The problem with this kind of thing is that the story looks different at the level of a government than at the individual level.
The FDA article mentioned 2,645 illnesses and 228 hospitalizations in a 20-year period, and that was a period during which raw milk was heavily regulated, so would be likely to be significantly higher otherwise.
Still, the odds of you as an individual getting sick from raw milk would be relatively low. Does that mean it shouldn't be regulated? It's not a purely scientific decision.
Perhaps another way to go would be warning labels on raw milk. Still, I bet that would produce much higher illness numbers than the ones quoted above.
In the end the question is whether the government should be trying to help people stay healthy or not. If the goal is actually "Make America Healthy Again," then requiring milk to be pasteurized is an obvious choice.
Prior to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) it was mostly illegal to sell dietary supplements that weren’t legitimate. You couldn’t have homeopathy on the shelves at a drug store since it wouldn’t get through FDA approval. You couldn’t put so-called structure/function claims on the box such as ”for flu symptoms“ either. You couldn’t even do things like sell smoothies and claim that they boost the immune system.
Once the DSHEA passed, snake oil was back on the menu. It has now become a multi-billion dollar industry. If science and facts win out, a lot of people stand to lose a lot of money.
Hacker News is a little hard in these times. That it has kept politics unrelated to tech out is a great achievement, but as scientific method is being equated to flat-earth thinking by elected leaders talking about what's new in Rust seems off.
The distinction that there are separable and unrelated domains of knowledge and activity is a kind of Fordism of the mind that our current society has impressed upon us. It's artificial to not talk about politics in the same breath as science, since science and technology produce the resources that make our political process for distribution of those resources necessary. I think this is a correction for an aberrant distinction in our thinking.
It's especially hard given that big tech companies and their leaders are working closely with government and explicitly supporting certain political missions, there are few truly apolitical corners of tech now.
It was easier when "politics" and typical tech news overlapped now and then but not endlessly. You could filter ...
Now the culture wars and loyalty tests of the current government occur just about everywhere. There is no limit to the scope of topics that are part of the test, no objection will be tolerated. Any objection means you're <insert buzzword here>.
We're nearing the point where your point of view might even limit your choice of college (or maybe any college) if the president gets his way.
I think it's wrong to think of MAHA as "anti-science" because science is all about questioning. Something as important as medicine should be questioned and questioned again and again. Simply dismissing them out-of-hand with such a term is more anti-science than what they're doing.
Now having said that, it's perfectly fair to criticize some of their assumptions and methods. The article, for instance, talks about raw milk. Pasteurization seems like a smart idea to me, but to assert that anyone who drinks raw milk is "anti science" is wrong. They're just approaching science differently.
Questioning is great, but to generate scientific knowledge, we need a few more steps, roughly speaking:
1. Ask a question
2. Form a hypothesis
3. Experiment to test it
4. Analyze results
5. Draw conclusions
6. Repeat
The MAHA folks essentially disregard this as a valid process for gathering knowledge. They occasionally talk about experiments and studies, but they are selectively chosen to support their conclusions in a posthoc way, ignoring both evidence to the contrary and basic methodological issues. When people describe them as "anti-science," I believe this is the kind of thing they have in mind.
Saying "Everyone but me is lying to you." to ignorant people who are already suspicious of corporations and science is a simple way to consolidate power.
Once power is consolidated, you can then get paid by any snake oil salesman to say their snake oil is the best.
RFK, Jr.'s assessment of medical evidence is bad, and he doesn't seem to have spent a second on ending public advertising of prescription drugs. I personally don't like him and have never liked him. But also, medical evidence is bad and wrong, the modern anti-vax movement was started by the low standards of The Lancet, and big pharma really does run our media (through that advertising) and consistently suborns all medical research.
Watching that fake Alzheimer's drug get repeatedly reintroduced as a miracle for a change of 1.5 questions on a subjective checklist, even after a bunch of experts at the FDA who had a moral center quit over it, was depressing. Putting this quack rich kid at the head of the agency will at least have some effect on it other than the effect of big pharma cash.
I think the proof for the effectiveness of the MMR and HPV vaccines is indisputable. I also think that big pharma lobbying for vaccine indemnification against lawsuits, and the consequent explosion in the number of vaccines, was an opportunity to push a lot of stuff in that the "science" defenders never seem to bring up. They always defend the entire class of "vaccines," and avoid the harder to defend specifics. This is something you have to be paid to do, because it is a deliberate rhetorical distraction.
