Making Polio Great Again

Ok. It's time to call a shovel a shovel. Anti-Vax pseudo-scientific nuttery has now gone mainstream in the Republican Party. RFK Jr. is turning the Department of Health and Human Services into an agency dedicated to all out warfare on modern medicine. Florida's Surgeon General wants to end ALL vaccine mandates for kids. Yes, even Polio! If this quack had been in charge a couple of generations ago, we would still have Smallpox in the world. If you don't know what that is, firstly you are very fortunate, and secondly it's because we eradicated it by mass vaccinations. In the 19th century one in four children did not live to adulthood. Vaccines are one of the most important reasons we have reduced infant mortality rates in the developed world to less than 1%. The most dangerous people are always well meaning fools with power. And these kooks are going to get people killed. 

Medical Quackery and RFK's Purge at the CDC

An escalating conflict over an influential vaccine committee was one of the final straws that led to the firing of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez and the exodus of other highly regarded top officials.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had repeatedly undermined the agency’s independent Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, firing the committee’s members and appointing new members, including vaccine skeptics.

Early Wednesday, Monarez suggested to Dr. Richard Besser that she was going to be forced to sign off on new vaccine recommendations.

“She said there were two things she would never do in the job,” said Besser, a former acting CDC director and the CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “One, in terms of firing her leadership who are talented civil servants like herself, and the other was to rubber-stamp ACIP recommendations that flew in the face of science.”

Hours later, Monarez was out, according to a Health and Human Services post on X. Almost immediately, several top officials resigned in protest.

One of those officials, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who directed the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases — which oversees vaccines — wrote in his resignation letter that a particular document related to the vaccine committee “ignored all feedback from career staff at CDC.”

The document was guidance for a newly formed work group that will present Covid vaccine data and research at the upcoming ACIP meeting — scheduled for September 18 — and contained anti-vaccine talking points. The work group will be led by newly appointed ACIP member Retsef Levi, an MIT professor who has been vocally against the mRNA Covid vaccines.

Read the rest here.

Reality Check: RFK Jr is a nut, promoting fringe conspiracy theories and medical quackery

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine crusader, is not qualified to have any power at the agency that’s supposed to protect the health of Americans, said research analysts at Cantor Fitzgerald, which was formerly headed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Cantor’s note came as Peter Marks, the head of the Food and Drug Administration’s biologics division, resigned in protest of Kennedy’s skepticism of vaccines. Kennedy has already taken steps that public health experts say could deter routine immunizations in the U.S.

“We call on the administration to re-evaluate RFK Jr’s role at HHS. Pushing out one of the most trusted leaders of the FDA to promote an anti-science agenda is a step too far for us,” analysts Josh Schimmer and Eric Schmidt wrote in an unusual note to clients Tuesday. “HHS cannot be led by an anti-vax, conspiracy theorist with inadequate training.”

Kennedy has downplayed the importance of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and promoted unproven treatments to counter a measles outbreak. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also carrying out a study into long-debunked links between vaccines and autism, led by a researcher with a history of spreading misinformation about shots.

Read the rest here.

Worth a read...

Facing a suddenly hostile US; Europe turns to Germany and Berlin steps up...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/21/europe-germany-leadership-vote-spending-defence   

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/world/europe/germany-us-ally-relationship-military.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5k4.xjNZ.QvZ7je-pFlJW&smid=url-share

https://www.politico.eu/article/germanys-friedrich-merz-radical-spending-election-berlin-green-energy-fund/

Meanwhile Russia continues its campaign of disruption...

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-europe-hybrid-campaign-d61887dd3ec6151adf354c5bd3e6273e

Moscow and Beijing rejoice at the imminent demise of Radio Free Europe and VOA...

https://www.politico.eu/article/moscow-beijing-rejoice-europe-voa-radio-free-china-disinformation/

Four conservative columnists discuss Trump's enduring popularity on the right...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/opinion/trump-administration-polling.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5k4.fw_S._UmbInlTdDWd&smid=url-share

On the huge run-up in gold...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/03/20/golds-3000-surge-why-the-fed-faces-an-existential-crisis/

https://www.kitco.com/news/article/2025-03-20/gold-rally-should-be-flashing-yellow-washington-international-investors

(I agree in part, but also think there is more to the story. Gold has always marched to the beat of its own drum. Geopolitical and US specific political tensions, and the out of control US debt are all contributing. Also there has been a voracious demand for gold coming from other parts of the world, notably China.)

Europe sees opportunity in Trump’s economic chaos...

