If you "agree with" any of MAHA you're signing onto eugenics.
MAHA is a movement involving anti-vax eugenicist principles. Even if you can pick out one little part of it that sounds ok, do you really want to sign on to the stink of eugenics?
"Eugenicists frequently focused on dietary habits, and their objectives “often dovetailed with broad public health and hygiene practices.”" is how Daniel Kracov described it in a journal publication in Food and Drug Law Journal in 2022, when talking about the early days of The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), from 1906 to the enactment of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. The article goes over the history of regulating diet from over a century ago and how tied into product promotion this always has been, and about an “influential factor in that critical period typically goes unnamed or unexamined: eugenics”!1
Back during the campaign to eliminate polio, there was an anti-vaxxer that was really out there named Duon H. Miller, described as “the cantankerous owner of a cosmetics company in Florida” by an article in Slate, which reported, “To Miller, “polio” was not an infectious disease. It was a state of malnutrition caused by midcentury American diets, particularly soft drinks—his mortal enemy.”2 Sounds awfully familiar!
It’s not just RFKJr who’s into quackery around diet either among the Trump administration officials. Kash Patel had been promoting supplements with the false claim that they were “a detox” for covid vaccines.3 And loads of livestreams of Donald Trump events feature covid products,4 especially the disproven claimed remedy ivermectin in “contagion” emergency kits.5
It’s common to push these types of products in the context of “taking control of your own health” and other pseudoscience and eugenics type frames. I don’t think most people notice this of course, because nobody stops to think about where this kind of narrative leads. Sure of course people can like healthy food and exercise. But the problem comes in because that stuff is just part of the eugenics ideology. And what you think is something positive, gets spun as a reason to claim some people don’t deserve to live. We’re back to how anti-vaxxers assert that people shouldn’t need vaccines if they’re “fit” and eat right, and if you get some disease, you must deserve it. It’s related to the “invisible hand of the market” that makes no sense in markets,6 let alone disease or anything else. The invisible hand of the market is apocalyptic hopium, because there’s no tipping point where people wake up and magically start doing the right thing and it’s the same reason I think relying on FAFO is a terrible strategy.7 And it’s why I say eugenics ideology is a form of pseudoscience.8
And it’s ugly. Peter Greene described it very well saying that they “believe the marketplace is God's own way of sorting out the deserving from the undeserving. Their own wealth and success are a result of their superior awesomeness, not the luck of timing and circumstance. And if you are poor, that is a reflection of your unworthiness, your moral failings, your character flaws, and trying to boost you out of that is to go against the laws of nature. The implication underlying all this? Not everyone can succeed, and not everyone should.”9 The same thing gets applied to health, where people are set by the wayside and that’s just the way it is,10 or that they actually should expect to be sacrificed not just for the health of anyone else but for The Economy as a false god.11 The herd immunity ideology, and public health gets twisted to where people with “underlying conditions” are the cause of not only their own illness, but everyone else’s too, that’s the propaganda that’s been pushed for years now in the pandemic.12
And all this is pushed together. This is how these things work, and it’s well studied. At an MIT Digital Economy seminar they discussed how the anti-vax influencers have various ways to get income including subscription fees, maybe from astroturfed sources, and selling conspiracy theory swag. A guy in my neighborhood was wearing a Qanon shirt in 2021. We’ve all seen weird bumper stickers. A researcher at the Digital Economy presentation said: “So if you are anti-vax, you are selling supplements right, if you are, you're selling essential oils, you're selling products that are directly benefiting from the disinformation or misinformation that is circulating.”13 You can quickly see how the diet and exercise wellness influencers also so obviously play into this mix.
All sorts of influencers play in the “awareness” and special people with special knowledge being able to overcome the health challenges that others do not.
They “do their own research” and go counter to what experts say. This is part of the reason I object to the term "covid conscious" that some people online use to mean that they’re actively avoiding covid, either because of high risk or personal preference. It’s akin to “health conscious” and unfortunately the term seems to have been born out of covid wellness influencers who promote the idea that people avoiding covid are superior, more “aware” and even more intelligent,14 and so promoting the perversely comforting idea that people thus will win the zombie apocalypse with the eugenics of not having covid or covid complications. This isn’t public health, and it’s not even realistic, because disease is never fair, and because eugenics is a pseudoscience. Someone can do everything right and get a deadly disease, and some people get lucky despite all the risks. It is what it is. We can’t individualize ourselves out of a collective problem, but there are a lot of people ready to sell us on that, and to try to sell us a lot of products.
