In a Congressional hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) directly confronted anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on his rejection of germ theory—the unquestionable scientific idea that specific pathogenic microbes cause specific diseases. After Kennedy defended his fringe view, Senator Bill Cassidy fact-checked and debunked Kennedy’s denialist arguments in real time.
The exchanges mark a rare instance in which Kennedy’s dismissal of germ theory has been raised in such a high-profile public setting, in this case, a hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Kennedy, who has no background in science, medicine, or public health, is well known as an ardent anti-vaccine activist and peddler of conspiracy theories. But his startling rejection of a cornerstone theory in biomedical science has mostly been underreported.
As Ars Technica reported last year, Kennedy wrote about his germ theory denialism explicitly in his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci. In it, Kennedy maligns germ theory as a tool of pharmaceutical companies, scientists, and doctors to promote the use of modern medicines. Instead of accepting germ theory, Kennedy promotes a concept akin to the discarded terrain theory, in which diseases stem not from germs, but from imbalances in the body’s inner “terrain.” Those imbalances are claimed to be caused by poor nutrition and exposure to environmental toxins and stressors. (In his book, Kennedy erroneously labels this as “miasma theory,” but that is a different theory that suggests diseases derive from breathing bad air, vapors, or mists from decaying or corrupting matter. The idea was supplanted by germ theory, while terrain theory was never widely accepted.)
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When he dies, I hope they do an autopsy of his body to see how many parasites and infections he had.
I think he’ll explode into bugs like the oogie-boogie man.
It’s absolutely true that we have too much focus on pharmaceutical solutions and not enough on general wellness and prevention. But wellness and prevention means exercise and vegetables, not protein bars and woo woo shit about balancing your internal landscape.
Fuck this grotesque man.
yikes, dude is gonna be draining the four humors.
Who’s the barber here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edIi6hYpUoQ
What was only recently satire is an actual position.
They will kill you and your kids.
Hopefully not me, I follow medical science, although obviously herd wide health practices will suffer which may result in higher mortality for everyone, even those who follow medical science.
And not the funny ones.
I bet he doesn’t wash his hands after using the bathroom. Also, does he not visit the dentist? He should stop getting his teeth cleaned/checked if he thinks germs don’t cause disease.
His hygienist specializes in miasmas.
Pete Hegseth bragged on TV that he had not washed his hands in 10 years, because “germs are not a real thing.” These are stupid people.
These people are just layers of scourges.
To be fair, when he was young his parents put his swing too close to the wall.
Fuckin Typhoid Mary. Can’t we exile him to an island for the rest of his life, too?
These are stupid people.
And yet they were able to fully take over the United States government. Really says something about the movements and institutions opposing them.
The rules mistakenly assumed that politicians would always be intelligent people with the interests of the nation in mind.
They didn’t account for people voting for moronic crooks who openly intended to pillage and rape the nation for their own profit.
Says more about the fragility of democracies. For other countries, the warning should be clear: do not fucking defund public education, do not restrict education.
Unfortunately, we keep electing people who defund education, because it’s expensive, and then cry that people vote for morons who waste away tens or hundreds of billions of dollars…
That they are complicit, yeah.
Wowwww, somehow that honestly surprises me that even one of these magats could be this blindingly moronic
These are people that believe that if you say something with enough arrogance, it makes it true.
This is all an attempt by the rich to reduce numbers of poor people. They need more people dying, so they’re going to pull out all the safety features we’ve built into our society to prolong life.
Which is short sighted as a healthy populace is what lead to the US economic growth in industry prior to it being redefined as being based entirely on stock market gambling vibes. A strong and healthy populace was a big part of the post WWII boom.
Short-sightedness is like their chief feature
That’s not what Putin told him. You gotta do what the boss says.
Is that why they’re trying to restrict birth control and sex education while saying people need to have more kids, so there will be fewer poor people?
They need people to produce more babies to fuel the wars that they keep starting to keep the population in check.
Checkmate, liberal! /s
They’re trying to increase the number of white babies born, and reduce the numbers of _everyone else. _
To reduce the number of non-working poor people. Or “useless eaters” as the psychotic, billionaire class calls them.
Or “useless eaters” as the psychotic, billionaire class calls them.
More projection, I see
Less “reduce the number,” and more “make the poor more tractable.” The rich still need human carpet to walk on, they just need it to be uneducated, fecund, and desperate to get under their feet.
Also divided. A divided proletariat (class of wage earners) can make less of a fist against the elite.
