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- [00:00]
Kristen Bell
Hi, I'm Kristen Bell. Carvana makes car buying easy. Isn't that right hun?
- [00:05]
Dax Shepard
Dax.
- [00:06]
Kristen Bell
Dax.
- [00:07]
Unknown
Sorry, did you know about this? Seven day money back guarantee.
- [00:11]
Kristen Bell
A week to evaluate seat comfiness.
- [00:13]
Unknown
You say a week of terrain tests? Yeah, I can test the brake pad resistance at variable speeds.
- [00:18]
Kristen Bell
Make sure all the kids stuff fits nicely.
- [00:21]
Unknown
Make sure our stuff fits nicely.
- [00:23]
Derek Barris
Oh the right.
- [00:24]
Unknown
Still need to buy the car. Getting ahead of ourselves here.
- [00:27]
Kristen Bell
Buy your car with Carvana today.
- [00:31]
Dax Shepard
This episode is brought to you by Hay Day. Feeling stressed? Take a moment for yourself with Hay Day. Stroll through rows of golden wheat, tend to cute Barnard animals and discover the joys of a digital farm retreat. You don't have to hop in a car or catch a plane. Escape to the farm at the tap of a finger. With Hay Day, you're not just tending to a farm, you're tending to yourself. Hay Day Search Hay Day. That's H a y space D a y in your favorite app store. Hay Day is a free to play mobile game and offers optional in app purchases and random rewards.
- [01:12]
Derek Barris
Hey everyone. Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. I'm Derek Barris.
- [01:24]
Matthew Rimsky
I'm Matthew Rimsky.
- [01:25]
Julian Walker
I'm Julian Walker.
- [01:26]
Derek Barris
You can find us on Instagram and threads. Conspiritualitypop Pod. We are all individually on Blue sky and you can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on patreon@patreon.com conspirituality if you are an Apple Podcast subscriber, you can use Apple subscriptions just to get our Monday bonus episodes, which we all put a lot of work into every week. As independent media creators. We really appreciate your support.
- [01:58]
Matthew Rimsky
Foreign.
- [02:03]
Julian Walker
Spirituality 259 MAHA is Project 2025's Trojan Horse. We've been talking about RFK Jr. For years and even dedicated an entire chapter to him in our 2023 book. And we're going to keep covering him since his power and influence has only grown. And since he's now in charge of America's entire health apparatus, there's no way to avoid it. This week we catch up on the last few months of maha. Derek looks into why he believes Kennedy's apparatus, despite claims of being about health, is really a cover for Project 2025's deregulatory agenda. I'll be looking at a recent paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Covid contrarians Marty McCary and Vinay Prasad, who now both work under Kennedy. Finally, Matthew will contemplate Kennedy's crude remarks on autism through the lens of disability politics.
- [03:04]
Derek Barris
A hunch that I had when Kennedy went MAGA is now bearing out, and that's what I want to look at today. We know how unprepared Trump was back in 2016 when he first became president, and that's why the Heritage Foundation Playbook Project 2025, was created in the first place. We know a lot of their agenda has been systematically fulfilled over the last few months. The piece that to me always seemed off was how Kennedy's MAHA agenda, which on its face is about public health and regulating companies, fits into this right wing playbook for privatizing healthcare and deregulating industries. Now that we have a few months of Kennedy and crew in power, I think we can pretty clearly see that Maha's goals align perfectly with Project 2025, which is why I believe it is the Heritage Foundation's Trojan horse, because we can hear it in the language. Kennedy and his minions have been hedging on corporate regulations recently. He said he's interested in working with business interested interests, not forcing them to do his bidding. His food dye ban, which they did a whole press tour about, is entirely voluntary.
- [04:18]
Matthew Rimsky
Oh, I didn't know that. So people can, companies can opt out of it.
- [04:21]
Derek Barris
They say they're not going to whatever ones he supposedly talked to. I mean, Kennedy is very Trumpian in that sense. I've talked to all these companies. Which ones? I don't know, you know. But yeah, it's, it's entirely voluntary. There's no legislation saying they have to remove the food diet.
- [04:34]
Matthew Rimsky
That's great.
- [04:36]
Derek Barris
Now what isn't Voluntary is the $800 million Kennedy has cut from public health research. That's because I believe he wants to move those interests to the private market of functional health and alt med companies. He recently met with leaders from a group of. One of them was his good friend Mark Hyman, who runs Function Health, which is a functional diagnostics testing to supplements pipeline. He met with the founder of whoop, which is a health data tracking app, and they all were there to discuss the future of medicine. I'll get back to those diagnostic tests in a few moments. On one side, Kennedy claims that the public health apparatus has failed us. And as justification for those massive research cuts, then he claims functional medicine is the way healthcare should be heading. And he's not alone. His top advisor and former Heritage foundation intern Cali Means said he wants to see more functional medicine diagnostics in Healthcare as well. I recently covered his appearance on Politico for the Monday bonus episode, and I that is where he said it at that conference. We're seeing a pathway now as to how all of this might happen. So let's review a few things that help construct this roadmap. We know that Kennedy is a longtime anti vaxxer. We've covered that endlessly for years. We know he's launched an investigation into the cause of autism led by another longtime anti vaxxer.
- [06:04]
Matthew Rimsky
I, I wonder what they'll find.
- [06:06]
Derek Barris
Just baffled. I have no idea. I'm so wide open. We can be nearly certain vaccines will be the cause of autism, given that Kennedy has flagged that the supposed cause, quote, must be an environmental toxin, which is not how science works. Kennedy believes supplements are being suppressed. He actually said that. He also believes diagnostic tests should be covered more broadly, as does his advisor, Cali Means. Means runs True Med, a company that lets consumers use use HSA and FSA money to purchase alt med products like supplements. And for context, I also recently covered this. There's a theory that his company, Auto, generates the letters of medical necessity needed for consumers to do just that. While I can't confirm or deny that assumption, I can say True Med was founded a year and a half ago and they claim to have served 300,000 clients, which is an unrealistic amount of telehealth calls.
