On Thursday the full Senate voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). This gave Kennedy full authority over one of America’s largest government bureaucracies, including its 90,000 employees and an annual budget of nearly $2 trillion, twice that of the Department of Defense.
Ironies abounded in that narrow 52-48 vote, which was almost exactly along party lines, with every Democrat in opposition and all but one Republican in support.
Not only had Kennedy spent almost his entire life as a liberal Democrat, but he was the scion of that party’s most famous political dynasty, nephew of the martyred President John F. Kennedy and son of his brother Robert, who would have also probably reached the White House in 1968 if he had not been cut down by an assassin’s bullet.
The younger Kennedy had followed in their illustrious footsteps, spending nearly his entire life as a high-profile environmental activist, so well regarded in Democratic Party circles that President Barack Obama had considered naming him to the Cabinet in 2008. But in recent years, Kennedy’s views on public health issues had caused him to fall from grace in his own ideological camp. His strident skepticism regarding the safety of vaccines in general and the Covid vaccine in particular outraged the mainstream liberal establishment, as did his loud denunciation of the lockdowns and other controversial public health measures undertaken to control the spread of that dangerous disease.
This sharp ideological rupture eventually propelled him to challenge the renomination of President Joseph Biden in the Democratic primaries, then to launch an independent run for the White House, and ultimately to drop-out and endorse Donald Trump in that race. Following Trump’s victory, the president-elect named Kennedy as his choice to lead HHS, with the former Democrat proclaiming his intent to “Make America Healthy Again.” Last week’s Senate vote has now given Kennedy the authority to set our national public health policies.
Over the years, Kennedy had become a very sharp critic of both the pharmaceutical and the food industries, so having him in control of the NIH, the CDC, and the FDA represented the worst nightmare of those powerful corporations. Therefore, they naturally mobilized their army of lobbyists and opposition researchers to assist their media and political allies in derailing his nomination.
Along with Tulsi Gabbard, nominated as Director of National Intelligence, Kennedy had probably ranked as Trump’s most controversial and bitterly opposed nominee. Indeed, the volume and vehemence of the attacks I saw against him in our leading media organs such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal may have even been greater, with those influential publications doing everything they could to endorse and amplify any harsh accusations, hoping to sway enough senators to block his appointment. He was accused of every sort of iniquity and denounced as a deranged conspiracy theorist, whose bizarre, irrational beliefs would severely endanger our nation’s public health.
Few stones were left unturned in the attacks on Kennedy’s fitness for the job, and he experienced two days of grueling testimony before the relevant Senate Committees, with the Democratic staffers having obviously strategized on the best means of defeating him before feeding the most effective attacks to their senatorial principals who grilled the nominee before the television cameras.
But one oddity I noted was that almost none of the hostile news stories nor the probing senatorial questions ever mentioned the name of “Sirhan Sirhan.” That young Palestinian had been arrested and convicted of the 1968 assassination of Kennedy’s father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy Sr., and there had been a multitude of supposed eyewitnesses to that crime. But in recent years Kennedy publicly declared that Sirhan was an innocent patsy, framed by the true conspirators, and called for his release from prison.
For six decades, our media has invested enormous resources in ridiculing and demonizing anyone questioning the official verdict of the 1960s Kennedy assassinations as a “conspiracy theorist,” rendering that the term of abuse almost as radioactive as slurs such as “racist” or “antisemite.” Yet although Kennedy had publicly placed himself in that poisonous category, virtually none of his fierce opponents were willing to take notice of that important fact.
I think there were obvious reasons that those barking dogs kept strangely silent. Not only had the victim been Kennedy’s own father, but he had very strong evidence on his side. As even the ultra-establishmentarian Wikipedia page admits, the fatal bullet had been fired into the back of the senator’s head at point-blank range while everyone agreed that Sirhan was standing five or six feet in front of him, and this led the LA Coroner to declare that a second gunman had apparently been responsible. Sirhan’s gun only held eight rounds yet acoustical records proved that more shots had been fired. In an early 2022 article, I discussed all this evidence at considerable length, and the journalists and Democratic staffers challenging Kennedy must have realized that his case was too strong and raising it would badly backfire against them.
In any event, the question of who had assassinated Kennedy’s father in 1968 might have seemed too far removed from how he would administer America’s system of public health nearly six decades later.
However, I also noticed a far more recent and more relevant matter that had equally escaped any public scrutiny.
On two consequence days, the New York Times ran a pair of major articles summarizing the intense questioning that Kennedy endured, with each of these carrying five or six bylines and containing a number of sections highlighting all the major points raised against the nominee:
Fact-Checking Kennedy’s Health Claims in His Confirmation Hearing, January 29, 2025
- Chronic Disease
- Who Covid-19 Affects
- Children’s Risk from Covid
- Ultraprocessed Foods and Obesity
- Medicare and Medicaid
- Fluoride in Water
Fact-Checking Health Claims in Kennedy’s 2nd Day of Confirmation Hearings, January 30, 2025
- Prioritizing chronic disease
- Covid-19 in Children
- Hepatitis B Vaccinations
- Use of Adderall
- Weight Loss Drugs
- Cost of Childhood Diabetes
- Harms of Electromagnetic Radiation
These items were apparently regarded as Kennedy’s greatest vulnerabilities. But I noticed that one entire topic was totally missing from the interrogation, so I dropped a note to a highly knowledgeable journalist calling attention to that remarkable absence:
I know that you’ve been very skeptical of my support for the Duesberg Hypothesis regarding HIV/AIDS, but here’s another interesting data-point you might want to consider.As I’m sure you’re aware, the Democrats have been mounting a ferocious all-out attack in the Senate on RFK Jr., doing everything they can to discredit him and try to block his confirmation. They have focused on every possible means of portraying him as a deluded, conspiratorial individual who holds crackpot beliefs and who must therefore be kept away from our public health system…
Don’t you find it very odd that there has been absolutely no mention of HIV/AIDS during those hearings?
After all, Kennedy published a #1 Amazon bestseller that devoted 200 pages(!) to promoting the theory that HIV was harmless and AIDS was merely a hoax.
Obviously, I wouldn’t have expected any of the senators themselves to have read his book, but surely many of their staffers did, and held strategy sessions to decide which issues to raise against Kennedy. They must have consulted scientific and medical experts to help decide where Kennedy was most vulnerable.
Isn’t it absolutely extraordinary that apparently not a single senator has brought up the Kennedy’s utterly heretical views on HIV/AIDS?
Surely this must be one of the most extreme cases of “the Dog That Didn’t Bark” on record.
The only explanation I can see is that the staffers concluded that raising the HIV/AIDS issue would be disastrously counter-productive to their efforts. This doesn’t prove that Kennedy and Duesberg are correct, but I think it means many, many very knowledgeable people fear that they might be.
While still refusing to consider that the Duesberg Hypothesis might be right, he admitted that something very strange had taken place:
I agree – it’s most peculiar that Democratic Senators passed up the chance to assail RFK on his writings about HIV. I follow your logic that something must have warned the staffers off this issue.
Although there is naturally a great reluctance to consider the possibility that Duesberg was correct and our forty year battle against HIV/AIDS has been waged against a medical phantom, I think that anomalies such as the Kennedy confirmation hearings must force us to begin seriously considering that shocking notion.
Several months ago, I published a long article summarizing this case, and with Kennedy now in charge of American public health policy, I think it is now worth revisiting some of that important material.
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As I have recounted on several occasions, despite being a very strong critic of the wildly popular Covid anti-vaxxing movement, in late 2021 I happened to read Kennedy’s new book The Real Anthony Fauci.
I was quite impressed with a great deal of the material provided, which sharply criticized our pharmaceutical industry and its close allies in the public health bureaucracy. But what completely shocked me was that nearly half the text—some 200 pages—was devoted to presenting and promoting the astonishing claim that everything we have been told about HIV/AIDS for more than forty years probably constituted a hoax, and this latter issue became a central focus of my own subsequent review.