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-can-attract-those-who-seek-alternatives-to-the-u-s-dollar-lagarde-says/

The weird world of anti-vaxxers...

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/anti-vaccine-influencers-weaponized-measles-death-texas-rcna196900

Tesla owners are trading in their EVs at record levels...

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/20/tesla-owners-are-trading-in-their-evs-at-record-levels-edmunds-says.html

How Republicans Learned to Love High Prices...

https://www.cato.org/commentary/how-republicans-learned-love-high-prices

Hydroxychloroquine linked to ~17,000 deaths during Covid

Nearly 17,000 people may have died after taking hydroxycholoroquine during the first wave of Covid-19, according to a study by French researchers.

The anti-malaria drug was prescribed to some patients hospitalized with Covid-19 during the first wave of the pandemic, "despite the absence of evidence documenting its clinical benefits," the researchers point out in their paper, published in the February issue of Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy.

Now, researchers have estimated that some 16,990 people in six countries — France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the U.S. — may have died as a result.

That figure stems from a study published in the Nature scientific journal in 2021 which reported an 11 percent increase in the mortality rate, linked to its prescription against Covid-19, because of the potential adverse effects like heart rhythm disorders, and its use instead of other effective treatments.

Researchers from universities in Lyon, France, and Québec, Canada, used that figure to analyze hospitalization data for Covid in each of the six countries, exposure to hydroxychloroquine and the increase in the relative risk of death linked to the drug.

In fact, they say the figure may be far higher given the study only concerns six countries from March to July 2020, when the drug was prescribed much more widely.

Hydroxychloroquine gained prominence partly due to French virologist Didier Raoult who had headed the Méditerranée Infection Foundation hospital, but was later removed amid growing controversy.

It was also considered something of a “miracle cure” by the then-U.S. President Donald Trump, who said: “What do you have to lose? Take it.”

Source.

Washington State Braces for Potentially Severe Measles Outbreak

VANCOUVER, Wash. — Amber Gorrow is afraid to leave her house with her infant son because she lives at the epicenter of Washington state’s worst measles outbreak in more than two decades. Born eight weeks ago, Leon is too young to get his first measles shot, putting him at risk for the highly contagious respiratory virus, which can be fatal in small children.

Gorrow also lives in a community where she said being anti-vaccine is as acceptable as being vegan or going gluten free. Almost a quarter of kids in Clark County, Wash., a suburb of Portland, Ore., go to school without measles, mumps and rubella immunizations, and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) recently declared a state of emergency amid concern that things could rapidly spin out of control.

Measles outbreaks have sprung up in nine other states this winter, but officials are particularly alarmed about the one in Clark County because of its potential to go very big, very quickly.

The Pacific Northwest is home to some of the nation’s most vocal and organized anti-vaccination activists. That movement has helped drive down child immunizations in Washington, as well as in neighboring Oregon and Idaho, to some of the lowest rates in the country, with as many as 10.5 percent of kindergartners statewide in Idaho unvaccinated for measles. That is almost double the median rate nationally.

Libertarian-leaning lawmakers, meanwhile, have bowed to public pressure to relax state laws to exempt virtually any child from state vaccination requirements whose parents object. Three states allow only medical exemptions; most others also permit religious exemptions. And 17, including Washington, Oregon and Idaho, allow what they call “philosophical” exemptions, meaning virtually anyone can opt out of the requirements.

All those elements combine into a dangerous mix, spurring concern about the resurgence of a deadly disease that once sent tens of thousands of Americans to hospitals each year and killed an estimated 400 to 500 people, many of them young children.

Read the rest here.

'Miracle' providers claim constitutional protection (quackery)

An Ashland couple accused of peddling over the Internet a diluted version of industrial bleach as an elixir for everything from earaches to cancer claims the federal government has no jurisdiction over their operation because it is a private health "association."

Federal prosecutors labeled their claim "misguided."

In federal court filings, defendants Louis Daniel Smith and Karis Delong claim they have constitutional protections to make and sell "Miracle Mineral Supplement" through their online company, Project GreenLife, because their products are offered only to members of a "First Amendment Private Health Care Association."

Smith, 42, and Delong, 38, claim the First and 14th Amendments protect these associations because they are private and not part of the public domain over which agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration have power, so federal health laws don't apply, according to court filings seeking to get their case dismissed.

Project GreenLife shipped Miracle Mineral Supplement and other products only to members of the association, a distinction that frees them from the scrutiny of the FDA, which is mandated to protect public health, Smith and Delong argue.

Read the rest here.