This contradicts their insistence that children should have children to stop population decline
Not really. What they want is for the older generation that has greater disability and likely hood to be drawing on services or retirement accounts to die off. Getting younger people to pop out more worker bees is how they keep the tax revenue flowing into social security etc and never have to pay out if they can kill off the infirm/ unprofitable.
Average life expectancy is dropping in the us while retirement age has increased by a decade. The two numbers are only something like 5 years separated now, maybe 7. Idk Im not looking it up right now.
Right-wing politics has always been an incoherent ragbag of convenient positions insincerely held.
The Horseman known as Pestilence.
A kind of Terry Pratchett, Good Omens version, absolutely. “We don’t actually have to make new plagues, we just convince enough people that the natural plagues they’ve already got don’t exist, or the causes aren’t what they’ve been told, or that the treatments do greater harm than the disease. In fact, we don’t even have to deceive that many. A handful of posts to alternative medicine, conspiracy, and mom’s net forums, and human nature will do the rest.”
I need to read that one. Terry was a goddamn genius who got taken from us too soon.
There’s also already a horseman for War. Who would be Death and Famine I wonder?
Famine, whoever is in charge of cutting funds for humanitarian projects the USA were supporting and threatening millions of lives.
Famine is Brooke Rollins, secretary of department of agriculture.
unquestionable
Can we not call it that? The beauty of science is that it can be questioned.
Eh, while it’s nice to say that science is all about method and nothing is above being questioned, at a certain point there’s so much evidence that it’s insane to argue against them. Like, I’m fine saying more than just germs cause disease or that not all germs cause disease, but saying there are no germs that cause disease when we the mountains of evidence we currently have is insane. It’s a lot like saying gravity doesn’t exist. Like you can argue that maybe gravity is a niche case or a product of a particular frame of reference, but things still fall down. We know that, it’s unquestionable.
Isn’t the definition of a germ a microbe that can cause disease? Like I don’t think you can, by definition, have a germ that doesn’t cause disease.
Maybe, Idk. I don’t worry too much about definitions as long as I can figure out what’s physically happening they don’t matter.
This is what happens when you accept something without question… You might happen to be right, but you don’t know why…
You are correct, but I’m willing to give some leeway for using “unquestionable” as shorthand for “backed by such a remarkable corpus of evidence that for any contradictory hypothesis to seriously call it into question would require a literally unimaginable scope of evidence”.
I think germ theory and gravity are about the only ones I can readily think of. Not relativity based gravity, just… Gravity.
The way MAGA questions it is far from beautiful my friend.
people let him off easy because he can’t talk well. heard he’s invested in supplement sales. like snake oil guy of yesteryear
People didn’t let him off easy. They outright rejected him. So he sold himself to Trump for the position he has. He’s a morally compromised whore for money and power so he doesn’t have to face the harm he has caused to countless people.
So how do scientists reliably give lab rats diseases we want to study?
Clearly, scientists are witches and must be burned.
Didn’t ancient china have something similiar to the terrain theory?
Source: some Manhua i didn’t like.
As usual this is all made up and none of it happened
You mean environmental toxins like germs?
It is insane to think that he is endorsing a theory that was widely rejected even by Miasma guys in the 19th century.
The miasma advocates were wrong, but they still did many things that were beneficial. The first water treatment plants that provided the first safe drinking water were advocated for by miasma advocates, and the London sewer system, one that is still being used today was also built by them.
Terrain theory? They did jack shit. Just a bunch of crazy nuts who rejected both miasma and germ theory in the late 19th century.
To be fair, miasma theory made sense and was completely logical, before microscopes.
They knew about actual lethal gases, and ones that had different effects on the body. They knew there were gases they couldn’t yet detect, as they were still discovering new ones. They knew rotting stuff produced all kind of gases and stenchs.
Hell, the theory is still pretty much valid for radon, though for reasons they couldn’t have possibly imagined.
And at the same time, the idea that animals could get small enough to be invisible, and to invade the human body, was absurd.
It came as quite a surprise when the microscope was invented and every single drop of water turned out to be a whole ecosystem teeming with life, and we turned out to be precariously balanced colonies of microscopic cells, also inhabited by a whole bacterial ecosystem teeming with both friends and foes.
And then came viruses, which are downright absurd to the point that we’re still figuring out where they fit in the tree of life, and whether they’re alive or not.
And prions, which are the stuff of horror science fiction yet completely logical when you think about how proteins works, and how they might sometimes not.
Miasma theory wasn’t correct, sure, but it was definitely simpler, and made much more sense.
We truly live in the golden age of the moron.