Individual control and specialness makes for a compelling narrative. It's a good story, especially if you want to promote using products based on that.15 Many products which are dubious in some way -- maybe just mixed up in financial schemes,16 or sold by people who are gaming the rules,17 or have unproven efficacy and safety,18 or are even hazardous.19 This “alternative” health movement is NOT benign. Trying to get public health out of individualism and profiteering is like trying to get ice out of fire, it just doesn’t make much sense.
And we sure don’t get public health by opposing public health! Nevertheless, Monica Gandhi has been trying to gaslight us into going against established public health knowledge to claim that you can convince people to get vaccinated by discouraging vaccination.20 There’s no common ground and you can’t meet anti-vaxxers halfway to hell. Mike Osterholm was quoted in Stat News over 2 years ago saying that he thinks public health leadership is trying to “thread the needle” between people who want to be vaccinated and the anti-vaxxers who want nobody vaccinated.21 How could that work? The MAHA people don’t want anyone using fluoride.22 It also seems they don’t want anyone drinking pasteurized milk, yet they also don’t want anyone halting the spread of avian influenza on dairy farms either.23 These people are fringe, and not the majority, why should we cater to them anyway?
And the people against public health always frame it as a right to so-called “medical freedom” even while they limit other people’s freedom by not only spreading disease instead of getting vaccinated themselves, but also trying to stop other people getting vaccinated. Republican politicians in Montana have tried to pass a law against all medicine involving mRNA technology,24 which could potentially stop people getting vaccines or other medical treatments in the future.
I realize some people are also busy being big fans of Paul Offit and Katelyn Jetelina, imagining that they will lead The Resistance to anti-vax by solving this thorny problem — but they both have problems. Katelyn Jetelina has a history of being a terrible communicator when it comes to accurate information — leading with the lies and helping anti-vax to spread25 under the guise of being a debunker influencer.26 Her popular newsletter has always seemed to exist to soothe and coo people to believe everything’s going to be ok no matter what, telling people what they want to hear. And Paul Offit just straight up has been pushing anti-vax for years, he has himself long lobbied for the restrictions the Trump administration and RFKJr are imposing now.27 And now Katelyn Jetelina is paired up with Paul Offit and the guy who ran around New York City with ebola in 2014.28 And they say they’re “learning from MAHA”,29 when surely public health should be the ones educating people about real science, not joining their cult to try to fix the problem from the inside of MAGA by driving the murder trolley,30 or maybe join them instead of beating them or whatever they think they’re doing.
I listened to an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates who never specifically mentioned public health, but what he said really applies across the board on all our public good when he said that: “people have to have some positive vision of the state, like that has to happen, like at some point people have to feel like the state itself the government not America as an abstract concept, but the government is itself good for something.” Ta-Nehisi Coates also acknowledged the concept of finding common ground to build coalitions, and the realities of running for office, but noted the problem with having to avoid certain topics regarding civil rights and human rights just in order to do that, and how it throws people under the bus essentially, just as all of mainstream politics has done toward the clinically vulnerable with regards to the pandemic. Ta-Nehisi Coates described a conversation with someone about this, and it’s a discourse we’ve probably all heard before in some context or another, he said: “they were making the point I think you know it was an astute political point that “hey I won't go out and talk about you know say you know trans rights or immigrant rights you know to this person over here I will focus on the things that we have in common economically you know what I mean and try to build the coalition there. It's not that I'm anti-trans or anti-immigrant but you know I'm trying to build a coalition and coalitions have to be built on the things that are shared.” And I said yeah that makes sense but what happens when your opposition starts attacking those people?”31
I get that some of these doctor influencers might truly believe they’re going to break bread with anti-vaxxers and so convince these people to save themselves by being nice to them. I understand the impulse coming from doctors especially. But those people are already killing people, so what are they going to do with their MAHA learning sessions when more people are being killed?
What are they going to do when those MAHA people and the contrarians in charge at the government want to go further? We know they never stop at just a little, they keep going. The J6 insurrectionists weren't just pardoned, now they’re demanding reparations.32 And we’ve already seen that RFKJr wasn’t satisfied with “personal choice”, they’re looking to wrongly but officially discredit vaccines so nobody will get them. So the future might not just be withholding the prevention of suffering such as restricting vaccines. Forced breeding, sterilization, deprivation, and murderous executions have happened all over when authoritarians get into power and start implementing policies based in eugenics.
