Welcome to a Hump Day (“ཧམཔ་ཉིན། ” in Dzongkha): Wednesday, February 12, 2025, and Darwin Day, celebrating his birth on this day in 1809. Here’s a photo of the great man with the caption, “Darwin aged 46 in 1855, by then working towards publication of his theory of natural selection. He wrote to Joseph Hooker about this portrait, “if I really have as bad an expression, as my photograph gives me, how I can have one single friend is surprising.”
I would love to hear his voice but of course there are no recordings. The next post will have some Darwin photos, drawings, and caricatures.
It’s also National Plum Pudding Day, celebrating a good British dessert (but not as good as sticky toffee pudding). I did not know that they were dried out for a long time before Christmas. This photo from Wikipedia is captioned, “Christmas puddings are often dried out on hooks for weeks prior to serving in order to enhance the flavour. This pudding has been prepared with a traditional cloth rather than a basin.” Note that it normally does not contains plums.
It’s also Hug Day, National Freedom to Marry Day, Lincoln’s birthday (he and Darwin were both born on February 12, 1809!), and NAACP Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 12 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The cease-fire in Gaza may come to an end on Saturday unless Hamas returns its promised allotment of hostages.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel warned Hamas on Tuesday that if hostages were not released by noon on Saturday, the cease-fire in the war in the Gaza Strip would end and Israeli troops would resume “intense fighting.”
Mr. Netanyahu said that Hamas’s threat on Monday to postpone the next round of hostage releases amounted to a “decision to violate the agreement.” While the threat was clear, Mr. Netanyahu did not specify how many hostages would have to be freed to stop a renewed war.
The prime minister’s office, when asked to clarify, did not confirm how many hostages Mr. Netanyahu was referring to.
His statements nearly echoed President Trump’s ultimatum on Monday evening to Hamas that said if all Israeli hostages were not released from Gaza by 12 o’clock on Saturday, then the cease-fire agreement with Israel should be canceled and “all hell is going to break out.”
Originally, three hostages were set to be freed on Saturday under the first phase of the cease-fire.
In a video posted after a four-hour meeting with his security cabinet, Mr. Netanyahu said that he and his top advisers had been shocked by the emaciated appearances of three Israeli men who were freed last Saturday, in the latest hostage-for-prisoner exchange required under the cease-fire deal.
“The decision I passed in the cabinet, unanimously, is this: If Hamas does not return our hostages by Saturday noon, the cease-fire will end, and the I.D.F. will resume intense fighting until Hamas is decisively defeated,” Mr. Netanyahu said in the video, referring to the Israel Defense Forces.
I have no idea what will happen, and if Hamas were smart, they’d turn over the hostages. Israel is already moving more IDF troops south to the Gaza border, and this time I don’t think Israel will make any more concessions.
*Given his position as a government official (presumably unpaid) and a private entrepreneur, it would seem important that Elon Musk disclose his finances to the public. Well, he’s going to disclose them, but they will remain confidential. As the NYT reports:
Elon Musk plans to file a financial disclosure report to the White House, but it will remain confidential, a White House official said Tuesday.
There has never been a White House staffer with the vast potential for conflicts like Mr. Musk, the world’s richest person and the head of leading companies in electric vehicles, space exploration and artificial intelligence.
But Mr. Musk is serving President Trump as an unpaid “special government employee,” which means his financial disclosure is not required to be made public.
Mr. Musk received an ethics training this week, the official said, and Mr. Musk’s staff as part of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is in the process of receiving their own training, said the White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
Special government employees, like all federal employees except the president and vice president, are prohibited under federal criminal law from taking actions that directly benefit themselves or their families, unless they have an ethics waiver.
Mr. Musk’s companies have billions of dollars in federal contracts and are the subject of more than a dozen pending federal regulatory investigations or lawsuits, so he will almost certainly need an ethics waiver, several former White House lawyers said.
