Quackery Is As Quackery Does

Two weeks after the confirmation of RFK Jr as Secretary of Health and Human Services, the book is still out on exactly how much impact he will have on American public health, biomedical innovation, and agriculture. But one thing that should be clear is that with the elevation of Kennedy to high office and the rise of the MAHA movement, the selective ecoquackery that has long featured among environmentalists, progressives, and much of the Democratic Party is no longer tenable. It was always apparent that one couldn’t actually articulate a coherent explanation for why vaccines, in vitro fertilization, morning after pills, nuclear medicine, and biomedical technology were good but genetically modified crops, nuclear energy, Ozempic, and laboratory meat were bad.

There were, of course, clever work-arounds among many on the Left who made these distinctions. The problem, according to some, wasn’t the unnaturalness of things like GMOs and Ozempic, it was the corporations that made them. But all of the good unnatural things were also made by corporations, sometimes the same corporations. Bayer, for instance, sells glyphosate, MRI and CT machines, and immunotherapy drugs. The leading mRNA COVID vaccine is produced by Pfizer, which has a current market capitalization of $150 billion. The leading GLP-1 weight loss drug, Ozempic, is made by Novo Nordisk, with a market capitalization of $280 billion.

There are more and less colorable arguments about why vaccines and immunotherapy are good for society and Ozempic and glyphosate are bad. But neither the inherent naturalness of these various technological interventions nor their relative corporate provenance offer useful ways of distinguishing societally useful technologies from societally detrimental ones.

Many on the Right and the Left, of course, purport to make such arguments. The naturalness, or the corporateness, are secondary to the “facts.” And the facts come fast and furious. Vaccines are behind an alarming rise in autism. mRNA vaccines are causing heart failure among the young. Glyphosate is a known carcinogen. GMO foods are toxins, allergens, and immune suppressing. Seed oils cause cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Beef has too much omega 6 oil, like the seeds. Except for regenerative cattle, which have special omega 3 oil that is good for you and magical soil qualities that make them good for the environment.

Processed foods and high carbohydrate diets are behind the obesity epidemic… to which the solution is the paleo diet… just as long as it's the good meat and not the bad meat. And definitely not alternative proteins, which are heavily processed and often genetically modified, merging two long standing bugaboos of the environmental Left that have now been taken up as a cudgel by the MAHA Right, with the difference being that the latter has little interest in vegetarianism or the mediterranean diets advocated by liberal environmental icons like Michael Pollen, Mark Bitman, and Alice Waters as an alternative to alternative protein.

Until recently, the natty Left had far more traction with mainstream liberals, environmentalists, and Democrats than the natty Right had with the mainstream culture and institutions of the Republican Party and contemporary conservatism. There have long been pockets of anti-vax, Front Porch, and crunchy conservatives on the Right. But until the rise of the MAHA movement, it was exclusively Democrats that attempted to realize these various manifestations of naturalness through policy, pouring billions into organic, regenerative, and “climate smart” agriculture, subsidizing organic food in school lunches and edible schoolyards, and advocating for strict regulation of agricultural chemicals and genetically modified crops without much consideration of their benefits ( or in the case of the latter any clear evidence that genetic modification techniques created inherently greater risks than breeding the same crops through conventional methods).

For this reason, it was also almost exclusively the Left that sought to legitimize many of its naturalistic claims through public and private research efforts in academia, government, and NGOs, producing alarming health and environmental findings, glossed with the veneer of peer-review or blessed by government advisory groups, associated with technologies that environmentalists opposed for ideological reasons. Not all of it was wrong. But one need not look far to find all sorts of examples of dubious research passed off as authoritative by environmentalists and their political allies. From Alar to neonicotinoids, NutriSweet to endocrine disrupting chemicals, one environmental health scare after another has proven overheated, dubious, or false.

So long as it was only the natty Left that was taken semi-seriously by its respective establishment and mainstream institutions, those institutions could gate keep which claims to legitimize and admit into serious policy deliberations and which to exclude. The same institutions often told us that pesticides were elevating cancer incidence, that genetically modified crops required special scrutiny while biomedical products did not, and that tradeoffs with low level exposures to ionizing radiation were acceptable when they brought medical diagnostic or treatment benefits but not when they brought air quality or climate benefits and were also quick to debunk dubious claims about vaccines, morning-after pills, and alternative proteins. Acupuncture could be let through the gate while homeopathy could be kept out.

But with the rise of MAHA, the gates are now opened to ideologues, cranks and charlatans of all political persuasions, not just environmentalists. The debasement of scientific standards, the abuse of peer review, the self dealing and conflicts of interest within the academic research establishment, and above all the ideological capture of the gatekeeping functions by the soft-focus gauze of environmentalism, with all of its implicit and explicit naturalistic assumptions and fallacies, has allowed the MAHA movement to storm the gates. The naturalistic fallacy is now ideologically equal opportunity.

