget to snag your Make America Healthy Again crewneck fleece sweatshirt now!
America’s diagnosis, according to Casey Means, is metabolic dysfunction, her one true cause of all (chronic) diseases. According to her, our cells can’t produce good energy anymore because of chemicals and toxins. It doesn’t matter that she is not a metabolic health expert or that theories claiming to have found a single cause for all diseases never pan out; it sounds good. Mikhaila Peterson Fuller, daughter of infamous psychologist Jordan Peterson, was there to promote her own would-be panacea: steak and salt, a ludicrous regimen introduced by Senator Johnson as “a therapeutic and plant-free ketogenic diet.”
These outcasts don’t want to fix the system; they want to burn it all down and replace it with institutions made of unicorn horns. They have become consumed with mirages, obsessed with toxins and chemicals they cannot see but imagine are debasing our bodies and impairing our minds. We are witnessing the institutionalization of pseudoscience.
Pointing out the lies and falsehoods of this meeting, however, does a disservice to the reader who has not watched these people’s speeches and seen the applause (and sometimes standing ovations) they received. It misses the point that they sound credible. There are real and important problems surrounding ultra-processed food. Produce is often more expensive than packaged items that are far less nutritious. Many chronic diseases are getting more common, and the revolving door between industry and government regulation is a well-known issue. These influencers have managed to put their finger on a significant problem, but their simplistic minds keep missing the real solution. This echoes the marketing victory of integrative medicine, which denounces failings of conventional medicine and spotlights magical thinking in the form of Reiki and essential oils as a solution.
Real solutions would involve addressing socioeconomic inequalities. It would require facilitating access to doctors, nurse practitioners, dentists, and dietitians. It would necessitate the price of healthy food to go down, and for people who hold two or three jobs to somehow find the time to cook nourishing meals. To arrive at a real prescription for America’s dietary woes would have required inviting actual experts to this panel. Behind the microphones, however, there were no registered dietitians, no toxicologists, no public health experts. How could there be? The panel would view them as corrupt. Instead, we were presented with folks like Max Lugavere, a podcaster with a degree in film and psychology whose show is sponsored by a long list of dietary supplements, and Alex Clark, a Food Babe in the making with no formal background in food science who sees crank opinions about nutrition as “engagement” for her show.
Medical doctors have not been forgotten in this coalition, though, with Dr. Marty Makary bringing in a large share of those credentials. Makary is part of a vocal group of COVID minimizers, who are referred to by Dr. Jonathan Howard—who has conscientiously documented their rise—as the We Want Them Infected doctors. The name comes from an official in the first Trump administration who, in July 2020, proposed that young and healthy people should be infected by the novel coronavirus to build herd immunity. Months later, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Prof. Sunetra Gupta released the Great Barrington Declaration, another step in the direction of mass infections. It is unknown at this point how many of these contrarian doctors will be invited to contribute to Trump’s health plan. Events like Senator Johnson’s panel and Rescue the Republic, which portrayed RFK Jr and his associates as George Washington and his army crossing the Delaware, are auditions. Only some will make the cut and be given the power to make decisions in Trump’s upcoming reality TV show, until they are inevitably fired. Trump’s unpredictability and pride make it hard to foresee how many of these policy ideas will be enacted and how many will be rolled back, but there will be damage in the chaos.
The Heritage Foundation released a nearly-1,000-page document called “Project 2025” which aims to be a policy template for the next U.S. president. It demands that environmental concerns (read: climate change) be removed from dietary guidelines; it claims that gender identity is political and comes from “radical actors;” and it asserts that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is “perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government.” It pushes forward an agenda that is anti-abortion-pills, anti-puberty-blockers, and anti-vaccine and anti-mask in the case of COVID-19. Meanwhile, Trump’s own Free Speech Policy Initiative speaks of the “censorship cartel,” which must be “dismantled and destroyed.” It will ban social media platforms from moderating misinformation, fire federal employees who dared push back against falsehoods, and punish universities who have “engaged in censorship activities.” This is the Orwellian warping of free speech to quell dissent, going so far as to call for the prosecution of people who have used the labels “misinformation” and “disinformation” in their work. If our Office were on American soil, our very existence would be jeopardized.
With Kennedy and his allies being allowed to weigh in on health policy at the highest level of government, we will witness the metabolic dysfunction of the entire American healthcare apparatus. Food safety will be endangered, health disparities will increase, and infectious diseases will rage on. That is not how they see the future, though. They are busy looking in the rearview mirror at a rose-tinted past: trim and fit children, happy with life. They want to recreate the circumstances that led to this, but they don’t understand science. In a viral post on X, RFK Jr confirmed he is all-in on pseudoscience. “FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” he wrote. “This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.” I wasn’t aware the FDA was going after yoga instructors.
During the Second World War, Japanese troops followed by Allied forces established bases in Melanesia, a group of islands northeast of Australia which includes Papua New Guinea. Many of their Indigenous peoples had never met outsiders and were awed by the planes, guns, and medicines these soldiers brought to their islands. Veneration was also helped by some soldiers pretending to be revered ancestors of Melanesians. The war ended, and the “ancestors” took their cargo with them.
Charismatic local leaders then warned of a cataclysm, followed by the return of these ancestors bringing back the wealth they had briefly displayed. All Melanesians had to do was mimic the rituals they had seen the soldiers engage in. They practiced drills with fake rifles. They carved headphones out of wood and erected control towers. They lit torches alongside makeshift runways, hoping the planes would return. This phenomenon earned a name in 1945: cargo cult.
Anthropologists now recognize that this view may have been simplistic and obscured some of the Melanesians’ anti-colonialist sentiment. But it became immortalized in scientific skepticism circles by physicist Richard Feynman, who used it to refer to pseudoscience as “cargo cult science.” Irrational means are used to pursue rational ends. People go through the motions of science without understanding its core principles and nuances.
If MAGA is a cult, then MAHA is a cargo cult.
“Let food be thy medicine” is an apocryphal quote attributed to Hippocrates, the father of medicine. In reality, Hippocratic doctors knew the difference between food and medicines. But who cares when all we’re doing is lighting torches alongside make-believe runways and praying for the return of ancient idols and their precious cargo?