The White House has not responded to a request from The New York Times for a copy of the waiver, a document that is required under federal law to be released. Ethics waivers are typically drafted based on conflicts identified through a financial disclosure filing, so it is possible that no waiver has been prepared yet.
Now the NYT is dead set against anything Trump will do, but they are right here. Musk faces serious conflict of interest issues, and the public and press need to know what’s going on. Keeping his finances confidential will not allow that. He has to either disclose them, or resign his honorary Presidency.
*On his Substack column, virologist Paul Offit takes out after the likely new HHS Secretary in a piece called “Understanding RFK Jr.,” with the subtitle, “If you want to know why RFK Jr. believes so many weird things, just read his book, The Real Anthony Fauci. Four pages explain everything.” (h/t Bat).
In 1876, Robert Koch proved that a specific bacterium (Bacillus anthracis) caused anthrax. The germ theory was born. Understanding that specific bacteria and viruses caused specific diseases led to treatments like antibiotics and preventives like vaccines, which has caused us to live 40 years longer than we did in the late-1800s.
Nonetheless, in a section in his book titled “Miasma vs. Germ Theory,” RFK Jr. continues to embrace the miasma theory, writing the following statements:
“The ubiquity of pasteurization and vaccinations are only two of the many indicators of the dominating ascendancy of germ theory as the cornerstone of contemporary public health policy. A $1 trillion pharmaceutical industry pushing patented pills, powders, pricks, potions, and poisons and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology…The miasmist approach to public health is to boost individual immune responses.” If you want to avoid infection, according to RFK Jr., all you need to do is maintain a healthy immune system. This explains why he has said that no vaccine is beneficial, that the polio vaccine killed more people than it saved, that young parents shouldn’t vaccinate their children, that HIV does not cause AIDS, that HIV is not spread from one person to another, and that the anti-AIDS drug AZT was an example of “mass murder”. It also explains why he drinks raw, unpasteurized milk.
“Anthony Fauci [said that] vaccines have already saved millions and millions of lives. Most Americans accept the claim as dogma. It will therefore come as a surprise to learn that it is simply untrue.” This explains why RFK Jr. has claimed that improvements in sanitation, as promoted by miasmists, not vaccines, have accounted for a decrease in infections. In the late 1970s, when I was a pediatric resident, every year a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae type b (HiB) accounted for about 25,000 cases of bloodstream infections, pneumonia, meningitis, epiglottitis, and cellulitis in young children. A vaccine to prevent HiB, which was introduced in 1987, has virtually eliminated the disease in the United States. Hib wasn’t eliminated because of a dramatic improvement in sanitation. It was eliminated because of the Hib vaccine.
“When a starving African child succumbs to measles, the miasmist attributes the death to malnutrition; germ theory proponents (aka virologists) blame the virus.” This explains why, when RFK Jr. visited Samoa, which was in the midst of a measles outbreak that caused 5,600 cases and 83 deaths, primarily in young children, he urged vitamin A treatments, not a measles vaccine. Indeed, he said that the outbreak wasn’t caused by measles virus, which would have meant he would have had to embrace the germ theory. He made this claim well after a wild-type measles virus strain had been identified as the cause of the outbreak.
“Imperialist ideologues find natural affinity with the germ theory.” This explains why he has said that scientists who promote vaccines, like Anthony Fauci, should be put in jail.
This is not a man who should be leading the largest public health agency in the United States.
*According to the Bowdoin Orient, the un-PC named student newspaper of Bowdoin college, their “encampment” in a University building, has ended. And although the protest, organized by the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), failed to achieve its ends (see below), the students called it “an immense success.” But of course they would. From the B.O.:
Just before 6 p.m. on Monday, the final Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) protestors remaining in the Smith Union encampment walked out to a large, cheering crowd gathered on Dudley Coe Quad after reaching an agreement with College administrators. The encampment lasted for a total of four days, beginning on Thursday evening.
At this time, the details of the final terms reached between the SJP protesters and the administration remain unclear. However, according to protesters familiar with the negotiations, conversations between the two groups on Monday centered around the disciplinary process for students in the encampment, responsibility for shutting down Smith Union and discussions about violations of Title VI policies.
