Coffee Break: CDC – Vaccines – Autism, Oh, My!; Wellness; Prioritized Science; Very Ancient Art; and MAGA

Part the First: CDC Finally “Decides” that Vaccines Cause Autism.  In news that will surprise absolute nobody, while pleasing some and causing despair in others, CDC says the mountains of data that show vaccines do NOT cause autism is not evidence-based:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday publicly reversed its stance that vaccines do not cause autism, over the objections of career staff and counter to years of scientific evidence.

A CDC webpage that previously said there’s no link between autism and vaccines was quietly updated to call that claim “not evidence based,” among other statements that are not factual.

The updated page did not go through normal scientific clearance (of course it didn’t), Daniel Jernigan, a top CDC leader who resigned in August, told STAT, citing conversations with CDC staff. Another person familiar with the situation, not authorized to speak publicly, also said that the CDC office that manages the page was not involved in the decision.

I do wonder, what does Senator Bill Cassidy, MD (R-Louisiana) think about this, since he made it possible?  Which naturally leads to the question, “Why did you not believe this was coming when you cast your vote that confirmed the current Secretary of Health and Human Services?”  You believed him when he told you he would consult with you?  OK, then.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told STAT that studies supporting a link between vaccines and autism “have been ignored by health authorities,” echoing a claim on the CDC page.

“HHS has launched a comprehensive assessment of the causes of autism, including investigations on plausible biologic mechanisms and potential causal links,” HHS said in a statement. According to HHS, federal lawmakers were informed in advance of the change.

From this STAT article, an archived STAT covering the evidence: Here is how we know that vaccines do not cause autism.  RFKJr’s mania against thimerosal is just as misguided.  Here is an explanation from a non-archived STAT article:

Thimerosal is a critical tool for the safe use of some vaccines that are packaged in multi-dose vials, a format that is the backbone of vaccination efforts in low- and middle-income countries. The preservative ensures that the product does not become tainted by bacteria or other contaminants as health professionals insert syringe after syringe into the bottle to draw out successive doses (especially where refrigeration is not always available consistently).

It is a mercury-based compound, a fact Kennedy and his allies belabor when they rail against its use in vaccines. But thimerosal is ethylmercury, not methylmercury. The latter (originating from industrial pollution) is found in some fish and shellfish, is dangerous to human health, especially to developing fetuses. Ethylmercury, on the other hand, clears the body quickly. It has been used for decades in vaccines and multiple studies have found that in the concentrations used in vaccines, it does not pose a human health risk. The Minamata Convention contains a carve-out for thimerosal — it uses the name thiomersal — based on a WHO assessment (pdf) about its safety and importance.

The Food and Drug Administration also acknowledged the safety of thimerosal in vaccines in a review that was first published in 1997 that remains posted on its website today (but probably not for long). “A robust body of peer-reviewed scientific studies conducted in the U.S. and other countries support the safety of thimerosal-containing vaccines.”

Mercury is indeed a poison, now most commonly caused by artisanal gold mining, in which metallic mercury forms an amalgam with gold from low-grade ore and then heated with a blowtorch to leave a tiny gold droplet behind as the mercury evaporates.

Here is the simple but not simple-minded way to understand why thimerosal is not toxic, especially at the vanishingly small doses used in vaccines.  I have used the similar vanishingly small amounts for long-term storage of solutions to prevent bacterial growth:

• Drink ethyl alcohol in moderation and get happy.
• Drink methyl alcohol in any detectable amount and go blind, or worse.

In each case, two simple compounds produce two widely divergent outcomes.  The stupid, it burns.

Part the Second: Wellness on Steroids to Somewhere.  Wellness startup Function Health raises $300 million as consumer lab testing picks up steam.

Function Health, which offers its members nutrition, supplement, and other lifestyle guidance based on lab tests and body scans, announced on Wednesday $298 million in new funding with plans to add artificial intelligence features to help with the interpretation of patient data.

