It is frightening how extremely politicized and wasteful all the science management has become in a shockingly short amount of time.
The US is setting their entire science infrastructure on fire, leaving a massive opening for Europe, the UK, and especially China to take over. And the US does not consider any of those countries allies.
It's baffling to imagine why this is happening unless those in control are actually actively working on foreign orders to weaken the US and its future.
> It's baffling to imagine why this is happening unless those in control are actually actively working on foreign orders to weaken the US and its future.
This is exactly what is happening. I feel like people have to be deliberating ignoring all the evidence that Elon and Trump are foreign assets at this point. It has been obvious for years and only more obvious with time.
As insane as all of this is, I still have a hard time believing that they're foreign assets. They are doing what Trump was elected to do. The voters aren't Russian assets.
Certainly the Russians have been doing their best to dis-inform the voters, but that doesn't need to come from the top. And they are largely doing it by parroting the standard Republican talking points for the last four decades. The Russians are, at most, exacerbating what they already wanted to believe.
If anything, that's worse. They're not assets. They're doing this because they're genuine believers.
But where do those voters get their beliefs? Who controls their information space, and who is injecting ideas? This is classic Russian strategy all over the world, and they are experts at the psychology and how to control parts of the population through division of that population.
This might in fact be the only innovation that Russia can claim since the fall of the USSR: complete mastery of the technology of propaganda for controlling populations.
Conservatives have been threatening to drown the federal government in the bathtub since the 1980s. There’s no new beliefs. It’s just a reshuffling between the parties of the same folks that existed in 1990: paleocons and social conservatives, capitalists, neocons, nationalists, economic populists, etc. The anti-vaxxers were there, they were just democrats because that was the low-institutional-trust party back then.
The people you’re calling “Russian agents” were also there in the 1990s, as were the neocons calling them that. They just took over the GOP because it turned out that the Democrats (back then) were correct and american military intervention in places Iowans can’t find in a map is actually bad for the GOP base.
It’s only true out of convenience. Russian propaganda latched onto various divisive talking points and pushed them to the extremes.
I’m old enough to remember conservative republicans from 2008 ish era and while there was some dumb stuff, anything 2016 and beyond is unparalleled and its revisionist to say otherwise.
The American public got slowly acclimated to turning into a ridiculous version of idiocracy. A mix of corrupt / easily bought politicians, a voter base addicted to consumerism and social media, and a country with a problematic voting system, all contributed to todays situation.
I used to wonder, like many kids, “why didn’t anyone stop hitler, he was so obviously bad”. It was never that obvious to me that so many other indoctrinated people could have been just as awful and far gone.
I pray those smart enough to see where all of this is inevitably leading to, leave the US before it’s too late for them to. Do not become an unwilling contributor to what the US does next.
> I’m old enough to remember conservative republicans from 2008 ish era and while there was some dumb stuff, anything 2016 and beyond is unparalleled and its revisionist to say otherwise.
"Idiocracy" came out in 2006, and Carl Sagan was writing about American anti-intellectualism long before that. I'd also note that 2008 brought us Sarah Palin on the Republican ticket. I agree things were better, but the rot was clear to some already.
Why do politicians ask for money? Because money influences votes.
How does money influence votes? Money pays for private intelligence companies, PR firms, think tanks, and social media influence.
What does this mean? It means that politicians are influencing the voter base, rather than the voter base influence politicians.
What is the corollary of all this? A foreign government can influence American voters either via more direct means (such as running a private intelligence company) or indirect means (offering resources in exchange for favors).
Is there precedent? Yes. America institutes regime change in other countries in many ways. France funded and offered aid to the pre-american rebellion against British rule resulting in the formation of a new state.
At some point people stop being individual actors and become statistics. It might be even more correct to say people are in A/B testing groups and there are engineers literally experimenting on these groups to achieve an outcome for the purposes of whoever paid them.
> As insane as all of this is, I still have a hard time believing that they're foreign assets. They are doing what Trump was elected to do.
