Special Saturday Edition

"Make America Healthy Again" NOT

I normally don’t write a Saturday post, but I found this so alarming that I wanted to get the information out as quickly as possible so that you can protect yourself, and especially your children and grandchildren.

In honour of Worm Brain’s confirmation to head HHS, the White House has established the “Make America Healthy Again” Commission. You can read it here, but I’m happy to translate for you.

Like episodes of The Twilight Zone, they start with something reasonable. They talk about how our life expectancy is lower than other developed countries and how many people, especially children, have all sorts of chronic conditions and mental health issues that should be addressed. All of this is true, and if they actually had a plan to address things reasonably, using evidence-based medicine, and approaching the data honestly, this would actually be a good thing.

Even in their definition section, however, they miss the point. When they talk about life expectancy, they talk about all Americans, without noting that the data is vastly different between races, and with respect to income. Some races live longer than others. Richer people live longer that poorer people. A LOT longer. Ignoring those differences, and the multiple reasons for the disparity is just bad science¹. Not to mention that when they list the departments that are represented on the commission, these are departments that control money that could be spent on, OH! I dunno - SNAP, WIC, Meals on Wheels and other solutions to improve people’s lives. Sorry, I digress.

And then, after listing a bunch of conditions they want to focus on, like autism, ADD/ADHD and obesity, they say this:

This includes fresh thinking on nutrition, physical activity, healthy lifestyles, over-reliance on medication and treatments, the effects of new technological habits, environmental impacts, and food and drug quality and safety.

Let me translate “fresh thinking” for you:

• No vaccines

• No medicine

• No evidence-based medicine

• No clinical trials

• Supplements!

• Raw milk!

• Lard! Not making this up.

While they say “physical activity”, I worry. When I was a kid, we never formally exercised - instead we were outside every minute we could be: riding our bikes, climbing trees, talking walks while chatting with friends, making use of the playground’s swings, sliding ponds, teeter-totters and monkey bars, and PLAYING - stoop ball, softball, b-ball, hopscotch, jacks, tag, and a bunch of locally-made-up games. If we watched any TV, it was only briefly, and it was after dinner, after homework, after clothes had been set out for the next day.

If they want to bring that back, I’m all for it. But in some places, it’s illegal to let your kid go out and play by himself. Or even walk the dog. I fear they want to roll back child workplace protections, like they did in Arkansas. In that state, if you own a farm, and it’s not a school day, even little kids can be out there all day getting physical activity milking the cows, tending the crops, etc. And once they’re 14, they can work up to 48 hours a week at anything except the most dangerous of jobs. Call me crazy, but I think the job of a kid is TO BE A KID.

And to circle back to vaccines: Louisiana is done promoting vaccines, except for New Orleans. Really. They’re just the first.

They want to do away with treatments that work:

[A]ssess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs.

Allow me to translate —> No more NECESSARY medications including anti-depressants, anxiolytics (like Valium and Xanax), ADHD medications, or GLP-1 agonists (Ozempic, Mounjaro, etc.) for anyone! Unclear if that last category would also apply to treating type 2 diabetes, which is also a chronic disease, and for which those drugs are life changing.

The bottom line is that they want pseudoscience in lieu of evidence-based medicine. And they’ve already launched:

Trump’s nominees to lead NIH and FDA, Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary, are among the editorial board members of a new journal that includes scientists who promoted herd immunity and criticized public health measures during Covid. Link.

There’s a lot more in the link to the announcement. Go read it and be as appalled as I am.

Action Items

1. Educate yourself on nutrition

I cannot stress this enough. You need to know what is true and what is false regarding nutrition, so when they start telling you to drink raw milk and cook with lard, you’ll know they’re insane. And since they’ll be relying on pseudoscience, every bit of literature, every TV ad, every website will be slick and designed to make you buy in.

I’m sure a lot of you know your nutrition facts. But here are a few resources if you want to brush up. Learning what’s healthy and what’s not so healthy and OWNING that information will serve you well as we move forward.

• A quick test. Link.

• Ten true facts. Link.

• A spectacular site from the USDA. Read it and download what you want, since I’m sure they’ll take it down once they realize it’s still live.

2. Make sure your vaccinations are up to date

• If you are 65 or older, or 50 or older with a chronic condition, go get a Covid vaccine this spring. This is last year’s CDC guidance, but it’s still true. There is preliminary evidence that this year’s huge flu surge is due in part to people not receiving flu vaccines AND that having had Covid makes one more susceptible to a worse flu outcome if the illness is contracted, compared to someone who has never had Covid.

• If you don’t know if your childhood vaccines are still effective, you can get titer tests to show your level of protection. If you had an MMR shot as a kid, and you’re now in your 20’s, you may need a second shot. You can get titers for most childhood diseases.

• If you’ve got little kids, make sure they are properly vaccinated per the schedule set by their pediatrician.

3. Learn what’s coming down the pike

Katelyn Jetelina is an epidemiologist who has been an indispensable source of information since early in the Covid pandemic. Her post lists the things we’ll be seeing soon from HHS, in addition to the output of the committee.

One of the things she mentions is that 50% of Americans get their health information from social media. PLEASE, ignore what you read on social media, especially if there is a link to something you can buy².

My Biggest Fear

I harken back to the 1980’s. I was in private practice, and I saw HIV/AIDS patients. I didn’t treat them for AIDS, because it wasn’t my area, and because we had nothing³. But patients had other issues, which I did treat.

While there was no social media, there was “the grapevine”, and it was as accurate as most social media is today. One of my patients would bring in a bottle of something or other, saying he’d heard THIS was the cure. I would take a sample and send it to a lab for analysis, and while some of the things he brought wouldn’t harm him, actually wouldn’t do anything, two were poisonous.

Thus, my fear is that HHS will promote “cures” that are harmful, and it will take an army of legitimate medical professionals to evaluate, test, and then disseminate information to keep the population safe. If they can be believed. PLEASE, whatever your source for medical and scientific information, go with someone trustworthy, someone who sources back to actual base data, and someone who is NOT trying to sell you anything.

Tomorrow - unemployment, and then on Monday the proposed House appropriations bill with a very important Action Item.

1. One of the problems is that since they’ve removed “DEI references” from everything governmental, it will make it far more difficult to develop studies and clinical trials that would explain various gender and racial disparities. About 2/3 down in this article, you can see a specific impact. Therefore, “research”, if the fascists have their way, will be restricted to white men. It took targeted studies to determine that women have different heart attack symptoms than men. Since heart disease is the leading cause of death, causing 20% of all US deaths annually, being able to discern differences between genders, and races, is critical. And oh, “heart disease” wasn’t one of the conditions cited by the commission.

2. In general, Substack is not social media, as the vast majority of writers do long form, researched, journalism. There are a few scoundrels on Substack, however most authors are legitimate in my experience.

3. AZT became available a few years later.