In the early days of Christianity, after it was a tiny minority and therefore easy to blame for incompetent government choices (Nero, using a tactic politicians still use today) but before it was the dominant religion, the government did something smart; they ignored it.

They didn't have to punish Christians who refused to pay respect to the statue of the Emperor if the government had never asked them to do so in the first place.(1)

That is why the Biden government is smart to ban brominated vegetable oil a short while after California did. California is in violation of the Constitution, but President Biden already has over 30 percent of Democrats who don't want him to run for re-election, and California being a progressive state means they are anti-Israel compared to liberal Democrats elsewhere, and he supported Israel against Palestinian terrorists so coastal elites like at Harvard and Berkeley are already bothered by him. He basically cannot make any more enemies in his own political party.

So a decision to ban brominated vegetable oil based on sketchy data is terrible science, but good politics. Rats are not little people, yet that is the only evidence that "suggests" - the most useless word in science - a correlation between the oil and human disease. 

It is not science, not even close. What is science is that bromine keeps products from 'separating' and generally being disgusting. Yet the Biden administration is saying the lack of science is why they are banning it - they claim "unresolved safety questions."

What isn't an "unresolved safety question" if you can overdose a rat and cause a disease with a product but it has never happened in humans? Bromine is also found in fire suppressants, though, and progressives generally believe any dose is a poison, so that was a no-brainer for Democratic appointees in charge of FDA now.

Large brands stopped using it in the 1970s, weirdly outlets like NBC still mention that brands like Gatorade and Coca-Cola used to use it, to make it seem relevant, but California does not pay much attention to the US government(2), they instead follow European epidemiology claims.(3) 

Look for the Biden administration to ban Red Dye No. 3 next - because California already did and, as I noted, he can't stand up to California on science any more than Lebanon can stand up to Hezbollah on terrorism. It will topple the national government if either fight back.

So sorry, kids, you won't be allowed to have delicious Peeps as treats next Easter, government-funded epidmiologists gave a rat cancer with it so it must be removed from existence.

NOTES:

(1) There were obviously blips, Decius for example, was a terrible Roman Emperor in every possible way, and he attempted to persecute Christians, but he also died like a moron in a battle everyone but him knew he was hopefully unqualified to lead.

 (2) They demand a waiver from federal fuel emissions standard to force people to pay more for cars, and special gas formulations for those cars, and they force poor people to subsidize Mallbu solar installations but when reliance on solar and wind is causing brownouts they tell the federal government they need to be exempt from federal pollution standards so they can burn all the natural gas and coil they want. 

 (3) Yet they shouldn't. Even Europeans who visit California why everything in California has a cancer warning label claiming it causes cancer - except apparently only for Californians. California abdicated its science policy to the French International Agency for Research on Cancer, and in the following decades as IARC became overrun with epidemiologists under contract with environmental lawyers, and have classified numerous compounds as possible carcinogens - using no science, just dead rats and taking surveys of people asking if they ate Product X and got Disease Y.

Nothing is more stupid than the white board in a California oncology ward scaring patients that it causes cancer - in the one section of a hospital where people already have cancer.


For obvious reasons, the California doctor who sent this to me wishes to remain anonymous.