I don't recall most of the things going on now coming up during the campaign, so I don't see how you can conclude he was elected to do them. He was elected to do the things that he spent 95% of his campaign time on.
I don't believe it. Everything they did and achieved required a huge organization and a lot of influential sponsors.
It should raise even more alarms how thus far every single critic of them even inside their own party was silenced or actually joined them!
I don't believe in threats as explanation on that scale. Many of those people are themselves well connected and influential.
I fear there is something deeper going on, and we will only find out by watching.
I hate this narrative that concentrates on Trump, or even Musk. Neither would be where they are now with a huge amount of active support. Whatever is happening is coming from inside the US. They may also be working together with foreign actors, but they act according to their own interests.
So you're not as pro-vaccine as they come, because if you were, you'd be pro-vaccine even after other vaccine advocates did dumb stuff. People are always going to do dumb stuff, so invoking those dumb things as a defense for bad policy is just a way of revealing the softness of your original commitment.
I’m pro the current generation of scientists and health administrators getting wiped out so we can start over with people who understand and value the importance of ideological neutrality.
So, in wanting to "wipe out" the "current generation" of scientists, you're in fact pretty far from as "pro-vaccine" as they come --- like, significantly farther than the median American. That's fine, let's just make sure our premises are all aligned.
To the contrary. I grew up in public health and think it's tremendously important. The old school public health people didn't "bring their whole selves to work." If you're working in a Bangladeshi village and an old Muslim man wants a male doctor instead of a female doctor, you go and find a male doctor. The public health field has always been full of liberals, that was never the problem. But the new generation is full of evangelicals,[1] and that makes it impossible for them to do the job. And if they can't do what's required for the job, they need to be replaced with people who can--for the good of the field itself.
[1] I would say the same thing about evangelicals on the other side of the aisle. You cannot be in Bangladesh working in public health while being an evangelical Christian. You will never gain people's trust, and without that you cannot do the job.
You said "scientists" and "health administrators". I know what a "scientist" is and I know what a "health administrator" is. My son is working out how tenuous his biochem PhD offers are right now, which is pretty nerve-wracking. For obvious reasons, I take you to be saying he should be "getting wiped out". Fine, just so we're clear what you're saying.
Look, this is a solved problem. When my dad was developing vaccine and maternal health programs in Bangladesh, he knew there would be no faster way to destroy a vaccine program than by linking it to advocacy in favor of the country’s hindu minority.
The norm against that must be reestablished. So the people who did things like apply different hiring standards to medical students based on race, or proposed triaging care based on race, must go. Not because of their ideology—you can be a communist in public health as long as you compartmentalize—but because they hurt their institutions’ ability to do the job. And the people who sat by while that happened—who didn’t speak up to defend institutional values over progressive ones—need to learn some harsh lessons so that doesn’t happen again. I like you personally and hope your kid is part of rebuilding our public health institutions into what they once were.
I don't know what this has to do with what you said upthread but if this is a roundabout way of telling my son you're not happy he has to worry about whether his PhD offers are all going to be rescinded, I'll let him know you didn't really mean him when you talked about wiping people out.
TL;DR the people with "In this house we believe..." signs on their lawns have shredded the credibility of shared institutions by using those institutions as platforms for advancing their ideology on unrelated social and political issues. To restore faith in our institutions we will need to reboot them. Obviously there will be consequences, especially for PMCs and their children.
I hope the ones I know personally escape those consequences. Just as I assume they weren't intending for anyone they know personally to e.g. have their small towns flooded with illegal immigrants.
Oh, you don't know him personally, so I'll update him: you're good with his PhD program offers being withdrawn, because natural products biochemistry work is a small price to pay for exacting revenge on unrelated people who said some stupid shit back in 2020. Good note, Rayiner.
