Data like that that coast of California had more vaccine exemptions for school kids than the rest of the US combined. Some coastal schools had vaccine rates of just 26%. Fortunately, we had physicians like Dr. Richard Pan on our side, willing to defy his political party to save kids. We pressured the Governor to sign a law banning arbitrary exemptions and now California is nearly as high as Mississippi and Alabama in vaccine uptake.
COVID-19 flipped a lot of things. Though the CDC is 90% Democrats, career government employees, they insisted their unwillingness to do anything about COVID-19 until the World Health Organisation got China to sign off on it being a pandemic was Republican stalling - when a month earlier they had said cutting travel from other countries was Republican racism. Then they weaponized COVID-19 in the election that fall. Republicans lost and took it out on science.
Who are you to say perineum sunning isn't medicine, if people on surveys say they swear by it?
Though they had long agreed that government bureaucracy - 18 months to get a font color approved on a medicine label, $1 billion and 15 years to get through clinical trials - needed to get out of the way of American ingenuity, with COVID-19 vaccines they suddenly invoked "needs more testing" rhetoric of the anti-science left. FDA did exactly what was needed, they immediately reviewed good trial results and gave the products authorization. Instead of ushering in a Golden Age of Drug Discovery that Republicans could have been proud to claim - FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D., a Trump appointee, had gone to great effort to streamline approvals but suddenly Republicans demanded more government.
Who are you to say ASMR isn't medicine? You can't prove it doesn't work.
Yet despite being anti-science on one issue, progressives are still way out in front in denying science and reality on most. A new paper finds that alternatives to medicine have gone up substantially in the 'My child is allergic to Red Dye 40' crowd.
In a 20-year period, so basically just after President Clinton exempted alternatives to medicine from real oversight and attempted to legitimize acupuncture inside the National Institutes of Health, adults using seven forms of woo went from 19.2% to 36.7%. The woo are things like acupuncture, yoga, guided imagery, naturopaths, et al.
Enneagram, Progressive Muscle Relaxation, and taking a walk is what cancer patients need, according to people who have no real pain.
Like medical marijuana, the biggest use for these alternatives is nebulous 'pain management', which does a great disservice to cancer patients and people who experience real pain. If yoga can fix your pain, you don't have real pain, you have rich white woman pain.
Whereas naturopaths are dangerous crackpots, there is nothing wrong with yoga - until it starts to be called medicine. It isn't medicine any more than Crossfit exercise videos or Swedish Massages are.
We'd do the science community a huge favor by pulling taxpayer funding from wasteful government programs that spend valuable resources each year on a Quixotic effort to finally show New York Times subscribers that their belief in acupuncture and powdered rhino horn pays off.
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