- [07:04]
Julian Walker
Okay, so I'm just getting this, like, this is the one area where Means and Kennedy are in favor of expanding what's covered by healthcare.
- [07:13]
Derek Barris
Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
- [07:14]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah.
- [07:15]
Derek Barris
We have another part of that puzzle, Julian, which is Mark Hyman, who I flagged a moment ago. We know that he makes $28 million a year selling supplements and diet books, even though he's not a nutritionist. His Andreessen Horowitz funded company, Function Health, is doing a second round of fundraising right now for $200 million. They're claiming a $2 billion valuation. Annual subscriptions for Function Health are 4. And then there's diagnostics, upsells and supplements at that price point to be valued at $2 billion. You need a lot of people for that company to be profitable.
- [07:55]
Matthew Rimsky
So just. Can I try to understand something? If there is a wealth transfer from HHS in some way towards companies like Trumed for some diagnostic procedures, that would be one form of sort of like direct public to private, I guess, shifting and, you know, with all of the implications of fraud involved with that. But like, otherwise, the reductions of funds to HHS programs are just going to force people to look for private healthcare products. Is that correct?
- [08:33]
Derek Barris
My belief is that the cuts to the research means people are not going to be able to do good actual diagnostics about disease etiology.
- [08:44]
Matthew Rimsky
Right.
- [08:45]
Derek Barris
And so what you have here is this fear and uncertainty around the health care system broadly and then you have these solutions that are being pushed to the front.
- [08:58]
Matthew Rimsky
Right.
- [08:59]
Derek Barris
So the diagnostics company is Function Health. But my last bullet here is that Hyman's Ultra Wellness Superstore is a featured company on True Med's website. So Function Health, my guess would be that they would get the diagnostics contract from the government.
- [09:18]
Matthew Rimsky
Right.
- [09:18]
Derek Barris
And then be shuffled over to True Med where Hyman could also monetize his supplements as well as the hundred plus other companies. That means has deals with.
- [09:29]
Matthew Rimsky
So it's like an affiliate gateway between the government and, and the private sector. Okay.
- [09:35]
Julian Walker
Yeah. So essentially what you have is the fringe alternative doctor to medical institutional oligarch pipeline.
- [09:44]
Derek Barris
Yeah. The oligarchs in this case being these alt Med. Yeah. Multimillionaires, soon to be billionaires. If yes they get those contracts.
- [09:53]
Julian Walker
Yeah. It's just, just an incredible like doorway into a massive, massive pile of money for them.
- [09:59]
Derek Barris
Yes. This is all my speculation, but it's just looking at the many years of research that we've been doing in this.
- [10:07]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah. And I just have to say for listeners that Derek among us is the least corkboard guy on staff. He, he never like half of the comments we have in, in Slack are like hey, I don't want to speculate on that. You know, we have to get solid on this. So just so you know, everybody out there, you know, if, if this is where Derek thinks it's going, it's probably going that way.
- [10:32]
Derek Barris
I won't confirm or deny that. But just looking, looking at this jigsaw puzzle, it just seems, I mean and this is going to make Kennedy's inner circle, all of his advisors. The Boston Globe just published a piece today about his inner circle and who is in maha. All of them stand to benefit from these sort of public private partnerships redirecting taxpayer money from public health initiatives which is that 800 million and social services like we're going to talk about SNAP. I know Medicaid into diagnostic labs and supplements pipeline is only going to support the for profit wellness crowd that helped Kennedy be elevated to the position that he now holds.
- [11:18]
Matthew Rimsky
Right.
- [11:18]
Derek Barris
So yes it is, it is a little courtwardy, but I stand by it. MAHA stands regularly cite population health statistics as the root cause of America's negative health outcomes. The problem is the most vulnerable populations suffer the most. How does Maha explain this? Cali Means told Politico that food deserts are caused by snap.
- [11:43]
Matthew Rimsky
What a bastard.
- [11:44]
Derek Barris
If you're not in America, is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program because they allow soda to be purchased. Which is why Maha is now trying to ban soda from SNAP. Never mind the fact that 42.1 million Americans, that's 12.6% of the population, rely on SNAP on a monthly basis. The root cause of food assistance in their mind is obviously soda. It is such a privileged Heritage foundation mindset. You exploit the poor, take even more away from them in terms of services, food, anything, then you keep exploiting them by putting the onus of their bad health back onto them.
- [12:26]
Julian Walker
Yeah, it's also familiar. This weak willed, lazy, self indulgent poor person supposedly is being enabled by the government through handouts to consume soda. What they really need though, is that paternalistic firm hand of the Maha government steering them toward eating their vegetables.
- [12:43]
Matthew Rimsky
Well, buying them actually maybe in greens form athletic greens.
- [12:49]
Derek Barris
This is where their mind is at in the way that they view the world. He proposed, Kalimin's proposed replacing the money that is spent on soda with farmer's market fare. Now if you step back, you're like, oh yeah, that's a great idea. Which if you're talking about someone's health, yes, eating vegetables and fresh fruits is going to be healthier than soda. But what he never addresses is the infrastructure problem, which is the desert part of food desert. You need supply chains, you need physical locations, you need staffing, refrigeration, storage. Maha isn't going to build that. They're not looking even talking about that in any capacity. Everything points to this administration exploiting those populations and making the problems worse. The right doesn't want to limit snap, they just want to end it, just like they want to end Medicaid. And if you think MAHA is for the people, you only need to read a recent New York Times op ed which Kennedy co authored with Mehmet Oz. It's called Trump Leadership. If you want welfare and can work, you must. A few days after this just mind boggling numb privilege bullshit was published, the House passed the most restrictive Medicaid work requirements in the nation's history. And if it's adopted, it will likely kick millions of people off of that service.
