The undermining of science has given people like this more of a voice. US leadership has got to the point where science is largely disregarded and leaders just impose whatever they think is true regardless of facts.
Scientific method is practical. Scientific fact is a belief system, not unlike religion. This doesn’t undermine science, it’s just stating what these things are. Scientific belief can be helpful.
These silly beliefs though can be harmful as is the case with Chlorine Dioxide and that horse deworming medicine they said would cure Covid.
Don’t confuse or try to link these things together. The reason that the government is now full of idiots is that people voted those idiots in. It wasn’t due to clarity that science is part belief system.
They always say "more research is needed", overlooking the extensive research already done. At concentrations required for antimicrobial effects, chlorine dioxide poses serious toxicity risks - endangering the patient rather than helping them. You’d think these same people would have been dismissed after pushing ivermectin during COVID, but here we are.
They’re going to milk this market for all it’s worth. The reason they’re still around is because they have money and the people around them keep enabling them because money.
I'm sorry to be a pedantic about this, but we are absolutely not living through Idiocracy. In the movie, the President wants to better the material conditions of his people, then seeks and listens to the advice of the smartest person in the world, who successfully delivers.
If you want a movie, we are actually living in Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator.
Are we sure his coauthor is Jenna McCarthy? Also, the article was impressive in how it kept getting worse. A good reminder I need to donate to ProPublica.
> “They’re throwing up and vomiting and having diarrhea and rashes,” Eaton said … Some adherents advise parents that the disturbing effects indicate that the treatment is working, ridding the body of impurities
A time traveler from the 17th Century would be familiar with this sort of quackery. I guess not everyone can sell alchemy, so some make do with other branches of “science”.
Funny you should say that. I was reminded of Paracelcus who had the idea 'Only the dose makes the poison'. He was thinking that low doses of poisonous substances could be curative ... similar to this idea of using chlorine dioxide, with the crucial point here being the amount that is safe is tiny.
Summarising, the idea of toxicity of chemicals and dosage was first explored by an alchemist (Paracelcus) in the 1500s, which is the 16th C. - so yes, 17th C. medics might have been able to point out how crazy this all is, let alone 21st C. people of any kind.
“Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians.
Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky.
They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families,
American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities,
and they are elected by American citizens.
This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.
If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good;
you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans.
So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public.
Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope.'”
- George Carlin
I half-jokingly believe that MAHA is the answer the Fermi Paradox.
As technology/civilization progresses gains become more demanding, it requires a species to exploit increasingly subtler, smaller-scale and longer-term aspects of reality itself. Feedback loops go from hours to months to decades. An abacus is large and accessible to all, a relay switch is still large but not very accessible, basic lithography already requires very fine control of light and EUV processes are just insane. It's not just that things get smaller, but the timelines get longer and you have to start relying on very specific analytical work to achieve anything. Whether computing, medicine, energy, etc, everything is subject to this trend.
Our brains haven't evolved for this kind of work, and being able to perform it is probably just a happy accident. To a lot of people small, subtle, long-term effects just aren't real. Only macro-scale effects and short feedback loops are real, which is why the current MAHA health crazy is heavily focused on weights, food etc. Simple things they can understand and control. A graph of infection rates between control and experimental groups are not real. Graphs of carbon concentrations are not real, graphs in general are not real. All that stuff is "fake email jobs".
There's no reason to think our savannah-produced monkey brains can cope with the demands of technology so advanced that we become "aliens".
This will continue to happen so long as two things continue to exist:
1) diseases and conditions refractory to treatment or cure by modern medicine
2) expenses related to medical care being born by Americans at a personal level
If you look at other countries, there are absolutely people in positions of power who still push quack medicine because of 1), but 2) creates an extra incentive for desperate or overeager people to try quack medicine.
Trying to ban these people always seems like a terrible idea, it just leads to the inevitable claims that they must be right because the government is after them.
In the case of ivermectin, because it's relatively safe (In human doses, not horse doses) it would have been interesting to see how conspiracy theorists reacted if the government just gave it to anyone that requested it.
Long term, we need far, far, more funding for research into treatments that actually work.
Even short term that could help, if people are accessing experimental treatments through clinical trials they won't be desperate enough to try fake treatments. The main reason people use alternative medicine is because conventional medicine has failed them, so they cling on to anything that will give them hope.
In case you wanted more information than the headline, here's the subhead:
Wisconsin's Ron Johnson has a history of spreading vaccine misinformation. Now he's giving credence to assertions about the therapeutic powers of chlorine dioxide, a disinfectant and deodorizer.
> He’s promoted disproven treatments for COVID-19 and claimed, without evidence, that athletes are “dropping dead on the field” after getting the COVID-19 vaccination.
It’s interesting how prevalent lies and claims without evidence have become. And one lie gives another one the space to be accepted. At risk of making a claim without evidence myself, I feel like there is some link between claiming Haitians are eating dogs and claiming that athletes are dying after vaccination.
