Tag: science

Under RFK Jr., Vaccine Approval Is Getting More Politicized, Not Less

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Kennedy has politicized the U.S. vaccine approval process by summarily firing all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)”

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“Typically appointed to four-year terms, Kennedy has taken the unprecedented step of prematurely sacking the entire panel. Two days later, he announced his selection of eight new members, many of whom are chiefly famous for espousing contrarian views with respect to vaccine safety and efficacy.
So what did Kennedy find wrong with the original ACIP panel? The secretary asserted that it “has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interests” stemming from members’ “immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy.” At least in his Journal op-ed, the secretary offers no evidence of any unreported or improper conflicts of interest among those he just fired. It is worth noting that the fired ACIP members were vetted before they were appointed and that they each declare any conflicts that later emerge before each of the committee’s meetings.

What about RFK Jr.’s vague claims hinting at nefarious “immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms” on the part of committee members? If your automobile keeps stalling out, you take your jalopy to a trained mechanic for diagnosis and repair. If your computer system has been hacked, you seek help from qualified computer engineers. You earnestly hope that your mechanics and computer engineers are fully immersed in their respective systems of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms—that is, you hope they are experts who know what they are doing.”

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“The HHS secretary gives his game away when he characterizes his wholesale firing as being “above any pro- or antivaccine agenda.” With respect to his new ACIP appointees, Kennedy promised that “none of these individuals will be ideological anti-vaxxers.” That’s great. After all, an anti-vaccine agenda makes as much sense as anti–automobile repair or anti–computer debugging agendas. The agendas we want are pro–making cars run, pro–computers correctly ciphering, and pro–vaccines that protect against diseases.
However, in looking over the backgrounds of the new ACIP members, several of them can be fairly characterized as being at least anti-vaxxer-adjacent.”

https://reason.com/2025/06/12/under-rfk-jr-vaccine-approval-is-getting-more-politicized-not-less/

Despite What Robert F. Kennedy Wants You To Think, Cell Phones Do Not Cause Brain Cancer

Posted on by Lone Candle

“numerous studies going back to the year 2000 all indicate there is no particular reason to fear cell phones as a cause of cancer, and a new paper by Li Zhang and Joshua Muscat of the Department of Public Health Sciences at Pennsylvania State University examines the most up-to-date data from the United States to examine this question as if for the first time.

Most studies on this question so far have been case-control studies. This type of study is subject to biases (information bias and selection bias) because it selects subjects who already have the disease of interest (in this case, brain cancer). Although prospective studies avoid the biases inherent in case-control studies, they are expensive and difficult to carry out, especially for rare diseases such as brain cancer.

But now researchers can take advantage of the exponential increase in exposure to cell phones since their introduction in the mid-1980s. In the space of several decades, humans have gone from having no exposure—zero percent of the population exposed—to nearly universal exposure. This means that we can take advantage of what is referred to as a “natural experiment,” the approach that Li and Muscat take in their illuminating new study.

An earlier analysis of this type was carried out by the National Cancer Institute. That study showed no evidence of an association between cell phone use and cancer, but the data only went up to 2012. Possibly cell phones had not been in use long enough for an effect to show up. Li and Muscat extend the period of observation by nine years.

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The authors conclude that “these findings suggest that mobile phone use does not appear to be associated with an increased risk of brain cancer, either malignant or benign.””

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“in the face of this evidence, RFK Jr. insists on propagating this debunked claim, and he is sponsoring a study by a discredited researcher that he hopes will provide the answer he favors. This is an unforgivable waste of money that could be spent on addressing an important health issue. But it is also more than that.

From observing RFK Jr., and those he appeals to, we see that the belief in different bogus claims tends to be correlated. A belief that cell phones are causing cancer or that vaccines cause autism can serve as a sentinel indicator of the susceptibility to other false beliefs, such as those targeting pesticides and genetically engineered crops. It’s noteworthy that the prominent anti-biotech advocacy organization U.S. Right-to-Know is anti-vaccine in addition to being fiercely against glyphosate and other pesticides and genetically modified crops.