- [14:11]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah, 13 million I think is the estimate. Yeah. So you, if you want welfare and can work, you must. And meanwhile, this is kind of while our tech friends and associates upend the labor market because you know What Kennedy's circle are basically saying is if there's a job that, you know, tech can do, it will be replaced. And you know, so far, as we discussed a lot last week, it's white collar administration jobs, legal, accounting, medical records, copywriting, advertising, all of those are in the crosshairs. And alongside that there's this vague idea of expanding manufacturing, somehow renewing blue collar work. It's about as well thought out as the supply chain issue that you're talking about with food, Derek. You know, the vision is new Apple factories in the Rust Belt. But you know what happens in the unlikely event that factories actually do open up and suddenly the folks with the jobs who were raided by AI are also looking for work and the bosses are still busting up unions. I think it means that a lot more people would need snap, and I think that's probably an impetus to get rid of it now through the big beautiful bill, but also raising barriers to access through work requirements and so on. And we know that that doesn't work because in 2018, Arkansas started this pilot program installing work requirements for Medicaid. And over two years, the number of uninsured people went up by as much as 7% because of administrative barriers like, you know, paperwork. And you have to phone your case counselor at X hour and you can't because you're actually working a double shift. And the requirements also actually had no, you know, job creating capacity because they don't magically create jobs. So in a way, I'm, I'm actually grateful that Oz and Kennedy are able to be so transparent here because you know, there are wars over evidence as we've talked about for years. There are wars over ideology and cultural flashpoints and, and there are also class wars which are coming more closely into focus.
- [16:24]
Derek Barris
Speaking of the New York Times op ed, I want to cite a good article in that publication by restaurant critic Priya Krishna. It's called what has all this Restaurant Food Done to My Guts? It does play into the story we're constructing here. Krishna was concerned that she was destroying her health because she eats out all the time for her career. She also has a fantastic cookbook called Indian Ish. So I would suggest looking her up. She, she conduct microbiome tests with a leading microbiome laboratory at Stanford. It's considered world class. And then another with a for profit wellness nutrition app called Zoe. The results perfectly capture why Maha's wellness privatization push is so dangerous for the public, yet beneficial for wellness influencers. Krishna divided the experiment into three two week eating stages she only ate out and drank as much as she wanted for two weeks. Then she only cooked at home and didn't consume any alcohol for two weeks. And then she mixed them for two weeks. At the end of every stage, she sent in stool samples. Stool samples. The Stanford team found her microbe levels were consistent across all of them, which means she has a relatively stable microbiome. No interventions were needed.
- [17:44]
Julian Walker
Okay, great. We got that settled by the science, and so now everyone agrees. And in fact, I'm going to adopt this eating method. It sounds wonderful.
- [17:50]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah.
- [17:50]
Derek Barris
Yep. Okay, my segment's done.
- [17:52]
Julian Walker
Good.
- [17:53]
Derek Barris
No, you might be surprised that Zoe discovered her microbiome was well below optimal and then tried to sell her supplements. Her broader story is a warning that these functional tests that I. And I am extrapolating here, companies like Zoe, as we just heard, N Function Health, what they sell, are designed to find minor fluctuations in health and then sell you what they believe are solutions. I've included a review of Function Health in the show notes to highlight how they are exploiting these minor fluctuations to monetize people's concerns about their health as well.
- [18:28]
Matthew Rimsky
Okay, so for those who won't have time for the review, though, Derek, what's the 101 like? Are there meaningful fluctuations at all? Is there evidence that they actually are tracking anything? Because, I mean, at this point, it just all sounds like bullshit. And I wouldn't doubt that the apps, you know, are just feeding bio data into some random stat generator and, like, spitting out a response.
- [18:51]
Derek Barris
I don't think it's that bad, but it's close. You know, when you go to a doctor and you have to get blood work done, you have to fast. There are reasons for that, because they're trying to track what's going on in your body at certain stages. Now, yeah, with regular medical blood testing, they're very specific about those stages, but with these blood tests, not so much. So, for example, with Function Health, with that review that I flagged, the person who sent in their sample got a reading of LDL cholesterol. Now, cholesterol is a super contested. You know, there's a lot. There's a lot within actual medicine that we have to think about in statin use. But then there's a whole range of. Around it. And even though the person was in the near optimal range of LDL cholesterol at 106, Function Health said they were in the above range and wanted to sell them things. So that's what's being found with these diagnostics tests is that they take These super small samples or they, these super malls, derivations from what is considered optimal. And they make their optimal range much smaller than conventional medicine. And then if you just are a point away, like, I have genetic high cholesterol, so I've talked to my doctors for years about going on a statin or not. My dad's been on one for like 30, 40 years at this point. I have not because I hang out right at the same range, which is borderline. If I go above it, I'm going to go on one. But if I'm. If I sent it into Function Health, they would definitely be sending me a bunch of shit that they would want me to start taking.
- [20:34]
Julian Walker
Yeah. And this is, this has been the problem with alternative medicine all along, is that the pseudoscience component of it gives it legitimacy. And now what we see is more and more the Overton window is going to move this way. Where my sense is that this is something I'm always interested in, the public opinion about, the validity of a lot of these kinds of approaches is going to keep improving, that this is legitimate, this is real science. It's in fact, it's medical science. Plus it's all the stuff that the boring old conventional medical science misses.