As all of us know from the media, AIDS is a deadly auto-immune disease that was first diagnosed in the early 1980s, primarily afflicting gay men and intravenous drug users. Transmitted by bodily fluids, the disease usually spread through sexual activity, blood transfusions, or the sharing of needles, and HIV, the virus responsible, was finally discovered in 1984. Over the years, a variety of medical treatments were developed, mostly ineffective at first, but more recently so successful that although being HIV-positive was once considered a death-sentence, the infection has now become a chronic, controllable condition. The current Wikipedia page on HIV/AIDS runs more than 20,000 words, including over 300 references.Yet according to the information provided in Kennedy’s #1 Amazon bestseller, this well-known and solidly-established picture, which I had never seriously questioned, is almost entirely false and fraudulent, essentially amounting to a medical media hoax. Instead of being responsible for AIDS, the HIV virus is probably harmless and had nothing to do with the disease. But when individuals were found to be infected with HIV, they were subjected to the early, extremely lucrative AIDS drugs, which were actually lethal and often killed them. The earliest AIDS cases had mostly been caused by very heavy use of particular illegal drugs, and the HIV virus had been misdiagnosed as being responsible. But since Fauci and the profit-hungry drug companies soon built enormous empires upon that misdiagnosis, for more than 35 years they have fought very hard to maintain and protect it, exerting all their influence to suppress the truth in the media while destroying the careers of any honest researchers who challenged that fraud. Meanwhile, AIDS in Africa was something entirely different, probably caused mostly by malnutrition or other local conditions.
I found Kennedy’s account as shocking as anything I have ever encountered.
Under normal circumstances, I would have been extremely reluctant to embrace such seemingly outlandish claims, but the credibility of some of the adherents he mentioned was difficult to disregard.
However, the first endorsement on the back cover is from Prof. Luc Montagnier, the medical researcher who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the HIV virus in 1984, and he writes: “Tragically for humanity, there are many, many untruths emanating from Fauci and his minions. RFK Jr. exposes the decades of lies.” Moreover, we are told that as far back as the San Francisco International AIDS Conference of June 1990, Montagnier had publicly declared “the HIV virus is harmless and passive, a benign virus.”Perhaps this Nobel Laureate endorsed the book for other reasons and perhaps the meaning of his striking 1990 statement has been misconstrued. But surely the opinion of the researcher who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the HIV virus should not be totally ignored in assessing its possible role.
As Kennedy explained, three additional science Nobel Laureates have also expressed similar public skepticism toward the conventional HIV/AIDS narrative, one of them being Kary Mullis, the renowned creator of the revolutionary PCR test. Meanwhile, the reaction of the hostile media towards Kennedy’s book greatly raised my own suspicions.
Despite the book’s tremendous success, it was initially ignored by the mainstream media. That silence was finally broken a month after publication, when the Associated Press released a 4,000 word hit-piece harshly attacking the author and his controversial bestseller.Yet as I noted in my own response, that lengthy denunciation had entirely avoided the subject of HIV/AIDS, which surely constituted the most outrageous and explosive portion of Kennedy’s material. Six AP journalists and researchers had spent at least ten days producing the article, so their total silence on that topic struck me as extremely suspicious. If almost half of Kennedy’s book argued that HIV/AIDS was a medical media hoax and his harshest critics refused to challenge him on that score, any fair-minded reader must surely begin to suspect that at least some of the author’s remarkable claims were probably correct.
Prior to the recent Covid outbreak, AIDS had spent nearly four decades as the world’s highest-profile disease, and I began to wonder whether I might have been completely misled for all those years by my daily newspapers. Indeed, Kennedy himself had never previously been associated with the HIV/AIDS topic and he emphasized that his coverage was merely intended “to give air and daylight to dissenting voices” so I would need to consult other sources for additional information. The story he told was an extremely strange one but his book also clearly identified the most important figure in the debate.
In 1985 AZT, an existing drug, was found to kill the HIV virus in laboratory tests. Fauci then made tremendous efforts to speed it through clinical trials as an appropriate treatment for healthy, HIV-positive individuals, with FDA approval finally coming in 1987, producing Fauci’s first moment of triumph. Priced at $10,000/year per patient, AZT was one of the most expensive drugs in history, and with the cost covered by health insurance and government subsidies, it produced an unprecedented financial windfall for its manufacturer.Kennedy devotes an entire chapter to the story of AZT, and the tale he tells is something out of Kafka or perhaps Monty Python. Apparently, Fauci had been under enormous pressure to produce medical breakthroughs justifying his large budget, so he manipulated the AZT trials to conceal the extremely toxic nature of the drug, which rapidly killed many of the patients who received it, with their symptoms being ascribed to AIDS. So following FDA approval in 1987, hundreds of thousands of perfectly healthy individuals found to be infected with HIV were placed on a regimen of AZT, and the large number of resulting deaths was misattributed to the virus rather than to the anti-viral drug. According to the scientific experts cited in the book, the vast majority of post-1987 “AIDS deaths” were actually due to AZT.
One of the major scientific heroes in Kennedy’s account is Prof. Peter H. Duesberg of Berkeley. During the 1970s and 1980s, Duesberg had been widely regarded as among the world’s foremost virologists, elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences at age 50, making him one of its youngest members in history. As early as 1987 he began raising serious doubts about the HIV/AIDS hypothesis and highlighting the dangers of AZT, eventually publishing a series of journal articles on the subject that gradually won over many others, including Montagnier. In 1996 he published Inventing the AIDS Virus, a massive 712 page volume setting forth his case, with the Foreword provided by Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis, the renowned inventor of PCR technology and himself another leading public critic of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis. Duesberg even underscored the confidence of his HIV skepticism by offering to be injected with HIV-tainted blood.
But rather than openly debate such a strong scientific opponent, Fauci and his allies blacklisted Duesberg from receiving any government funding, thereby wrecking his research career, while also vilifying him and pressuring others to do the same. According to fellow researchers quoted by Kennedy, Duesberg was destroyed as a warning and an example to others. Meanwhile, Fauci deployed his influence to have his critics banned from the major national media, ensuring that few outside a narrow segment of the scientific community ever even became aware of the continuing controversy.
One of Duesberg’s central claims was that the disease known as “AIDS” didn’t actually exist, but was merely the official label attached to a group of more than two dozen different illnesses, all of which had a variety of different causes, with only some of these being infectious agents. Indeed, most of these illnesses had been known and treated for many decades, but they were only designated “AIDS” if the victim was also found to test positive for the HIV virus, which probably had nothing to do with the condition.In support of their contrary position, the authors noted that the various groups at high risk for “AIDS” only tended to get particular versions of the disease, with the “AIDS” suffered by hemophiliacs usually being very different from the “AIDS” of African villagers and only slightly overlapping with the diseases of gay men or intravenous drug addicts. Indeed, the pattern of “AIDS” in Africa seemed utterly divergent from that in the developed world. But if all these different illnesses were actually caused by a single HIV virus, such completely disparate syndromes would seem puzzling anomalies, difficult to explain from a scientific perspective.
The Lancet is one of the world’s leading medical journals and in 1996, the year after he become its chief editor, Richard Horton took to the pages of the intellectually-prestigious New York Review of Books to produce a 10,000 word discussion of Duesberg’s theories, as propounded in three of the researcher’s recent books and collections. Horton was obviously among the most respectable of establishmentarian figures, but although he mostly came down in support of the orthodox HIV/AIDS consensus, he presented Duesberg’s entirely contrary perspective in a fair-minded manner, respectfully though not uncritically.However, what struck me most about Horton’s account was how appalled he seemed at Duesberg’s treatment by America’s ruling medical-industrial complex, as suggested by his title “Truth and Heresy about AIDS.”
The very first sentence of his long review article mentioned the “vast academic and commercial industry built around…HIV” along with the fundamental challenge Duesberg posed to its scientific basis. As a consequence, the “brilliant virologist” had become “the most vilified scientist alive” and the subject of “excoriating attacks.” The leading professional science journals had displayed an “alarmingly uneven attitude,” and partly as a consequence, other potential dissidents had been dissuaded from pursuing their alternative theories.
According to Horton, financial considerations had become a central element of the scientific process, and he noted with horror that a press conference on research questioning the effectiveness of a particular anti-AIDS drug was actually packed with financial journalists, focused on the efforts of the corporate executives to destroy the credibility of a study that they themselves had helped to design but which had now gone against their own product.
Most importantly, although Horton was generally skeptical of Duesberg’s conclusions, he was absolutely scathing towards the opponents of the dissident virologist.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the dispute between Duesberg and the AIDS establishment is the way in which Duesberg has been denied the opportunity to test his hypothesis. In a discipline governed by empirical claims to truth, experimental evidence would seem the obvious way to confirm or refute Duesberg’s claims. But Duesberg has found the doors of the scientific establishment closed to his frequent calls for tests…Duesberg deserves to be heard, and the ideological assassination that he has undergone will remain an embarrassing testament to the reactionary tendencies of modern science…At a time when fresh ideas and new paths of investigation are so desperately being sought, how can the AIDS community afford not to fund Duesberg’s research?”