I see people assuring each other that they’ll be able to use one of the many underlying conditions that puts one in the at risk category now allowable under the current covid vaccine restrictions.33 But MAHA clearly wants vaccines to be taken off the market, and claim that vaccinated people are dangerous, they’ve been saying this for years, and I keep trying to tell people what is being said in fringe right-wing circles,34 the base of the current administration running federal public health and healthcare agencies. I’m just going to keep asking - why the hell do we need to cater to these people?
And still many people are reluctant to be “alarmist” because that of course is shamed, for reasons.35 But reproductive health professionals and lawyers warned us repeatedly about the decades about Roe V. Wade, and yet so many (probably PR placed) op-eds insisted on that it was "settled law". In 2021 Corey Robin had an essay published in The New Yorker magazine arguing that fear of fascism and the overturning of Roe V Wade was overblown and essentially alarmist. So don’t worry. Then a year after that was published, Roe V Wade was struck down by the Supreme Court. Historian Thomas Zimmer pointed out that after that happened, The New Yorker quietly changed the wording in Corey Robin’s article,36 apparently to move the goal posts to keep chastising people as overreacting but acknowledging that what they said wouldn’t happen absolutely happened.
These MAHA people want pasteurization gone, no fluoride in toothpaste, and may start criminalizing being “unhealthy” based on who knows what. Maybe they’ll use the standards of some wellness bro influencer and right-wing podcaster with a concierge clinic who thinks covid should’ve been allowed to cull the human species more.37
This is bigger than public health of course. Andrea Pitzer described it as a “pre-1945 mindset”,38 and that seems to be driving all of societal logistics in a distinctly not good way.
References:
KRACOV1, DANIEL A. “Eugenics and the Development of U.S. Food and Drug Law.” Food and Drug Law Journal, vol. 77, no. 2, 2022, pp. 135–75. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27186356. Accessed 28 May 2025. Despite its focus on race and genes over environment, eugenics was seen as having a particularly important connection to hygiene, diet, and public health. In the eugenic mindset, “(c)leanliness often referred to as much having a pure hereditary lineage and unblemished moral record as it did keeping one’s body and home free from dirt.”68 Hygiene indicated “high evolutionary status, for by avoiding disease the health- conscious individual increased personal and national productivity, fitness, and superiority.”69 Eugenicists also had a preoccupation with efficiency and “flow” through the digestive system as well as optimizing the human body.70 A regular feature of eugenic displays at state fairs and national expositions were displays on hygiene and the ideal (and invariably white) human body.71 This was part of a broader “exhibitionary culture” at the time that utilized such events to reach “the multitudes with their messages of better healthcare for mothers and infants, immigration reform, and sterilization of the socially and racially unfit.”72 Advertisements presented the streamlined “eugenic ideal,” showing products in which eugenics ideas had a direct relationship to product design, from cars to kitchens to buildings to dinnerware.73 The objective was achieving an “earthly utopia”—”a seamless society made of perfected people and products.”74
Slate - The Loneliest Anti-Vaxxer. Even the popular polio shot had its haters. By Nick Keppler, Nov 26, 2021 Under the banner of his organization, Polio Prevention Inc., Miller distributed hair-raising mailers with claims like “Thousands of little white coffins will be used to bury victims of Salk’s heinous and fraudulent vaccine.” A self-made shampoo magnate, he was one of the few malcontents who publicly campaigned against the polio vaccine. His crusade shows that even during a public embrace of the polio shot that many people frustrated at COVID anti-vaxxers have held up as the ideal reaction to a new lifesaving vaccine, there was dissent, some of it as vitriolic as that you find in the corners of Twitter that swap anti-Fauci memes and Bill Gates rants—and just as weird. To Miller, “polio” was not an infectious disease. It was a state of malnutrition caused by midcentury American diets, particularly soft drinks—his mortal enemy. “Disease and malfunction do not ‘strike’ us; we build them within ourselves,” he wrote in one of his two-sided handbills.
NBC News - Trump’s pick for FBI director promoted bogus supplements to ‘reverse’ vaccines - Kash Patel has posted about a supplement line that claims, without evidence, that it can help people “detox” from Covid vaccines. Dec. 4, 2024, 5:00 AM EST By Aria Bendix “Spike the Vax, order this homerun kit to rid your body of the harms of the vax,” he wrote in another. It is not clear whether the posts were paid promotions; they were not labeled as such. Warrior Essentials sells what it calls a “Spike Protein Detox Protocol,” a set of up to three supplements that it claims, without evidence, will “undo the damage from the spike protein,” a component of the coronavirus. The mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna prompt the body to produce and fight an altered version of the protein to train the immune system. Warrior Essentials is one of many companies that trade on unfounded theories about the dangers of vaccines, which have proliferated in the alt-right social media landscape since the pandemic — ideas that are not backed by science.