Students inside Smith Union communicated to the crowd outside the building that the negotiation did not result in the College agreeing to the terms of Bowdoin Solidarity Referendum, the chief aim of the encampment.
“[College administrators] have agreed to understand a context of good faith for the students who have engaged in this action,” lead encampment organizer Olivia Kenney ’25 told protesters Monday night. “The College has finally come and agreed to work with us in good faith toward a conclusion to this action.”
President Safa Zaki emailed members of the College just before 9 p.m. Monday to notify them of the encampment being cleared and stated that involved students will face the College disciplinary process.
“These past few days have been stressful and unsettling. We heard from some members of our community that these events have left them feeling vulnerable,” she wrote. “We take these concerns very seriously as a community that is devoted to a safe and welcoming environment for all.”
Protesters were notified late Sunday night that they would receive temporary suspensions if they did not clear the space by 8:30 a.m. Monday. Those who remained in the encampment past this deadline received a letter from Senior Vice President and Dean for Student Affairs Jim Hoppe informing them that they had been temporarily suspended and that remaining past 5 p.m. would result in “further disciplinary action.”
The solidarity referendum, which failed to get administrative approval, can be found here; it includes the usual requirements for divestment and a condemnation of Israeli “scholasticide” in Gaza. The only “immense success” that I can see in this endeavor is that not all the students got suspended after the warning. As usual, colleges don’t follow through with these warnings, and, as the article notes, the SJP will return:
“We want to acknowledge that the space that we have opened up on this campus for speech on Palestine … has broken down doors in the context of our campus community,” Kenney said. “This is not the end.”
I think there was always space for speech on Palestine!
*The Free Press reports that in light of Trump’s orders to eliminate DEI in public institutions, PBS has just fired its DEI department, which consists of two people. But it’s unclear if they really were fired:
Just before 5 p.m. on Monday afternoon, PBS CEO Paula Kerger sent a staff-wide email announcing the departure of the company’s two DEI executives: “To ensure that we are complying with the President’s Executive Order we have closed our DEI office, and Cecilia Loving and Gina Leow are leaving PBS. I know you join me in wishing them well in their future endeavors.”
The message announcing the departure of Loving, the senior VP of DEI, and Leow, the director of DEI, continued: “I know that this will raise many questions for people across the organization and look forward to discussing this in more depth at the upcoming All Staff meeting on Wednesday.”
But the timing of the announcement raised several eyebrows in our newsroom. That’s because earlier this morning, we wrote to PBS asking them about a tip we received from a high-ranking executive at the network. The tipster had told us that PBS was planning to move both Loving and Leow to the network’s station services department in order to skirt Trump’s executive order calling for the elimination of DEI-focused positions and grants from government-funded institutions.
“The employee population at PBS loves DEI,” the high-ranking source told The Free Press. “They’re unwilling to change; they’re unwilling to adjust; they’re unwilling to make concessions in order to protect the sustainability of PBS. Instead, they were trying to play chicken and move things around and try different things to circumvent the executive order.”
. . . Originally, PBS had planned to move the two execs into a “wellness department” before dismissing that idea in favor of placing them in the station services department, the source told The Free Press. PBS’s station services department oversees communications between its national headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, and its local affiliates.
My guess is that they’ll still be employed at PBS. Although I’m a Democrat and think I’m a liberal, I am pretty appalled when I turn on PBS (the only station I listen to in my car), and hear only the progressive side of issues. Since part of the station is funded by taxpayers, I’d think that they have an obligation to present various points of view. (Perhaps they’re presented late at night when nobody hears them!). Well, at least Krista Tippett is gone. . . .
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili avoids the paparazzi (Andrzej)
Hili: Somebody is following me.A: You have delusions.Hili: Yes, and it’s a coincidence that you have this camera.
Hili: Ktoś za mną chodzi.Ja: Masz złudzenia.Hili: Tak, a ten aparat to przypadkiem masz ze sobą.
