RFKj Hearing [A Wee Update]

I've just seen clips from it.

   Again, the dude seems nutty and unqualified to me. (Though apparently he has something of a point about fluoride...) I think it's good to bring in "disruptive" people to challenge institutions like HHS...which I expect leans blue...but I'm not at all a fan of putting them in charge.

   I was kinda rooting for the Dems in this case. I'd really like to see Kennedy put through his paces, to make whatever crackpottery he might be committed to clear.

   And I think they scored by revealing a tension between RFKj's anti-mRNAism and his commitment to the strange view that Trump deserves some kind of Nobel Prize for Operation Warp Speed. OWS was a good thing--but what Nobel Prize would it qualify him for? Medicine? Seems not... Is there an NP in public health? Well, I don't really know anything about this.

   But, of course, the Democrat "Women Have Penises" Party disappoints as usual. For example: despite their freakout about it, Kennedy is right about the AMA: only about 15-18% of American doctors belong to the organization, only about 11% of doctors think its views accurately represent their views...and, yeah, it's been ideologically captured by the left like most such other such organizations (the APA, the American Academy of Pediatrics, etc.)

   Of course it's exasperating to see the Democrats squawking about the ideological capture of science... The threat of that from the Trump administration is almost trivial compared to the threat from the left--which is inside the wire, and has been for some time.

   Nevertheless, though there's much less of a threat from the Trumpistas, it's still a threat.

   And, of course--and not to exempt Trump or Kennedy from blame here--the blues are largely responsible for the broad public skepticism that brought us to this position. The faction that's spent the last decade denying commonsense, science, and basic biology gets teary-eyed at the fact that we don't trust them implicitly anymore. Well, maybe you shouldn't have gone to the mat for "women have penises" and "lockdowns forever...except for BLM and Anifa"...

   Finally: I do know a bit about the similar battle for academia--and in that case the administration is far less of a threat than the left. So it wouldn't astonish me to find out that something analogous is true in the case of medicine/public health. Certainly the competing crackpottery about COVID is at least approximately a tie--the left went into full panic mode about COVID, giving us pro-lockdown mania and pro-vax mania--not to mention The lab-leak hypothesis is a racist conspiracy theory... The right gave us There's no such thing as COVID and The vax is killing more people than COVID and other such stuff. Anyway, I'm sure the red-blue conflict in academia also might seem like a rough tie to civilians...but it isn't.

[Update:

And: Kennedy seemed to be right about the COVID vax and CDC recommendation: anybody can get the vax...but it's not recommended for everybody. Warren et. al's freakout seemed based on the claim that if the vax isn't recommended, most (?) insurance won't pay for it. But...so? The CDC shouldn't be recommending treatments on such grounds. I doubt the Dems would argue that the CDC should recommend Ivermectin for COVID because otherwise insurance won't pay...]