Isn't that basically the theory behind Traditional Chinese Medicine?
Even Black Death killed "only" an estimated 50% of the population. That means that there were necessarily a lot of people that got infected and survived it, probably some of them asymptomatically. Bodies are complex and varied, and there's no 100% way to predict how they'll respond to any given situation.
The most dramatic examples of this are when children start going to school and bring home various colds and such. Some of them barely affect the children at all, but will leave the parents bedridden. And some barely affect the parents at all and leave the children bedridden.
We need to educate people from an early age in media literacy, skepticism and science. Make The Demon-Haunted World a mandatory read for every high school student.
Personally, I'm afraid it could be a deliberate propaganda pose, with the dual objective of distracting the masses with an enemy and depriving people of expensive actual healthcare.
it's not like this is the first time that a bunch ofnew age folks with a predilection for alternative lifestyles and "health" practices have quickly moved from a hedonistic "liberal" position to a shockingly right-wing position.
A lot of the mysticism and weird ideas of cultural cleanliness that we can see exhibited in the ruling classes of Germany during the 1890s-1940s are very present in the ideas in the current MAHA movement.
That similarity might push against the idea that these ideas are purely propagandistic in nature. Personally, I might feel a little more reassured if I thought that RFKs positions were pure grift, but I have been watching a lot of my woo-woo friends flat-earth their way to fascism and find it somewhat chilling.
It's like we've given up on the people with bad behavior to the point that we tacitly endorse them to have whatever terrible viewpoint they have, even while we admonish others like they're more responsible than the person with the bad behavior.
We have to stop giving bad-faith-actors the benefit of the doubt. RFK is a grifter. It definitely doesn't matter where he got the viewpoint from, he has 1 million terrible viewpoints that are not grounded in science. He's figured out how to pedal this as non-extremist and couch it in friendlier language, but that just makes him more of a snake.
And one of the people organizing those conspiracies was Fauci. In order to protect ... virologists. We know all this because we can read the emails and Slack logs where the conspiracies were organized.
As for his other beliefs, like HIV not being the cause of AIDS, well that belief comes from renegade scientists in the 90s who alleged that a young Dr Fauci was at the center of a HIV-related conspiracy organized by virologists to give their field new relevance and grant funding, after attempts to connect viruses with the 60s era 'war on cancer' fell through. One of those scientists was himself a virologist, and another was Kary Mullis. Mullis is famous primarily for being the inventor of the PCR test, he even received a Nobel prize for it.
So where RFK Jr gets this stuff is no mystery.
Anyway the article is wrong. It quotes Paul Offit who makes the same claims in his Substack. I haven't read the book but people who have say Offit is selectively quoting Jr, who does believe germs exist; that he uses the terms miasma/terrain theory interchangeably, and that his book argues for a better balance between the notion of strengthening immune systems and targeted pathogen treatments - not that the latter shouldn't exist at all.
> And one of the people organizing those conspiracies was Fauci. In order to protect ... virologists. We know all this because we can read the emails and Slack logs where the conspiracies were organized.
Downvoters, I was shocked to learn that was actually true: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/opinion/covid-pandemic-la...:
> Or take the real story behind two very influential publications that quite early in the pandemic cast the lab leak theory as baseless.
> The first was a March 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine, which was written by five prominent scientists and declared that no “laboratory-based scenario” for the pandemic virus was plausible. But we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely. One of the authors of that paper, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, wrote in the Slack messages, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”
> Spooked, the authors reached out for advice to Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist at the World Health Organization. In his book, Farrar reveals he acquired a burner phone and arranged meetings for them with high-ranking officials, including Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci. Documents obtained through public records requests by the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know show that the scientists ultimately decided to move ahead with a paper on the topic.
> Operating behind the scenes, Farrar reviewed their draft and suggested to the authors that they rule out the lab leak even more directly. They complied. Andersen later testified to Congress that he had simply become convinced that a lab leak, while theoretically possible, was not plausible. Later chat logs obtained by Congress show the paper’s lead authors discussing how to mislead Donald G. McNeil Jr., who was reporting on the pandemic’s origin for The Times, so as to throw him off track about the plausibility of a lab leak.
There's more.
I recommend Leah Sotille's new book Blazing Eye Sees All, which looks at New Age figures who have drifted into the MAGA movement. It's kind of wild seeing the channelers I remember from my childhood going hard right.
At this point it doesn't matter which "side" it came from. Even if it came from the "left", people knew this was pseudoscience and relied on anecdotal evidence and it never went mainstream. You never had a HHS Secretary espousing the goodness of unchecked pseudoscience in the name of "challenging the status quo".
