Health disinformation & pseudoscience promotion will likely get much worse.
People who oppose public safety & human health are never right.
Health disinformation & pseudoscience promotion will likely get much worse.
It's really unlikely that there will be any policy reforms in the US to combat medical misinformation any time soon. We now live under an anti-vax federal government regime in the U.S. which will likely have tragic public health ramifications worldwide.
CIDRAP - During pandemic, ivermectin use rose 10-fold, hydroxychloroquine use doubled, study reveals - Stephanie Soucheray, MA February 24, 2025 "Our findings underscore the urgent need for policy reforms to combat misinformation and mistrust in scientific institutions," said John Mafi, MD, MPH, the senior study author, in a press release from the University of California Los Angeles. "Eliminating undue industry influence in government, enhancing transparency around scientific uncertainty, and earmarking public funding for clinical trials of new drugs are good places to start."
It's more important than ever to pause before believing anything you find online, especially from influencers on social media, including Tiktok, Youtube, and yes even Bluesky. Let me tell you about my "discover" feed on Bluesky. If I post the word disabled or disability or related words, for the next few hours and maybe a day or so I get served posts by influencers who are promoting "life hacks" and supplements, and I get followed by spammy accounts pushing such things. We may have moved away from twitter to bluesky, but the same problems have followed the people to the new watering hole.
The truth is that we may never solve the problem of snake oil and quackery because the people who fall for it usually have been failed in some other way by the healthcare system or the community. Then sadly, the people who do know better often tend to treat those people who don't like absolute shit. They write them off, ridicule them, call them "idiots", and present as a hostile enemy. Who wouldn't run from that? The sick burns satisfy the dopamine and they wind up trying to work out all their venting and rage in public with a real mean streak. It was even reported in The New York Times that many doctors don't like having disabled people as patients. That leaves a door wide open for dubious actors.
The Long Covid thing is even worse, because there are no proven treatments for it, and so people with Long Covid are sitting ducks for every supplement advertisement and every weird unproven treatment, and the organizations rubberstamp dangerous self-experimentation, and nobody seems to want to rigorously call out very questionable and expensive treatments as folly, even though such unhappy stories are rampant. Almost a year ago I went through a bunch of treatments one particular person documented trying on Reddit. Today this person is posting anti-vax covid content on Youtube, and promoting the same theories that are the basis of quack treatments he tried unsuccessfully.
Whenever Long Covid sufferers talk about their experience, they always highlight taking a pile of OTC pills, and organizations seem to endorse this by picturing a pile of bottles sometimes so numerous it can't possibly be safe to take them all, and I worry the attempt at demonstrating something is just normalizing it. It seems to be marketing to recreate the scenes that were common in highlighting HIV patients and all the pills they have to take to prevent AIDS, but in those situations they were proven and prescribed approved pills taken under the care of a physician or clinic, not just OTC products and experimenting with supplements.
And the anti-vax stuff that's thoroughly become accepted in Long Covid circles is problematic. I warned people a couple of years ago that this alliance was toxic. I was afraid to be too assertive about this because I didn't want to drive even more traffic to anti-vax ideas. (This is always a problem with deciding how to warn people.) But now it does seem like Long Covid research will fall by the wayside, and more people are finding out what I've known for a long time - that a lot of Long Covid science researchers are actually networked up with anti-vaxxers, some who sell cures, and are more obviously now pivoting to so-called vaccine conditions instead, likely to follow the politics.
If someone really cared about the effects of what they were publishing, they would be doing mea culpas, retractions, taking their name off stuff. A senior author could take their name off and stop an entire publication, for example, if there were say conflicts of interest that weren't included up front, or connected to influencers in organizations claiming without evidence that the risk is bigger than it is, or the science contained in the study just wasn’t that great, or maybe the recruitment for the study might be questionable.
What I’m sure about is that doctors shouldn’t be promoting supplements that were initially promoted by anti-vaxxers for protecting against the bogus anti-vax nonsense of “vaccine shedding”. Sadly, there’s a huge amount of disinformation that is target marketed with minor tweaks to both people who take covid seriously and covid deniers.
