Republicans duly flipped to being anti-vaccine, as 35% of all people will when political elites tell them they should, while wealthy California Democrats who had insisted they caused autism just a few years ago - some schools on the coast had under 30% of kids in school vaccinated - now even line young people up to take the HPV vaccine they insisted was just a Big Pharma financial grift to inoculate 4 million kids per year for only a 70% chance to prevent a problem few would ever get.(1)
With Secretary Kennedy also declaring war on American farmers - except the Organic™ and Raw Milk belief system he cherishes - there may be an opportunity to get $3 billion in environmental groups, and their political allies, on the side of science there as well.
Scholars from UC Davis, a school with a long agriculture heritage yet located 'east of the 5' where San Francisco culture means science goes to die, want this new acceptance of chemistry sooner rather than later.
They are warning about infectious disease and resistance that could make Candida auris (C. auris) a COVID-19 of the fungus world.(2)
Image provided by CDC.
All those ridiculous antibacterial soaps bought by wealthy people clearly accelerated antibacterial resistance, which meant need for new treatments, and the same could happen with fungi if consumers don't obey labels there. Farmers know science, and chemicals are a high-cost line item, so they only use enough, but individuals often think more is better.
Fungal diseases could create a huge health burden. Nothing like lockdowns and panic during COVID-19 but still a large concern because western nations often have everyone paying for health care. When a few people bleed, the economy hemorrhages.
The EPA's new Interagency Drug and Pesticide Resistance and Efficacy Workgroup may do valuable work in this area, and it may also do harm. EPA is famous for undermining science as often as it has helped worldwide progress. But if the secret goal is not Kennedy and his progressive allies banning pesticides and invoking epidemiology to do it, they could provide a lot of benefit to Americans and the world in making sure some new fungus doesn't get out of control.
NOTE:
(1) It is important for activists to invoke the least beneficial and oldest outcome forever and ever. That is why anti-science progressives still insist that weedkillers 'turn frogs gay', when other weedkillers aren't giving human cancer if they sprayed it on their lawn one time.
(2) It sounds bombastic but when in 2017 when colleagues and I wrote The Next Plague And How Science Will Stop It, coronavirus was included but despite having two pandemics in the previous 14 years, SARS and MERS, was considered too statistically unlikely to become a worldwide plague. And then it happened in 2020. So nature is always looking for new ways to kill us and we shouldn't count anything out. We can't go Full Precautionary Principle, that is just scaremongering so environmental lawyers can make money, but we should start thinking about it.
Comments