Also, the classes of drugs that make the most money (not vaccines) have the least evidence of effect. Not just the real evidence, but even the claimed effects are tiny and take a bunch of suspicious math to find. This is a sign of a system that runs on corruption. Not that you need signs, because the companies are making direct payments. Just like we legalized bribery in our politics, we normalized bribery in medical literature, practice, and journalism.
[*] like Ioannidis taught us before he got canceled for being more right (or at the worst equally wrong in the other direction) about covid than everyone else. Remember when HN worshiped the science, rather than "the science," and posted every Ioannidis paper?
The quack rich kid is breaking the parts of NIH/CDC/etc that were working correctly. Writing that off as "some effect" ignores what we can already plainly see.
There don't have to be beneficiaries driving it. RFKj is an actual eugenicist. He's not doing it for hidden reasons. He's doing it because he thinks your child who does not survive measles should have died because that's the better outcome.
And Republicans! Damaged/hurt/frightened humans tend to vote for right wing and fascists. This is because going left wing is expensive, it requires time to know, like and trust your neighbors.
25 comments
[ 12.3 ms ] story [ 69.7 ms ] threadBut I believe the premise that financial interests aren't being challenged
The problem with this kind of thing is that the story looks different at the level of a government than at the individual level.
The FDA article mentioned 2,645 illnesses and 228 hospitalizations in a 20-year period, and that was a period during which raw milk was heavily regulated, so would be likely to be significantly higher otherwise.
Still, the odds of you as an individual getting sick from raw milk would be relatively low. Does that mean it shouldn't be regulated? It's not a purely scientific decision.
Perhaps another way to go would be warning labels on raw milk. Still, I bet that would produce much higher illness numbers than the ones quoted above.
In the end the question is whether the government should be trying to help people stay healthy or not. If the goal is actually "Make America Healthy Again," then requiring milk to be pasteurized is an obvious choice.
Once the DSHEA passed, snake oil was back on the menu. It has now become a multi-billion dollar industry. If science and facts win out, a lot of people stand to lose a lot of money.
Now the culture wars and loyalty tests of the current government occur just about everywhere. There is no limit to the scope of topics that are part of the test, no objection will be tolerated. Any objection means you're <insert buzzword here>.
We're nearing the point where your point of view might even limit your choice of college (or maybe any college) if the president gets his way.
Now having said that, it's perfectly fair to criticize some of their assumptions and methods. The article, for instance, talks about raw milk. Pasteurization seems like a smart idea to me, but to assert that anyone who drinks raw milk is "anti science" is wrong. They're just approaching science differently.
1. Ask a question 2. Form a hypothesis 3. Experiment to test it 4. Analyze results 5. Draw conclusions 6. Repeat
The MAHA folks essentially disregard this as a valid process for gathering knowledge. They occasionally talk about experiments and studies, but they are selectively chosen to support their conclusions in a posthoc way, ignoring both evidence to the contrary and basic methodological issues. When people describe them as "anti-science," I believe this is the kind of thing they have in mind.
I'm only kind of joking.
Once power is consolidated, you can then get paid by any snake oil salesman to say their snake oil is the best.
RFK, Jr.'s assessment of medical evidence is bad, and he doesn't seem to have spent a second on ending public advertising of prescription drugs. I personally don't like him and have never liked him. But also, medical evidence is bad and wrong, the modern anti-vax movement was started by the low standards of The Lancet, and big pharma really does run our media (through that advertising) and consistently suborns all medical research.
Watching that fake Alzheimer's drug get repeatedly reintroduced as a miracle for a change of 1.5 questions on a subjective checklist, even after a bunch of experts at the FDA who had a moral center quit over it, was depressing. Putting this quack rich kid at the head of the agency will at least have some effect on it other than the effect of big pharma cash.
I think the proof for the effectiveness of the MMR and HPV vaccines is indisputable. I also think that big pharma lobbying for vaccine indemnification against lawsuits, and the consequent explosion in the number of vaccines, was an opportunity to push a lot of stuff in that the "science" defenders never seem to bring up. They always defend the entire class of "vaccines," and avoid the harder to defend specifics. This is something you have to be paid to do, because it is a deliberate rhetorical distraction.
Also, the classes of drugs that make the most money (not vaccines) have the least evidence of effect. Not just the real evidence, but even the claimed effects are tiny and take a bunch of suspicious math to find. This is a sign of a system that runs on corruption. Not that you need signs, because the companies are making direct payments. Just like we legalized bribery in our politics, we normalized bribery in medical literature, practice, and journalism.
[*] like Ioannidis taught us before he got canceled for being more right (or at the worst equally wrong in the other direction) about covid than everyone else. Remember when HN worshiped the science, rather than "the science," and posted every Ioannidis paper?