Weekly Grounding #131
Special edition on health politics
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework.
This week’s Grounding is a Special Edition on health politics. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
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“Who Needs Glyphosate?”
At The Brownstone Institute, Joel Salatin writes that “President Donald Trump’s executive order of Feb. 18 invoking the Defense Production Act of 1950 to ensure US glyphosate production and availability is neither necessary nor helpful. HHS Secretary and Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) founder Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s endorsement of the order has created a firestorm in that health-interested base.”
He continues: “At the risk of irritating my MAHA friends, I take umbrage with this whole sordid affair because glyphosate is a deadly poison, is not needed, and certainly does not jeopardize American security. Its use is primarily on genetically modified corn and soybeans. But consider that nearly half of America’s corn production goes to ethanol fuel; it has nothing to do with food.”
“Something else is going on here, and it has nothing to do with national defense. It has to do with offering a shield of protection to arguably the most egregious agricultural chemical on the planet. It’s also a financial windfall for Bayer. The catastrophic predictions in this scenario have no basis in fact. First, China has not threatened to withhold glyphosate from the world market. Second, an immediate cutoff by any manufacturer is not imminent—except Bayer indicating it could terminate the herbicide due to lawsuits. But that has nothing to do with China. Third, neither RFK, Jr. nor President Trump offered a timeline of phaseout that would be acceptable.”
Salatin concludes: “If the president wants to truly address the nation’s food security, he would issue a Food Emancipation Proclamation executive order freeing America’s homesteaders and small farmers from tyrannical, scale-prejudicial regulations…Unleashing neighbor-to-neighbor unregulated food commerce on the marketplace would show just how unnecessary half the corn and soybeans really are. Who will tell these farmers, destroying the soil and waterways, that their production is not needed and they could do better reverting to perennial prairie polycultures growing beef? Well-managed and not overgrazed, to be sure, but financially profitable and necessary to meet the shortage of red meat in America. Thousands of small farmers stand ready to serve their neighbors with food outside the industrial food oligarchy.”
“Why MAGA Is Losing the MAHA Mom”
On Trump’s glyphosate order and RFK Jr.’s MAHA betrayal, Poppy Sowerby writes at Unherd that, “As one of the Russian dolls in modern American populism (at the centre of which is a plump, painted Trump), Maha has one of the most passionate, yet also precarious, support bases. They are led by furious mums such as Zen Honeycutt, who set up the grassroots group Moms Across America in response to her sons’ struggles with allergies, autism and mental-health problems. Hers is a typical case within the movement: devastated by family misfortunes, she turned to politics as a solution. Honeycutt appeared on CNN on Monday to express her ‘outrage’ at Trump’s ‘love letter to glyphosate,’ a chemical which she blames for many of her children’s ailments (she once claimed to have cured her son’s autism by feeding him only organic food). Her crusade is personal, and her vote rests on a single issue. Honeycutt was not always a conservative voter; she changed tack when she and her mum friends felt ‘abandoned by the Democratic Party.’”
She notes that “So much of American family life has been destabilised by the chaotic past decade: identitarianism, gender debates, a pandemic. The body of the child is the most urgent symbol of vulnerability in a state of chaos: protecting it is therefore a true crusade, which has emboldened and ennobled the Maha Mom…[T]he Maha Mom encompasses many thousands of women, and Maha is as varied a group as Maga itself. But the underlying facts tend towards shock and alarmism, favouring the most extreme within the movement: obesity rates have more than tripled in the past 60 years, while autism diagnoses have tripled in 20 (helped in no small part by changing diagnostic criteria). If the body politic feels unstable, the body proper is a mess.”
“Some of her reasoning may be shaky but this voter is nevertheless a folk heroine, a final barrier between the family and entropy if only as the gatekeeper of what goes in the lunchbox,” Sowerby concludes. “In a West where biopolitics—the statistics-driven interventions into public health—is the norm, she asserts a stubborn sovereignty. She feels most viscerally the weird American paradox of the supermarket shopper, which stands in for the broader national malaise motivating Maga: how can a country be so rich and yet feel so unwell? Given that she represents Trump’s essential channel to the suburban female electorate, her political capital is only likely to grow—meaning it may be crunch time for Monsanto and, if he fails to stick to his guns, RFK Jr himself. Perhaps our worm-brained secretary of health would be wise to heed mother’s advice. And if she deserted him, where would she go? Perhaps many of these not-natively-conservative voters would be enticed by a future radical among the Democrats: in that case, the parties could find themselves in a minimally processed bun fight for the Maha Mom’s love.”
“Can the MAHA Movement Overcome the Influence of Big Wireless?”
Derrick Broze reports that “the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) confirmed the agency is undertaking a study on the impact of electromagnetic radiation emitted by modern cell phones. This is part of President Trump’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda. However, the influence of Big Wireless corporations and friendly regulators—such as Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr—threatens to undermine efforts to revisit the science around mobile devices.”