Trump still promoting covid pseudoscience quack products. Mar 20th, 2024 The image is a screenshot of timestamp 2:12 in the video. On screen is Donald Trump speaking at a microphone at a podium labeled National Religious Broadcasters. Taking up nearly a quarter of the screen is a big ad that says IVERMECTIN question mark, in all caps.
Trump rally streams still pushing ivermectin. Nov 1st, 2024 screenshot of the Majority Report on youtube for Oct 28, 2024 titled “Trump rally goes full racist” and shows a stream from the Trump rally at Madison Square garden with a 3-way split screen with the featured comedian in the middle, a view of the entire arena filled with people on the left, and on the right an advertisement for ivermectin with the caption Ivermectin question mark, “contagion emergency kit” with the same advertisement at the bottom, the livestream logo in the bottom right says RSBN 255PM
PBS Hacking Your Mind Weapons of Influence Episode 102 Aired: 09/16/20 Thaler helped to create a new field, behavioral economics, for which he won the Nobel Prize. One of the field’s key insights is that gut feelings like loss aversion lead consumers to make predictable mistakes, and companies in a market economy make a lot of money by encouraging us to make those mistakes. Until then, the widely accepted view had been that markets actually protect consumers from their mistakes.Thaler: “And so I would often hear something like the following — “Yes, yes.I understand that the people in your experiments and some of the people I know do foolish things, but in markets, then — and then I claim…” They could never quite finish this sentence without literally waving their hands, and the argument is somehow if you choose the wrong career or fail to save for retirement, that the market will somehow push you back toward being rational. There’s a reason why no one can make this argument without waving their hands, and that’s because the argument is just silly. You know, if you don’t save enough for retirement, what happens to you? You’re poor when you’re old. The market doesn’t discipline you.
DOES FAFO EVEN MATTER? - #MAGA REFUSES TO #LEARN W/ CHLOE HUMBERT! - The Letterhack There's no invisible hand of the market That is religious That's a religious hope It's apocalyptic hopium that there's going to be some tipping point where everybody suddenly magically wakes up and starts doing the right thing And um yeah I just I just don't like let's just get away from this idea There's nothing wrong with mandates We have a mandate to pay into social security It works It works
Curmudgucation - School Choice Isn't Uber. It's LulaRoe. From September 2021 - PETER GREENE SEP 14, 2023 They believe the marketplace is God's own way of sorting out the deserving from the undeserving. Their own wealth and success are a result of their superior awesomeness, not the luck of timing and circumstance. And if you are poor, that is a reflection of your unworthiness, your moral failings, your character flaws, and trying to boost you out of that is to go against the laws of nature. The implication underlying all this? Not everyone can succeed, and not everyone should. This is not an idea that translates well to public education, but it is a foundational belief about how the world works, and their ideas about the freedom to rise or fall on your merits echo those of fellow multi-level millionaires, Dick and Betsy DeVos (in fairness, Betsy's money also comes from the manufacture of auto parts).
Teen Vogue - COVID Isn’t Going Anywhere. Masking Up Could Save My Life. Disability Visibility is a column on being disabled in a nondisabled world. By Alice Wong January 17, 2024 Many are promoting the idea that COVID is not the mass disabling event that many argue it is, that everyone will be fine because vaccines and antiviral medications exist without acknowledging structural barriers and racial disparities, and that high-risk people are inevitable acceptable losses. In an August interview with the BBC, Dr. Anthony Fauci said, "...even though you'll find the vulnerable will fall by the wayside, they'll get infected, they'll get hospitalized, and some will die. It's not going to be this tsunami of cases that we've seen.” Dr. Vinay Prasad wrote the following in his newsletter: “If your child is sick, you should not test them, and you should send them to school if they are mildly ill… Go to work if you feel up for it; stay home if you are too sick to work. Don’t test.” The condescension of people in positions of authority who are telling the public not to worry dismisses the valid fear of high-risk people who struggle to exist in public spaces without being harassed for masking or requesting accommodations because society abandoned us in a push to return to “normal” while leaving many behind. For many, the pandemic is not over. People need to continue to wear masks and get vaccinated if they can, in addition to pushing for better air quality and other mitigation efforts, instead of worshiping the individualistic “you do you” philosophy.