*******************
From Things with Faces; a concerned pepper:
From My Cat is an Asshole:
From Stuart, who says “Google has capitulated.” And it’s true; go here to see it on Google Maps!
Posted by Masih. The translation is “Another video of slogans against Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Republic in Ekbatan town, Tehran”. The first post has no video but shows vociferous opposition to the Iranian theocracy:
ویدیوی دیگری از شعارها علیه علی خامنهای و جمهوری اسلامی در شهرک اکباتان تهران pic.twitter.com/ZR8UxSUTXc
— Vahid Online (@Vahid) February 9, 2025
From J. K. Rowling, and it seems accurate:
#IStandWithSandiePeggie
H/T @5uffragette pic.twitter.com/xsasu9uf6R— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) February 11, 2025
From Malcolm, who says, “Not just cats have fun with these.”
Little rascal.. 😅
Sound on pic.twitter.com/ycEWBhOe0I
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) January 24, 2025
Yvonne Ridley is on the right here, and she says the hostages were treated with “kindness”. Ridley is unbelievably stupid or blind. Julia Hartley-Brewer pushes back big time:
Journalist Yvonne Ridley tries telling @JuliaHB1 that the hostages were treated “well”. What follows is the most entertaining WTF moment of the year.
Jaw dropping madness! pic.twitter.com/TY9DoZBlrU
— The Mossad: Satirical and Awesome (@TheMossadIL) February 11, 2025
From my feed, the Beatles’s first concert in the U.S. It’s 35 minutes long, and you can hear it:
Today in 1964, The Beatles played for the first time in the United States.
Here’s the complete concert.
Enjoy this masterpiece. pic.twitter.com/d6C0J1EObP
— 🎸 Rock History 🎸 (@historyrock_) February 11, 2025
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:
Dutch mother and two-year old baby girl, both likely gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-02-12T11:04:39.510Z
Two tweets from Matthew. He calls this first one, “More beautiful grimness.”
Whip spider (Paraphrynus laevifrons) covered with chloropid fly puparia. The parasitoid fly attacks the eggs carried by the female. When done, the maggots climb on the "childless" mom's back and pupate. She protects them during this period thanks to her motherly instincts.
— Gil Wizen (@wizentrop.bsky.social) 2025-02-06T17:13:24.292Z
Matthew said he spotted 17 crabs. I didn’t even try:
How many Broad-clawed porcelain crabs (Porcellana platycheles) can you spot?County Clare, Ireland.
— Cormac McGinley (@cormacscoast.bsky.social) 2025-02-11T17:14:51.557Z
My friend deleted Google Maps off of her phone due to the renaming of the Gulf. My Apple Maps currently shows that body of water as a big unnamed gulf. At least Mapquest shows it by the original “Gulf of Mexico”.
And that interview with Yvonne Ridley claiming that Hamas kindly gave hostages mementos and “goodie bags”….mind boggling! Good thing the other lady let her have it!
I saw something about Redditors eschewing use of google maps. I took a look at MapQuest. They have not renamed the Gulf, but there’s a reason you don’t hear people talking about MapQuest anymore.
“True dat – DOUBLE TRUE!”
Lazy Sunday (Chronic-cles of Narnia)
Chris Parnell & Andy Samberg / SNL
youtu.be/sRhTeaa_B98?si=2fz_fCn4OOh_RgWa
The Apple Maps app on my iPhone shows it as “Gulf of America.”
I didn’t think anyone would take renaming the Gulf seriously.
Oh yep, now mine is too! I let my friend know and she promptly filed an error report on it, citing “Name is wrong”.
Yes! And “…They [Hama] gave them a little mementos, Palestinian Mementos.”
‘Hostage Certificates,’ as if the captives liked it there so much, they couldn’t bear to leave.
In Canada Google Maps is showing it is as:
Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)
I’m pretty critical of Trump but still pleased with banning men in women’s sports and his more pro-Israel stance.
