Hey. Don’t knock it. Ya can’t be too careful. Alien abductions happen when you forget to wear your magic Mormon underwear.
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16 posts were split to a new topic: Unqualified for the Argument Clinic
The phrase used to be “Beam me up, Scotty.” Whether it is Scotty or La Forge, I too would like to get out of here.
Friends, we must stand together. My domain is not healthcare, so I have little voice, but for those of you who do, we have to speak truth.
I was really hoping for a different outcome to this election. Now I have to refresh my notes on this particular branch of pseudoscience in order to counter it in my social circles.
May truth prevail.
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Kook magnetism never ceases to amaze me. What’s the explanation?
I’m a big fan of the subfamily Otariinae—but not so much the verb form.
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Can you quote what he said on this topic precisely ?
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There you have it. RFK Jr. asserting that the FDA has been aggressively suppressing, among other things, sunshine and exercise, he asserts because it advances human health and can’t be patented by pharmaceutical companies.
It hasn’t, and it’s not clear how it could do that even in principle.
So the FDA is somehow in league with pharmaceutical companies, eroding public health for the benefit of pharma profit. That’s what he appears to suggest.
What’s rather ironic is that many of the things he says the FDA is also suppressing, would be or are already produced by pharmaceutical companies and licensed for use in at least some products. And could be sold and marketed for profit.
Your favorites ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are pharmaceuticals, licensed and produced. They’re just not licensed as cures or treatments for certain ailments where there is evidence they don’t actually work. So in fact the FDA has been protecting the american people from greedy pharmaceutical companies that want to push untested cures on them for profit.
This isn’t to give a free pass on anything the FDA might have gotten wrong, but everything RFK Jr. has been quoted saying on that topic, in this thread, is either misleading, false, or stupid, or all three.
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RFK Jr. is clearly not in his right mind. (I do not say that casually.) I have similar reactions at the zaniness of Rudy Giuliani. There was a time in the past when Giuliani could be quite brilliant—and even be considered a heroic leader by some. But now I see in Giuliani the same pattern I’ve seen in a number of academic and institutional leaders who “stayed past their prime”, and eventually cognitive decline and/or some kind of mental illness took over. I’ve known families crushed by this kind of phenomenon. (“Grandpa used to be the kindest and most rational person I knew. Now he is out of control, angry, erratic, and speaks nonsense. He’s destroying everything he accomplished in his life.”)
Air traffic controllers must retire at age 56 because the stakes of their age-related decline are simply too high. The dangers are potentially far too disastrous. Of course, there is no age limit for the Presidency. Or for presidential appointees.
Meanwhile, all fifty states as well as the federal government have laws prohibiting a convicted felon from having access to a firearm. I would posit that an aged convicted felon in obvious cognitive decline should not have access to a firearm—and access to the nuclear launch codes constitutes one heck-of-a firearm.
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Yes, RFK thinks that pharmas have somehow captured the regulatory agencies. But isn’t the case that there may be some truth in his opinion, given that it seems that over half of the FDA’s budget is sourced through the PDUFA Act of 1992 which allows regulators to defray the costs of regulation by accepting payments directly from the companies they regulate? If true, wouldn’t this constitute a conflict of interest ?
I can see a case for that, if somehow the salary of the people employed to review drugs safety depend on whether the drug is approved or not. Not impossible there are some bad incentives there.
But as I understand it that act was originally introduced to make it possible to use the money to increase the number of reviewers assessing the drugs, to speed up the process of review.
So not having this act in place would mean the money the FDA uses on employing reviewers to do this job, would have to come from elsewhere. And if they don’t get this money, the drug review process presumably gets slowed down a lot again as lots of reviewers have to be let go.
And where else would that be but through taxation on the american people, or taxes on companies? I certainly don’t see the Trump administration arguing for shifting the cost of employing reviewers to increases in taxes on american consumers, much less on drug companies. It actually makes sense that the companies that want their drugs to be reviewed must pay a fee for it.
But if this possible conflict of interest is what is bothering RFK Jr then he’s of course welcome to take up that fight anytime he wants, instead of saying stupid, false, and misleading stuff about vaccines, sunshine, exercise, and all the rest. But I somehow don’t see him proposing a solution. Has he suggested one anywhere?
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I don’t see much reason to think there is much of a problem. I don’t see any real incentive to rig the review process. It’s not as if applications are likely to dry up if approval is refused.
These two recent threads bear witness to your constellation hypothesis. You might want to record them for posterity.
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Just wondering:
Is it a conflict of interest that the inspectors the government sends to the site of any building I choose to build are paid by a combination of fees I pay per inspection plus taxpayer funds? Is it a conflict of interest that the inspectors the governments sends to inspect meat packing plants are covered by a combination of taxpayer funds and fees paid by the meat-packing companies? [The exact combination and breakdown is complex but that is irrelevant to the point I’m making.] And importers pay fees to cover customs inspectors (who certainly fall under the definition of “regulators”) and those inspectors are paid by a complex combination of various fees of that type plus taxpayer money.
Do all of those situations constitute a “conflict of interest”? Or do they mostly represent FAIRNESS because the American people (through their elected representatives) believe that the public benefits and therefore should pay taxes to support those inspections AND Americans also believe that those companies and individuals involved benefit and therefore should be fairly charged.
So is it REALLY accurate to say the FDA is “somehow in league” with the companies? Now, if there is something sinister going on, I’m entirely in favor of rooting it out. But, no, I don’t think the fact that both taxpayers and the companies involved pay for the regulators/inspectors constitutes a “conflict of interest” per se.
POSTSCRIPT: Air traffic control (a kind of regulation) and the Federal Aviation Administration are directly and indirectly [in complicated ways] funded by both the general public and excise taxes and other fees generated by and/or collected by the major airlines.
Now I will agree there have long been debates how directly and indirectly various industries should pay for their regulation but I wouldn’t simplistically suggest that these necessarily reflect conflicts of interest.
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Check out the blog, ‘Respectful Insolence’, for numerous entries about RFK Jr’s shenanigans.
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I haven’t checked out Orac for a while. It’s good to see he is still at it. Unfortunately, it looks like his services will be sorely needed for the foreseeable future.
Agreed. If there is one thing that desperately needs to be improved, it is to introduce critical thinking at the High School level (or equivalent). While that is part of the foundation, it is not enough. It also has to be combined with a love of truth and a desire to prove yourself wrong. I don’t expect everyone to become a “scientist” or an “engineer”, but people need to be aware of their own cognitive biases.
My eyes were opened and my life transformed when I first started learning about confirmation bias.
I hope that when we have earned a seat at the table of ideas, we sit down in good faith and with enough humility to see when we are wrong.
One question I ask myself is: Am I just looking to defend a position, or am I interested in truth? They are not mutually exclusive, but if I am not careful, I won’t allow myself to consider sound (in the technical sense of that term) arguments that tend to disconfirm my current beliefs.
In the case of this public high profile gentleman (and I use that last term very loosely), I would argue that he is not arguing in good faith and is either unwilling or unable to accept response after response that cogently demonstrate he is mistaken.
God help us.
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