Maybe the Emperor can appoint a Moon Landing Denier to run fucking NASA.
Eventually you hit a point where something or someone is so stupid you can’t comprehend that what they say is what they really think. Like you may intellectually ‘know’ with near certainty that they are that stupid but the emotional centre of your brain can not accept it.
I hit that point with the politics of the US a long time ago, in the back of your head you think these are capable-ish people just grifting off the stupid people but that’d require such a malicious intent it’s from an emotionap standpoint nearly impossible again.
This is a paradox that will never be answered with certainty but given the track record of the current US president (and his pre political business ventures) I’d say it is stupidity, I’m nearly certain of it.
The problem we face today is that the we no longer have adults or rational people in the US government. As a nation, the US did an okay-ish job at keeping people like Marjorie Taylor Greene out of government positions. We didn't let people like Musk take control over everything. The writing was on the wall for a while we were headed in this direction. They were quickly gaining ground to take control of everything. The Republican side during the Trump impeachments were a spectacle. There is obviously a very large population in favor of the spectacle.
The US has simply failed repeatedly to get out and vote and keep the wackos out power. Well, here we are. It truly is a shame and we're paying the price.
The "just say no" party, is pretty baked.
When I started getting worried about Elon around 2018 the drugs were part of it but also the persistent sleep deprivation. But there's also the way his father went a bit crazy in his 40s which I only learned about recently.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trum...
The world would be better if Fred Trump Sr were emotionally capable of saying “I love you, son.”
I swear, it's like a ship goes there only once every two years, and the crew scrubs it down with bleach every day.
Even President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho deferred to smarter people.
Examples:
> Kennedy published a story in Rolling Stone and Salon.com titled "Deadly Immunity," which ... described Offit as "in the pocket" of the pharmaceutical industry and claimed RotaTeq was "laced" with thimerosal.
They don't link to the article but the only place "in the pocket" appears is a direct quote from Offit himself arguing that he is immune to conflicts of interest [1].
> Rolling Stone and Salon amended some of the article's problems, but eventually Salon retracted it and Rolling Stone deleted it.
The wording implies that the article had so many factual errors by RFK Jr it was pulled shortly after publication, but Salon actually deleted it six years later in sync with the release of a new book on public health by a Salon staffer. Nor were any of the errors material to the case the article made, and Salon apologized to RFJ Jr in writing for introducing them as they reduced the word count of his article. None of this section is remotely close to what really appears to have happened.
> Looking back, Offit said he was sandbagged. "He's a liar. He lied about who he was; he lied about what he was doing. He was just wanting to set me up," Offit said.
Nothing in the article "sandbags" Offit in any way. He's treated with kid gloves and only appears twice, both times via direct quotes from himself.
> But Kennedy has frequently used thimerosal as a vaccine bogeyman over the years, claiming it causes harms (there is no evidence for this).
It's literally toxic.
> he doesn't believe in a foundational scientific principle: germ theory ... Kennedy is a germ theory denialist and terrain theory embracer
And yet Ars admits (much later) that "Kennedy seems to accept that bacteria and viruses are real" and that terrain theory obviously does have merits. People who have read his book (I haven't) have said Kennedy just wants a better balance between improving people's general health and specifically pathogen-targeted pharmaceuticals.
[1] https://archive.org/stream/deadly-immunity-by-robert-f.-kenn...
It's from Ars Technica, which I used to like but kinda got tired of. They regularly have kind of "two minute hate" columns against their house villains, and revel in schadenfreude.
Yes, vaccines — as with all medical procedures — have bad outcomes for some people. You can't inject everyone with saline without someone having a bad reaction, if only because it ended up stabbing a tendon or something.
However, the risk of injuries for all common vaccines are orders of magnitude less than the harm from the things they decrease. For ever 1 person harmed by a vaccine, 100 people don't get seriously ill from the disease it counters. And while it’s an enormous bummer for that 1 person, the other 100 experienced a modern miracle of public health.
No one’s ever said vaccines can't make you sick. (Well, they've said that they provably do not cause autism, but that's a different claim.) They've said that if you go to Vegas and have an option to bet where you have a 99% chance of winning $1000 and a 1% chance of losing $1000, you take that bet every time.
Except all the people who ran around yelling "100% safe and effective" four years ago.
Perhaps some non-experts were spouting such nonsense, but nobody should be putting any real importance on what they say.
Tap water is safe, but non-zero people get sick from it. That just means it's not completely safe.