That ringing last sentence closed the entire review, which appeared in a prestigious and influential publication nearly thirty years ago. But as near as I can tell, Horton’s heartfelt criticism fell on deaf ears, and the AIDS establishment simply ignored the entire controversy while gradually pressuring the media to end any coverage. This seems to fully confirm the narrative history provided in Kennedy’s current bestseller, and I recently summarized this strikingly dissenting analysis of the supposed HIV/AIDS disease in a lengthy article.
If the Duesberg Hypothesis of HIV/AIDS is correct, many hundreds of thousands of American lives were needlessly lost due to a combination of corporate greed, political opportunism, and media incompetence. But most of that calamity took place thirty years ago, and there have been other public health disasters that were both much more recent and also considerably larger, with their reality and their scale now publicly acknowledged by everyone.
As Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy may be able to explore the deeper reasons for these disasters and finally begin to give them the scrutiny they deserve, perhaps with dramatic consequences for the lives and well-being of most Americans.
Although for nearly all of my life, I had paid very little attention to public health issues, during the last few years that began to change, as I gradually discovered that the standard media narrative in that subject had sometimes been just as unreliable as it so often proved to be with regard to the political or historical events upon which I’d more usually focused.
A couple of years ago, I discussed my awakening to these matters in an article:
All of us necessarily focus on different areas, and until quite recently I’d never paid much attention to public health issues, naively assuming that these were in the hands of reasonably competent and reasonably honest government servants, monitored by journalists and academics of similar reliability.For many of us, myself included, an important crack in that assumption came in 2015, when the pages of the New York Times and our other major newspapers were filled with reports of a shocking new study by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, a married pair of eminent economists, with Deaton’s career having been crowned a few weeks earlier by winning the Nobel Prize in his discipline.
Their remarkable finding was that during the previous 15 years, the health and survival rates of middle-aged white Americans had undergone a precipitous decline, completely breaking with the pattern of non-white American groups or with whites living in other developed nations. Moreover, this sharp fall in physical well-being represented a radical departure from the trends of the previous half-century, being almost unprecedented in modern Western history.
Although their short paper filled merely a half-dozen pages in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it was quickly endorsed by a host of prominent public health experts and other scholars, who emphasized the dramatic nature of the discovery. A couple of Dartmouth professors told the Times “It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude,” while an expert in mortality trends exclaimed “Wow.” Their striking results were illustrated by numerous simple graphs based upon easily obtained government statistics.
The two authors were both economists, whose normal work was distant from public health issues, and according to their account, they had stumbled into these remarkable results quite accidentally, while exploring a different topic. So the natural question that came to my mind was how such a momentous calamity affecting a large fraction of the American population could have been entirely ignored for so long by all the academics and researchers actually working in public health. Perhaps a short trend of three or four years might have escaped notice, but missing fifteen years of such a deadly national decline?Moreover, the source of this drastic reversal in long-term mortality trends was narrowly confined to a few particular categories. For white Americans aged 45-54, deaths due to drug overdoses and other poisonings had soared almost 10-fold during the period in question, easily overtaking lung cancer to become the leading cause of death.
Mortality by cause, white non-Hispanics ages 45-54 (PNAS)
Together with the steep rise in suicides and chronic alcoholism, drug deaths accounted for the great change in life-expectancy. This situation was particularly acute for the working-class, with the death rates rising a remarkable 22% for white Americans who lacked a college-education.
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Case and Deaton grouped together drug overdoses, suicides, and chronic alcoholism as “deaths of despair,” and in 2020 they expanded their ground-breaking study into a book of that title, which was widely discussed and praised. Their subtitle emphasized “the Future of Capitalism” and they argued that the central cause of America’s deadly predicament was the opioid prescription drug epidemic, produced by the FDA’s 1996 approval of addictive OxyContin and its subsequent massive marketing by Purdue Pharmaceutical. Under the pressure of manipulative corporate lobbying, our government had “essentially legalized heroin,” with the consequences being exactly as might be expected. By 2015, 98 million Americans—more than one-third of all adults—had been prescribed opioids and the level of drug overdoses and other deaths of despair reached 158,000 per year by 2017.
The total American body-count from this opioid disaster, brought about by the widespread use of dangerous but highly lucrative prescription drugs has been estimated at around one million, and often described as “the White Death.”
Back in 2012, I had published an article telling the somewhat similar story of Vioxx, another very profitable but harmful prescription drug.
In September 2004, Merck, one of America’s largest pharmaceutical companies, suddenly announced that it was voluntarily recalling Vioxx, its popular anti-pain medication widely used to treat arthritis-related ailments. This abrupt recall came just days after Merck discovered that a top medical journal was about to publish a massive study by an FDA investigator indicating that the drug in question greatly increased the risk of fatal heart attacks and strokes and had probably been responsible for at least 55,000 American deaths during the five years it had been on the market.Within weeks of the recall, journalists discovered that Merck had found strong evidence of the potentially fatal side-effects of this drug even before its initial 1999 introduction, but had ignored these worrisome indicators and avoided additional testing, while suppressing the concerns of its own scientists. Boosted by a television advertising budget averaging a hundred million dollars per year, Vioxx soon became one of Merck’s most lucrative products, generating over $2 billion in yearly revenue. Merck had also secretly ghostwritten dozens of the published research studies emphasizing the beneficial aspects of the drug and encouraging doctors to widely prescribe it, thus transforming science into marketing support. Twenty-five million Americans were eventually prescribed Vioxx as an aspirin-substitute thought to produce fewer complications.
This story of serious corporate malfeasance largely forgiven and forgotten by government and media is depressing enough, but it leaves out a crucial factual detail that seems to have almost totally escaped public notice. The year after Vioxx had been pulled from the market, the New York Times and other major media outlets published a minor news item, generally buried near the bottom of their back pages, which noted that American death rates had suddenly undergone a striking and completely unexpected decline.
A cursory examination of the most recent 15 years worth of national mortality data provided on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website offers some intriguing clues to this mystery. We find the largest rise in American mortality rates occurred in 1999, the year Vioxx was introduced, while the largest drop occurred in 2004, the year it was withdrawn. Vioxx was almost entirely marketed to the elderly, and these substantial changes in national death-rate were completely concentrated within the 65-plus population. The FDA studies had proven that use of Vioxx led to deaths from cardiovascular diseases such as heart attacks and strokes, and these were exactly the factors driving the changes in national mortality rates.
So although the official FDA research indicated that Vioxx had killed many tens of thousands of Americans, there are some indications that the true number of premature deaths might have been in the hundreds of thousands.
One major point emphasized by Kennedy has been the terrible long-term consequences of American nutritional and dietary policies.
Although I hadn’t paid much attention at the time, for the last couple of decades our media has been filled with stories about our growing national obesity epidemic and the huge rise in diabetes, high blood pressure, and related American health problems. In a recent article, I summarized the terrible state of those aspects of public health:
According to research studies, about 74% of all American adults are now overweight, while almost 42% suffer from clinical obesity, along with nearly 15 million adolescents and children. These rates have skyrocketed during the last half-century.
Our national obesity figures are not only far higher than those of any other developed nation, but they are nearly double those for Germany and almost four times the rates for France.Obesity is closely associated with diabetes, and nearly 40 million Americans now suffer from that serious medical condition, while another 115 million have prediabetes. Tens of millions have high blood pressure and other related illnesses. Once again, these rates have risen dramatically over the last generation or two.
These are huge numbers, with massive health consequences. Diabetes alone ranks as the eighth leading cause of death, annually killing more than 100,000 Americans, while being a contributing factor in 300,000 additional deaths. By contrast, the combined total of all our drug-overdose fatalities is a little over 100,000.A study last year indicated that obesity substantially boosted the risk of death, potentially by as much as 91%, and with so many tens of millions of Americans suffering from that condition, the mortality impact has obviously been enormous. Partly as a consequence of these very negative trends, we spend much more on health care than any other developed nation, yet our life expectancy has generally been much lower, and stagnant rather than rising.
The cause of this public health crisis had always seemed obvious to me, namely that Americans were eating too much and exercising too little—the traditional sins of gluttony and sloth—and the media seemed to say much the same thing.
However, I was recently very surprised to discover strong evidence that many of these terrible American health problems—obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and cardiovascular illness—were probably due to some disastrous mistakes in nutritional policy that our government had made a half-century ago, encouraging Americans to abandon their traditional, reasonably healthy foods for different ones that produced these dire result.
As far back as I can remember, government health experts and the media reporting their warnings had informed us that eating fatty foods was bad for your health and led to much higher risks of heart attacks, strokes, obesity, and numerous other ailments. Although I never paid a great deal of attention to such matters, I always assumed those facts were true, as did most other Americans.Decades of such media messages told us that the traditional hearty American breakfasts of bacon, sausage, and eggs, often served with gobs of butter—foods overflowing with fat and therefore fattening—needed to be replaced by healthier fare such as granola, fruit, and yogurt. Much of our population eventually heeded those warnings and did exactly that.