So it should surprise no one that MAHA is led by RFK Jr, an icon of the environmental movement for decades, employed by the most mainstream of mainstream environmental organizations, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). NRDC, notably, kept him on the payroll and prominently featured on its website for two decades after he launched his various apostasies about Covid, vaccines, autism, and the AIDS epidemic. It also goes without saying that had Kennedy limited his misinformation, grandstanding, and opportunism to subjects like nuclear energy, pesticides, and GMOs, and his palling around to people like Vandana Shiva and not Joe Rogan, he would still be a senior attorney at NRDC in good standing.

Kennedy only became a problem for NRDC when he began trafficking misinformation and fraudulent science about the wrong topics. The problem, in other words, wasn’t his methods or his uncredible claims. Kennedy and MAHA were operating from the same playbook that the environmental movement invented a generation ago. The problem was that he was deploying those tactics against things that liberal environmentalists believed in.

But ultimately, the chemophobia that claims that tiny exposures to mercury and other chemical agents in vaccines are producing an epidemic of autism is no different than long standing environmental claims that exposures to infinitesimal doses of ionizing radiation and pesticide residues is causing an epidemic of cancer and birth defects. Indeed, cancer incidence and mortality have fallen substantially over recent decades and the incidence of birth defects in the United States is unchanged while there has been an actual, observed increase in autism, albeit one driven by better diagnostic tools, changing definitions of autism, and a number of other factors, not mercury or other ingredients in common vaccines.

Many other MAHA claims, meanwhile, are drawn directly from long-standing environmental claims. Regenerative agriculture was a fever dream of environmentalists, who over the last decade have seized upon the fantasy that building soil could achieve massive amounts of carbon removal, long before the MAHA crowd converted it into a feature of the paleo diet. MAHA claims that estrogen mimicking chemicals were resulting in the feminization of men simply repurposed environmental claims that they were responsible for declining sperm counts and infertility.

Environmentalists and their liberal allies long insisted they “Believe in Science,” while regularly attacking and misrepresenting well established science, attributing natural disasters all over the world to climate change, cancer clusters in upscale, bucolic suburbs such as Marin County to industrial toxins, and childhood asthma to the use of gas stoves. MAHA has done the same, hence President Trump’s MAHA executive order insists that NIH shall “prioritize gold-standard research on the root causes of why Americans are getting sick.”

But like environmentalists, the MAHA movement is quick to abandon gold-standard research when it suits them—Dr. Oz and Children’s Health Defense being merely the MAHA equivalent of Dr. Helen Caldicott and Friends of the Earth a generation ago. Both must so frequently turn to alternative quasi-scientific authorities, of course, because gold-standard research has consistently failed to validate the environmental health theories that environmentalism and MAHA demand that the nation’s public health institutions investigate. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Neither ionizing nor electromagnetic radiation are responsible for an epidemic of cancer. The overuse of agricultural chemicals often has negative consequences for both farmworkers and wildlife, which are exposed to those chemicals in high doses and suffer from them acutely. But there is no plausible mechanism through which extremely low levels of pesticide residues in food are responsible for chronic childhood disease.

What distinguishes both the environmental movement’s long standing claims and MAHA’s more recent claims in most cases is an implicit theory about human health and the environment that is functionally the same as homeopathy. Both tell us that there are invisible environmental poisons, originating in industrial processes and pollutants, that even in infinitesimal doses are responsible for death and illness at vast scales. Hence, the President’s MAHA executive order directing the commission to investigate the causes of “the childhood chronic disease crisis” includes “absorption of toxic material,... environmental factors,... food production techniques, [and]... electromagnetic radiation…”

There is always a grain of truth to these sorts of concerns. Cancer, diabetes, obesity, and chronic disease are real problems. Whether or not they are increasing, and whatever the cause, there is good reason to seek to understand the causes of these ailments and how to eliminate or treat them. But the causes are generally more prosaic and obvious and the solutions more complicated and tied up in modern life than environmentalists or MAHA enthusiasts would have us believe. All are, at bottom, diseases of affluence and industrial modernity. We live longer, have cured many of the diseases that historically plagued human societies, and have vastly better diagnostic tools. We live sedentary lives and are surrounded by an endless abundance of food. And we direct vast amounts of resources and attention towards our personal health, which also results in vast anxiety about the same.

The embrace of all that is natural and wholesome, in contrast to that which is artificial, synthetic, unnatural, and corrupted, offers a seemingly simplistic framework for navigating the contradictions of modern life and the afflictions of societal affluence. But the claims and remedies, whether offered by environmentalists or MAHA influencers, are almost always retrograde and shot through with a kind of privilege that masquerades as virtue. MAHA’s remedies, like so much that has long been advocated by environmentalists, are really leisure class luxuries—diets, supplements, personal trainers, and organic foods. They are all, at a personal level, exclusionary, and at the level of policy and society functionally regressive, insisting that making the poor and working class pay more for food, medicine, energy, and consumer goods will pay for itself through good health. I have joked for years that it is always wise for working people to beware of environmental geeks bearing gifts. The same will be true for MAHA’s many naturalistic remedies and public health apostasies.