The NIH is picking up Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s argument that a healthy immune system can keep even pandemic germs at bay.
The standard pandemic-preparedness playbook “has failed catastrophically,” NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and NIH Principal Deputy Director Matthew J. Memoli wrote in City Journal, a magazine and website published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative think tank. The pair argue that finding and studying pathogens that could cause outbreaks, then stockpiling vaccines against them, is a waste of money. Instead, they say, the United States should encourage people to improve their baseline health—“whether simply by stopping smoking, controlling hypertension or diabetes, or getting up and walking more.”
On its own, Bhattacharya and Memoli’s apparently serious suggestion that just being in better shape will carry the U.S. through an infectious crisis is reckless, experts told me—especially if it’s executed at the expense of other public-health responses.
The miasma theory claimed diseases were caused by bad sanitation, foul odors and unhealthy air. Before the discovery of germs, it led to the creation of a sewer system in London, and ventilation systems in hospitals, (both of which helped reduce exposure to the germs they didn’t believe in) although it didn’t stop greedy water companies from pumping drinking water from downstream on the Thames, or ease overcrowding and poverty.
The problem with Kennedy’s “just get healthier” version is that like all other Republican schemes it doesn’t provide any actual support for doing so. Because that would take money from the deserving wealthy to aid the indigent poor!
We all know where the real foul odor is coming from…
The standard pandemic-preparedness playbook “has failed catastrophically,” NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and NIH Principal Deputy Director Matthew J. Memoli wrote in City Journal
I’ll offer this in response, which the author failed to note:
[>Public health and national security experts shake their heads when President Donald Trump says the coronavirus “came out of nowhere” and “blindsided the world.”
They’ve been warning about the next pandemic for years and criticized the Trump administration’s decision in 2018 to dismantle a National Security Council directorate at the White House charged with preparing for when, not if, another pandemic would hit the nation.](https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ap-top-news-virus-outbreak-barack-obama-public-health-ce014d94b64e98b7203b873e56f80e9a)
The episode of Sawbones where they talk about this, they imply that RFK Jr doesn’t even know what miasma theory is. The thing he talks about is weird nonsense unrelated to old medical idea (which was also wrong)
Ah yes, just being healthy overall is enough to ward off pathogens. Someone please remind our cytokines not to kill us next time around. Maybe if we tell them they’re acting unreasonably they won’t cause young, healthy people to drop dead when they get sick.
I love how our health system has embraced eugenics wholeheartedly
I do not love it at all. In fact I think it’s an actively bad things for everyone. Like everyone, globally. Our country still is rich for now and our people travel all over the world being obnoxious and now we will be bringing all sorts of novel diseases not to mention what it means for the world to lose a whole country of researchers.
Yeah it is really bad all around to throw the most vulnerable to the wolves. Who would have thought these nazi fucks would suck at everything
Who would have thought these nazi fucks would suck at everything
Well shit, you say it like that and it seems obvious!
Of fucking course it is