> Not because of their ideology—you can be a communist in public health as long as you compartmentalize
Seemingly this is something you don't actually agree with, considering as I've mentioned to you multiple times now of the Trump admin kicking out and discriminating against transgender individuals in the military despite having nothing to do with anything else.
Other than that you've been just continually justifying petty revenge for increasingly insane reasons.
It's actually very much not "fine" to want to "wipe out" an entire generation of a nation's scientists and replace them with ones that fit your ideological preferences.
Sounds like you just want scientists and researchers to share your ideological biases. Who would be the arbiter of neutrality?
"Wipe out"? Absolutely abhorrent and authoritarian take. I'll note the common thread of brutal authoritarian regimes who executed purges of scientists and professionals convicted of wrongthink.
You want to destroy the future of science in this country because of some manufactured culture war. So much for free speech.
> Sounds like you just want scientists and researchers to share your ideological biases.
Not at all. My dad worked in public health, and I grew up around extremely liberal northeastern white people who worked in Africa and Asia while adapting themselves to the moral environment of wherever they happened to be working. You'd never know from their work they had any beliefs other than "vaccines are good" and "pregnant women should get sufficient folate."
> Who would be the arbiter of neutrality?
The public as a whole. Either they perceive you as neutral or they don't.
> "Wipe out"? Absolutely abhorrent and authoritarian take.
Public health as a field needs people who prioritize institutional values to the exclusion of everything else, because that's the only way you can build trust across the whole population. People who "bring their whole selves to work" endanger lives by destroying confidence in the public health system. If they can't do what the job requires they must leave.
I am extremely dubious of your concept of ideological neutrality.
Further, that you want all current scientists and health administrators "wiped out" because you disagree with a tiny number of statements or situations pins you as an extreme anti-vaxxer, just one that isn't very honest about it. As an ideological extremist.
It's the classic "I'm super for vaccines, just not any of the existing ones..." bit that antivaxxers often use to try to launder their nonsense.
Ala Jack Posobiec's "What if instead of a vaccine we just were able to get exposed to a weak version of the virus that enabled us to build the antibodies we need to fight the real thing" bit (which is hilariously real, btw).
Your idea of 'ideological neutrality' involves open and flagrant discrimination against individuals as a form of political retribution [1] [2]. The fact that you can say this while arguing that you really care about people who are discriminated against (as you have done in the past) shows what you really mean whenever you write things like this.
Could you point to an institution or even individual you feel is an exemplar of ideological neutrality? I don't believe this exists but I'm very curious how you perceive it.
First, racism is a public health issue. I know you're imagining "no blacks" signs on restaurants but it's actually that... well Jesus damn near everything is set up in a way that produces worse health outcomes for people of color. But even if you don't subscribe to the wider systemic effects it's still an issue even restricted to our healthcare system itself. They weren't saying that bullets from cops was a public health crisis, your own article outlines it really well.
The second was because if they didn't the ACLU was going to sue them into the ground on a 1A violation because protesting is the most bright line clear cut political speech. This wasn't a Black Lives Matter thing only either, the protests against the (in practice) vaccine mandate and social distancing itself were protected by this. How else could you protest them?
Theres evidence of that happening today at medical companies. [0][1]
The way to do this while retaining trust is to gather data, release the methodology and data transparently, then have other labs reproduce the studies and see if they get the same results.
RFK and others have touted they will be aggressively transparent. In my opinion, lets let them do it and see if their words match their actions.
If it ends up being a connection, we should be able to reproduce with independent labs. If not, then proceed as normal.
Given the historical mistrust with pharmaceutical industries, investing resources in a study such as this is low on the “wasteful spending” list.
Worst case, its a scandal and we need to reevaluate how we handle vaccine testing. Best case it builds trust back in institutions.
Classic scientific method has been tainted by corporate interest.
Why? Why do we need to waste money on something that's already been researched and confirmed to death? And why would you trust someone to be aggressively transparent when the first thing they do when entering office is outright lie?