Gulf of America only show up for USA folks; the rest of the world still sees Gulf of Mexico.
I wonder what Trump’s small brain his thought of for renaming New Mexico? And just wait until someone points out to him the Florida is a Spanish word!
Sorry (not really, of course), but I just can’t get too sentimental about left-wing crazies whining about right-wing crazies renaming the Gulf of Mexico. After all, they (the left) have spent the last decade renaming buildings, birds, and who knows what else.
What goes around, comes around.
100% agree with the hatchet job on the clueless Ridley.
Good point. I’d forgotten about that.
Regarding the dog and the door stop, I saw a video around Christmas time about a dog that loved those. As a present, his owner took a square board and put sixteen or twenty of those on it. The dog loved it.
Just a small clarification: Dr. Paul Offit MD is a pediatrician and infectious disease doctor with the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia. Wikipedia lists a subspecialty in vaccineology and he is co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine and a leading public spokesman supporting vaccines.
He’s also on the panel that reviews and votes on potential vaccines, which I believe is called Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee
(VRBPAC). Far from voting yes on anything, I recall specifically that he was one of the two dissents in a 17-2 vote for something re. the vaccines vs. SARS-CoV-2, IIRC one involving either a booster dose recommendation, reformulation to a new strain, or something involving age limits.
And, he’s the author of Autism’s False Prophets that is in part a take-down of Andrew Wakefield, of the infamous Lancet paper. BTW, it isn’t till near the very end of the book that it is revealed that Wakefield’s driving force is religion.
Yes, thanks, he is on several U.S. advisory panels, at least one of which had its Feb meeting cancelled by the DOGE boys and girls. I just wanted to clarify that his daily work is more clinical peds at the CHOP than research labish. Also he is a prolific author of public health and medical books for the general public and his wife is a pediatrician.
I think that Wakefield’s driving force was personal gain. He patented a single measles vaccine, and then wrote (together with colleagues whom he misled) a fraudulent paper that the triple MMR vaccine was causing autism, in order to get it banned and replaced with his brand.
From the article :
“he urged vitamin A treatments, not a measles vaccine.”
When truth (“healthy immune system”) serves to advance a lie (nothing to do with a virus) that’s dialectic. Woke uses dialectical alchemy all the time.
I assume he was an authority figure in the measles story.
If so, RFK, Jr.’s consciousness fits a Woke Right pattern. Total control to advance a totalizing vision – gnosis – of life from some ancient past, that we must return to – out of the Woke gnostic prison of “here and now”.
#WordPressItalicsAndBoldSkills
Woke Right — an interesting phrase. Thanks. Did you coin it? I may use it. Fair & balanced, do you reckon?
It can be generally assumed I’m coming from the “ConceptualJames” AKA James A. Lindsay angle.
Not balanced at all though. It is dialectical in development – In haste :
First, Woke arises (critical consciousness) from Leftism (Hegel, Rousseau,..). Woke comes under attack from various angles. The ideology can develop through a reactionary negation towards the same authoritarianism, using different or opposing ideas.
Lemmee see if Lindsay’s Venn diagram is around …
x.com/conceptualjames/status/1877183024363704740?s=46
Also search up New Discourses “how the pendulum really swings”.
This Venn diagram is genius!
Do you love yellow buses, too?
I missed that you said this Venn diagram. Now I’m curious to check out Bryan’s link to Lindsay (I hope it’s an article and not a podcast video thing).
Konstantin Kisin has a discussion of “woke right” here:
https://www.konstantinkisin.com/p/thou-shalt-not-criticise-the-woke
Well, the Kisin article cut off after a few paragraphs; one has to subscribe to see more.
But, I can very highly recommend his book, “An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West.” It’s magnificent; a superb takedown of the anti-western bias of the far left.