Politico: A far-right rallying cry: Older Americans should volunteer to work. Older Americans are key drivers of the country's faltering economy — and more at risk of dying from the coronavirus. By Tina Nguyen. 03/27/2020 And Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, himself a former radio talk show host, went on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show to argue that older Americans would willingly sacrifice themselves to keep the economy afloat and prevent the country from sliding into a depression.
The Economy demands full participation, herd debt paid on an altar of lies “Public health” is operating, but with the wrong information and the wrong solutions to solve the wrong problems, because those calling the shots have the wrong goals. Chloe Humbert Dec 23, 2022 This theory is definitely not based in any science and is completely without any reality. But I think the false concept being floated is actually worse than most realize. People are being convinced to blame all disease mitigation. They are being propagandized into blaming, and resenting, the people who have in fact been isolating or otherwise taking precautions to avoid sickness.
MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy - Thinker-Fest: Session 1 - Fireside Chat - How to Fix the “Splinternet” Mar 3, 2023 They are really invested in gaining social capital and reputation for participating in these types of industries. And they also have economic models at play. You can buy flat earth sweatshirts, you can buy anti-vax stickers and notebooks, you can pay subscription fees, you can watch videos that are monetized on YouTube. And this is also very much a reputational economy. We also have a factor that I don't think is talked about a lot which are intentional antagonists otherwise known as trolls. What's interesting about them from a digital community perspective is that they too are chasing social currency but the reputation that they're cultivating within their own communities is one where the more chaos they create, the more reputation credibility that they have. And so these three forces are kind of at play when we look at what's happening from an individual and community's perspective. The issue is that if you broaden out, you start to see that all of these dynamics can take place because there are very clear revenue models and businesses. People are making money from this. For example I trace what's called direct benefits. So these are companies that are selling products and services directly related to the idea that's circulating. So if you are anti-vax, you are selling supplements right, if you are, you're selling essential oils, you're selling products that are directly benefiting from the disinformation or misinformation that is circulating.
Jessica Burn Notice - Chloe Humbert · Jan 22, 2023 To be an influencer of course means she has a way of ingratiating herself into hearts and minds by telling her audience what they want to hear. People see what they want to see because the influencer leaves things vague and open ended enough to facilitate that, while inserting the ads or narratives. It’s also quite alluring to be told you’re special, that you have special knowledge, that you’re smarter than other people. Maybe that you’ll survive when others won’t? Disease is neither fair nor just and this would qualify as ableism at best, or worse, could be characterized as eugenics.
Jessica Overdose This time Jessica appears to be promoting the idea of buying LOTS and LOTS of supplements. Chloe Humbert · Oct 9, 2024 She makes brief passing reference to actual proven mitigations for covid, but then lists a bunch of studies that are supposedly about supplements as covid remedies and we have no idea if they actually prove anything at all or if so, what, but assures everyone that her family is using a load of supplements and asserts that “we can up our supplement game”. Do I think you should take medical advice from a pseudonymous financially successful influencer, who you don’t know what country they live in or who they are, or who is paying them for what, but they tell you they have a phd in english? I’d say no. Go to a doctor who at least has a legal responsibility to give you expert individualized advice, don’t just listen to some rando blogger saying “looks like it works”.
Making Novavax into a memestock is a threat to public health. All 3 vaccines approved in the U.S., from Pfizer, Moderna, and Novavax, are basically in the same ballpark with efficacy. Chloe Humbert · Nov 11, 2024 Often people will hype the shit out of anything that is rosy about a particular stock and I suspect there are troll farms and probably botnets paid to do so, because that’s what people do nowadays in the information landscape and the internet of fakes. Many overly rosy posts about Novavax on social media include the stock symbol which is kind of a giveaway! There’s substantial money involved. Novavax is one of the most shorted stocks too. So there’s plenty of interest in manipulating online conversations and creating controversy about the product, in order to manipulate the perceptions, the automated systems monitoring social media for stock signals, and people trying to influence the stock market. I’m concerned some could be trying to orchestrate something akin to a pump & dump scheme.
