Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
RFK Jr.’s CDC Panel Ditches Some Flu Shots Based on Anti-Vaccine Junk Data
Beth Mole, reporting for Ars Technica:
The vaccine panel hand-selected by health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to drop federal recommendations for seasonal flu shots that contain the ethyl-mercury containing preservative thimerosal. The panel did so after hearing a misleading and cherry-picked presentation from an anti-vaccine activist.
There is extensive data from the last quarter century proving that the antiseptic preservative is safe, with no harms identified beyond slight soreness at the injection site, but none of that data was presented during today’s meeting.
The significance of the vote is unclear for now. The vast majority of seasonal influenza vaccines currently used in the US — about 96 percent of flu shots in 2024–2025 — do not contain thimerosal. The preservative is only included in multi-dose vials of seasonal flu vaccines, where it prevents the growth of bacteria and fungi potentially introduced as doses are withdrawn.
However, thimerosal is more common elsewhere in the world for various multi-dose vaccine vials, which are cheaper than the single-dose vials more commonly used in the US. If other countries follow the US’s lead and abandon thimerosal, it could increase the cost of vaccines in other countries and, in turn, lead to fewer vaccinations.
Having an ignorant conspiracy nut lead the Department of Health and Human Services is angering and worrisome, to say the least. But it’s also incredibly frustrating, because Donald Trump himself isn’t an anti-vaxxer. In fact, one of the few great achievements of the first Trump Administration was Operation Warp Speed, a highly successful effort spearheaded by the US federal government to “facilitate and accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics.” Early in the pandemic experts were concerned it would take years before a Covid vaccine might be available. Instead, multiple effective vaccines were widely available — and administered free of charge — in the first half of 2021, only a year after the pandemic broke. It was a remarkable success and any other president who spearheaded Operation Warp Speed would have rightfully taken tremendous credit for it.
But instead, while plotting his return to office, Trump smelled opportunity with the anti-vax contingent of the out-and-proud Stupid-Americans, and now here we are, with a genuine know-nothing lunatic like RFK Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. God help us if another pandemic hits in the next few years.
‘Stupid-Americans Are the New Irish-Americans, Trump Is Their JFK’
Banger of a post by “tarltontarlton” on Reddit:
That same process is happening now with stupid people. They’re transcending their individual limitations, finding each other and becoming out-and-proud Stupid-Americans. [...]
How individual stupid Americans are becoming the collective, self-aware group of Stupid-Americans is a great idea for a lot of very fancy journalism I’m sure. It’s probably got something to do with the internet, where stupid people can find and repeat stupid things to each other over and over and over again.
I believe it has a lot to do with the Internet, which has functioned as a terribly efficient sorting machine. It used to be that there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. Both political parties were, effectively, shades of purple. Now we’ve sorted ourselves, and the result is the palpable increase in polarization. Low-IQ stupidity might still be spread across both sides of the political aisle, but willful ignorance — the dogmatic cultish belief that loudmouths’ opinions are on equal ground with facts and evidence presented by informed experts — is the entire basis of the MAGA movement. A regular stupid person might say, “Well, I don’t know anything about vaccines, so I better listen to my doctor, who is highly educated and well-informed on the subject.” An out-and-proud Stupid-American says “I don’t know anything about vaccines either, so I’m going to listen to a kook who admits that a worm ate part of his brain, because I can’t understand the science but I can understand conspiracy theories.”
If written language survives the next six weeks, we’ll be writing about Donald Trump for a thousand years. But whatever else there is to say, the most important thing about Donald Trump, the thing that is obvious from watching him speak for just 14 seconds, is that he is profoundly stupid. Whatever it is that he might be talking about or doing at any given moment, it’s clear that while he has a reptilian instinct for reading and stoking conflict, he has no real idea what’s going on and he doesn’t really care to. Stupid is what he is and where he comes from. It is his mind and his soul. Catholic was what JFK was. Gay was what Harvey Milk was. Stupid is who Donald Trump is.
And that’s what they love most, the Stupid-American voters.
Remember that sentence you heard at the beginning of all this in 2016? “He’s just saying what everybody is thinking.”
But see, not everybody was thinking that Hillary Clinton was an alien, that global warming was a Chinese hoax and that what America needed most of all was a plywood wall stretching from Texas to California. Only the stupid people were. And suddenly, in an instant, the most powerful man on earth was thinking just like them. With his clueless smirk and unstoppable rise, he turned people whose stupidity made them feel like nobody into people who felt like everybody.
That’s why he’ll never lose them. Because it was never about what he did or didn’t do. All that stuff is very confusing and the Stupid-American community isn’t interested in the details. They love him for who he is, which is one of them, and because he shows them every day that Stupid-Americans can reach the social mountaintop.
(Via Kottke.)