The title suggests Kisin refers to :
Love Letter to America
Yuri Bezmenov (alias Thomas Schuman)
ca. 1984
ia802207.us.archive.org/3/items/love-letter-america/love-letter-america.pdf
I loved the Julia Hartley-Brewer interview and wish the US press would take the same approach with Trump and both parties in Congress. There’s a wonderful meme making the rounds that shows the little girl from the television show “Good Luck Charlie” with an incredulous expression on her face. The meme’s caption says, “All I’m saying is that the first reporter who yells out ‘What the f*** are you talking about?’ should get the Pulitzer Prize.”.
Microsoft Bing has also renamed the Gulf.
Dutch Google Maps has Golf van Mexico (Golf van Amerika)
[Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)]
This seems to me to be even more cowardly than just Gulf of America.
I just checked, and Bing still names it Gulf of Mexico. This is in the UK; perhaps that makes a difference.
It does make a difference which country. In Canada Google Maps shows:
Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)
Last night I wrote to my new Senator, Carpetbagger Dave McCormick (PA, but he’s from CT), urging at least to abstain from voting for Junior Kennedy (JrK). Suggest that if you have an R Sen (or worse, two), urge them to abstain. It wouldn’t take many abstentions to tank that nomination.
The renaming of the Gulf is a loyalty test. The White House has banned an AP reporter because the AP continues to use Gulf of Mexico rather than America. This is insane.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-ap-journalism-first-amendment-8a83d8b506053249598e807f8e91e1ae
The cult has totally bought into the Orange Felon. George Orwell was prescient.
CNN reporter: “Which White House official made the decision to bar the AP reporter from the Oval Office and the diplomatic reception room last night?…And so the question here is, is this setting a precedent that this White House will retaliate against reporters who don’t use the language that you guys believe reporters should use? And how does that align with the First Amendment commitment that you were just talking about?”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: “It is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America. And I’m not sure why news outlets don’t want to call it that, but that is what it is.”
PBS is dead to me, and has been for several years.
And if RFK Junior really believes in the miasma theory—and not the germ theory of disease—then his nomination really does need to be rejected. That probably will not happen, which means that he will need to be watched closely. We’ll see if his errant views on science influence the organization in substantive ways.
If he gets in, I suspect he’ll replace the vaccine review panel with a collection of his toadies. We are witnessing the unfolding of neo-Lysenkoism before our eyes.
I’m with you on NPR. It used to be the only radio I listened to. Then came 2020 and the takeover by the woke. I have pretty much stopped listening to it entirely.
I said in 2020: NPR can’t report the weather anymore without stating that “and we know that adverse weather events effect people of color more.” (I detest that phrase, “we know”. Tell me exactly how we know; what evidence supports the claim.)
I, too, and a Dem and a liberal. But the woke capture of media and academia dismays me.
I hate watch PBSs TV news most nights. It is on for an hour and I can manage about 15 min if I grit my teeth.
I can’t watch the networks (sorry Jerry) b/c I’m not brain damaged enough and the Beeb has been as beclowned as to be unwatchable for about a decade. I was suspicious when they started telling us British figures of the past were all black.
I think PBS have gotten worse in the past decade. And the “we know” cliche is indeed extra irritating. They seem to have little self awareness of how preposterous and biased they look. Purity spirals and bubbles all the way.
Most media has declined horribly. Wish I had the engram of various woke words skewing up HUGELY in the past decade: NYT, WP, LA Times and even WSJ. The word usage of things like “racism” or “white supremacy” for the past decade looks like last century’s world population graph. Amazing. Google Engrams (word counts) are excellent heat maps of word usage and thus cultural trends.
Getting non garbage news these days is a challenge. I wish NHK were more online to watch it from Japan (it is in English on TV but I cut the cord 5 years ago and watch only online). Excellent.
D.A.
NYC
“From J. K. Rowling, and it seems accurate”.
Note the stray lower limb that appears between the two women in the left-hand corner of the cartoon. The artist responsible, 5uffragette, posted on X that she rarely makes mistakes and that of course it would be one in which she did that would be retweeted by JK Rowling to her millions of followers. (Though she is, naturally, happy that “the Queen” did so!)