- [21:02]
Derek Barris
Yeah.
- [21:03]
Matthew Rimsky
Now, about the boring old conventional method. This isn't my beat, so I'm not quite sure who establishes optimal cholesterol, but is one of the other things that's going on is that if Kennedy strips away legitimacy from, you know, whatever agency does that, the CDC or the fda, that that gives more of a doorway for these companies to establish their own sort of metrics for what healthy cholesterol means. Right?
- [21:27]
Derek Barris
Absolutely. And I really fear what sort of metrics are coming down the line. I mean, there was recently an article talking about how there have been no reported bird flu cases in the last few months in America.
- [21:39]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah, right.
- [21:39]
Derek Barris
Because they stop tracking.
- [21:41]
Matthew Rimsky
Right.
- [21:42]
Derek Barris
So what happens is you stop tracking data and then you start making up your own data based on these ridiculous reports that are usually written by propagandists. And then that is going to shift the window and we're going to see that is another pathway for these supplements companies to really start making bank.
- [22:01]
Matthew Rimsky
It's amazing. They really worked it out, didn't they?
- [22:04]
Derek Barris
They're on their way, I will say. And just as a final note, Kennedy met last week with leaders from seven health tech startups, six of them funded by Silicon Valley powerhouses Andreessen Horowitz. And I know these guys well in terms of their profile and the companies that they invest in they are going to want a return on investment. None of these companies are beholden to those pesky clinical trials that the pharma companies Maha decries must conduct. This isn't giving a free pass to the worst players in America's for profit healthcare system. But Maha's response is unregulated, untested free market biotech and wellness startups that I believe are going to start being handed taxpayer funded government contracts and that is only going to make things worse.
- [23:08]
Unknown
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- [23:37]
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- [24:07]
Ryan Reynolds
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Kristen Bell
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- [24:38]
Julian Walker
To focus on today is an opinion piece published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine by Marty Makary, new Commissioner of the fda, and Vinay or Vinay Prasad. Trying to make sure I get those pronunciations right. Vinay Prasad, who now oversees vaccines there. Both are prominent Covid contrarians and vaccine skeptics with ties to J. Bhattacharya's Great Barrington Declaration and the Stanford Conference. That was looking back with the revisionist history lens on the pandemic that we covered last year. The two also discussed this article from New England Journal of Medicine as episode five on Makary's super casual and chatty new FDA Direct podcast, which leads with a discussion on how vaccines are great. But here's a list of the ones that failed, including Covid, because it didn't actually stop anyone from getting sick.
- [25:28]
Derek Barris
Right. And Julian, you and I will be doing a deeper dive into that podcast on this Saturday's brief.
- [25:35]
Julian Walker
Yeah, it's quite something. So with the article, their angle is clear right out of the gate because it's titled An Evidence based approach to COVID 19 vaccination, which I can't help but think implies that the previous approaches were not evidence based. But now that they've gotten power, all of that is going to change. The general thrust of the article is that the US Government has granted vaccine manufacturers broad marketing approval for Covid boosters regardless of the scientific evidence, which means that they are recommended annually, the boosters in the US for everyone older than six months, alongside flu shots. But Makary and Prasad present a table that shows 12 high income countries like Australia, Canada and Belgium that they say only recommend Covid boosters for people over 65. And so I looked into this opening claim from the new champions of evidence based vaccine policy. And, and I found that it's just kind of true because these other countries don't officially recommend Covid boosters for the whole population, with the exception of the first country on their list, Australia, which as it turns out, actually does. They literally recommend boosters once a year for everyone between 6 months and 65 years of age, but then double it to twice a year for people over 75. And they say people over 65 can request to get one every six months.
- [26:59]
Derek Barris
This is something that people like Kennedy and means regularly do. So on the Monday bonus, when I was talking about how means just plays loose with data, there was one sentence where he had three data errors in terms of the claims of number of people who were suffering from some disease or some sort of etiology that was being presented. It was easily fact checkable. But when you have this rhetorical style where you're just throwing numbers at people so fast that they can't possibly fact check that in real time, that slips into people's consciousness who are trying to listen and discern, you know, the broader narrative that they're constructing. So they are both masterful at doing this and the fact that the New England Journal of Medicine published that Australia claim, when you and I, Julian, found in like a minute that it wasn't true. That's a real editorial problem over there.
- [28:00]
Julian Walker
Yeah. So not a great start for the Evidence Bros. Now, many countries on that same list that is sort of their opening piece of evidence also do recommend boosters for people under 65 who are healthcare workers, immunocompromised, pregnant, living in care homes, regardless of whatever age they may be, they're explicit about that. And in the case of Canada, first nations and other marginalized folks, presumably due to their greater socioeconomic risk from COVID.
- [28:28]
Matthew Rimsky
I think that this particular discourse in the US depends upon propaganda about socialized medicine. It seems that for years misinformation about, you know, healthcare systems abroad has just been standard here in Canada. All of the stated recommendations are in place. It's not, it's, it's. You don't get between or under the age of 65, you don't get like an email or specific instruction to go out and get your COVID vaccine. And so there has been a fall off in terms of, you know, public service announcements for the general population. It does feel like Covid boosters are going to take up the same bandwidth as flu shots in public awareness. And the thing is though, that within a socialized system that also is under constant privatization stress, it's hard to know if those limiting recommendations are about cutting costs or they're about the government trying to avoid appearing overbearing and provoking more anti vax sentiment. But yeah, there's no sense in which Health Canada is like unrecommending that the general population be vaccinated.
