Being the opposition to science in academia is a good place to be. They can get a publication to check off that annual box and nothing much will change. They won't get any blame.
Yet with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now in government they should start to worry, because he believes epidemiology is science, and their doom-and-gloom paper lamenting that a hand-picked group of 31 adults and 11 children in California’s San Joaquin Valley showing 22% of adults and 10% of kids had "detectable" levels of pesticides could lead to actual bans.
Such bans will harm the poor, something epidemiologists should worry about a lot more than banning harmless products if they care about people.
Academics, riding a 40-year wave of unlimited student loans created thanks to their party in Congress, are no longer poor, the average income for a professor is double what people 20 years older make(1) That privileged status means epidemiologists only have to think about the poor in a White Savior way. They must be protected from Evil Corporations because Science Is A Vast-Right Wing Conspiracy.(2)
Epidemiologists should be worried because Kennedy agrees with them about all of that. Scientists are bad, raw milk is good, vaccines create harm, and agricultural chemicals must be banned unless they are "organic certified."(3) One country was dumb enough to listen to white progressive activists who think 'detectable' is the same as 'harmful' and put it into policy. That country was Sri Lanka. Food riots just a few months later nearly toppled the government.
The first rule of government needs to be that you don't listen to epidemiologists when scientists in biology, chemistry, and toxicology can show they're wrong. Even if you are a Democrat for the last 60 years or a Republican starting in 2025, the dose still makes the poison.
Yet epidemiologists have routinely promoted hysteria. The recent paper invoked chlorpyrifos, for example, a pesticide used for 60 years they note "has been linked to neurologic damage in children." Except "linked" means it was just another epidemiologist who looked at a map showing where pesticides are used, look for "damage" in kids, which is actually behavioral conditions like autism, which had a surge in diagnoses in California, and declared statistical significance.
That is not science. It shouldn't be policy. Yet epidemiologists who continue to promote scary narratives about science claiming 1 dose is the same as 10,000 doses in harm are giddy they will actually matter.
NOTES:
(1) And they are so protected they can be sitting in a foreign jail cell and demand a raise because their six-figure salary is only 18th highest - in one department. At one public school.
(2) When the real threat poor people face is from inflation caused by a $4 trillion stimulus plan that overwhelmingly benefited 16,000,000 government employees. The poor must now also suffer paying $11-per-dozen for eggs because organic farmers refuse to give sick chickens medicine or pasteurize milk. While companies that sell "raw" pet food will kill 50% of cats due to H5N1 being spread in it.
All ideas that Kennedy endorses, along with 80% of the California coast.
(3) When he was a Natural Resources Defense Council attorney that litigation group insisted his beliefs were "mainstream" but now even environmental lawyers have to worry if his beliefs actually become mainstream.
They make money off of corporate fat, if a lot more poor people are created due to expensive food, the $3 billion environmental industry is in peril.
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