Function’s new fundraise is a reflection of momentum behind a booming wellness industry that the company helped manufacture. Function, based in Austin, Texas, is one of the leading companies marketing preventive care services directly to consumers with emotional advertising that implores watchers to “find out what you’re made of” and that individuals “deserve answers just as unique as they are.” The company’s gospel of self-empowerment has been buttressed in part by co-founder and chief medical officer Mark Hyman’s friendship with health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

For a yearly subscription fee of $365, Function tests members’ blood for common biomarkers, like glucose and LDL cholesterol, as well as for metals like lead and markers of autoimmune health. The company also offers add-ons including Grail’s test for multiple cancers, a test for gluten intolerance, and “extended hormone health” tests for men and women. Members repeat tests as often as every three months to monitor for changing signals in their biology. Following the acquisition of Ezra earlier this year, Function has tapped into the preventive body scanning trend, and now offers MRI and CT scans to detect cancers, aneurysms, plaque in the heart, and more. Function is not covered by insurance.

After testing, members receive a clinician-reviewed overview of their results along with nutrition, supplements, and lifestyle recommendations (clinician undefined).. Hyman told STAT that the company is planning to launch a supplements offering “that is unlike anything that’s ever been in the marketplace before” but declined to go into detail.

Naturally Mark Hyman, “the most trusted name in functional medicine,” and winner of the 2009 Linus and Ava Helen Pauling Award in Functional Medicine, declined to go into detail.  But you can find answers and details about “functional medicine” at his other link.  And if he does not work for you, Medical Medium or the Surgeon General designee will have other answers.  But back to Function Health:

With a fresh $2.5 billion valuation, Function is charging deeper into its thesis that oodles of data collected from users can be used to inform consequential health care and lifestyle decisions. On Wednesday, the company is announcing Medical Intelligence, its new AI platform for analyzing user data and providing personalized recommendations. Initial features include a chatbot that can answer questions based on the user’s health data and new “protocols” that offer concrete steps that users can put into practice. Members will be able to upload clinical notes, lab tests, and scans for the system to analyze as well.

“Medical Intelligence is about being able to sort through the infinite complexity of human biology, and understanding that the way medicine is currently practiced is based on a very reductionist model, but the body is infinitely complex,” said Hyman. He added: “It’s a platform that allows you to sort through and sift through all that data that makes sense of what’s going on with unique biology and create personalized road map for you.”

The AI chat will answer questions and offer suggestions about a range of topics. Examples provided by a Function spokesperson include creating an “anti-bloating” nutrition plan; recommending supplements for heart health; reviewing out-of-range test results or explaining negative trends; and creating a morning routine for energy. The new protocols feature builds on the recommendations Function already offers users and might include “foods to enjoy vs. avoid, meal plans, supplements, sleep, exercise, stress, and anxiety relief.”

The spokesperson said the company employs “a clinician-in-the-loop system where clinician inputs are used to continuously train the model.” Hyman acknowledged that concerns around the accuracy and confabulation are valid but said the system wouldn’t go too far.

No, the human body is not infinitely complex.  But even Wassily Leontief’s system of 500 linear equations eventually broke down, which was a tragedy to the professor who taught my linear algebra class.  The equations that govern human physiology from the cell to the organism are probably uncountable and 95% of them are nonlinear.  Plus, outcomes are not path independent.  This will make a lot of money for a lot of people.  At the far margin, it will do some good, because the fraction of functional medicine that actually works is simply medicine.

One cannot help but wonder how well people would be thriving if we had an economy that was mostly for people rather than the other way around.  That would include living wages across the board in meaningful employment, healthcare for all and universal childcare for those who want or need it, and a secure, affordable place for every family on any size to live.  And no war, which only destroys the Earth and its people while making a solitary few unimaginably rich to the rest of us:

With splashy new AI features, Function may be the vanguard of a new wave of testing startups, but it is replicating playbooks that have been tried before. Like a recent crop of direct-to-consumer wellness companies, it’s advertising on podcasts that appeal to listeners likely to be conscientious about their health.

Companies selling screening tests on the internet are also not new. Tim Mackey, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, recalled his research from over a decade ago that identified bad behavior by direct-to-consumer testing companies, including misleading marketing and insufficient counseling offered to patients.

