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MAHA: Everything old is new again, except this time antiscience cranks (like Stanislaw Burzynski) are in charge
Returning from my hiatus, I couldn't decide on a specific new topic, mainly because so much bad stuff happened in my absence. So, in this post I back up a bit to reflect on how RFK Jr.'s "make America healthy again" is nothing new. What is new is that the antiscience-cranks are in charge.
The post MAHA: Everything old is new again, except this time antiscience cranks (like Stanislaw Burzynski) are in charge first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.
**Shares
I am returning from a two-week bereavement-related hiatus. Longtime readers deserve to know that two weeks ago my mother died after a long illness, and the funeral was held on Saturday. Since my father died a couple of weeks before Christmas 2024, I have been primarily in charge of my mother’s finances and house since then. Over the last year and a half my sister and I visited my mother several times a week and my sister from out of town would come in when she could; quite frankly, I’m feeling a strange emptiness from not knowing what to do with those many hours a week spent with Mom as her cognition and health declined. Coming back, I was seriously tempted to write a more personal post about how, during the three years since my mother’s stroke that resulted in her developing vascular demential and the 14 months since my father’s passing at the end of a long hospitalization, I as a physician have confronted the medical system from the other side, discovering in the process just how much the US healthcare system falls short and how much eldercare in this country stinks, but it’s just too soon. One day I will do such a post, but today is not that day. Feelings are still too raw. Maybe I’ll do it after the estate is taken care of.
Still, this blog beckons, and, although tempted, I really didn’t want to take a third week off because writing my weekly post will help me ease back into my regular routine.
As I contemplated what to write about this week, I must confess to having faced the tsunami of nonsense that has occurred during the three weeks since I last posted here and experienced an uncharacteristic feeling of being overwhelmed. There are so many things that I could have written about. For example, I was highly tempted to write about “Podcast Jay” Bhattacharya‘s having been appointed acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that in addition to his role as NIH Director. Let’s just say that his appointment as acting director of the CDC confirmed to me what I have been saying all along. Podcast Jay was never truly in charge of the NIH; he has been and continues to be a figurehead under whom Russell Vought and Matthew Memoli will transform the NIH into a research arm of MAHA and a grant awarding system based, as part of Lysenkoism 2.0, less on scientific merit than on patronage to reward friends of the administration and punish opponents. Similarly, Podcast Jay will not be in charge of the CDC either. He will be the temporary figurehead under which the longtime antivax activist who is currently our Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., will degrade and ultimately destroy much of the CDC’s public health and vaccination programs. I just had to mention that in case I never get a chance to circle back around to this out in detail.
Instead, for some reason, I kept thinking about how there’s nothing new about RFK Jr.’s “make America healthy again” (MAHA) movement, except that the antiscience cranks, quacks and antivaxxers are firmly in charge. The led me to reflect on one the longest-standing bête noire of pseudoscience, Polish expat turned cancer quack Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, and how his activities starting 50 years ago and continuing into the 2020s, helped lay a lot of the groundwork for the tactics and tropes of MAHA. There is nothing truly new under the sun in terms of quackery, other than that, even with my knowledge of medical history, I am not aware of a time when not only are the cranks fully in charge but when actual science-based medicine is in retreat.
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