- [29:43]
Julian Walker
Yeah, and here's the real problem here, is that this is like an opinion piece in the New England Journal of Medicine, but it turns out, as I'll go into in a minute, that it's actually an announcement of new FDA policy. And what the policy is really about is denying vaccine manufacturers licenses to be able to sell those vaccines to people under 65. So it's not just saying we're going to stop it from being recommended, is that you're not going to be able to get them.
- [30:09]
Matthew Rimsky
Incredible.
- [30:10]
Julian Walker
So regardless, the authors soldier forward with their populist claim that US booster policy is actually based on the condescending belief that the public is not smart enough to understand guidelines and make up their own minds about whether or not to get their booster. They claim that their efficacy for younger, healthier people with natural immunity has supposedly not been established and that has led to high percentages of patients alongside many health care providers not opting to get or give them. This waning public trust in vaccines, which they see as a problem, has led to a potential ripple effect with more and more parents opting out of childhood vaccines like MMR and therefore resultant illnesses and deaths. Wow, they're so close. It's Maddening to read because actual waning trust and measles deaths are much more based in the contrarianism and libertarian think tank policy of Makari and Prasad Bhattacharya RFK Jr than in public faith in Covid boosters. But hey, they have the solution. Because about halfway into the piece, as I mentioned, we find out that this is actually an FDA policy announcement. They're going to be randomized controlled trials evaluating the efficacy of booster outcomes for everyone under 65.
- [31:31]
Matthew Rimsky
How long is that going to take though?
- [31:33]
Julian Walker
Exactly? And those trials will have to happen before biologics license applications, which is the required FDA permission to market biologically based medicines can be approved.
- [31:45]
Derek Barris
It's going to take so long that by the time it's actually tested they would have to have developed another booster for the next variants. And that will just be a self defeating cycle.
- [31:55]
Matthew Rimsky
Right? Exactly.
- [31:56]
Julian Walker
And so one thing that I'm just realizing as I read this is they're saying that natural immunity is, you know, the protection against boosters, but the whole reason, or the protection that we don't need boosters for, but the whole reason we need boosters is that the variance present a new challenge to our immune system. And yeah, the idea that you cannot develop a vaccine and then create a slight tweak on that vaccine that relies on the efficacy and safety data that you've already accumulated that somehow you have to start from square one every single time, it's just ludicrous. So the second half of the article, now I detect one of the underlying agendas here. They make oblique of risk benefit ratios, they imply that there has so far been a lack of evidence on the benefits of boosters, and they even construct the thought experiment of a 52 year old woman with the mythical normal BMI who's had Covid three times and she's been boosted six times so as to say that we just don't know what the benefit might be for that seventh booster. And that exposes another piece of the narrative. Why take the supposed risk of additional boosters if we don't know if they really work? And natural immunity anyway is better, as most listeners will know. It turns out that Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad are key figures in the Rogues gallery of contrarian doctors whose destructive pandemic discourse was exhaustively cataloged and critiqued in two time former guest Jonathan Howard's book We Want Them Infected. They were wrong in all of their predictions which downplayed the severity and duration of the pandemic. They were wrong about the necessity of boosters once the Omicron variant started tearing through the population and forced all of us to update our priors. I asked Jonathan Howard about this article and he pointed out that we really don't know the risks of further unprotected COVID infections for this mythical 52 year old woman with normal BMI, especially considering mutations and long Covid. And that's the risk that they always leave out, right? He also had this gem to add to the conversation regarding the author's claim of ushering in an adherence to gold standard science.
- [34:24]
Unknown
Well, I will say that after the first Covid booster was available, There was an RCT of 10,000 people that showed it was 95% effective at stopping COVID infection. Infections that did not stop Vinay Prasad and Marty McCary in December 2021 from Just Laughing at people who wanted that booster dose. And the Omicron wave arrived immediately after that in January 2022, which devastated many children and especially older people who'd only had their first two vaccine doses. So although they claim to be motivated by evidence and data, they have rejected boosters from the first one that was available, even though there was the gold standard science available to them at the time.
- [35:16]
Julian Walker
Yeah, so so much for gold standard science. But you also notice there he mentioned them laughing at people. He's referring to the frequent podcast appearances by these guys at the time where they downplayed the pandemic. They downplayed people that made fun of people who wanted to protect their kids or wanted to wear masks, and they made fun of boosters and the fear mongering of quarantine measures. They the pandemic is almost over now, and the real pandemic is the fear. And then Omicron came along. As Jonathan just mentioned, there's another key sentence toward the end of the article that goes like this. Natural immunity from COVID 19 against severe disease appears robust. And that's a direct quote from recent studies. It's a reference to this study published in Nature this past February that showed just how much natural immunity to new variants had almost completely disappeared since Omicron, which emerged in November of 2021. And in that piece, the authors gave the caveat that enduring protection against severe disease still does appear robust. So regardless of the variations of the variants cropping up, there is some protection from natural, quote unquote natural community of having had Covid before that is protective against severe disease. But that leaves out the groundbreaking findings published in Cell Reports Medicine, showing that hybrid immunity, which combines previous infection and current vaccines, actually exhibits A uniquely strong response against all existing variants and even some distantly related SARS like viruses. And it does this by developing a novel plasma cell antibody that they call SC27, which blocks Spike protein activity. And this combination of the immunity that your body has developed from previous infection plus vaccines may actually be the key to further progress in long lasting vaccination efficacy, which may then mean we don't need boosters as often. But that's the scientific process.
- [37:17]
Matthew Rimsky
You know, in all of this discussion of natural immunity, I want to know what you guys think of this. I'm not sure where I saw this comment, but it seemed like a sound proposal that we should replace the term natural immunity with the term survival immunity, because that more fully conveys what's going on and it reflects the long term costs of having contracted an avoidable disease. Because, you know, natural immunity plays right into their sort of keyword playbook, into this purity, you know, organic, you know, fetish that this crowd has in opposition to the supposed artificiality of vaccines while making the infection sound like a desirable process or something like that. That.
