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It is darkly funny that Kennedy does not care about actual epidemics, like COVID or measles, but obsesses about a fabricated “autism epidemic.”
2
I am not comparing autism to pancreatic cancer. I’m merely illustrating the line from Mystery, to Discovery, to Technology, to Adoption that marks all scientific progress.
3
Society is, almost by definition, not designed to accommodateoutliers. It can be harder if you’re left-handed, or 7 feet tall, or have an IQ of 200.
Hell: Just imagine how hard life was for anyone with bad eyesight before glasses were invented in the thirteenth century. You could be the smartest, strongest guy in your village, but if you had terrible vision, you were consigned to digging ditches.
4
The least problematic part of yesterday’s event was the administration’s promotion of leucovorin as a therapeutic for some autistic kids.
The research on efficacy for leucovorin in this use case is less clear-cut than the administration presented, but pursuing a promising therapeutic is a good idea nonetheless.
In general, I’m in favor of having pharmaceutical therapeutics available for everyone in cases where they’ve been shown to be safe and effective.
The administration’s embrace of leucovorin does, however, highlight the illiterate nature of MAHA’s approach to pharmacology. People such as Kennedy latch on to experimental or unproven therapeutics like leucovorin or (in the case of COVID) ivermectin. They are clearly huge fans of certain classes of steroids.
But they disdain many therapeutics that have deep wells of research behind them, simply because they are in common usage: MAHA hates SSRIs, the methylphenidate family of drugs, and vaccines. They’re against Tylenol now.
MAHA’s approach to pharmacology seems driven in large part by conspiracism and/or contrarianism: Treatments widely accepted by the scientific establishment are viewed as dangerous, while treatments viewed skeptically by the scientific establishment are dogmatically embraced.
5
I hate that phrase, but the MAHA people use it, so I’m using it here as a reference to Makary’s statement.
6
Causality is important for science, but not for Christianity, which is controlled by Divine Mercy.
7
It is possible that someday we might discover factors that contribute to neurodiverse development. But to date, no such reliable evidence exists. |
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