Kirk Milhoan's comments come as federal vaccine policy slides to insignificance.
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Do we really need polio shots? Deep thoughts by RFK Jr. advisor get dragged.
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Needs to be a double-blind study and you need to work out the confounding variables associated with other comorbidities. You leave him on an island, but you as researcher and he as subject have no idea whether the dogs on that particular island are or are not rabid. You remove him once he is bitten and provide him with a treatment that either contains the rabies vaccine or a salt-water placebo. Neither you nor he will know which treatment group he has been assigned to until after the study concludes. To be sure, you'll need to run this at least four times for each combination in alternate realities.
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There was a Durex ad going around mostly on MTV I think, about 30+ years ago. It was showing vintage black&white pics of young couples, narrating "...Alois and Klara - parents of Adolf... Besarion and Ekaterina, parents of Josef, Andruta and Alexandrina, parents of Nikolae...", etc, etc, etc, "...Oh, if only they had used our product !!!".
Couldn't this guy's parents skip the polio vaccine for him ?!?
Couldn't this guy's parents skip the polio vaccine for him ?!?
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That's absolutely what they're about. If lots of the "undesirables" die then there's "more for me!" Everything is zero sum to these shitstains.
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agree, you’re not really good at that to the detriment of the world.
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I read that and now I'm terrified of living here.
(I am not sure it is making a comeback but looking at the list there are a lot of African countries which have significant expat communities in the UK and I suspect this may be the source, since non-European immigration increased as a result of...the Brexit which was supposed to stop all those immigrants coming here but in fact resulted in Europeans leaving and being replaced with Indians and Africans.
Farge and Tice should be invited to fund the vaccination programme made necessary by their activities.)
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Phlogiston was never more than a house of cards based on a false premise and very poor experimental technique. Exactly the same as Kennedy's idea of virology.
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As someone else observed, they're still called "doctor" even if they just barely graduate. That doesn't really reflect how good a doctor they actually are going to be, however. Some people are extremely bright but don't flourish in traditional academia, while the brightest can end up being thick as a brick in the real world outside of academia.
Taking away the doctor's license to practice ultimately will backfire as well since the true believers and some skeptics will believe he's being punished by the "establishment", which is actually true, for proclaiming the "truth" about vaccines (which isn't true), but it just further reinforces their persecution complex and makes him a martyr to their cause. It's also likely that pulling his license won't actually stop him from practicing, either, and certainly won't stop people from listening to his dribble.
What can be done? I honestly don't know. The only way you can get to vaccine skeptics is generally on an individual basis by addressing their fears in a way that's non-confrontational, compassionate, and understanding. You can't berate them for being stupid, you'll instantly lose them and make them all the more angry. You probably can't do it in a widespread education campaign any longer, either. People have been immunized against "education" campaigns from all the misinformation put out by government, political parties, and bad faith "experts" and corporations till it's hard to know what to believe any longer - including quoting statistics because statisticians can tell what's ultimately a lie while quoting facts. The average person won't know how, or likely even have the time to even if they do, question the methodology used to arrive at the misleading conclusion. You're probably never going to reach the true-believers ever, but not everyone who's a skeptic is a fanatic about it. They're just misinformed and likely trust the wrong sources.
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Yah, the Marseillaise is amazingly frank for a national anthem. No snowflake woke cancel culture there.
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But ... when he goes frothing at the mouth mad, bow do you know it's rabies and not just a common symptom of all conspiracy theorists?
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Really? As far as I know it's almost unheard of to revoke a degree for anything other than cheating/fraud during the pursuit of the degree.
Licensure is separate. Any kind of misconduct can be grounds to suspend someone's license to practice in a professional field.
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Hey, nothing in my engineering degree says I'm not living in a simulation created by some noodle alien round about six thousand years ago. It's just following the laws of physics as defined in the simulation.
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As long as you don't put ketchup on your pasta. Then you're damned to eternity in an especially glitchy edge case of the simulation.
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I would also note that he doesn't work as a pediatrician in a doctor's office where children get vaccinated at their wellness visits. Nor does he work in family practice, where these decisions generally are made for adults and children who don't go to a pediatrician.
The guy is a specialist in pediatric cardiology. It's a nice specialty where he probably never really has to deal with vaccination decisions and wouldn't be the one making advice to anyone.
There are cardiologists who only do a handful of procedures, and that is all they ever do. You want that person for those surgeries, but you probably don't want to consult them on most ofther medical things.
The guy very well could be very competent within his specialty, but completely unqualified for what he is doing today.
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I'm in my late 60's and I remember. Not people in my graduating class, but a friend of
my older brother (late 70's) had both legs in braces. The older brother of former NFL
QB Lynn Dickey was crippled by polio. His mom and my mom went to church together.
There just HAS to be a bunch of republican voters who still remember. This is truly shameful, as is the crap about the Measles vaccine and acetaminophen and ICE
and USAID and ....
Thank you Ars and Beth and the wonderful commentariot here for keeping sane thought
and discussion alive.