- [37:57]
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah, I could see survival immunity or exposure immunity. Exposure immunity that avoids this, this naturalistic fallacy. So my comment here is that Maha revisionist history on the pandemic, on vaccine science, and on the supposed failure of government agencies to protect us from food dyes and pesticides and seed oils. All of this dovetails into how conspiracism is used by MAGA to do retroactive justification because Democrats supposedly stole an election, and so now Republicans are justified to enact an aggressive campaign of voter suppression. Biden supposedly weaponized the DOJ by prosecuting Trump for his actual crimes, so now it's legit to fire prosecutors and FBI agents involved in the January 6th investigations. And that list goes on and on with Maha, as we see in this article. One complaint they often issue is that vaccines have never been subjected to appropriate safety testing, or that we just have insufficient gold standard science on whether or not vaccines or quarantine measures really work when compared to a control group just left to do what? Mainline raw milk and snort ivermectin while alternating between the sauna and the cold plunge. They'll say that there is this revolving door of corruption that allows Big Pharma executives to transition into senior posts at government regulatory agencies, which can plausibly be a path to undermining objective scientific rigor that should be looked at. But as you point out, Derek, the kinds of opportunistic partnerships that we see emerging now are between HHS and influencers promoting completely untested pseudoscience, and they're blatantly backed by a small incestuous group of venture capitalists.
- [39:40]
Derek Barris
I completely agree that there should be no politician that's allowed to become a lobbyist after they serve, and I believe that anyone moving from pharma to government regulatory should be looked into as well. Like again, they get things right, but their solutions are not actually going to help us.
- [40:01]
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah, that's right. And in all of these examples I've been listing here, the conspiracy theorists seem to me to never actually have cared about corruption, injustice, or standards of evidence. They just really believe in their hearts that their side is in the right and should prevail by any means necessary. And meanwhile, these prestigious appointments to government agencies and these publications in prestigious journals make it seem to much of the public as if paranoid pseudoscience conspiracism has in fact turned out to be the truth.
- [40:40]
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Matthew Rimsky
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Kristen Bell
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Matthew Rimsky
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- [42:09]
Matthew Rimsky
So after all this time, I think we have a handle on the lies, the pseudoscience, the corruption, the grift of Maha. I know we're going to be covering it for the long run. I think we have a handle on the personal train wreck volatility of Bobby, who chugs methyl and blue and swims in shit creek and is trying to have one last vision of St. Francis. I think we can see that Maha is another front in the war against, truly against the idea even of socialized medicine through its focus on individual responsibilities and outcomes bespoke lifestyle therapies and it's complete erasure of the social determinants of health. I think we can see the class war implications and to the extent that Trump's instinct is to make the entire country as mean as he is, he's got a great team working for him. And I also think that, you know, in the spirit of sunlight is a kind of disinfectant, there might be some good news in all of this to lean into. Because what I think we get to see as these mega rich overlords of health stewardship like Oz and Kennedy show their whole asses, is a kind of foundational logic of ableism and its roots in economic cruelty. Just taken to this logical extreme, I think they're amplifying pre existing conditions and I want to focus on autism and attitudes towards autism in this segment because I think they're a good focal point for a couple of reasons. First of all, Kennedy's distortions and their historical antecedents are really becoming very easy to spot for a lot of people. And secondly, in the autism world, as in the wider disability studies world, there's a lot of super articulate pushback against the systemic issues in a fight to really make and amplify the social model of disability. And I'll get to that in a moment. But first, like these, these two layers that I think are becoming easy for people to see. One is, you know, Kennedy's just distortions, lies, misinformation about autism, you know, that it's caused by vaccines or environmental pathogens, that it can't be genetic. In other words, it can't come from us, it can't be a natural variation of human beings. This line that he always brings out, that he didn't know any autistic people when he young, and that's because the diagnostic criteria were primitive and because a lot of disabled people were institutionalized and invisible. He shows no awareness of spectrum in his obsessive focus on the 25% of ASD people with high support needs. And by the way, I'm using a word there, spectrum. That's actually its own point of debate within autism studies that I might be able to say something about. He's also calling autism as a chronic disease at this point.
- [45:10]
Derek Barris
He didn't say specifically it can't be genetic. I just want to be clear on that because this is a point that people like Hyman and Bhattachary also make. They say it can be rooted in genetics, but an environmental pathogen has to turn it on.
- [45:24]
Matthew Rimsky
In other words, it shouldn't be turned on. It should never be turned on. Yes, it's kind of cutting. It's like walking a line between is this a. Is this a natural variation in human, human beings or is it. Or is it pathological? Okay. There's this second layer of bullshit that I think is becoming more important to people that has a lot of political implications, which is that by focusing on, you know, autism ruins families and it causes economic dysfunction. Kennedy is consistently echoing the dehumanizing language and logic of the earliest villains in autism studies. So the Austrian Nazi Dr. Hans Asperger, and also the founder of Applied Behavioral Analysis, Ole Ivar Lovas, who's a Norwegian psychologist whose family was deeply embedded in the Norwegian Nazi collaborationist movement. He tried to hide that for a number of years in the post war era and then people found it out and that was that. Asperger. Just as a reminder, he coined the term, or actually he coined the diagnosis of autism by studying mainly boys who failed to fit the expected soldier mentality and group conformity of the emerging Reich. And that meant that he divided autistic individuals into those having worth to the empire due to their special interest, focus and obsession versus those who were not useful and so they could be sterilized or eventually murdered. Lovaas held the early anti psychiatry view along with Thomas Szasz, that the concept of mental illness was often fake and used to or abused to help people evade social responsibility. So Lovaas aim was not to heal illness, but to discipline what he considered to be abnormal behaviors. And that would be with punishments that included electric shocking and slapping. So if you can imagine trying to get an autistic kid to stop stimming or toe walking or to make eye contact and using shocks or slapping to get that done, then that was what he was all about.
