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.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) was once a serious, revered organization with the somber task of tackling what environmental factors caused what cancers so that we could eliminate them.(1)And they did. Their decisions for the first 20 years were rock solid - there is no debate now that cigarettes, smog, and alcohol will kill you, especially if you routinely have high doses. When California chose to abdicated its science policymaking to a French group, there were concerns that its power might be abused but they were dismissed because there was no indication IARC was heading in that direction.
The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC is promoting a doomsday shortage where America is without 47-122,000 physicians, over a third of them being general practitioners, by 2032 and say it is due to the “graying” of America, both among providers and the public.
Just over a year ago I testified before a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel in support of the iQOS device, a smoking replacement tool that heats tobacco but doesn't ignite it.
There is a big difference between a trial lawyer convincing a jury in one of America's most anti-science regions that an herbicide that only acts on plants might be able to cause human cancer, and scientists with knowledge of chemistry, biology, and toxicology who know better.
Cows and chickens will never go extinct because they are food, and some useless critters like Aedes aegypti have managed to tough it all despite being just disease vectors. For everything else, it can be a crap shoot. Nature is out to kill us all.
A new index of scientific output has been released and it finds that the United States continues to dominate in research, bolstered by the private sector accounting for nearly 70 percent of science funding, where most other developed countries instead rely on government. The analysis factored in the number researchers as percentage of population, patents, papers released, and GDP spending.
When we think of Mt. Everest, it's usually imagery like Sir Edmund Hillary and his guide Tenzing Norgay in parkas and with oxygen tanks making the hazardous 29.000 climb. And then there are the dead bodies, nearly 300 of them, those who perished on the trek to the summit.What we don't think of is a man running, yet that is what Kilian Jornet Burgada did part of the way in famous photos - and then after 26 hours and 31 minutes, the fastest climb ever(1), he came back down, rested, and did it again, all within a week.
Poor people live in areas with more pollution, but pollution is relative in 2019.
Environmentalists may hate science but they love to ignore inconvenient truths about alcohol - namely that it is a toxic carcinogen the way they wish BPA, atrazine, fracking, vaccines (insert whatever they are raising money on this week) could be.
Zooey Deschanel, whose picture could be in the dictionary under "adorkable" thanks to starring roles in "Elf" and "New Girl", isn't well regarded in science, and hasn't been since for as long as she's been undermining it, which is as long as people have known her name. That's now a long time, since "Almost Famous" is about to turn 20.
In the movie "Erin Brockovich", actress Julia Roberts portrayed a clerk who got energy company PG&E worried enough about a jury being scared of science they wrote her boss a giant check. Because Hollywood is in California, the state government was motivated to declare the compound harmful and put in tighter restrictions.The concern from the science community was that no one was being harmed. It's a slippery slope from demonizing a scary sounding chemical in water to doing the same thing to vaccines or weedkillers. Which is exactly what has happened, and California has led the way in both cases.
There are various groups that claim to care about the environment and put on expensive seminars with corporate sponsors (i.e. FoodTank) that just happen to align with the ideological goals of their industry friends (i.e. FoodTank with organic food) and then some misguided agricultural and food companies also spend money hoping to buy some cultural goodwill.
That won't work, they are in a war of extinction against regular farming. What will work is showing how biology can lead to reduced spoilage, and therefore less food waste.