Prior to the availability of a vaccine, it is estimated that all children under 15 in the United States contracted measles, which became a nationally-notifiable disease in 1912. In the following four years, the United States averaged 5300 reported deaths annually from measles. (Accounting for a presumed under reporting, the death toll was likely higher.) Adjusting for overall population, this would be equivalent today to over 18,000 deaths annually, yet the CDC reports that there have been no reported deaths from measles since 2015. Vaccines save lives. End of story.
Not quite. “From 1956 to 1960, an average of 450 measles-related deaths were reported each year” in the United States, “compared with an average of 5300 measles-related deaths during 1912–1916.” (Link below.) Had reported measles fatalities continued at the same level as in the earlier years, then after adjusting for population, we would have expected nearly 10,000 deaths annually in the late 1950s—a level 21 times higher than what was experienced. Curiously, the first measles vaccine was not available until 1963. What then accounts for the drastic decrease in deaths? Publishing in “The Journal of Infectious Diseases” in 2004, a researcher from the CDC’s National Immunization Program said that by “the late 1950s, even before the introduction of measles vaccine, measles-related deaths and case fatality rates in the United States had decreased markedly, presumably as a result of improvement in health care and nutrition.” (I don’t know the degree to which antibiotics contributed, but I assume there was a marked decrease in complications and deaths from secondary bacterial pneumonia.) Whatever the specific causes of the decline, over 95% of the decline in measles deaths in the United States happened before there was a vaccine.
https://academic.oup.com/jid/article-abstract/189/Supplement_1/S1/820569?redirectedFrom=fulltext
None of this is to belittle the measles vaccine: it has been important in further reducing deaths and complications—and it is particularly important in countries that might otherwise lack access to adequate healthcare and nutrition. But “miasma theory” taunts aside, RFK Jr. is correct when he says that the drastic decrease in measles-related deaths in the United States was not a result of the vaccine. Something else was at play. Honest discussion will grant where he is correct to better focus on where he is mistaken. But we also need to acknowledge mistakes on the “science” side. For instance, a briefing currently available on the CDC website (last updated in 2019) says that in the United States measles causes death in “1-2 per 1000 cases” and “For every 1,000 children who get measles, one or two will die from it.” I can understand a parent being concerned after reading this, but it is wildly inaccurate—or at least misleading. The error? While this is portrayed as the overall fatality rate, it is actually the case fatality rate for “reported” cases in the late 1950s, during which fewer than 14% of estimated cases were reported, despite measles being a “notifiable” disease. The infection fatality rate was on the order of 1 in 6700 to 1 in 8900. That’s still significant, depending on one’s risk tolerance, but it is much less dangerous than 1 in 500. If we are going to judge “misinformation,” then let’s do it evenhandedly. Failure to do so is unnecessarily inflaming people on both sides of this interminable debate.
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/downloads/measlesdataandstatsslideset.pdf
Re: the article by Dr. Offit concerning the brain-dead RFK Jr. I just sent the following to each of the two (Democratic) senators from my state:
I am very concerned with the potential for harm that a totally unqualified person could do as head of the HHS department of the US government. While I am certain that you share this concern, I am not certain that you realize just how unqualified RFK Jr. is. I just ran across this article, written by a competent, well-respected, professional virologist, and am forwarding it to you. Should you not have time to peruse it (though it is not long), the main takeaway is that RFK Jr. DOES NOT ACCEPT THE GERM THEORY OF DISEASE. This puts him in league with flat-earthers, people who believe in phlogiston, and astrologers.
While I know you will not be voting to confirm his nomination, I would urge you to make known his position to as many of your Republican colleagues as possible; if only a few see the light, his nomination can be forestalled.
The document, by Dr. Paul Offit, is here: https://pauloffit.substack.com/p/understanding-rfk-jr
Sincerely,
Your constituent,
Mark Joseph
Feel free to steal, revise, or otherwise use this as you best see fit. Other of Der Pumpkinführer’s nominations might range from bad to atrocious, but this one comes with a body count.