🗞️ In the news
Reuters - Kennedy proposes scrapping public comment on major US health policies By Ahmed Aboulenein, Julie Steenhuysen and Michael Erman February 28, 20254:54 PM EST Proposal affects major agencies like FDA and CDC - The move effectively ends a policy in place since 1971 - Policy shift puts Kennedy's transparency pledge in question
WBUR - Canceled meetings and confusion: NIH grant funding in limbo despite court injunction - February 24, 2025 Anna Rubenstein Marder said she has received funding from NIH for many years through a series of grants. She relies on this money to fund her lab and train the next generation of scientists. One of her grants was scheduled for a council meeting on Wednesday, Feb. 12. But the day before that, on Feb. 11, Marder learned the meeting had been canceled. She said she has no idea when it will be rescheduled and is worried the clock will run out. “If everything turns on three weeks from now, nothing will be irreversible,” said Marder. “But if it goes on for nine months or a year, basically all of my people will be gone.” Marder said she has held meetings with her staff and hates not having answers for them. “The ambiguity and lack of clarity in what's going to happen is incredibly demoralizing to them,” she said. “I can't protect them from the irrationality of what may or may not happen.” The confusion over federal health programs began on President Trump's second day in office.
The New Republic - Hafiz Rashid / February 27, 2025 Trump Struggles to Rehire Bird Flu Experts as Egg Prices Skyrocket The Trump administration is desperately trying to correct a grave miscalculation. The Trump administration is having trouble bringing back fired avian flu experts to take on the spread of the disease, which has caused egg prices to skyrocket. Earlier this month, the administration fired 25 percent of the employees in an office testing for avian flu, as well as scientists and inspectors, as part of its mass purge of federal workers. The layoffs partially shut down a research facility at the Department of Agriculture, interrupting anti-bird flu efforts. Administration officials are attempting to tout a $1 billion plan to combat the disease, as well as plans to import eggs from overseas. But that plan doesn’t include bringing back fired avian flu workers, whom the USDA is struggling to rehire. The agency is running into logistical issues as well as skeptical ex-employees, some of whom aren’t convinced they should return as Trump and Elon Musk continue to fire federal workers indiscriminately. “I don’t know if people are going to want to come back,” one anonymous USDA employee told Politico. “Now there’s this perception that federal jobs are not secure. I think they permanently damaged these services.”
ProPublica - Speaker Mike Johnson Is Living in a D.C. House That Is the Center of a Pastor’s Secretive Influence Campaign by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski Feb. 28, 2025, 9:45 a.m. EST The Capitol Hill townhouse is owned by a major Republican donor. It’s the headquarters of a little-known political influence project that has reached a number of powerful Republican politicians. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Berger said in a sermon that he’d advised “some congressmen” to see the conflict through the lens of Ezekiel 38 and 39, parts of the Bible some see as prophesying a great war before the Second Coming. He did not specify what that meant from a policy perspective. An energetic 60-year-old with a white goatee and penchant for preaching in sneakers and jeans, Berger has strong views on a wide range of issues, including economic policy and public health. He is vehemently opposed to the World Health Organization, which Trump moved to withdraw the U.S. from last month, and recently predicted that COVID-19 vaccines will result in “young people dropping dead all over the place.” He attacked the World Economic Forum at length in a recent sermon, accusing it of “taking advantage” of COVID-19 “to implement their satanic plot.”
CIDRAP. Saudi Arabia announces $500 million commitment to end polio News brief February 24, 2025 Stephanie Soucheray, MA The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) said today during the fourth Riyadh International Humanitarian Forum that Saudi Arabia has formally committed $500 million to end global polio.
AP - A Texas child who was not vaccinated has died of measles, a first for the US in a decade By DEVI SHASTRI and AMANDA SEITZ Updated 8:36 PM EST, February 26, 2025 In federal response, RFK Jr. appears to misstate several facts Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official and a vaccine critic, said Wednesday that the U.S. Department of the Health and Human Services is watching cases and dismissed the Texas outbreak as “not unusual.” He appeared to misstate a number of facts, including a claim that most who had been hospitalized were there only for “quarantine.” Dr. Lara Johnson at Covenant contested that characterization. “We don’t hospitalize patients for quarantine purposes,” said Johnson, the chief medical officer.
CIDRAP - 4 in 10 Minnesota COVID survivors report having at least 1 lingering symptom - News brief January 14, 2025 Adults who were vaccinated at the time of their first COVID-19 infection were less likely to report lingering symptoms than unvaccinated respondents. Similar to national study findings, participants who completed the primary COVID-19 vaccination series and at least one booster dose had a 30% lower risk of long-COVID symptoms than their unvaccinated peers. "Nearly half of those who experienced a long-lasting symptom said they had visited a health care provider about a new health issue after their COVID-19 infection, however, only 9% were told by their provider that they may have long COVID," the report said.
Kash Patel to work from home while Trump claims federal employees who telework are "not working".
And wow, I wonder why he wants to work from this home so bad, which isn't even his own.