The history of those disastrously wrong-headed official nutritional policies had been laid out by Gary Taubes, a very distinguished science journalist in a New York Times Sunday Magazine cover-story published more than two decades ago.
Under this nutritional framework, a healthy diet relied upon a basic foundation of grain-based foods, such as bread, rice, and pasta, supplemented by substantial quantities of fruit and vegetables, and taken together these plant-based carbohydrates should supply the bulk of one’s daily calories. Animal products such as milk, cheese, meat, fish, and eggs were high in protein with substantial fat and they should be eaten in moderation, while servings of fatty foods and sweets should be minimized. Many of us naturally fell short in adhering to those guidelines, but they represented the lodestar for the healthy lifestyle that all of us were encouraged to pursue.But according to Taubes’ blockbuster article, this had all been “a Big Fat Lie.” As he told the story, fatty foods were healthy foods and eating them was the best way to keep yourself slim, while fruit and low-fat yogurt were exactly the sort of dangerous foods that promoted obesity. I’m sure that for those who closely followed such matters, these outlandish claims must have seemed much like declaring that rocks fall upward.
Taubes later expanded his analysis into Good Calories, Bad Calories, a very heavily documented 2007 national bestseller.
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During my entire life, the mainstream media had always informed me that fatty foods were high in something called cholesterol that greatly increased one’s risk of heart attacks and strokes, and not having any interest nor expertise in such matters, I’d naturally assumed that was true. But Taubes rather convincingly argued that this conclusion was based upon extremely flimsy scientific evidence and might be totally false, with a mountain of that media coverage having been built upon barely a postage stamp of rather doubtful scientific evidence….
This same severe mismatch between minimal factual evidence and enormously widespread belief was also the case with regard to the supposed connection between salt intake and high blood pressure, dietary fiber and colon cancer, and various other health conditions. But the mythology regarding diet and obesity was the worst example of all.
As Taubes documented, from the earliest days of nineteenth century nutritional science and for generations afterward, it had been very widely accepted that diets high in carbohydrates such as pasta, bread, potatoes, and especially sugar were generally fattening and the best way of losing weight was to forgo those foods. Yet in the postwar era, rather scanty or misinterpreted scientific evidence convinced some energetic American nutritionists to develop an entirely different understanding of obesity, based upon the assumption that all calories were essentially interchangeable, and since fatty foods were much denser in their caloric content than either carbohydrates or protein, they should be avoided in order to lose weight. As Taubes evocatively put it, their simple argument amounted to the dogma that obesity was caused by the two traditional sins of gluttony—eating too much—and sloth—exercising too little. This had always seemed intuitively plausible to me, and I’d accepted it as true my entire life.
But Taubes argued that this completely ignored the underlying endocrinological facts and these were far more complex. As he explained, people get fat because their fat cells grow larger, taking on more fat molecules than they release for use in the rest of the body, a process that is regulated by various hormones, especially insulin. When carbohydrates such as starches and sugars are ingested, insulin is released into the bloodstream, leading fat cells to absorb fats rather than release them, while the liver converts excess circulating blood-sugar into molecules of fat for such storage. But eating fatty foods or proteins does not have this same impact upon insulin release, helping to explain the traditional folk-wisdom that carbohydrates are fattening foods.
The simplistic notion that all calories are the same for purposes of weight control fails to consider these crucial hormonal factors. While eating fats or protein assuages our hunger, eating carbohydrates and especially sugar stimulates the release of insulin, which may actually indirectly trigger further sensations of hunger, thereby leading to over-eating.
As Taubes recounted the history, our governmental nutritional guidelines had been produced nearly a half-century ago based upon very scanty scientific evidence and often determined by completely extraneous ideological and political factors.
Taubes had clearly invested a great deal of time in studying the scientific and public health history that had produced our current policies, and one surprising aspect of his account was how remarkably contingent many crucial turning points seem to have been.For example, the battle over whether dietary fat was seriously harmful had raged for a couple of decades by the mid-1970s, with prominent academic nutritional experts on both sides and the anti-fat camp gradually gaining ground but without any clear decision. Indeed, according to Taubes, much of the growing support for that hypothesis had absolutely nothing to do with research studies or even health issues, but was partly carried along by the growing concerns that overpopulation would doom the world to starvation unless diets in wealthy countries shifted from meat to far more efficiently-produced vegetable products, with all of this occurring before the Green Revolution of agronomist Norman Borlaug swept away the threat of world hunger. So once a traditional American diet heavy in meat had become “politically incorrect” for those totally unrelated geopolitical reasons, there was a tendency to conclude that it was also unhealthy even if the actual supporting evidence was rather thin and ambiguous.
Taubes pointed to the single day that played the greatest role in setting American nutritional policy and enshrining anti-fat dogma. A Senate select committee on nutrition had been established in 1968 by Sen. George McGovern aimed at eliminating the malnutrition caused by poverty, and on Friday, January 14, 1977, it issued federal dietary guidelines declaring that Americans could improve their health by eating less fat. The author noted that the staff members who made that decision were almost totally ignorant of the underlying scientific debate, and in a lengthy footnote, he even raised the disturbing possibility that they were driven to take that step by their fears that the committee would soon be disbanded unless it could gain publicity from some dramatic public declaration.
Once the government had adopted that position, the verdict naturally influenced the subsequent research of FDA investigators and outside academics dependent upon federal funding, so to some extent the anti-fat doctrine then became a self-fulfilling scientific prophecy. And after a generation of researchers had invested their careers warning of the harmful role of dietary fat, they probably became very reluctant to later admit that they might have been mistaken.
The result of these dietary and life-style changes were exactly the opposite of what their advocates had expected, but our political and medical establishment almost entirely ignored these facts and never reconsidered them.
It was only in the 1970s that our government firmly put its stamp of approval on replacing fatty foods with carbohydrates in our diet, especially favoring those in the “health food” category such as granolas, fruit, and whole wheat breads. There was a clear shift away from bacon, sausage, and butter to yogurt, fruit juice, and leaner rather than fattier cuts of meat. Around the same time, more and more Americans began embracing regular daily exercise, including jogging and gym workouts, activities that had previously been almost unknown or even considered harmful. So this combination of less fatty food and more regular exercise should have been followed by very noticeable changes in American weight and related health problems. And so they were, but in exactly the opposite direction from what the nutritional framework promoted by the government and the media would have predicted.Obesity had always been a very minor problem in American society, but it now suddenly skyrocketed. The obese fraction of our population had been relatively static at one in eight or nine, but it now rose to better than one in three during the thirty years that followed. Meanwhile, the number of Americans with diabetes rose even faster, increasing by nearly 300%.
Taubes highlighted our very heavy and growing consumption of sugar as probably the single most important factor behind our dire health problems.
But all these general concerns about carbohydrates are hugely magnified in the case of sugar, which only very recently became a major component of our diet. Although sugar had been known for many thousands of years, until the last couple of centuries and the creation of large tropical sugar plantations, it had only been available to the wealthy in very limited quantities, and was often regarded as a medicinal or even semi-magical compound with powerful properties. Thus, it would hardly be surprising if the human digestive system and bodily metabolism had a difficult time handling it in the very large quantities that we currently consume, and Taubes provided quite a lot of scientific evidence supporting that very worrisome possibility.Although Taubes had discussed these concerns about sugar in both his books, a year after releasing the second one, he published a major new Times article entirely devoted to that topic, which carried an explosive title.
- Is Sugar Toxic?
Gary Taubes • The New York Times Sunday Magazine • April 13, 2011 • 6,500 Words
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Over the last couple of centuries, sugar has become one of the most ubiquitous components of our ordinary diet, heavily found across an enormous range of foods from cookies to sports drinks to ketchup, and the notion that it might actually be a harmful human toxin seems exactly like the sort of nutritional “conspiracy theory” we might expect to find in isolated corners of the Internet, spouted by paranoid health-cranks. Yet that case was instead made by one of our most distinguished science writers in a lengthy cover-story for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and he subsequently expanded it into The Case Against Sugar, a heavily-documented 350 page book once again published by Knopf in 2017.
But fructose falls into an entirely different category, and it can only be metabolized in the liver. Taubes emphasized that forcing that organ to handle too much fructose may result in long-term tissue damage, just like drinking too much alcohol can produce cirrhosis of the liver.In addition, he argued that the liver-damage caused by such fructose-processing may lead to the growth of insulin resistance, which he suggests may be the central factor behind both obesity and diabetes. So ingesting large quantities of sugar probably has an impact upon obesity far greater than merely the extra calories provided. He even speculated that the resulting over-production of insulin may increase the risk of cancer, an illness often associated with obesity and diabetes.
