In 2008, Senator Obama won the election against Senator John McCain to become America's 44th President. It brought a lot of excitement to the science community. Before social media, opinion was easy to manipulate. Academics who, let's be honest, are almost 90% Democrats, were ready to believe the worst about Republicans. Bush banned stem cell research and it would cure Alzheimer's if a Democrat was in office(1), they repeated. Solar was ready but Republicans blocked it, while nuclear energy had to stay banned because it always led to nuclear weapons, they insisted.(2)

Academics in science are no smarter outside their field than a plumber is, which does not stop them from rationalizing that their control of academia is because they are just smarter than Republicans.(3) 

In the real world, President-Elect Obama also wanted Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to run EPA. He had agreed with him about vaccines and autism and his concern impacted his policy. During the Bird Flu pandemic his concern about preservatives in vaccines kept vaccines out of the hands of people because he wouldn't allow multi-dose vials. And he believed that epidemiology was superior to science. There is no greater example than when he appointed Linda Birnbaum, a famed anti-science conspiracy theorist, to run the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences inside the NIH. 

In an ideal world, NIEHS would engage in serious exploratory work and hand it over to science to validate. In the Birnbaum world, chemists, biologists, and toxicologists were all corporate shills and finding correlation in surveys of products people use would sound the alarm, and then scientists would have to find out why.

I was targeted by her for noting that PM2.5 has never harmed anyone, it is virtual pollution you can't even detect without an electron microscope. Unlike real pollution, PM10, the smog that kills. And for saying vaping was not an epidemic in kids. I was a shill for Big Tobacco on that last one, despite being against smoking my entire life and never getting a penny from Big Tobacco.

Unlike Birnbaum, who had lots of paid engagements sponsored by environmental and organic groups.

She is back in science media because she got a creampuff hagiography from a journalist writing in Undark, which was founded by, you probably guessed, a progressive conspiracy theorist who hates science, named Deborah Blum.(4)
 
The hard-hitting investigative journalism of Undark when they are writing about an ally.

Kennedy is no longer an anti-vax conspiracy theorist in the Democratic party, he joined the Trump administration, so the 'Republicans hate science' trope is back. Yet it means ignoring that the origin of Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) rests with the person progressive journalist Michael Schulson in Undark lauds: Linda Birnbaum, Ph.D. Also a member of the unhinged activists known as Ramazzini Institute.

MAHA today says all the things that Dr. Birnbaum brought into NIH in 2009. 'This is happening and these products exist and we have statistical significance to show they are related.' Can't sleep? Blame virtual pollution. Sure, studies have shown no harm from small micron particles, PM2.5, but for that she invoked "hormesis"; it has effects at really high levels, no effect at normal levels, and then effects at really low levels. That's homeopathy, what an alarming number of epidemiologists also seem to believe.

Yet MAHA is firmly in the camp that believes bizarre homeopathic things just like Dr. Birnbaum does. Like that BPA, which binds 1/20,000th as well to estrogen as products like birth control pills, is an "endocrine disruptor" that is causing health effects and scientists are too stupid or too bought off by corporations to tell us about it. When the Undark article at least attempts to be balanced, such as invoking legendary critical thinker Dr. Geoffrey Kabat, they immediately go back to Birnbaum, who dismisses him with “Kabat never saw an environmental chemical that he thought was a problem.” 

Birnbaum never saw one that wasn't a problem. Unless it was produced by one of the organic industry groups paying her. And Phil Landrigan, another corporate conspiracy theorist, is sprinkled throughout the piece. 

MAHA is bad, unless it is the policies of the Obama administration with a leader with enough force to enact it. Then it is an uncomfortable alliance that is hinted will make people healthier.

It's fine advocacy, with its uncritical claims that more people are ill than ever - children impacted most! - but it's untrue. Yet before 2015, when we finally got California to ban arbitrary vaccine exemptions by wealthy progressives after three children died of Whooping Cough in 2014, the same rationale was made to justify beliefs by Democrats that vaccines caused autism, and GMOs caused obesity. It is a simple bandwagon effect in epidemiology, no differently than a theoretical physicist hired to calculate String Theory has to believe in String Theory. More diagnoses does not mean more instances, it means that creating a wide autism spectrum increased the pool of people on that spectrum.

We see it today with prediabetes diagnoses and injections used as diet plans. No other country accepts prediabetes at all, much less the a1c level pulled out of thin air that the Obama administration used. Half of China is prediabetic if they use that blood sugar number. Is it a corporate conspiracy or public health win? It depends on your politics.

Yet by pointing out inconvenient facts such as that, Undark will once again claim I am on the take from Monsanto or Big Sugar or whatever group is in vogue this year. That I have never gotten a penny from them won't matter. When reality disagrees with advocacy journalism, print the fiction. And maybe mythologize your biography targets, like they did with Dr. Birnbaum.

NOTES:

(1) It did nothing of the kind. Campaigning is one thing but political reality is another. The Dickey-Wicker law had been signed by Clinton, a fellow Democrat, not Bush. That is why human embryonic stem cell (hESC) technology had been created without federal funding of any kind. When NIH-funded scientists wanted to use it for research, President Clinton couldn't overturn his own law, so he stalled. When President Bush got into office, he listened to arguments from all sides and then agreed to fund research using lines that had been created. Political journalists instead claimed he banned it. Senator Obama declared he would lift the ban, but when he got into office he added a few more lines and kept Clinton's ban.

To-date, all breakthroughs have been made using never-controversial induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), not hESCs. Partisan science journalists then began to call the breakthroughs due to "stem cells" so it would look like it was due to Obama.

(2) Unless it was in the hands of Iran, in which case nuclear energy would not be weaponized. And if it was, it would only be against Israel, which was fine with progressives then just as it is today. 

(3) One famous example:


Enjoy that student loan debt, kids.

(4) For being a conspiracy site, Undark has never once investigated the alarming control that progressive NYU journalism employees have over Pulitzer Prizes. Probably because Blum's friends gave her one. And Schulson, the author of the hagiography of Birnbaum, also got money from their department. Here he is lovingly citing the work of NYU, and yet another Pulitzer Prize winner, who is on the committee that gave him his "fellowship" and who are also noted anti-science corporate conspiracy theorists. Like Blum and Birnbaum.