Category: Public Health
Negative Health Effects of Vaping
When vaping was first introduced it was marketed mainly as a safer alternative to smoking and as a potential smoking cessation method. But increasingly people who have never smoked are vaping, and now the concern is that vaping is more of a pathway into smoking than one out of it. According to the CDC, about 30% of all adults who vape have...
“Learn to love MAHA” vs. “how to make the CDC great again”?
MAHA apologist Dr. Joseph Marine recently wrote an article on how to make the CDC great again. Wait, what? Trump's been in office a year and a half, and the CDC isn't great?
“Abolish the NIH”? Dr. Scott Atlas gives the antiscience game away
Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at the right wing think tank Hoover Institution who came to prominence as a COVID contrarian, recently wrote an op-ed advocating the elimination of the National Institutes of health and leaving the funding biomedical research to the "free market." These are the "ideas" animating this administration's science policy.
Lysenkoism 2.0 in action: Dismantling peer review at NIH
A recent report in Nature describes how the Trump administration is weakening peer review in favor of ideology-based grant approval at NIH. Lysenkoism 2.0 is in full swing and getting worse.
Lysenkoism 2.0 in action: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. abuses his power to bully journal editors over a retraction
A journal editor decided to retract and remove a bad study by an antivaxxer named Neil Z. Miller. RFK Jr. publicly demanded to know why. This is Lysenkoism 2.0 in action in 2026.
The Lysenko-ization of federal science takes a big step forward
From the beginning, Trump science policy has been Lysenko 2.0, in which ideology, not scientific promise and rigor, dictates federal grantmaking. OMB Director Russell Vought's proposed rules de-emphasizing peer review and placing political appointees in charge of final grantmaking decisions do Lysenko proud.
How Unbekoming! The central delusion of MAHA
What do vitamin K shots, vaccines, MTHFR variants, and statins have in common? The answer is what I call the central delusion behind MAHA, which was inadvertently revealed by a blogger with the 'nym Unbekoming.
MAHA vs. the FDA: Dredging up old anti-regulation revisionist history
Recently, I've noticed articles from outlets aligned with MAHA calling for the elimination of the FDA. It's all recycled "health freedom" revisionist history and ahistorical nonsense.
KevinMD platforms criticism of MAHA by a “functional medicine” practitioner
Although some of the criticisms of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s MAHA movement are spot on, why did KevinMD platform a practitioner of functional medicine woo to make them?
MAHA and science-based public health: Can’t we all just get along?
The answer is: Very likely not, at least not as long as MAHA embraces quackery and antivax pseudoscience—not that that didn't stop STAT News from ignoring the elephant in the room, vaccines, in search of a "kumbaya" moment between MAHA and public health.