When public concerns developed during the late 1970s that our soft drinks and other foods contained too much sugar, industry reacted to that pressure by replacing such ordinary sugar with high fructose corn-syrup (HFCS), a supposedly natural compound that sounded relatively innocuous, was just as sweet, and had the additional benefit of being even cheaper. Yet, ironically enough, HFCS is actually around 55% fructose to 45% glucose, so that substitution may have actually been somewhat more damaging to the liver and other internal organs. And perhaps coincidentally, the gently rising curves of both obesity and diabetes underwent a further inflection point soon afterward, beginning their rapid subsequent increase.
Taubes’ discussion of the central, pernicious role of sugar had drawn very heavily upon the work of Dr. Robert Lustig, an endocrinologist specializing in childhood obesity at the UCSF’s highly-regarded School of Medicine who had spent years researching that issue.
In 2009 Lustig had given a classroom lecture on his analysis of the harmful effects of sugar. His talk had been unexpectedly recorded and uploaded to YouTube under the title Sugar: The Bitter Truth, where it began attracting considerable viewership and eventually came to Taubes’ attention.
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In the years since then, that video has gone super-viral, with its 25 million views possibly ranking it as the second most popular academic lecture in the history of the Internet, only exceeded by Prof. John Mearsheimer’s famous 2015 presentation on the underlying causes of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
In 2012, Lustig published Fat Chance, his own national bestseller covering all these same issues regarding sugar in considerable detail, which I discussed at length in a recent article:
Once we recognize that sugar—or rather its fructose component—constitutes our main dietary problem, our evaluation of different foods and beverages is completely transformed.For example, it has long been widely understood that heavily sugared soft-drinks are bad for our health, and in recent years the media has often portrayed Coca Cola and its rivals as a major source of our obesity problems. But I’d guess that at least 98% of the public regards natural fruit juices as an ideal alternative, with their consumption even being encouraged by government food programs.
However, Lustig pointed out that this was total nonsense. Although nothing might seem more healthful than freshly-squeezed orange juice, the unfortunate truth is that calorie for calorie or ounce for ounce, fruit juice is actually higher in dangerous fructose than sugary sodas and therefore worse for our health…
According to Lustig, eating most whole fruits themselves—whether oranges, apples, or pears—is generally harmless because their fructose is surrounded by a thick layer of indigestible fiber, greatly slowing its digestion and therefore putting much less pressure on the liver. But using a blender to create the fruit “smoothies” so beloved by many health-food adherents shears away those cellulose fibers and allows the very rapid absorption of the fructose. So the result is something just as harmful as fruit juice itself, and for similar reasons, applesauce falls into the same dangerous category…
Some of the statistics cited by Lustig were quite remarkable. He explained that by 2012 the average American was ingesting 130 pounds of sugar each year, amounting to more than a pound every three days, up from just 40 pounds per year in the 1980s, and that 33% of such sugar came from beverages, with sodas foremost in that category.
When the FDA first began to classify food additives in 1958, sugar had been declared entirely safe due to its natural origins and long use rather than as the result of any sort of testing or scientific analysis, while political pressure later ensured that the same “officially safe” designation was applied to HFCS, once again without any testing. As a consequence, those compounds could be added in unlimited quantities to any food product, and since they generally improved the taste, this was so widely done that of the 600,000 food items today sold in the U.S. fully 80% are laced with added sugar. So finding a food product without added sugar is actually much more difficult than not.
I also discussed Lustig’s important nutritional analysis in Metabolical, the book he had published in 2020, and his explanation of the intensive corporate lobbying that had played a major role in this disaster.
Lustig has become best known for his focus on the dangers of sugar, and he noted that inedible dietary fiber played an important mitigating role by preventing its rapid absorption, thereby cushioning any potentially harmful impact upon the liver. This explained why the fructose in whole fruit was relatively harmless while the fructose in fruit juice was not.But he also emphasized that we needed to eat sufficient fiber in order to maintain the health of our microbiome, the trillions of bacteria that symbiotically coexist inside our intestines. He explained that these microorganisms normally feed upon the dietary fiber that we ingest, but if that supply is lacking, they may instead begin digesting the mucin layer that protects our intestinal cells, leading to severe health problems. So fiber is beneficial in both these ways, explaining its importance in our diet. Unfortunately, fiber also tends to make the long-term storage of food more difficult, and for that reason it is usually removed from processed foods, so many Americans now get much too little if it in their diet.
Our media and health advocates regularly denounce our diet for being so heavy in such “processed foods,” but to a large extent I think that term is merely shorthand for foods in which the fiber has been removed and additional sugar added. Those are the underlying problems, and obfuscating that issue with a vaguer and more general term can have negative consequences. For example, almost nobody would describe freshly-squeezed orange juice as a “processed food,” but according to Lustig it is just as harmful as the worst of those.
…Lustig’s nutritional mantra, regularly repeated throughout his book, was a very simple one: “Protect the liver and feed the gut.” The leading source of liver damage is the fructose component of sugar, while dietary fiber both protects the liver and feeds the gut, so those seemed the most important items upon which to focus, a relatively simple action plan to take away from a book running more than 400 pages long and containing over than 1,000 reference notes.
Lustig also explained the important role of corporate lobbying and PR efforts in our public health disaster. He drew a clear and persuasive analogy between the nefarious activities of Big Tobacco and those of Big Sugar, noting that contrary to what one might assume, the former was actually modeled upon the latter rather than the other way round, with the tobacco industry hiring a top sugar lobbyist to launch its efforts in 1954.As concerns over rapidly rising obesity and related health problems escalated, the sugar industry became very successful at deflecting the blame unto all sorts of other products such as fatty foods and salt, so those became the central villains of the standard nutritional narratives promoted by our government and media. Sugar-funded studies suggested that sodas or desserts ranked below French fries and potato chips as a cause of weight gain, but they omitted the fact that both ketchup and chips were actually very heavy in sugar. In fact, a more realistic study seemed to show that of all the items offered on the McDonalds menu, purchase of the sugary drinks correlated most closely with the added weight of the customers.
Researchers and investigative journalists eventually uncovered documents revealing that the Sugar Lobby had spent decades secretly funding scientific researchers whose studies pointed to all culprits except themselves.
During the last decade or so, Kennedy has been most heavily identified with his sharp criticism of vaccines, a subject that I had never previously considered. But despite my very strong criticism of the widespread Covid anti-vaxxing movement, I was eventually persuaded to read a recent book challenging the broader narrative of that long-established public health product.
Early in 2023 I published an article explaining that I’d been quite impressed with much of the material it presented and the controversial questions that it raised.
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However, those earlier vaxxing concerns still have a presence here and there, and a few months ago I received a book on exactly that broader subject, published under the auspices of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense organization. It had originally been released in 2019, long before anyone had ever heard of Covid or Wuhan, so it had nothing to do with these current issues, but addressed the previous vaccine controversy. The authors were anonymous—supposedly a couple of Israeli medical doctors—and their work had originally been published in their own country, but had now been released in an English-language American edition. Except for a few simple charts, the contents consisted entirely of text, and the title was a puzzling one: Turtles All the Way Down.
I was really quite impressed. Most of the Covid anti-vaxxers I’d encountered on the Internet were prone to making wild, very doubtful charges involving gigantic body-counts but I encountered very little of such grandiosity in this extremely sober 500 page discussion of the subject.Yet although the tone and the factual claims were quite restrained, in many other respects this book constituted a far more radical critique of vaccines than anything I’d previously seen, amounting to a frontal assault against their traditional role in modern medicine. Turtles aimed at overthrowing what most of us had long assumed we knew about those established public health measures, so I was hardly surprised that the authors chose to conceal their names for fear of professional retribution. According to the foreword to the American edition, some months after its original publication the book had received a strongly favorable review in Israel’s leading medical journal, but the senior academics who praised it were then harshly vilified by a medical establishment that was unwilling to directly challenge the substance of the text they had applauded. The front of the book is studded with lengthy endorsements by nearly a dozen medical professionals and other academics, certainly enough support for me to take the book seriously rather than merely dismissing it out of hand…
Turtles provides some 1,200 references, which fill 273 pages of an online document…
A central theme of anti-vaxxers has been that many of the vaccines they criticize actually have serious adverse side effects, sometimes doing more harm than good, and I’d always been quite skeptical of this claim. After all, I’d known that prior to their general release new vaccines must typically go through a long period of clinical trials, in which they are matched in randomized, blinded large-scale tests against placebos. But the very first chapter of Turtles claimed that this was mostly a myth and a deception.