- [47:31]
Julian Walker
I mean, this history is so awful, Matthew. And I think it's really important to point back to it. But the Maha folks are not suggesting anything this despicable and murderous.
- [47:44]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah, no, but there are themes and through lines that remain and There's a general structural approach that remains constant and that the Maha people aren't even sort of like the foundational. As I said before, I think they're amplifying something that already exists. So largely due to a robust online autism and disability justice activism community that I spend a lot of time in, because I have to continue to educate myself to better parent and homeschool our autistic kid who just turned nine. These issues are becoming more and more visible to wider populations. But I think something else is as well, and I think that might be ultimately more important, because when Kennedy panics over the supposed dysfunctionality of autistic people with regard to paying taxes and holding jobs, he's showing that the primary reference point is not dignity. And this is evidence because ironically, he uses the same medical model of disability that he rejects in favor of holism and the rest of his rhetoric.
- [48:47]
Julian Walker
And so he's tying in some kind of economic argument for why we need to solve autism by September.
- [48:53]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah, well, his first major statement that really caught on fire listed taxes, not being able to pay taxes as the primary sort of bullet point of concern for those who want to cure the disease of autism. So, broadly speaking, in the medical model, a person is disabled by the abnormalities of their own body brain. They're broken versions of humanity that have to be cured or isolated or prevented from reproducing in older terms or today. They have to be made into functional members of society. That is, they have to. To be economically. They have to be economically viable. They have to work or they have to provide some sort of like, income for the caregiving state. So they become burdens to society, but also wards of professionals who make decisions for them. And this is what Beatrice Adler Bolton and Artie Veerkont in Health Communism called extractive abandonment of a surplus population. So that's all non working people or those whose labor isn't profitable to the ultra wealthy. Extractive abandonment they define as the process by which those populations are made profitable to business interests and the government through charities that aim to either repair disabled people to become workers or policies that grow the for profit private nursing home sector. But the social model of disability stands in contrast to that. And it says that the person is disabled by their environment and its demands. So autistic people, in that view, are normal and valid variations of human experience who deserve equal rights as they are, along with free and informed consent, which ironically are values that Kennedy says he holds. So if you believe in dialectics, the acceleration of bullshit over autism is going to provoke Increasingly smart responses to it. And the best one that I know of in the autism world so far comes from an autistic philosopher named Robert Chapman, who wrote an amazing book in 2023 called Empire of Neurodiversity and Capitalism. And in it, he argues that when captured by the medical model of disability, autistic people constitute their own political and economic class, usually oppressed in some way, and that seeing this clearly underlines the moral obligation of socialized care. So I'm going to go deeper into this in a Patreon episode later, but I'll give the 101 here. His main argument is that it's changing labor conditions that drive the pathologization of neurodiversity. We don't discover autism as a problem so much as create it by changing what we ask people to tolerate.
- [51:42]
Julian Walker
Okay, wait, wait. This is fascinating, Matthew. So contrary to RFK's position that there are more autism diagnoses because of all of the environmental toxins. Right. And vaccines, et cetera.
- [51:53]
Matthew Rimsky
Right.
- [51:53]
Julian Walker
Chapman is saying these people have always been here. They've always dealt with what autism is. But it's changing labor conditions that has made the society increasingly label them and identify them as such because of their inability to tolerate what is being demanded of them by economic pressure.
- [52:16]
Matthew Rimsky
That's the social model of disability. Right.
- [52:18]
Julian Walker
Okay.
- [52:19]
Matthew Rimsky
And he covers it over. He covers a long historical timeline, and I'll just flat like one key instance of it to give a sense of what he's getting at. He finds evidence that prior to the Industrial Revolution, a lot of labor, while grossly unequal through feudal structures of inequality, also took place at the scale of the family, at the scale of the farm or village seasonally, with fluid time patternings where people with intellectual or social impairments could be more easily accommodated within the general economic rhythms. He describes a slower, more flexible pace of work in certain times of year.
- [53:07]
Derek Barris
Does he actually talk about certain societies? I get a little concerned about this idea of slower because I think of Chinese rice substance farmers who historically, because of the conditions of the environment, had to work 12, 14 hours a day, year round in order to make their crops work. So I understand the seasonal aspect. I understand the sort of. I can't even say dependability on agriculture, because that isn't true either, depending on the actual weather patterns.
- [53:37]
Matthew Rimsky
Right.
- [53:38]
Derek Barris
So does he. Does he talk about specific ones? Because the romanticized notion of a slower life during agriculture does concern me a little bit.