Ignore nose hype and don't waste money. More pandemic profiteering that might violate regulations, and definitely isn’t ready for prime time. Chloe Humbert Dec 03, 2024 I don’t see how a personal care product could reasonably be said to prevent disease, and how they could say it’s drug free when what they’re describing is a product that absolutely fits the objective definition of a drug. It sure seems like someone should be verifying that this product is or is not a drug, and if it is or is not in compliance with regulations of the FDA and FTC. Personally I think it’s wrong to just say anyone can circumvent safety regulations just by claiming something’s not what it obviously is being sold as.
The Best Approach to COVID Prevention? It’s Not Up Your Nose Nasal sprays aren’t part of a science-based multilayered COVID-prevention strategy Kaitlin Sundling Apr 29, 2024 Unproven products can seem attractive, especially when social media marketing overhypes potential benefits, without mention of risks or uncertainties. Even for people who are highly informed about COVID, it is easy to be swayed by aggressive advertising and personal anecdotes about unproven products. Unproven methods for COVID prevention can cause harm in at least three ways.
I stay FAR away from any avoidable UV lights. If it’s UV, it’s likely capable of harming human cells - there’s no long-term evidence otherwise. And exposing people to risks repeatedly while insisting IT'S MILD sounds awfully familiar. Chloe Humbert Aug 07, 2024 Some people, often promoting products - or just hyping this “new technology” - often have been pointing to studies that have been ridiculously small and that don’t actually back up the safety claims at all. Fraudulent Appeal to Authority - the tactic of citing sources that don’t actually back up a claim, is sadly very much rampant in marketing that happens on social media. In one case a study that has been cited, it was one person experimenting on themselves! This person exposed their own skin and gave themselves a yellow spot sunburn with the “far uvc” wavelength. We have no idea what’s going to happen to that person some years from now, or the tissue on that person’s body that was affected. This is not a reassuring thing to cite as reason to trust exposure to UV at any wavelength is safe. The study itself includes the statement: “This single individual study does not provide a definitive answer to the question of skin safety. Our study is the basis for future exploration above the current ICNIRP limit values, which would allow quicker inactivation of the virus than is currently permitted in occupied spaces. Furthermore, what this research and other published literature clearly highlight is that the hazard of all wavelengths emitted must be appropriately assessed—it is too simplistic to state that far-UVC devices are “safe for humans.”
Don't take public health prescriptions from repeatedly wrong Doctor Monica Gandhi. Don't Wait For Everybody - Episode 023 Chloe Humbert May 11, 2025 In an era when we have a renowned, prolific, and horrific anti-vax advocate in charge of the governance over vaccines, there are two doctors who want to seem like they're trying to split the difference between what should be a robust and protective public health plan that saves lives and a dark and gloomy world of rampant disease spread with eugenics schemes. No, I don't want to go halfway to hell.
Stat News: FDA offers radio silence on question of spring Covid boosters, as other countries push ahead By Helen Branswell March 16, 2023 “We currently live in a world where those that want additional booster doses really want them. And those that don’t want them don’t want them at all. And what we’re trying to do is thread that needle,” Osterholm said.
NBC News – FDA moves to take prescription fluoride drops and tablets for kids off the market Despite decades of evidence that fluoride prevents cavities, the agency said the best way to keep kids’ teeth strong is to stop eating so much sugar. May 13, 2025, 12:11 PM EDT By Erika Edwards Dr. Meg Lochary, a pediatric dentist in Union County, North Carolina, said she’s been prescribing more of the drops and tablets since county commissioners voted to stop adding fluoride to its water supply last year. “This is really going to hamper our goal of providing kids with fluoride,” Lochary said. “It’s ridiculous, and it takes away the choice of parents to allow their children to have better dental health. It doesn’t make scientific sense.”
Seriously, don't drink the raw milk: Social media doubles down despite bird flu outbreak Portrait of Mary Walrath-Holdridge USA TODAY May 14, 2024 The spread of these claims has led experts to express concern for consumers who may be exposed to or convinced by these messages, as the consumption of raw milk can be especially dangerous for the elderly, children, pregnant people and those with compromised immune systems. Here's what to know about pasteurization and what it does to the products we consume: Pasteurization is the process of heating milk to a high enough temperature for a long enough time to kill harmful germs, according to the CDC. The process of pasteurization became routine in the commercial milk supply in the U.S. in the 1920s and was widespread by the 1950s. As a result, illnesses commonly spread via milk became less prevalent.