This isn't a 'big pharma doesn't want YOU to know the truth' problem. There have been multiple and independent studies done into this topic across the globe. The people perpetuating the line of vaccines causing autism are the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet with zero credentials and zero actual evidence backing it up.
Yeah. If people are worried enough about something that they vote this hard about it, go ahead and do some more tests. Be super transparent.
The real fight will be the communications about the results. Bend over backwards to explain everything extremely clearly. If RFK Jr oversees a milestone study that dramatically shows there is no vaccine/austism connection then maybe, just maybe, we can stop talking about it.
Then again, flat earthers seem to lose faith in their experiments as soon as the results disagree with their preferred outcome…
I'd be more worried the results are something like "1% chance of saving your life and 0.001% chance of exacerbating autism symptoms" and RFK focuses entirely on the latter as an excuse to ban vaccines.
We know vaccines can have negative side effects, but a reasonable person weighs those against the (larger) benefits. I don't think the current regime is very reasonable though.
I'm curious how this will turn out because this administration is so comfortable lying, if we get data that says there is a connection between vaccines and autism, will the assumption be that the data was manipulated and if so that completely evaporates the US trust on the world stage in science. I don't see how that's good for anyone, even Elon.
If science cost zero dollars and zero cents, sure. When it's public dollars you can see why every researcher needs strong preliminary evidence to justify dropping hundreds of NIH dollars on research. Waste, fraud, and abuse, no?
Anyway, if you want a sacred cow to kill, a good one would be "we don't have enough evidence to draw conclusions about the risks and benefits of vaccines".
It is unclear whether the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has long promoted anti-vaccine views, is involved in the planned CDC study or how it would be carried out.
Uh-huh.
How would this work? If they're going to do a literature review or meta-study, the conclusions are foregone. If they're going to do new studies, it will take years to get anything conclusive. Longer than the current political administration.
There's not enough consensus and science communicators haven't been successful with convincing the American public about vaccines. This research will also be some of the most impactful science the CDC produces. If we bring all the deniers and skeptics to agree on a way to test it (e.g. double blind study), and then the results don't match their opinions, then continued denials makes their case unreasonable.
Right, if it is unreasonable a bunch of climate change denying creationists who think Canada is responsible for the US' drug problems will feel totally ashamed. Maybe they will even go to area 51 to ask for safe passage away from their shame in this galaxy.
Frankly, issue is not with science communicators not being successfully. Vaccines were accepted... until conservatives started to lie lie lie and lie again.
This is not about lacking research. This is about lying for profit.
The issue is that head of the HHS has led a years-long campaign against vaccines built atop shit-tier science and outright misinformation, and is part of a political movement that is growing increasingly anti-vaccine.
There is a clear possibility that the results will be cooked or otherwise fraudulent because the secretary will not take "no link" for an answer. Even if such a study is obviously deeply flawed or rigged, the damage it would do to public acceptance of vaccines would be unparalleled, measured in thousands (and likely more) of dead children.
We've already investigated this for science and showed there is no connection. Instead we're just wasting taxpayer dollars (MY dollars) on shitty research for the sake of some insane non-elected bureaucrats suffering from severe brain rot.
... so far. What's the harm in pivoting research goals? A curious mind (like many have here on HN) will pursue all avenues, even those some may consider controversial and contradictory to our current beliefs. I, for one, am supportive of being curious like this, and I can only hope that it spurs curious discussion among the world, as per the HackerNews guidelines.
The harm is that if we spend more money following up a purported link between vaccines and autism, it will be taken away from people doing more useful research.
We have limited time and funding, so we maintain a portfolio of research investments that are based on what we currently see as reasonable.
"Curious" is not what the folks who want to research the link between vaccines and autism are. Weaponized is a better term.
There is a huge difference between being curious and attempting to reverse engineer a connection which they are clearly doing now. Rfk already believes the lie that vaccines cause austism they just want studies they can put their thumb in to go "see the science isn't settled"
Whether there is a connection between vaccines and autism depends on whose research you believe.