The New Republic - Hafiz Rashid/ February 28, 2025 Kash Patel Wants to Work From Home for FBI. But Who Does He Live With? The new FBI director says he plans to WFH and run things remotely from Las Vegas. But why won’t he answer about who else lives in his house? Kash Patel’s appointment as FBI director seems to be coming with conditions: He wants to live part-time in Las Vegas and work remotely, far away from FBI headquarters in Washington. Why Las Vegas? Patel has long called the city home, but what’s most intriguing is his actual place of residence. The FBI director lives at a home owned by Robert Muldoon, a Republican Party megadonor who runs shady time-share companies, reported the Nevada Independent earlier this month. Muldoon has been sued over allegations of running a “bait and switch” scheme in his time-shares, where “owners” didn’t actually own their properties and were gouged for fees at the same time. Muldoon appears to have a history of cozying up to law enforcement officials. He has donated a lot of money to the political campaigns of former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, whose office received multiple complaints about Muldoon’s businesses but never pursued them. And apart from sharing an address with Patel, Muldoon also has intricate business dealings with him, utilizing the same incorporation and legal services. Patel and Muldoon even took a golf trip together to Scotland back when the FBI director was a federal employee on the National Security Council, which could be an ethics violation
New FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino never stopped promoting anti-vax nonsense for political attention.
Claims of Covid Vaccine Injuries and Deaths Revive Protest Movement Street rallies, legal conferences, and suspicions about "sudden" deaths show that anti-vax propaganda hasn't gone away — it's just evolving January 24, 2023 Miles Klee On Monday, Fox News host Dan Bongino opened his daily podcast on a topic that seemed like old news: Covid-19 vaccines. He brought them up after first complaining that fellow conservatives had gotten “bogged down” in the story about classified documents seized from President Biden‘s Delaware home and former Washington, D.C., office, “because the left are absolute experts at misdirection,” he said. Instead, Bongino wanted to focus on what he sees as a growing sense of distrust among those who had received vaccines and boosters. “I’m sensing an enormous cultural shift here, folks,” he said, arguing that even Democrats were having second thoughts.
Conservatives have admitted to running ad campaigns to convince liberals to be anti-mask, so I don't doubt there's been target marketing of anti-vax aimed at democrats.
People who oppose public safety & human health are never right.
This is an example of Kaiser Family Foundation and MedPage Today conforming to manufacture consent, by introducing the topic this way in a PR piece that is of course outrageous clickbait material.
MedPage Today - The COVID 'Contrarians' Are in Power. We Haven't Hashed Out Whether They Were Right. — "This is an open question that needs to be confronted," said a Princeton political scientist by Arthur Allen, KFF Health News February 22, 2025Now, the "contrarians" are seizing the reins: President Donald Trump has nominated Bhattacharya to lead the NIH and Johns Hopkins University surgeon Marty Makary, MD, MPH, to run the FDA. Yet the polarized disagreements about what worked and what didn't in the fight against the biggest public health disaster in modern times have yet to be aired in a nonpartisan setting -- and it seems unlikely they ever will be.
This is not an open question, it's been confronted and confronted, over and over again throughout the pandemic and this was all hammered out pre-pandemic, over many decades by healthcare professionals and public health experts.
Then a bunch of right-wing anti-vaxxers and fellow travelers came along and politicized it all in order to advance their own interests.
Why would anyone ask a political scientist if pandemic deniers are right about public health and safety? Why would a political scientist have any say at all in my healthcare choices? I don’t want the pseudoscientists, eugenicists, or political hacks involved in my healthcare.
My letter to reps:
People who oppose public health & public safety have no business making decisions for me and my healthcare. The Musk-Trump administration has inserted pseudoscientists, eugenicists, and political hacks into government agencies against all sense and reason in order to advance their own interests. These people cannot be trusted. All of this needs huge oversight because we have a right not to have bonkers nonsense healthcare scams perpetrated upon us.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
Quote:
"Sometimes, crackdowns do happen, but even in those cases, the nonviolent campaigns were outperforming the violent ones by 2 to 1. It turns out that when security forces beat up, arrest, or even shoot unarmed activists, there is indeed safety in numbers. Large, well-coordinated campaigns can shift between tactics that are concentrated, like protests or demonstrations, to tactics of dispersion, where people stay away from places they were expected to go. They do strikes, they bang on pots and pans, they stay at home, they shut off their electricity at a coordinated time of day. These tactics are much less risky, they're very hard, or at least very costly to suppress, but the movement stays just as disruptive. What happens in these countries once the dust settles? It turns out that the way you resist matters in the long run too. Most strikingly, countries in which people wage nonviolent struggle were way more likely to emerge with democratic institutions than countries in which they wage violent struggle." – Erica Chenoweth