Montana House votes down bill to ban mRNA vaccines by KATE HESTON Daily Inter Lake | February 21, 2025 12:00 AM Proponents of the bill argued that the gene-based vaccinations were harmful while opponents argued that a ban would infringe on medical freedom. Rep. Braxton Mitchell, R-Columbia Falls, chaired the session on Wednesday where legislators debate the legislation. Rep. Lukas Schubert, R-Kalispell, spoke in favor of the legislation, telling his colleagues he believed that someone who received the Covid-19 vaccine could spread it to other people. “These vaccines spread like diseases, you can look it up,” Schubert said on the floor. “As an individual who did not receive the Covid vaccine, I don’t want to have vaccines forced upon me without my consent.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that Covid-19 vaccines recommended for use in the United States do not shed as they don’t include a live virus.
Don’t wait for the influencers. Don't Wait For Everybody - Episode 010 Chloe Humbert Sep 21, 2024 Transcript: I didn't even name names in this because I had hoped at the time to help people who were doing this unwittingly. So I didn't mention that I was talking about Kristen Panthagani and your local epidemiologist at the time. But I'm no longer sure that these people want to do better on messaging. I just don't feel like wrapping anyone in cotton anymore about this. They don't want to hear it. So I'm just going to warn others about the problems I see with this. Repeat the truth. Don't lead with a lie.
Repeat the truth, don't lead with a lie. The "truth sandwich" means leading with the facts and repeating the correct information. It's probably the only way to debunk lies without helping to promote them. Chloe Humbert Oct 14, 2022 The tweet that got to me was from a doctor — MD PhD who unfortunately led with the lie on the first tweet of a tweet thread. I was momentarily fooled into thinking fictitious research took place. The initial tweet went viral — hopefully because later in the tweet thread she debunks the claims. BUT THE FIRST TWEET ONLY CONTAINED THE LIE AND THE BOGUS INFORMATION — and that’s the tweet that went viral. An irony is that the doctor also publishes a debunking blog, yet seems unaware of this basic strategy for fighting misinformation. If you only saw the first tweet, especially the first sentence, you could easily have believed untrue claims. After all, an MD PhD who’s pro-vax was presenting this scary anti-vax stuff. Several people I’ve talked to since said they would not have even seen this garbage at all — had it not been for the many twitter stars shouting it out in their timelines —dozens or more decided to prove their big shot debunking chops on this one. The tweet I saw was not the only one where someone decided to lead with the lie. Some people quote-tweeted, driving engagement. So the disinfo was repeated, highlighted, and promoted by both anti-vax AND pro-vax accounts, doing the social contagion work16 of aiding the propagandists.
I don't trust Paul Offit. I wouldn't recommend looking to Paul Offit for leadership on vaccines, because what the Trump administration is doing he was lobbying for in the Biden administration all along. Chloe Humbert May 29, 2025 Paul Offit always wanted to restrict them to 75+ and the severely immunosuppressed all along. Getting the age down to 65+ & people with conditions is better than what some of these (supposedly) liberals we've been fighting have argued for. Anti-vax has permeated everywhere.
Craig Spencer, Doctor in New York City, Is Sick With Ebola By MARC SANTORA OCT. 23, 2014 Dr. Spencer, 33, had traveled on the A and L subway lines Wednesday night, visited a bowling alley in Williamsburg, and then took a taxi back to Manhattan. The next morning, he reported having a temperature of 103 degrees, raising questions about his health while he was out in public.
Don't drive the murder trolley. I hate all the trolley problems. Chloe Humbert Aug 18, 2024 The trolley problem cartoon, except the trolley is already running over a full set of people on the tracks and there’s a bit of red ink following it and the caption says I became a murder trolley driver to help fix the trolley system from the inside!
Ta-Nehisi Coates Unleashed on Trump and the LA Riots | Bulwark Podcast The Bulwark Jun 9, 2025 people have to have some positive vision of the state like that has to happen like at some point people have to feel like the state itself the government not America as an abstract concept but the government is itself good for something And it would be helpful if that something was not just violence so for instance if it was not just the cops or the military like it like there has to be some positive articulation of the state And I think that that is important because when you are asking people to go out to vote for something when you're asking people to go out and support something (…) I was talking to somebody a couple months ago you know who I you know actually was you know I think you know further to the left and they were making the point I think you know it was an astute political point that hey “I won't go out and talk about you know say you know trans rights or immigrant rights you know to this person over here I will focus on the things that we have in common economically you know what I mean and try to build the coalition there It's not that I'm you know anti-trans or anti-immigrant but you know I'm trying to build a coalition and coalitions have to be built on the things that are shared.” And I said yeah that makes sense but what happens like when your opposition starts attacking those people right like that that that really is you know I get it hey you don't want to highlight it and talk about it you know I I understand that you know I mean that's not the you know the point of how you get elected but when people decide that they want to talk about it you know what what do you do then yeah you know and I probably am one that feels that it's it's it's immoral to um see bullying and to look away from it And not to mention you know as some people are now pitching jump in on it.
