During the Obama administration, he was concerned about vaccines causing autism and it showed when it came to guidance about swine flu vaccines. His administration banned multi-use vials because of his party's insistence that preservatives caused the disorder.
Astronomers have speculated that black holes eat slowly. A recent paper argues that their computer simulation shows just the opposite. Don't get too excited, this is still a computer simulation about theoretical physics, which isn't out there with science-fiction but is limited by the fact that we know very little about black holes - including how fast they consume the universe around them. The new estimate is that a black hole can tear apart space-time and consume the accretion disk of material around it in months, rather than the hundreds of years that some believe.
When a pandemic is happening in real time, it's only possible to know in hindsight what was a successful mitigation strategy, what was hype to help a presidential candidate, or even what was suppressed for geopolitical interests.There is no question mitigation was good, but political and corporate media pressure to keep the world locked down and terrified into 2022 was always immunologically suspect. Many lives their lost due to the pandemic, some lost their lives because it was suggested people should not seek medical care due to imagery of COVID bodies stacked in parking lots, but a whole lot of damage won't be known for a decade or more.
In the past, you may have seen various 'we detected X in urine' papers endorsed by suspect names like homeopathy believer Phil Landrigan and endorsed by organic industry apologist Chuck Benbrook.What do such claims even mean? In science, nothing. We can detect anything in anything now, but groups like Heartland Health Research Alliance Ltd are prized by litigators who sue "at the drop of a rat" and need any detection in humans - bonus points if they can claim pregnant women - of any chemical that can kill a mouse at 10,000 times a real-world dose. Any reason to send a teary press release sent to the New York Times.(1)
The International Agency for Research on Cancer(IARC) was once so heralded in a field so rigorous and methodologically conservative that epidemiologists were last to accept a hereditary aspect of cancer. That's right, they didn't see enough evidence to think family history of cancer mattered, and only agreed when overwhelming data were found. They were so thorough that when they declared smoking caused cancer, Big Tobacco was doomed.
If you go to social media, you can see a lot of suspect claims about fad diets, unapproved medical devices, therapies, and conspiracy theories. Many of them have names with "Dr." attached.How is the public to know a "Dr." may be a PhD or an EdD or an osteropath or someone else who didn't go to medical school and become an M.D.? How should physicians respond? From the years 1998 to 2021, coastal states in the US led America in vaccine denial, were doctors supposed to tell their patients they were stupid for believing vaccines cause autism?(1)
With rampant inflation, an economy whose only baffling bragging right is that it gained back 80 percent of the jobs lost since the Biden administration began, and mortgage rates increasing the most since Jimmy Carter was president, calls are on to subsidize more housing for the poor.
The world is in a tough spot with antibiotics. Because they came into use in 1928, to the public they seem like they should all be generic and cost a dollar. Yet due to expensive new regulations passed this century pharmaceutical companies don't have much interest in new ones.(1)
Chronic lyme disease does not exist, but if you say it does long enough, a scholar will begin to study it, and then others will cite 'emerging evidence', and journalists will 'teach the controversy', and soon enough doctors who don't want to get sued will sign off, no differently than California pediatricians gave wealthy parents vaccine exemptions to prevent autism during the first two decades of this century.
Half a decade ago, France's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) tried to fight for its credibility in the face of a scientific onslaught against their latest epidemiology findings by actually lowering the "risk" of something.Like everyone else, when it was announced they were 'studying' it - in IARC, that only means mouse models that support claims of cancer and surveys that can be linked to cancer - I assumed they would finally do what they had wanted to do since the early 2000s; declare coffee a carcinogen.And get $15,000 an hour expert witness contracts from lawyers who could then sue, claiming someone who cut the lawn and drank a cup of coffee got cancer due to the coffee.
The American Heart Association is concerned that stroke and heart attack survivors don't think enough about 'risk' of LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol, now colloquially termed 'bad' cholesterol.
Prior to the Olympics in Beijing, China solved a pollution problem they previously claimed they never had by banning all cars except those for communist party elites. It did little for CO2, Beijing had a PM10 (smog) problem, but it showed drastic interventions could help the air.
If a school doesn't have a strong sports program, universities that have seen faculty and administrative salaries skyrocket have used the unlimited student loan debt program created in the late 1980s to fund growth. Yet a few years prior to that, a science fundraising option had also been made available.In 1980, Democrats passed the Bayh-Dole Act and it reversed long-standing policy that if a discovery was made using taxpayer-funding, it could not be privately monetized. It became possible for scientists who did applied work to start a company or sell a patent so a corporation even if the American people had paid for it.