“While the MAHA movement—under the influence of RFK Jr.—seeks to investigate the harms associated with RFR [radiofrequency radiation], the US Federal Communication Commission (FCC) continues to push bills and rules that would severely hinder local governments’ ability to regulate wireless telecommunication technology relating to cell phone networks…The FCC also discusses how mobile network operators use artificial intelligence (AI) to manage the performance of their networks and asks for public comment about whether state and local regulations focused on AI are an ‘effective prohibition on wireless providers’ ability to provide covered service using AI technologies.’ The FCC appears interested in preempting or overriding state and local AI regulations as part of their effort to advance 5G and 6G networks.”
Broze writes that “Carr is a perfect example of a government official working closely with industry and maintaining relationships that clearly present conflicts of interest. Carr is credited with accelerating the 5G rollout during the first Trump administration. Prior to joining the FCC, Carr worked as an attorney at Wiley Rein, where his clients included Verizon, AT&T, Centurylink, and CTIA—The Wireless Association (formerly known as the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association). The Wiley Rein law firm is a hotbed of activity for former government officials and industry regulars. One of its founders, Richard Wiley, is himself a former FCC chairman. According to Open Secrets, in the first four months of 2020 alone, the Wiley Rein law firm was retained by several telecom companies, including AT&T ($80,000), CTIA ($50,000), and Verizon ($30,000). For the past 20+ years, the firm has spent at least $2 million on lobbying for its clients. Open Secrets also shows that CTIA itself spent more than $3 million on their own lobbying efforts.”
“Health Not War”
Amidst the heightening contradictions within the MAHA movement, the Iran War has further jeopardized the stability of this fragile coalition. Charles Eisenstein, RFK Jr.’s chief speechwriter during the latter’s short-lived presidential campaign, notes that “many Republicans understand that MAHA (the Make America Healthy Again movement) is crucial to their chances. And most in that movement are strongly anti-war.” He circulated a petition titled “Health Not War!” to Congress, “framed…around the basic principle that a nation’s physical health and its moral health are inseparable.”
The petition states that “We, the undersigned, are American citizens who care deeply about the health of our nation: both its physical health of its people, and the moral health of its conduct in the world. We understand that these are related. Neither can stand without the other.”
“We remind members of Congress, and the Trump administration, that our nation has squandered $8 trillion on regime-change wars since 9/11. We remind them that our nation’s infrastructure, its middle class, and its health have all been hollowed out to fund these wars. We remind them that these wars have also hollowed out our moral standing in the world. And we remind them that they have uniformly failed to achieve security at home or freedom abroad.”
“The War on Evidence”
At Signal & Noise, Tiffany Ryder reflects on Dr. Vinay Prasad’s departure from his role as Chief Medical and Scientific Officer and as the Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research at the Food and Drug Administration: “He’s leaving the FDA ten months in, reputation shredded by lies and spin while the drug companies and newspapers that tell the public what to think…[W]hen Prasad’s exit was announced, the biotech ETF rallied on the news. Which tells you everything you need to know about who thinks they won this battle.”
She writes that “Vinay Prasad is a rare thing in American medicine: a credentialed insider. Honest. Brave. He’s tenured, published, and despite his outspoken nature (or perhaps because of it)—taken seriously by the institutions that matter. He made a choice a long time ago to say out loud what his colleagues whisper at the bar after conferences—that the drugs getting approved are often backed by evidence so thin you could read their press release right through it. That companies have learned to completely game the system by picking the right surrogate marker, designing the trial against a weak comparator, manufacturing excitement for the New York Times, and converting that excitement into approval before anyone answers the harder question: does this actually help the patient? In many cases, those paying attention know the answer reveals itself (often years too late) to be a definitive, ‘no.’”
“To every person who has seen the truth about how this system works and can’t unsee it. To every organization that claims this calling. If we see the work that needs to be done and we don’t build the infrastructure to protect the people doing it, then we are not a movement. We are simply an audience playing games that make us feel good about ourselves while accepting defeat and calling it ‘activism.’”
To understand just how moderate and measured Dr. Prasad’s views are, see my 2022 conversation with him on covid policy here.
“The Father of Evidence-Based Medicine: Why N=1 Trials Top the Evidence Hierarchy”
In an important interview at Harnessing the Power of Nutrients, Chris Masterjohn, PhD speaks with Dr. Gordon Guyatt on the history, promise, and distortion of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM).
Of particular significance is Dr. Guyatt’s discussion of N-of-1 trails (randomized trials conducted on a single patient), which he places at the “top of the hierarchy” of medical evidence “because anything else in multi-patient randomized trials, people have different responses to treatment and evidence about groups of people can only tell you about groups of people…There may be an overall effect which will certainly differ across individuals…So the best would be to find out what the effect of the treatment is in this patient, and that is what N-of-1 trials are about.”
For my thoughts on the contemporary practice of EBM, which has failed to understand and promote Dr. Guyatt’s vision for N-of-1 trials, see my essay, “The Truth of the Anecdote.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.