CBS News - Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, 4 other members sue U.S. government over Jan. 6 Updated on: June 6, 2025 Five members of the Proud Boys, a far-right militant group, claim their constitutional rights were violated when they were prosecuted for their participation in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to a lawsuit filed Friday. The lawsuit was filed in Orlando federal court by former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, Ethan Nordean and Dominic Pezzola. It seeks unspecified compensatory damages plus 6% interest and $100 million plus interest in punitive damages.
Many will be following the politics, not the science. Feb 23, 2025 Alex Jones routinely agitates his audience to believe (wrongly) that doctors are being made to do experiments as a type of hazing ritual to weed out people who aren’t willing to torture and kill patients for “they”, something which Alex Jones bizarrely asserts is happening all the time at hospitals. He stokes fear of healthcare a lot with wild stories.
Alarm is appropriate, the volcano is erupting - Chloe Humbert Jul 06, 2022 People respond to crisis with alarm — which leads people to take appropriate actions. Humans are generally actually good about reacting appropriately to disasters — it’s the elites who succumb to what disaster researchers call “elite panic” and behave counter-productively, putting a higher priority on controlling people over controlling the problem. There are countless stories of people escaping disasters and other calamities because they were “alarmists” — and also wrenching stories about people perishing because they did not or could not take timely action in a crisis. The the story of Pompeii is riveting. One may be led to think initially that the people frozen in place by the volcano were merely caught unaware. But only about 2,000 people out of around 20,000 actually stayed behind in Pompeii to get pyroclasted into a grim posterity. The vast majority were alarmists who fled the city — in abject fear of the volcano… and escaped in time and therefore lived out the rest of their lives. What led that minority to stay behind? Normalcy bias? Propaganda? I wonder if perhaps elites convinced some essential workers that they needed to stay behind and keep the economy going.
Democracy Americana The Anti-Liberal Left Has a Fascism Problem Prominent leftwing intellectuals are allowing their singular, disdain-driven focus on (neo-) liberalism to completely distort their perspective on the Right THOMAS ZIMMER MAY 24, 2024 I’d be very interested to find out what happened here. Maybe I missed something, but I couldn’t find an acknowledgment anywhere in the anthology that the selected pieces might have been altered and updated. In the credits, it merely says “reprinted.” The update, clearly, has been made to reflect that something major had happened in between the original publication and the reprint, something that in many ways directly contradicted a key argument. Robin’s overall assessment in 2021 was that Liberals needed to calm down since the Right wasn’t ever exercising its power in the way Liberals decried, the liberal doomsday scenarios were never coming true. But in Dobbs, the Right did exercise power in a dramatic way, stripping half the population of bodily autonomy and equal rights.
Alt-right podcaster espoused eugenics pseudoscience, then founded a concierge medical clinic. Jack Murphy’s all over the weird map. Chloe Humbert Oct 15, 2024 tweet by podcaster @jackmurphylive says “If covid had been left to do it’s thing our nation would have become as a result, healthier, fitter, and younger — ie stronger. 10:32 PM 11 December 2021
The concentration camp tendency, part 2 How our domestic detention nightmare is also a global one, and likely to get worse. June 03, 2025 Andrea Pitzer, Degenerate Art The return to a pre-1945 mindset has other consequences. I don’t think the expansion of concentration camp-style indefinite detention is random, nor is the targeting of vulnerable classes. All of this mirrors the period between World War I and World War II, when it became acceptable around the world to indefinitely detain the homeless, the mentally ill, or suspect ethnic groups—and even Black people in the wake of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Involuntary mass detention was seen as ubiquitous, unremarkable, and even desirable. Humanity is currently on a path to repeat that era. But this time we have lost the excuse that we cannot imagine where it will lead. These crises of asylum and detention are only likely to get exponentially worse with climate change, which will amplify water and border disputes, lead to more natural disasters and heat-related death, as well as spurring overall conflict. Unfortunately, climate change is another area where the administration and much of corporate America are actively accelerating current, dangerous trends.