According to the authors, such vaccine trials are not conducted against true placebos such as saline solutions, but only against previously approved vaccines. So a new treatment is considered safe if its rate of harmful side-effects is no worse than those of previously approved versions rather than no treatment at all, an illogical approach that seems to make little sense. Thus, the supposed safety and efficacy of current vaccines has only been established relative to a long series of their predecessors, often stretching back decades, and this constitutes the “Turtles All the Way Down” metaphor of the book’s title. This sort of very simple factual claim seems unlikely to have been made unless it were actually true.
Surprisingly enough, the tested rate of adverse vaccine side-effects is sometimes quite significant. For example, during the clinical trials of the Prevnar vaccine, about 6% of the 17,000 infants tested needed emergency room visits and 3% required hospitalization. But because the previous vaccine used for comparison purposes had similarly high rates of negative side-effects, Prevnar was judged safe and effective, a shocking verdict.
There are also cases in which no previously approved version of the vaccine existed for use in such a comparison trial, and one might naturally assume that the only possible choice would be to use a true placebo such a saline solution. Yet as Turtles reveals, in that situation a deliberately crippled version of the vaccine itself is given to the other half of the trial population, a compound which could not provide any benefits but would still probably produce all the same adverse side-effects. The most plausible reason for this strange methodology would be to mask the existence of those adverse side-effects, thereby ensuring the vaccine’s approval.
Turtles summarizes this outrageous situation by stating that each year tens of millions of vaccine doses are administered to infants and toddlers in America, and not a single one of them has ever been tested in clinical trials against an inert placebo. None of this proves that any of these vaccines are dangerous, but it certainly raises that serious possibility. Pilots who fly blind may not necessarily crash, but they probably have a much greater chance of doing so.
Once a vaccine has passed its clinical trials and been approved for general use, any future problems that might appear are supposedly covered by VAERS, the “Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System,” whose name indicates its role of bringing any such problems to the attention of public health authorities. Turtles devotes a full chapter to this system, which the authors claim is very poorly designed and quite unreliable.
In particular, the reporting system is entirely voluntary, so that medical professionals are not obligated to file reports regarding harmful results they have encountered, even those involving the most severe reactions. This suggests that a large degree of under-reporting may be occurring, while at the same time false or misleading reports can also be filed by anyone, without any verification process.
As a result, the data collected by VAERS is statistically suspect and probably quite unreliable, and the authors are suspicious as to why those huge defects in such a seemingly vital system have been left uncorrected for decades. They suspect that these flaws may be deliberate, intended to mask the dangers of the vaccines the system is supposedly meant to monitor.
The authors recognize that skeptical readers may find it difficult to believe that ill-effects from so widespread a product as vaccines might have remained concealed for decades, so they take a short digression into the past history of disease epidemiology. They note that lung cancer was once extremely rare, but then suddenly began to appear in the early part of the twentieth century around the same time that cigarette smoking became widespread, and did so in many of the same populations. But although scientists began pointing to the possible connection and the supporting statistical evidence, that causal relationship was fiercely disputed for decades, partly because of the wealth and power of the industry responsible. Turtles suggests that this tragic history, which led to the premature deaths of millions of lung cancer victims, should be kept carefully in mind as we consider the issue of vaccine safety.
By the late 1990s, renewed questions regarding the safety of vaccines were beginning to appear in the scientific literature, notably the 1998 publication of a hugely controversial study concerning the safety of the MMR vaccine by Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues in the Lancet, a leading medical journal. In addition, the appearance of the Internet for the first time allowed ordinary individuals to share their experiences and concerns, and organize themselves to investigate these issues.
But according to Turtles, the response of the vaccine establishment was to release a series of studies debunking these concerns, studies that the authors argue were severely flawed, biased, and possibly even corrupt, but which were heavily promoted by the medical establishment and its subservient media allies. They devote most of a long chapter to analyzing five of these major studies in considerable detail, noting that some of the most influential contained errors that seemed to severely damage their credibility. Remarkably enough, the raw data presented in one of the most important, the 2002 Madsen study of Danish children, actually seemed to support the opposite conclusion, suggesting that the vaccine indeed had dangerous side-effects, but various dubious statistical “adjustments” were then employed to produce the desired, reassuring result.
At this point the authors raised a very simple question. The easiest and most convincing means of demonstrating that vaccines are actually safe and beneficial with few serious side-effects, would obviously be to conduct a large randomized trial study comparing the total health consequences of vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, what they call a “Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated” (VU) study. Yet according to Turtles, no such study has ever been conducted: “It seems inexplicable that VU studies have not been initiated by the vaccine establishment for so many years.”
Indeed, there already exist substantial populations such as the Amish which forego vaccinations and whose health outcomes could easily be compared with a matched control group of the general, fully-vaccinated public, and Turtles notes some disturbing indications in this regard. A journalistic investigation found that the rate of autism in the Amish was just a small fraction of that in the general population, and the same condition was non-existent in unvaccinated Ethiopian-born children in Israel, while their fully-vaccinated Israeli-born siblings showed normal levels. A similar pattern occurred with Somali immigrant families to both Minnesota and Sweden. Given that those autism-vaccine concerns have for years been such a flashpoint among anti-vaccine activists, it does seem quite suspicious that the public health authorities have been unwilling to respond with a large-scale VU study to conclusively settle the issue.
There have been repeated demands for such VU studies but the regular response of the medical establishment has been to dismiss the proposal as unethical, claiming that it would require denying a large group of children access to beneficial vaccinations; but this is obvious nonsense. A non-randomized study could be based upon unvaccinated groups or a retrospective study could use the health history of large numbers of children who had been unvaccinated in the past. Turtles notes that 0.8% of all American children are today completely unvaccinated, thereby providing 30,000 potential subjects in each birth cohort, while in Australia the rate is 1.5%. These would obviously provide large enough numbers to conclusively determine the relative health benefits of vaccinations, so various other doubtful or entirely specious excuses are typically made…
The authors argue that such studies have indeed almost certainly been quietly conducted, probably many times, but the results have never been made public because they pointed in the wrong direction. After all, the data has been accessible to government authorities for many years and it seems inconceivable that no analysis was ever performed, only that the findings were never released. While I can’t be certain that the authors are right, I do think that their deeply cynical suspicion is more likely correct than not.
The second half of the book shifts to a broader historical perspective, focusing on what the authors describe as the “founding myths” of public health, especially the supposedly crucial role that medical innovations such as vaccines had played in freeing us from the deadly diseases of the past. For nearly my entire life, I had always vaguely accepted these beliefs and had never seriously questioned them.The authors tell a very different story. They explain that beginning in the early 1960s, Dr. Thomas McKeown, a leading British physician and academic researcher, and his colleagues had published a series of ground-breaking articles that successfully challenged these assumptions, noting that the huge reductions in infectious disease mortality in Britain had actually long pre-dated the introduction of either vaccines or medical treatments such as antibiotics. Instead, the sharp reductions in disease mortality had overwhelmingly been due to major improvements in public sanitation and private hygiene, a surprising conclusion later confirmed in the US as well. They provide several very telling charts demonstrating these facts.
Among other factors, changes in urban transportation technology such as the replacement of horses by automobiles had had an enormous impact given that the former produced an average of 25 pounds of feces per day, much of it scattered on the city streets. The urban reliance on horses involved other major health hazards, with New York City having to remove some 15,000 horse carcasses from its streets during the year 1880. Meanwhile, refrigeration greatly reduced the consumption of spoiled or tainted food, and advances in nutritional understanding increased personal health.The authors emphasize that forty years after McKeown and his allies produced this “conceptual revolution,” leading health authorities have fully recognized the relative importance of these different factors. A report by the American Institute of Medicine states that
the number of infections prevented by immunization is actually quite small compared with the total number of infections prevented by other hygenic interventions such as clean water, food, and living conditions.
But although the academic community has absorbed these facts, they have still not been widely disseminated or given proper attention. For example, most CDC publications still misleadingly emphasize the central role of vaccinations, leading to widespread public misconceptions. According to Turtles
the scientific consensus regarding the minor role vaccines played in reducing the burden of infectious diseases has become a kind of “open secret” in scientific and medical circles: Everyone knows the truth but nobody cares to share it with the public.
Turtles does freely admit that some major diseases were largely eliminated by vaccines, notably smallpox, and also that vaccines played an important role in reducing the morbidity—widespread illness—of others such as measles, even if not their mortality.