- [53:46]
Matthew Rimsky
He's mainly focused on what he's reading through accounts of Western European agricultural history. And he's taking the sort of labor records that he's sorting through to make his argument. I don't see him referring to tropical or Asian climates or places where agriculture is going to be more sort of rigid through the years. Right. But I think he would say as well that there's this other element that comes along with urbanization and population density and then industrialization, which complicates things, and that even in agrarian economies, where, you know, maybe work days were longer depending upon where you were in the world, that there are these other factors that get added in. So Chapman does a lot of history in this book, and he does it from sort of like a philosophical, critical perspective where he looks at primarily the history of Western Europe and how its ideas around labor and personhood and subjectivity filter down through to the Industrial Revolution. And he finds evidence that prior to heavy urbanization and industrialization, while there would be grossly unequal labor conditions in feudal, you know, territories, that work often took place at the scale of the family, the farm, or the village, where people with intellectual or social impairment might have been more easily accommodated within more fluid rhythms of work, more flexible rhythms with a lot of variability in jobs. So he describes that it was possible that people were coming from a slower, sometimes and more flexible pace of work in some situations. And then the 18th century hits them upside the head with, with the explosion of industrial capitalism, where there are now suddenly very new standards for being a successful worker in an urban factory. You know, you have to stand at a loom all day. You have to hold your attention on tiny details for hours at a time. You're in population dense environments in which if you have any of the social impairments or challenges of the autistic triad, then those are going to be elevated. These were all things that you could now do or couldn't do. And if you couldn't do them, you might belong to a lower class of person. And so we also have the fact that, you know, crowded cities are now loud and stinky. Trains, factories, machines, you know, private cars backfiring. And we know that autistic people are prone to sensory overwhelm. So he describes, describes an increasingly divided society, not necessarily along the lines of owner class wealth versus working class poverty, but between workers who can comply with these new industrial demands and those who can't. And then he cites Foucault describing how this division becomes institutionalized when those who aren't behaving normally amidst the urban chaos begin increasingly to be seen as mad or insane. And so alongside the factories The Global north also builds asylums, workhouses and prisons. Foucault calls this the great confinement period that didn't really exist before, where those who weren't conforming to the intensifying demands of the social economy would be quarantined from the rest of the population. Now we know know that RFK Jr. Thinks that the statistical increase in autism diagnoses comes from vaccines, fast foods, environmental pollution. But when actual experts try to understand why there are so many more people being diagnosed with autism these days, they point to changing diagnostic definitions. They'll talk about how child psychologists have become far more educated in recent years, how parents likewise are more apt to wonder whether their kids are developing according to some sort of norm. And with more information available, more people are accessing diagnosis. Now what Chapman adds to this is the idea that people who are neurodiverse may not suffer from alienation and stigma until they are forced into inaccessible environments that trigger their vulnerabilities and turn them into targets for diagnosis. So the question is, where does the problem lie? Like, is it with the neurodiverse person or is it in the society that asks them to comply with a bunch of new demands that nobody asked for before and that might only serve to make more money for the wealthiest people? And in this light, I think we can see that it makes a lot of sense that the most well funded and institutionalized therapies for autism still come from that old Nazi originated ABA mold. Nobody, as you said, Julian, you asked and wonder, is using electric shocks or slapping anymore? But the goal remains the same, that kids should comply with school curricula for eight hours a day so that both parents can work, work. And I can tell you from experience that when you're a parent of an autistic child, this is the primary message you get from everyone around you. Co workers, neighbors, older family members, sometimes doctors and school administrators. Everything is about timing, schedules, benchmarks and productivity.
- [59:26]
Julian Walker
And to that point, Matthew, about people not using electric shocks or slam these days. I know from going down the rabbit hole a little bit on this stuff that there are plenty of autistic activist voices who grew up getting a certain kind of conventional therapy where they do actually report that they were abused and traumatized and often had physical coercion put upon them in order to try to act normal.
- [59:53]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah, and what that ends up doing is it ends up forcing the kind of adaptive behavior that is causing the stress in the first place, which is called masking. Right. So if you, if you really force a child to behave in a Certain way to stop stimming or to make eye contact. They'll figure out how to do it, most likely. And the cost of doing that is actually, you know, associated with all kinds of terrible outcomes beyond autism.
- [60:19]
Derek Barris
This is just somewhere where I agree with alternate school administrators in that children should not be forced to sit inside for eight hours a day. I don't care what condition. Like, they should be moving and be out in nature in some capacity. I think that is a failure of the educational model broadly that will more specifically affect autistic children. But I think we all could have done better with a little more time in the woods.
- [60:43]
Matthew Rimsky
Yeah, I mean, in principle, I agree. I think that the problem is that is about regimentation, because you can have a lot of kids in that situation who, yes, would benefit from more time, you know, moving outside than sitting. But then the issue is how much agency do they have over transitions over the choices that they're making during the day? How safe are all of those particular moments and environments? It gets complicated. In general, I would agree with you. But sometimes it's also about like. Like, is the particular child being listened to with regard to. With regard to what their support needs are?
- [61:26]
Derek Barris
Sure, that's true. And people hated gym class, and I love gym, so there's that aspect. But in high school, we had Project Challenge, which was our version of rock climbing and doing outdoor excursions. But that was only one year in high school. I could imagine that sort of curricula being extended throughout every year.
- [61:46]
Matthew Rimsky
So in the typical system that I'm describing, the child's existential dilemma cannot be primarily the question of what is my life for? What is it about? How shall I find or create love or meaning or community? Which I think are all questions that the Maha crowd would love their children to be asking. The question really is, what will my child be able to do in this world that they didn't create? And the standard answer to that existential problem is they need to get a good job. Now, I can't speak for the parents of autistic kids in general, but I can say that I think this just can't be the focus of what we do as the parents of autistic kids. Like, we have to live and engage with these deeper questions of meaning. And what is this for? Sometimes on an hourly basis. And I'm focusing on this, remember, because. Because, like Bobby Kennedy's first item in his list of what are the problems of autism are? Is these are kids who will never pay taxes. Right? None of this feels natural to me. All of it is, you know, organized by economic pressures to be useful, to succeed. And that leads me to believe that it can be rethought and changed. None of these things are written in stone. I think that between the contradictions and cruelties that are now so clear in the autism discourse that Bobby and company have turned up over, I think we may all be forced to do just that.