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You just described an idiot savant. You're sure someone like that could get through medical school? There are after all required classes that require slightly broader cogitation to pass.
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Cat_Herder
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
As if Greenland and Canada actually need another reason to say "Hell, no!"....
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Yes, because doctors become specialized in their areas of practice over time. They may have had that more generalized education when they got out of medical school, but it could have been a decade or more since they've done anything outside of their specialty.
They likely are out of date on things outside of their specialty and out of practice.Even something as generalized as family medicine is its own specialty, as having to be that front line for all specialties is a skill in and of itself.
As far as surgeons, its more like you want someone extremely skilled if you're getting heart surgery. You want the person who not only has seen the surgery go right, but has done it enough to see the complications and to have experience handling the complications.
This is how specialties work. The more specialized you get, the narrower the area of expertise is.
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Neither ever needed any reason at all to say hell, no. It's implied in the bit that says "sovereign state".
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Sure but this guy literally doesn't understand the scientific method. I'm not a scientist and I don't need that knowledge every day or even sporadically, but I still know he's spouting bullshit about "science".
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Denmark. Of which Greenland is an autonomous region. Which might have become independent in a couple years but with neighbours like that, who knows.
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Someone tell this moron that this is because of polio vaccines not in spite of them.
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I'd guess when he was in school he'd have been perfectly able to discus science and had an understanding of it.
I would note that you're assuming he doesn't understand the scientific method. That implies his statements are being made in good faith. I think if you search down where these beliefs come they either lead down the road to money, power, or both.
Sometimes people running scams like these for money/power also eventually start believing what they're saying.
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What's in it for a doctor to say ridiculous things like vaccine side effects are as risky as disease side effects and that "science is what he observes"? What's the incentive here? It shouldn't be money; he's a pediatric cardiologist. Is he desperate to be part of the Trump administration? Is there some weird religious nutjob angle?
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I know this pic was probably chosen for a reason, but everything about his face says "stubborn idiot". I suppose it even helped him get hired by this admin.
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I'm assuming because he was part of an organization that pushed whatever nonsense the far right wanted during the pandemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Medical_Alliance
I would suspect the motivator for this is purely power on his end, but it is hard to be sure as he's pretty recent to be on scene compared to say RFK Jr.
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"While arguing that he was not anti-vaccine"
As if saying you're not anti-vaccine absolves you of all the dumb shit you say and do after making that statement.
Of course, people who feel the need to say they're not anti-vaccine are generally anti-vaccine, just like people who say "I'm not racist, but..." tend to follow that up with a racist statement.
As if saying you're not anti-vaccine absolves you of all the dumb shit you say and do after making that statement.
Of course, people who feel the need to say they're not anti-vaccine are generally anti-vaccine, just like people who say "I'm not racist, but..." tend to follow that up with a racist statement.
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As are his masters, too.
But what they all truly long for is starring roles in a real-life Game of Thrones, where the poor are wretched, the weak dead, and the lords and warriors (themselves, of course) chase thrilling lives of wealth, power, and betrayal.
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Just got mine a few months ago. Didn’t even feel the needle go in and no pain or side effects whatsoever.
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I keep telling my agent I want off this unreality show, WTF. The plots just keep getting more improbable, and we’ve lost the smart two-thirds of the audience. It’s not just bad for my career, it’s bad for my life and family.
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As a perinatal nurse, I am so frustrated that I can no longer direct my patients to the CDC for evidence-based guidelines about vaccines and newborn medications. I am now referring them to the American Academy of Pediatrics. I am so glad to have at least one reliable source of information.
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That ignoramus RFK Jr was born on 17jan1954. On 12April1955 the Salk polio vaccine was declared safe and effective. Do you think that his mom, Ethel, hesitated to have little Bobby vaccinated ASAP?
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Tell me that you don't understand the laws of large numbers without saying that you don't understand the laws of large numbers.
0.5% means 200,000 Canadians. 1.7 million Americans. 135,000 Australians. 25,000 Kiwis. 3.5 million Europeans. Seven million Chinese. 600,000 Japanese. And so on. It means one in two hundred people. That's high enough that even if you don't personally know somebody who's in that group, you'll certainly pass by a few on the streets, and it's no more than one or two hops to get to somebody within the broader social network. (Assuming that the disease is spreading freely within the population, which, thankfully, hasn't been the case in most countries for quite some time.)
And, quite frankly, the consequences of this sort of paralysis are severe enough that even if people "overestimate the paralytic symptoms of polio", the risk analysis that leads to is still close enough to reality as to be worthwhile - because everybody who suffers paralysis, even if not of the diaphragm or other breathing muscles, needs a high degree of support from society. Anybody in that position absolutely should get that support - but far better for us to avoid the need in the first instance. Especially since the avoidance is so trivial, cheap, effective, and safe.
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Yeah. One of my good friends from choir years ago is old enough they got it back in the bad old days, and they're handicapped for life because of it; from something preventable ten years ago. No desire to go back to those days of more people ending up like that.
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