Penicillin is effective, but some germs are resistant now. That just means it's not completely effective.
Public messaging around human health, especially with respect to powerful tools that modify the immune system, has always been extremely challenging. Public health officials typically want to maximize health for a whole population, and we know that messaging can lead to society-level changes in behavior around vaccination. So experts are typically quite careful when they talk about harms from vaccines.
He noted that for years, the CDC has insisted the only way to manage measles is through universal vaccination. But Kennedy challenged that approach.
He argued that people who have concerns about the MMR vaccine—whether it’s due to aborted fetal debris or DNA particles—deserve access to treatment options.
“And that’s what we’re developing at CDC right now,” Kennedy said, “protocols for treating measles.”
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"Terrain theory" holds that "you are what you eat." Well, uh...yeah, that's true.
"Terrain theory" also holds that ingesting pollution and poisons...poisons a living creature. Well, uh...yeah, that's true.
mRNA is dangerous, very dangerous. It was abandoned as such during animal trials. The large drug companies have been facing "patentagedon", the expiring of patents on which their profits are based. Traditional drugs are somewhat analogous to salves. What do drug companies want? Does it benefit them to prevent/solve disease or is it more economically advantageous for them to always be "needed?"
There is no substitute for healthy food, a clean environment, and exercise. No amount of synthesized chemicals artificially introduced to a human body will/can replace that.
Some drugs are highly useful, some are barely marginal. What's a multi-billion dollar company to do if/when it "solves" the majority of major problems?
The answer is "perverse incentive." Factory food, factory pharma, big tech, political parties, etc., etc., etc....any entity which becomes too large AND whose major reason for existance disappears...fights to survive, including creating false need. It's the story of human existence through all societies.
So...maybe, just maybe, both terrain and germ theory, like all theories, are an attempt to reduce totality into a useful modeling tool.
WRT that article, it's a desperate shill hack job, not structured well at all, and full of logical fallacies and lies.
Oh baby, give me that big pharma K street revolving door propaganda! Empiricism is dead, credentialism gutted it to make a skin suit that academia now wears, so it's the science now! Preventative care is only legitimate if you pay the health industry for it! I look forward to the day when we can just label anyone who doesn't trust "the science" as insane so we can lock them up. Maybe if I'm a good boy they'll give me a weekly vaccine to protect me from misinformation. I wouldn't want to risk me having unapproved positions if I'm accidentally exposed.
What does this mean? I’d imagine you can’t just buy the credentials (there’s no lack of trying though), but like… what’s the litmus test? There’s also a concept called peer-reviews, which generally gets people of varying credentials who work in the field to weigh in on the matter.
> I look forward to the day when we can just label anyone who doesn't trust "the science" as insane so we can lock them up.
There’s no such thing as “the science” as much as you want it to be. Science is a process, it changes with more data. You trust the data, not the science.
> Preventative care is only legitimate if you pay the health industry for it!
Nobody is saying that. For example, people have been taking some form of lemon and honey to ward off things common cold, fever, etc. But for new diseases, there’s no preventative care (by definition).
> Maybe if I'm a good boy they'll give me a weekly vaccine to protect me from misinformation.
Now you’re talking like an idiot. Nobody ever in the scientific field says shit like this. Shame on you. Where did your critical thinking skills go?
If repeating the words a person themselves has written makes something into a "hit piece" what does that say about the words?
I am not sure he even misunderstands miasma theory. At a certain point in history, miasma theorists were incorrect about the exact mechanisms for spreading disease — they didn’t understand the concept of disease vectors in the environment, like mosquitoes — but their drainage and sanitation solutions were highly successful. I think that is what he refers to with statements like "miasma’s approach to medicine". At worst it seems like he may have used the term 'miasma theory' in a different way than is typical, which hardly justifies the claims in the article.
The section of his book ends with this: "As a final side note, it seems to me that a mutually respectful science-based, evidence-based marriage incorporating the best of these two clashing dogmas would best serve public health and humankind". How can he write that if he doesn't believe in germ theory as the headline clearly implies? He is looking at the history of science and making deeper statements about the general approaches to studying the spread of disease. I think the article seems to willfully and intentionally misrepresent the text.
Kennedy himself claims he doesn't believe in the germ theory of disease, or at least in the ability of modern medicine to cure many diseases. He is a crank and an idiot who has gotten hundreds of people killed, and will probably get many times more.
At this point, they have ascended the plane of humanity and now exist in quantum superposition. They're both everything they say they are, and nothing at all.