But even these successful examples may raise complicated, hidden questions. Just as the widespread use of vaccines was successfully eliminating various contagious but non-fatal childhood illnesses, other important changes in public health occurred, sometimes quite negative ones. For example, chronic, incurable illnesses such as asthma, autism, and ADHD began appearing for the first time in significant numbers or rapidly growing, soon greatly surpassing the dwindling infectious diseases in their debilitating impact. Despite this, most such chronic diseases have received little attention from the CDC and other infectious-oriented health organizations that prefer to continue focusing upon the vanishing sliver of measles or mumps cases while the millions of children now suffering from chronic illnesses are given much less attention. Turtles raises the disturbing suspicion that these two divergent trends may be directly connected, suggesting once again that large-scale studies should explore the possible links of these new chronic illnesses to the vaccines that were introduced during roughly the same period.
The sole Republican vote against confirming Kennedy came from former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and the media often explained his opposition by describing him as a polio survivor, who therefore understood the horrific consequences of populist attacks on vaccines. A week or two before the hearings, the Times had run a front-page article focusing on the 300,000 survivors of that dread disease, forever vanquished through the miracle of vaccination, and Kennedy never challenged any of those arguments in his testimony.
Yet as I explained in my early 2023 article, the true medical story of polio may actually be considerably more complex than what is widely believed.
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Turtles had presented all of these vaccine and public health issues in a relatively cautious manner, and although I found much of the information quite surprising, almost none of it provoked any sense of disbelief. However, the penultimate chapter of the book was by far the longest, amounting to nearly a quarter of the entire text and its contents were far more shocking. I suspect that the authors deliberately placed it near the end so that the earlier revelations would have already softened the skepticism of readers, reducing the likelihood that this explosive material would simply be dismissed out of hand. The title of the chapter is “The Mysteries of Polio” and the first sentence describes the towering edifice they are boldly preparing to assault:
The epic tale of science’s victory over polio—more than any other account of a fight against disease, even the fable-like story of Edward Jenner and his smallpox vaccine—is the foundational myth of vaccination.
Just as the authors suggest, the successful use of the polio vaccine to eliminate that dread disease became the greatest public health triumph of the 1950s, one that saved countless children from crippling paralysis and lifted a reign of terror facing American families, while elevating Dr. Jonas Salk and his vaccine to secular sainthood. The history of that fearsome disease and the vaccine that eradicated it seems as solidly established as anything can be in medicine, with the Wikipedia page running well over 11,000 words and including nearly 150 references.
Yet remarkably enough, Turtles seeks to completely overturn this long-established narrative, claiming that the scientific facts are actually far more complex and ambiguous than I or most other readers would have ever imagined. While this single long account can hardly overcome my enormous presumption in favor of so seemingly well-documented a medical history, it did raise numerous major issues that I’d never previously known, so I will merely present their arguments, urging those interested to read the book and then decide for themselves.
The authors begin by briefly summarizing the standard history of polio, explaining that the disease is caused by a viral infection that can produce a flu-like illness, but which in less than 1% of the cases may also damage the nerve cells thereby creating long-term paralysis. Polio has apparently been around for thousands of years, with the earliest evidence being an Egyptian stele from 1500 B.C. showing a young man with a withered leg supported by a crutch, and its first medical description came in a book by a physician published in 1789. But the illness was extremely rare with no recorded outbreaks so it received minimal attention until near the end of the 19th century, when such outbreaks suddenly began in Europe and the U.S. These soon multiplied in size, claiming 9,000 paralyzed victims in New York City in 1916, and polio epidemics then came and went without any clear pattern, increasing after World War II and reaching a peak in the early 1950s.
The mystery of the illness was solved in 1908 when the virus responsible was isolated, and with the later support of FDR, himself a paralyzed polio victim, huge sums were invested in studying the disease and seeking a cure. This finally culminated in the Salk and Sabin vaccines of the early 1950s, leading to the disappearance of the disease in the industrialized world in the 1960s and 1970s and its eventual near-eradication elsewhere by the end of the twentieth century.
Yet the authors note that this apparently simple story that I had casually absorbed over the years and never questioned, actually hides numerous strange anomalies, mysteries that have always been known in scientific circles but that were never brought before the public. There was no explanation of why polio outbreaks first began in the late 19th century, why they were entirely confined to industrialized countries, and why they were far more severe in summer and early fall. Polio spread and intensified exactly when most other infectious diseases were sharply declining, most victims had no identified contact with other infected individuals, and there was no explanation as to why the virus would only so very rarely attack the nervous system. It proved impossible to infect laboratory animals orally, as humans themselves supposedly became infected.
And oddly enough, although the disease itself has supposedly been vanquished and almost eradicated by medical science, all these mysteries still remain unanswered today despite over a century of research, and some of them have become even more puzzling.
As the authors emphasize “Polio is one of a handful of diseases that have become a major threat to public health during modern times” and the well-documented record of its appearance followed a very strange pattern. The early outbreaks in Europe and North America were sufficiently conspicuous that they clearly represented a new phenomenon, yet there is no explanation for why they suddenly began.
These outbreaks were almost entirely confined to industrialized countries, and in those rare cases in which they spread to other parts of the world, the disease was almost always restricted to Westerners and only rarely affected local residents. American soldiers based in the Philippines contracted polio, but local Filipinos did not, and the same was true for such troops located in China and Japan. American soldiers stationed in the Middle East contracted polio at a rate ten times higher than their counterparts who remained in the U.S., but local residents seemed almost immune. During the early 1940s, polio cases were five times higher among British officers stationed in India than among British enlisted men and 120 times higher than for local Indian troops. Similarly, British officers based in North Africa and Italy were nearly an order-of-magnitude more likely to contract polio than the soldiers serving under their command. Numerous similar instances were recorded of this strange pattern of infection, disproportionately striking those of higher social status.
So during exactly the era when improved sanitation, hygiene, and diet had caused the dramatic decline of other infectious diseases in industrialized countries, polio began its frightening rise. By the late 1940s, the noted tendency of polio to strike Westerners rather than locals living elsewhere gave rise to the theory that “improved hygiene” was somehow an important contributing factor, a conclusion widely accepted by many top polio experts. Scientific hypotheses were formulated to explain this, but these were soon contradicted by empirical research.
However, as the authors point out, the earliest outbreaks of polio in the U.S. had actually followed the exact opposite pattern, being concentrated in the dirtiest, least hygienic urban slums, which had led to the widespread belief that polio was a disease of poverty. But then after polio waned and eventually disappeared in the industrialized world during the 1960s and 1970s, it suddenly reemerged in impoverished Third World countries at rates similar to its 1950s peak in the West. So over the course of a couple of generations, a disease widely believed caused by poverty and lack of hygiene had been transformed into a disease associated with affluence and too much hygiene, but then afterwards returned to its roots as a disease of poverty and dirt. According to Turtles, these totally contradictory assumptions were sometimes simultaneously accepted by leading polio researchers. This very strange pattern of polio infection raises the obvious possibility that the true nature of the illness had been misunderstood in some very fundamental way.
A crucial point that Turtles raises is that contrary to public perceptions, the flaccid paralysis characteristic of polio may actually have a very large number of different causes, perhaps as many as 200 according to the medical literature, with most of these involving poisonings or toxic chemicals. But by the early decades of the 20th century the very high profile of the polio disease meant that the label “polio” was almost always immediately applied to any such physical illness. In some important cases, this was later found to have been a misdiagnosis, but the authors wonder whether this problem may have actually been much more widespread than was realized at the time.
As they emphasize, something very dramatic must have happened late in the 19th century producing the remarkable rise in the incidence of paralytic polio, and they note that this same period saw the widespread introduction of new dyes and pesticides based upon arsenic, lead, and other potentially toxic chemicals.
As a suspicious example, they explain that farmers in the northeastern U.S. began applying lead arsenate to their apple trees in 1892 and the following year there was a large rise in polio cases in the Boston area, which more than quadrupled in number. Moreover, these cases peaked in apple-picking season and most of the victims came from the rural areas surrounding Boston rather than from the city itself. Even decades later, medical experts emphasized that it was very difficult to distinguish polio paralysis from the nerve damage caused by lead poisoning, and misdiagnosis was common. The authors note that the rise of apparent polio cases from a few each year to hundreds or more seems to closely match the widespread use of lead arsenate, which was not only far more dangerous than previous pesticide chemicals but also remained on the fruit much longer.
