Donald Trump said he lied about public health during Covid in order to prevent a panic. He said he played down the deadliness of Covid in order to not create a panic.
In rare cases, modern vaccines have negative side effects, and under normal law, people can sue and sympathetic juries can reward huge sums of money. This would make vaccines unprofitable, and without vaccines many many people would die from a variety of diseases. Instead, in the 1980s, we set up a parallel system for vaccines where people with negative side effects can get a payment, but not an exorbitant sum from a normal lawsuit. This system is underfunded and understaffed and could use reform to keep up with claims, but throwing the system out risks for-profit vaccine companies ending the production of vaccines, resulting in many deaths. So, the system is needed, unless the government chooses to manufacture vaccines themselves. People can still sue vaccine manufacturers for negligence, but that is hard to prove.
By letting the Covid-era boost to ACA subsidies end, Republicans are making health insurance for 24 million people much much more expensive. These are people who: don’t get subsidized health insurance at work, make too much for Medicaid, but also too much for regular ACA subsidies. Many are small business owners.
“The researchers followed 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals for nearly four years. They found not only that vaccinated people have a 74 percent lower risk of death from severe COVID-19, but also that those individuals have a lower risk of death, period. Specifically, people who received the shots have a 25 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality.
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The researchers sought to control for various confounders, such as a healthy-vaccinee effect, where healthier individuals are more likely to opt for vaccination, or a frailty-related bias, where those in poorer health may avoid it.
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“This study helps to put an end to the misinformation spread about mRNA vaccines,” the study’s lead author, Mahmoud Zureik, told Le Monde. “Providing data on the absence of long-term risks helps strengthen confidence in these vaccines, which will be developed for other viruses and diseases.”
Their results should indeed strengthen confidence. But Kennedy, who has been shifting research dollars to purportedly “safer” vaccines, will likely ignore it.”
“What about his promise to maintain the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes? Nope. RFK Jr. fired all of the vaccine experts and loaded up the committee with anti-vaccination appointees.”
“After a few months in the program, Smith was no longer diabetic, and she has now been sober for two and a half years.
Her story highlights the success of the Healthy Opportunities Pilot, which launched in North Carolina in March 2022. The program had benefits beyond health and quality-of-life improvements; researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill found the program saved $1,020 a year per recipient on health care costs, and the 38,000 participants had “significantly lower” emergency room visits than their peers.
The program was unique, funded with a five-year, $650 million federal grant approved by the first Donald Trump administration. The idea was to use fresh food, safe housing and transportation — social and economic factors that researchers say determine 80 percent of a person’s health — to improve the lives of the sickest, most expensive patients.
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But the Healthy Opportunities Pilot shows the limits of such food-based interventions in public policy. These programs often require longer-term investments, chafing against the cost-cutting instincts that characterize Trump’s second term and legislatures in most red states — the policy level at which most MAHA ideas are put into practice.
In the case of HOP, the Joe Biden administration approved a Medicaid waiver last December to continue the program in North Carolina, which Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, hoped to expand throughout the state over the next two years. But in June, the Republican-led state legislature declined to fund it. State lawmakers argue the program costs more than it saves — a claim that state policy experts dispute because of the way Republican lawmakers were calculating the numbers. These experts say the long-term savings potential was given short shrift.”
The studies that best control for confounding factors do not find a link between Tylenol and autism.
Among all studies, some find a negative correlation, some find no correlation, and many find a very small positive correlation, but in the best studies, this is not found, indicating there isn’t a causal link.
Tylenol helps control fever, which can prevent fever-caused health issues with the baby.
Arguments that we shouldn’t have Medicare for All because medically and scientifically incompetent people like Trump and RFK will gain power and make bad decisions…ignore that people in power like them can also influence private corporations to do healthcare the way they want, so that is a threat either way.
“Recall that Kennedy infamously asserted back in December 2021 that the COVID-19 vaccine “is the deadliest vaccine ever made.” Reams of subsequent research have found that COVID-19 vaccines are in fact generally safe and effective.
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In June, Kennedy falsely stated that the Centers for Disease Control had suppressed a hepatitis B vaccine study in newborns in 1999 that found “an 1,135 percent elevated risk of autism among the vaccinated children.” In fact, the researchers cited by Kennedy reported in 2003 that they found “no consistent significant associations” between the vaccine and autism. Infants infected with hepatitis B via mother-to-child at birth or during their first year of life have a 90 percent chance of developing a chronic infection—of which 15 to 25 percent will eventually die of cirrhosis or liver cancer. Since vaccination for all newborns was approved in 1991, infections with the hepatitis B virus in children and teens have decreased by 99 percent.
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Kennedy has commended Coca-Cola and Tyson Foods for replacing high fructose corn syrup with cane sugar. One problem: There is essentially no nutritional difference between them. That said, health-conscious Americans would do well to heed Kennedy’s call to consume less sugar.
As for food dyes, as recently as 2023 the FDA concluded that the totality of the evidence showed no adverse effects when children consume foods containing color additives. That was then, but this is now. In April, Kennedy denounced synthetic food dyes as “poisonous compounds.” At the time, he laid out a timeline for the food industry to transition to natural alternatives by 2027.
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a recent meta-analysis found that drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams per liter of fluoride slightly lowers children’s I.Q. scores. Keep in mind, though, that the recommended level of fluoridation in the U.S. is 0.7 milligrams per liter. A 2023 meta-analysis found that the level of fluoride in community water systems “is not associated with lower IQ scores.
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As the scope of Kennedy’s initiatives show, his agency’s vast powers allow him to inflict his peculiar obsessions on the health and lives of Americans—for good and for ill.”