Category: Politics and Regulation
Wearables and Wellness Populism: How Smart Watches Got MAHA’d
Fifteen years ago, then-contributor Peter Lipson wrote a short post on this blog that I’ve reflected on many times since. Titled Your Disease, Your Fault, Peter described a central theme that runs through nearly every variant of alternative medicine: That illness is preventable, and therefore, your fault. According to this worldview, disease isn’t a product of biology, inequity, or chance. It is...
Big Trouble in Little Pharma
The Excruciating Inspection of David Geier’s DAP Pharmaceuticals
RFK Jr.’s reconstituted vaccine committee meets for the first time, and I can’t help but think of clowns…antivax clowns
Last week, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s reconstituted Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) met for the first time. The proceedings reminded me, more than anything else, of an antivax clown car.
HHS explains new vaccine recommendations: Is this the “gold standard science” we were promised?
FAQ sent to Congress looks more like fake gold
RFK Jr.’s remade ACIP meets: And so it begins (in earnest)…the dismantling of US federal vaccine infrastructure
The newly reconstituted CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices will meet this week. Packed with antivaxxers, the antivax-adjacent, and the unqualified, ACIP will begin the dismantling of the US federal vaccine infrastructure.
Infection Control/Infection Prevention
Summertime. And the living is easy. Janice Joplin has to be the best singer. Ever. There may be those in the comments who disagree, but remember, within the context of the blog, what I write is canon. Which is not the same as being true. Canon. Any-who. I spend summer on the front porch and rarely venture inside. Outside has had the...
RFK Jr.’s vaccine committee bloodbath: I hope you’re all up-to-date on your vaccines…
...because the CDC schedule is about to start shedding vaccines the way antivax newly appointed ACIP members think people vaccinated against COVID-19 shed spike protein. Ground zero for RFK Jr.'s extinction-level event with respect to public health is vaccines and the committee that recommends them for the CDC schedule.
The Long Med Con: The Self-Styled Expertise and Expansive Invoices of Mark & David Geier
All it takes is a coming-of-age consultancy and you, too, can morph from an average teenage Joe or Josephine to an instant "vaccine expert"
RFK Jr. Sacks Entire CDC Vaccine Committee
I’m sure you are as sick of reading about RFK Jr. as we are of writing about him, but this is the world we live in. We cannot let outrage fatigue cause us to take our eye off the ball. If nothing else, SBM needs to chronicle every anti-science move that this administration makes. As most people, and certainly most readers here,...
Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad embrace a “more fluid concept of evidence” at the FDA
Last Thursday during a roundtable on stem cell therapies, new FDA Commissioner Marty Makary referred to EBM levels of evidence as an artificial and dogmatic construct. Apparently Dr. David Katz's "more fluid concept of evidence" now reigns at the FDA—selectively.