At this point, Turtles employs highly restrained language to offer a remarkably explosive hypothesis:
The supposition that polio is an infectious and contagious disease—that is, it is caused by a living organism (typically a bacterium or virus) and is transmitted from person to person—has not been in dispute in scientific circles for many decades. The institutional version of polio history has cast a thick layer of concrete around it, and any scientist daring enough to challenge it is likely to be ignored or mocked. The disease, as “everyone knows,” is caused by the poliovirus—a highly contagious virus that enters the body through the mouth and is excreted in the feces. But is polio really an infectious and contagious disease? Delving into some of its early history suggests that the answer to this question is not nearly as straightforward or unequivocal as the official polio story would have us believe.
During the early years of polio’s rise, the nature of the illness was often disputed, with critics of the infection theory emphasizing that they could find no examples of person-to-person transmission. Indeed, the cases were so geographically scattered that almost none of the victims had had any contact with each other. Among 1,400 cases reviewed, less than 3% involved more than a single patient in a family.
Meanwhile, there were many other large-scale instances of such paralysis produced by poisoned foods. In Manchester, England, a mysterious epidemic broke out in 1900, paralyzing thousands of people and killing several dozens, which was eventually traced to high arsenic concentrations in the sulfuric acid used to process sugar in local beer breweries. It was later determined that a similar problem at lower levels had been producing dozens of mysterious cases of paralysis each year in northwestern England during the late 19th century. In 1930, 50,000 Americans became paralyzed in the southern and central regions after they drank a patent medicine contaminated with a toxic chemical, and ten days had usually passed between time of consumption and first onset of the symptoms, completely masking the true cause.
The notion that the paralysis ascribed to polio might actually be due to a toxic chemical seems an astonishing one, not easy for me to accept, but it would help to explain the very strange pattern of the disease and its apparent lack of transmissibility.
Meanwhile, the authors carefully examine the historical studies said to have established the contagious and infectious nature of polio, and find them very doubtful and inconclusive, pointing out that scientific critics had raised many of these same objections at the time. Although repeated experimental failures seemed to establish that polio infections were strictly unique to humans, they note that some of the earliest reports of the rural outbreaks had mentioned that similar forms of paralysis had also afflicted local farm animals such as horses, dogs, and fowls, suggesting that a toxic agent might have been responsible.
So the question naturally arises as to why the possible role of lead or arsenic poisoning had been ignored in those early studies, which instead concluded that a viral disease was responsible. The authors suggest that this was due to the powerful influence of the chemical industry, which marketed these dangerous compounds as pesticides for apple farmers. At the time, such chemicals were totally unregulated by the American government, and indeed several European countries banned American apples for exactly that reason.
The authors note that polio outbreaks in the northern hemisphere tended to peak in the summer and autumn months when fruits and vegetables were most heavily consumed and also intensively sprayed with chemicals to protect them from pests. By contrast, other infectious childhood diseases were much less likely to occur during those same months because schools were not in session.
Polio paralysis had become a notable illness in America by the late 1930s, but its incidence then grew very rapidly after the end of World War II, while outbreaks also began to afflict countries such as Germany, Japan, and the Netherlands, where it had previously been unknown. The first epidemics in France, Belgium, and the Soviet Union were only recorded during the 1950s. Medical historians have no explanation for this strange pattern, which elevated polio to a particularly fearsome disease even as so many others were finally being controlled and disappearing.
The authors note that a pesticide revolution was occurring at exactly this same time, with DDT becoming the global insecticide of choice, an inexpensive, powerful, and long-lasting compound that attacked the nervous system of common agricultural pests. Although the chemical was officially judged completely safe, early reports did show some examples of apparent toxicity to humans, even including paralysis as a symptom. According to some medical critics at the time, the pattern of surprising growth in polio infections both in America and other countries seemed to generally track the widening use of DDT, but the Department of Agriculture and other federal agencies strongly denied any possible connection.
All lingering doubts about the true nature of polio were swept away once the Salk vaccine was released in 1955, followed by the rapid disappearance of the illness, but the authors raise serious doubts about this seemingly conclusive cause-and-effect relationship. They note that polio cases had already been sharply declining nationwide for several years, and this trend merely continued, followed by a noticeable rise in polio incidence a few years later. The trajectory in Israel was even more contradictory, with a long decline in polio cases actually being reversed after vaccinations began, before dropping back down a few years later.
According to the authors, during the early 1950s American government agencies had become quietly concerned about the health effects of DDT and began discouraging its extensive use, especially in food preparation and within houses. They suggest that this might explain the sharp decline of apparent polio cases during the years prior to introduction of the Salk vaccine.So for whatever combination of reasons, polio had largely disappeared from the US and the rest of the industrialized world by the 1970s. But meanwhile, the widespread use of DDT and other pesticides in many Third World countries was soon followed by a surprising rise in apparent polio outbreaks, which had previously been unknown in those regions, leading to the launch of a global vaccination campaign in 1988 to eradicate polio.
That massive effort has seemingly been very successful, and by 2013 reported cases of polio had dropped by 99.9%. However, the authors seriously question this triumphal narrative, noting the concurrent, even more rapid rise of “Acute Flaccid Paralysis” (AFP) syndrome, a physical ailment with similar characteristics but not ascribed to the polio virus. If the actual number of severely paralyzed individuals has remained constant or even sharply increased, perhaps the supposed success of the global polio vaccination campaign has been achieved merely by redefinition, a sleight of hand.
Although I’d found most of the previous sections of Turtles interesting and reasonably persuasive, these had hardly prepared me for the incendiary impact of this very long chapter on polio, which completely astonished me. The mere possibility that one of the most famous historical diseases of the twentieth century had largely been a figment of medical misdiagnosis simply boggled the mind.Polio’s fatalities had been relatively few in number, but its legacy of permanently crippled children had established it as a particularly terrifying illness, finally conquered by the heroic medical breakthroughs of Dr. Jonas Salk and Dr. Albert Sabin, for which the former received a Nobel Prize. Just as the authors declare, the eradication of polio had been a crowning achievement of mass vaccination drives, permanently justifying that public health measure and leading to its widespread expansion. My view on all these matters had always been quite conventional and I’d never doubted what I’d read in my newspapers or textbooks. So I was stunned to encounter 125 pages—soberly written and carefully argued—that raised the serious suspicion that the contagious disease had never really existed, with most of the victims actually suffering from various types of toxic poisoning rather than any viral infection.
I’d similarly remembered the controversy surrounding the use of DDT as a pesticide and its ban a half-century ago because of the threat it posed to wildlife. But I’d accepted the arguments that it was almost entirely harmless to humans and had never heard of any possible connection to an illness, let alone anything as high-profile as the paralysis attributed to polio.
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There is obviously an enormous difference between creating serious doubts about a landmark scientific issue and successfully overturning it. Even if I were willing to check the hundreds of scholarly references Turtles provides to support its revolutionary hypothesis, I probably wouldn’t possess the technical expertise to properly evaluate them. The victory over polio ranks as one of the most famous triumphs of modern medicine, and surely its legion of defenders could produce lengthy rebuttals to the arguments made by these anonymous authors, rebuttals that would have to be carefully weighed by those with the expert knowledge to effectively do so. Reversing our settled understanding of polio is the sort of monumental feat that would require an equally monumental professional debate. But from my perspective, even merely raising significant doubts about such a seemingly central element of medical history entirely justifies reading the book of these courageous authors.
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Not long after publishing that article, I was sent a copy of an earlier 2018 book focused entirely on the strange and anomalous history and medical aspects of the disease of polio, covering the same subject but in far greater detail.
The Moth in the Iron Lung by Forrest Maready reached conclusions roughly similar to those of Turtles, and had apparently served as a source for some of the latter’s analysis. Therefore, those strongly interested in the subject should certainly consider adding it to their reading list as well.
The “Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect” is an important aspect of our psychology that was described by the late novelist Michael Crichton in a 2002 speech:
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
Even after we recognize this principle, we often still suffer from its effects, and in my own case this has happened on multiple separate occasions.
During the last couple of decades, I’d become more and more suspicious of the established historical narrative regarding our wars and other major political events of the last hundred-odd years, and begun investigating these in detail, producing my lengthy American Pravda series as a consequence.
However, until recently I never applied this same skepticism to our public health matters, which I assumed were more or less as they had been officially presented. But over the last several years, I have concluded that I had probably been mistaken about this.
Some of the major health controversies described and summarized in this long article involved a greater loss of American life than the combined total of all of our wars of the twentieth century. So if our accepted view of them has been incorrect and should be revised, the implications are absolutely enormous.
Over the last decade, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been one of the boldest public figures arguing for this sort of sweeping reassessment and he has now been installed as our country’s most powerful public health official, able to translate some of his concerns and skepticism into careful investigation and possible public policy.
So if he successfully undertakes such actions, he might eventually come to be recognized as one of the most momentous public officials of our recent national history.
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