Another aspect is some lies have a small truth. Like maybe the claim that an athlete died after vaccination has one example. But that doesn’t mean it is true in general or that the athlete didn’t have some special situation. I see a lot of generalizations casually tossed around these days, especially in American politics.
Yes, there was an athlete or small number of athletes who died. It happens sometimes, it happened before COVID also. A seemingly very healthy person just drops dead. But it was seized upon and made big news, at least where it suited the agenda being pushed.
For some of the replies here: EVERY vaccine licensed for use in the united states has clinical review documents (100+ pages) detailing the reactogenicity/immunogenicity of the vaccine in question. These findings result from excellent experimental design
What's happening is that politicians are slowly realizing that they no longer get punished for lying. At some point people got so worn down by more sophisticated half-truths that a large portion of the voter base just don't care about how true rhetoric is anymore. That plus the veil of civility that seems to prevent effective counter messaging mean lying blatantly is actually an effective strategy.
Scientific method is practical. Scientific fact is a belief system, not unlike religion. This doesn’t undermine science, it’s just stating what these things are. Scientific belief can be helpful.
These silly beliefs though can be harmful as is the case with Chlorine Dioxide and that horse deworming medicine they said would cure Covid.
Don’t confuse or try to link these things together. The reason that the government is now full of idiots is that people voted those idiots in. It wasn’t due to clarity that science is part belief system.
They’re going to milk this market for all it’s worth. The reason they’re still around is because they have money and the people around them keep enabling them because money.
If you want a movie, we are actually living in Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator.
A time traveler from the 17th Century would be familiar with this sort of quackery. I guess not everyone can sell alchemy, so some make do with other branches of “science”.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_dioxide#Safety_issues... the EPA "has set a maximum level of 0.8 mg/L for chlorine dioxide in drinking water", which is certainly much higher than the amounts in MMS.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Mineral_Supplement (for example) - "Following a May 2010 advisory which indicated that MMS exceeds tolerable levels of sodium chlorite by a factor of 200".
Summarising, the idea of toxicity of chemicals and dosage was first explored by an alchemist (Paracelcus) in the 1500s, which is the 16th C. - so yes, 17th C. medics might have been able to point out how crazy this all is, let alone 21st C. people of any kind.
It's been 500 years, people.
It's not primarily merit based though is it? It's very much about who has more money these days or is that wrong?
As technology/civilization progresses gains become more demanding, it requires a species to exploit increasingly subtler, smaller-scale and longer-term aspects of reality itself. Feedback loops go from hours to months to decades. An abacus is large and accessible to all, a relay switch is still large but not very accessible, basic lithography already requires very fine control of light and EUV processes are just insane. It's not just that things get smaller, but the timelines get longer and you have to start relying on very specific analytical work to achieve anything. Whether computing, medicine, energy, etc, everything is subject to this trend.
Our brains haven't evolved for this kind of work, and being able to perform it is probably just a happy accident. To a lot of people small, subtle, long-term effects just aren't real. Only macro-scale effects and short feedback loops are real, which is why the current MAHA health crazy is heavily focused on weights, food etc. Simple things they can understand and control. A graph of infection rates between control and experimental groups are not real. Graphs of carbon concentrations are not real, graphs in general are not real. All that stuff is "fake email jobs".
There's no reason to think our savannah-produced monkey brains can cope with the demands of technology so advanced that we become "aliens".
1) diseases and conditions refractory to treatment or cure by modern medicine
2) expenses related to medical care being born by Americans at a personal level
If you look at other countries, there are absolutely people in positions of power who still push quack medicine because of 1), but 2) creates an extra incentive for desperate or overeager people to try quack medicine.
Well I guess you cannot be too stupid to be in Congress. The place were unemployable people end up.
In the case of ivermectin, because it's relatively safe (In human doses, not horse doses) it would have been interesting to see how conspiracy theorists reacted if the government just gave it to anyone that requested it.
Even short term that could help, if people are accessing experimental treatments through clinical trials they won't be desperate enough to try fake treatments. The main reason people use alternative medicine is because conventional medicine has failed them, so they cling on to anything that will give them hope.
Wisconsin's Ron Johnson has a history of spreading vaccine misinformation. Now he's giving credence to assertions about the therapeutic powers of chlorine dioxide, a disinfectant and deodorizer.
It’s interesting how prevalent lies and claims without evidence have become. And one lie gives another one the space to be accepted. At risk of making a claim without evidence myself, I feel like there is some link between claiming Haitians are eating dogs and claiming that athletes are dying after vaccination.
Another aspect is some lies have a small truth. Like maybe the claim that an athlete died after vaccination has one example. But that doesn’t mean it is true in general or that the athlete didn’t have some special situation. I see a lot of generalizations casually tossed around these days, especially in American politics.