The hydroxychloroquine debacle is one thing because there's no way as a layman to gauge that. It's still wrong, but I understand that people were worried and there's no intuitive route to "this won't help".
This feels like something where even laymen should be skeptical. Baseline, disinfectants are generally not medicine. Really, I would hope our education system was good enough that people hear "chlorinated disinfectant" and can jump to "probably an oxidizer and very bad for living things".
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.
In my unbroken experience, they possess a demonstrated ability to believe in trivially disproven lies.
You can still have and respect beliefs, but distinguishing fact from belief is purely in the realm of philosophical debate. That doesn’t mean you have to accept absence of absolute truth or facts, but there is much we don’t know and that we think we know but we don’t, and that is logical and illogical. Life is dichotomy.
lots of _oofs_ while reading his page. ron, i was not familiar with your game.
“The House Select Committee on the January 6, 2021, Capitol Attack revealed that Johnson's aide Sean Riley texted Chris Hodgson, an aide to Vice President Mike Pence, to request that Johnson personally give Pence an envelope containing alternate electors for Michigan and Wisconsin, which were later determined to be fraudulent. Hodgson refused to do so. In March 2022, Johnson's campaign hired Pam Travis as a full-time aide, although she had signed a statement as one of Wisconsin's ten "fake electors," who challenged the legitimacy of the state's delegation to the Electoral College. While walking outside the Capitol and pretending to be on a phone call, Johnson claimed he was not aware of the contents of the envelope.”
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.
The War On Ivermectin – Jenna McCarthy
Written with Jenna McCarthy, Dr. Kory’s story chronicles the personal
attacks, professional setbacks, and nefarious efforts of the world’s major
health agencies and medical journals to dismiss and deny ivermectin’s
efficacy.
jennamccarthy.com/portfolio-items/the-war-on-ivermectin-cloned
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.
“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 CarlinIt's not primarily merit based though is it? It's very much about who has more money these days or is that wrong?
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.
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".
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.