These, and many others, are zombie risks that never die. It doesn’t matter what the specific risk is. The credulity, the failure to take any commonsense evidence or distillations of the scientific evidence into account, the refusal to value the judgment of experts who have spent untold hours examining the issue, or the conclusions reached by institutions such as the National Institutes of Health, the Institute of Medicine, or the American Cancer Society, into account are the same.

RFK Jr. appears to have an implacable drive to do away with vaccines by undermining public confidence, disrupting insurance coverage, and making it too costly for pharmaceutical companies to produce them, as happened in the 1980s. Exposing his lies is literally a matter of protecting the lives of children and adults from the all-too-real infectious diseases that RFK Jr. doesn’t believe in.”

https://reason.com/2025/06/25/despite-what-robert-f-kennedy-wants-you-to-think-cell-phones-do-not-cause-brain-cancer/

Trump’s $150 Trillion Question | Glenn Loury & Ross Levine | The Glenn Show

Posted on by Lone Candle

Trump’s tariffs are costly, but if Trump takes over the financial power currently held by the Fed, that’s a much more dangerous threat to the prosperity and democracy of the United States. Especially when you combine this with Trump’s other potentially costly actions like limiting science and scientists, Trump’s constellation of bad economic policies could add up to a considerably weaker U.S. economy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne9xsFhc34o

RFK Jr. Hires a Vaccine ‘Skeptic’ To Find the Cause of Autism

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Vaccine “skeptic” David Geier has reportedly been hired by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as a data analyst to oversee a new study probing the possible links between vaccinations and autism.

High-quality research and transparency are not likely outcomes from a project headed by Geier. Geier and his physician father, Mark, have published in a variety of obscure journal articles claiming that vaccines cause autism. Based on those sketchy publications, they began hiring themselves out as “expert witnesses” in hundreds of vaccine-related lawsuits. Mark Geier was stripped of his medical license by the Maryland Board of Physicians over dosing autistic children with his home-brewed treatments.

The Geiers asserted that their research had found that tiny amounts of ethyl mercury preservative (thimerosal) in some vaccines was the culprit behind the rise in autism diagnoses. Interestingly, thimerosal has never been used in the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine that has most widely been blamed for causing autism. However, excepting seasonal flu vaccines, thimerosal in the U.S. was removed from any other vaccines in 1999. Amusingly, the Geiers took note of that fact and published an article in 2006 claiming that autism rates were subsequently declining. As it happens, the rate of autism diagnoses has increased since then. Evidently tiny amounts of mercury in vaccines has nothing to do with autism.

In any case, the claim that vaccines cause autism has been comprehensively debunked.
“The problem with the Geiers’ research is that they start with the answers and work backwards,” said Dr. Steven Black, director of the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center in Oakland, California, in 2005. “They are doing voodoo science.”

By applying his methodology in his new study of the putative relationship between autism and vaccines, Geier will doubtlessly and transparently get the answers that our new secretary of Health and Human Services thinks he already knows.”

https://reason.com/2025/04/03/rfk-jr-hires-a-vaccine-skeptic-to-find-the-cause-of-autism/

A New Study Adds to the Evidence That Drug Busts Result in More Overdose Deaths

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The study included 2,653 drug seizures and 1,833 opioid-related deaths from 2020 to 2023. “Within the surrounding 100, 250, and 500 meters,” RTI International researcher Alex H. Kral and his two co-authors reported in JAMA Network Open on Wednesday, “drug seizures were associated with a statistically significant increase in the relative risk for fatal opioid overdoses.””

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“Prohibition makes drug use more dangerous by creating a black market in which quality and potency are highly variable and unpredictable. Ramped-up enforcement of prohibition magnifies that problem, as dramatically demonstrated by the deadly impact of restricting access to pain medication at the same time that illicit fentanyl was proliferating as a heroin booster and substitute.”

https://reason.com/2025/03/20/a-new-study-adds-to-the-evidence-that-drug-busts-result-in-more-overdose-deaths/