Did the Guardian present any research showing there is no evidence showing a connection between vaccines and autism, or are they insisting that it is so because they say so?
The Guardian is saying what they are saying because they trust the (previously) reliable health establishment's general consensus.
Let's ignore any single article from the Guardian and instead talk about the larger public health question: "Do vaccines have side effects that are great enough to prevent their use"? It's a classic risk benefit problem with additional societal complexity (most vaccines work much better at high rates of vaccination) and a fair amount of subtlety to the outcomes (people who are vaccinated can still get sick, the vaccine itself can have short-term side-effects).
Of course, there are many different vaccines and each needs to be treated more or less independently of any other in terms of risks. The technology used to create, store, and deliver the vaccine matters tremendously. We have had terrible outcomes with vaccines before, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories#Cutter_inc...
was an example where an error cause a bunch of people to die after they were vaccinated for polio.
But throughout my whole life, people, regardless of their political orientation, always thought the polio vaccine was a great thing. One exception: I worked with a guy whose parents didn't get him vaccinated for polio, and he was in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
Anyway, back to the scientific story. As we know, you can't "prove a negative" (can't prove there is no vaccine/autism causative relationship), but scientifically speaking, nobody has been able to come up with a reliable experiment demonstrating that it does ("proving a positive"). This is not for lack of trying; the problem is inherently challenging, because running trials like this skirts ethical issues.
What we do know is the original paper by Wakefield that purported the vaccine/autism relationship was fraudulent- contained false information - and more importantly, similar studies that were not fraudulent (to the best of our knowledge) did not replicate the results. And all of that led to a number of trials where a great deal of evidence of Wakefield's actions (which include close to half a million pounds in payments from a vaccine manufacturer) was presented and Wakefield was found guilty.
Not sure where you're really going with your question other than to muddy some fairly clear waters. Nobody has shown replicable evidence that there is a causative relationship between vaccines and autism.
> What we do know is the original paper by Wakefield that purported the vaccine/autism relationship was fraudulent- contained false information - and more importantly, similar studies that were not fraudulent (to the best of our knowledge) did not replicate the results. And all of that led to a number of trials where a great deal of evidence of Wakefield's actions (which include close to half a million pounds in payments from a vaccine manufacturer) was presented and Wakefield was found guilty.
The Wakefield red herring as usual.
Did anyone mention that the MMR was derived from a vaccine that was banned by the Japanese Govt, and that it was one of the reasons that prompted Wakefield to research it?
There are more than enough papers showing a correlation between vaccines and autism, even a case where the CDC prompted its researchers to distort and remove evidence which indicated a correlation between a vaccine and autism in black boys.
The Wakefield paper was written with with 12 other co-authors. 3 of the authors Wakefield included were struck off by Britain's GMC. They all fought their case in court and 2 of them were reinstated except Wakefield which is why it is called the Wakefield case.
The primary case of the GMC concerned the ethics of the research not its findings but the papers don't focus on that. The authors of the paper still stand by the clinical conclusions no matter what. The Lancet withdrew the paper not because of its clinical conclusions but because of the ethics. Go figure.
Addressing only one of your statements: Japan stopping using their own domestic MMR, but split it into several different vaccines (and the mumps and measles vaccines have been combined back). It was not the vaccine used in the US or UK and the underlying epidemiological condition was meningitis, not autism. Rates of autism continued to increase in Japan after the triple vaccine was stopped (personally I suspect this is more due to increasing awareness and changing definitions of autism than any iatrogenic cause.
I feel like of all the issues and problems in medical research, chasing after vaccine/autism association is one of the less likely to bear any useful fruit.
The US is setting their entire science infrastructure on fire, leaving a massive opening for Europe, the UK, and especially China to take over. And the US does not consider any of those countries allies.
It's baffling to imagine why this is happening unless those in control are actually actively working on foreign orders to weaken the US and its future.