“It’s like a gold rush market,” he said. “There’s so many more people worried about disease than actually have the disease.”

Well, there are so many more rich people worried about disease than actually have the disease.  Everyone else has more pressing matters relating to survival of their families.

Part the Third: The Hits to NIH and the Rest of Us, They Just Keep on Coming.  Has NIH funded clinical research and basic research that in hindsight wasn’t worth it.  The common answer is, “Yes!”  The correct answer, however, is “No!”  And this is for the simple reason that virtually nothing in biomedical science or clinical medicine can be known in advance, by deduction, for example.  Nothing.  Which brings us to this short article in Scientific American: Halted NIH Clinical Trials List Reveals Slashed Treatments for Cancer, COVID and Minority Health.

Sickle cell disease, sleep disorders and lung cancer: these are just a few of the medical issues that were under investigation in at least 383 clinical trials that have had research grants terminated by the National Institutes of Health since February.

That’s about 1 in 30 of all the clinical trials—tests of medical interventions in human volunteers—funded by the federal agency, which has a $48-billion research budget, according to a JAMA Internal Medicine study published Monday.

The full list of 383 shelved clinical trials cited in the JAMA paper, obtained by Scientific American, reveals a wide range. The cuts follow a Trump administration drive to slash costs and cull funding for studies “misaligned” with its priorities; some 74,000 study participants have been affected by the trial cuts, according to the study.

Misaligned with its priorities?  Sickle cell disease?  Hmm.  Or this one, which is quite a mouthful: “Intensive Symptom Surveillance Guarded by Machine Learning-directed Risk Stratification in Patients With Non-Metastatic Head and Neck Cancer, The INSIGHT Trial.”  As a survivor, so far, of a similar thing, that one stuck out.  Perhaps the 85% survival rate (or 15% death rate after a long and miserable decline) for my condition could have been improved to 95% or higher.  We will never know.

Once again, in a surprise to absolutely nobody, “spokesman Andrew Nixon said the Department of Health and Human Services ‘strongly’ rejects the study’s findings,” while noting the 42,500 trials in the planning, recruiting, and active stages.  So, why these 383 trials?  Followed by this nonsense:

Selective focus on a handful of appropriately paused studies does not change that fact, and it should not be used to cast doubt on the overwhelming majority of trials that meet or exceed the gold standard of clinical research,” he said. “We are committed to ensuring that taxpayer dollars support programs rooted in evidence-based practices and gold standard science—not driven by ideological agendas.

“Gold-standard” science is nothing more than fetishistic trope, although it does fit the president’s faux-Versailles aesthetic (apologies to the shade of the Sun King).  There is no evidence presented that any of this research was driven by ideological agendas.  And aside from the knowledge never developed that could save many in the future, this is also a complete breach of trust with the 74,000 people who volunteered for these trials and the thousands of scientists, physicians, nurses, clinical trial coordinators (who have a huge task), and other healthcare workers who were doing this research.

Part the Fourth: Can Artifacts Tell Us Anything about Prehistoric Belief Systems?  This is addressed in a short article from Reuters: Figurine of a woman and a goose offers peek at prehistoric beliefs.  The course in Comparative Belief Systems I took during my misspent youth was a favorite, and the distinguished anthropologist who taught the twelve of us said, “It all depends.”  A diamond motif is common among the few artifacts left by Native Americans of Southeastern North America, so the natural conclusion by many is that these peoples venerated the eastern diamondback rattlesnake.  Or they could have just liked the motif.

One of my first lessons in archaeology was given by a guide at Rock Eagle in Georgia when I was in elementary school.  Naturally, that bird effigy on the ground must be an eagle or the site would have another name.  But as he said, “Rock Buzzard” is just as likely.  And even then, buzzards were probably much more common in this part of the world than eagles.

In the present case, these archaeologists are more convincing:

It is the earliest-known figurine worldwide showing human interaction with an animal, according to Laurent Davin, a postdoctoral researcher in archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and lead author of the study published on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  It is also the oldest-known naturalistic, rather than stylized, portrayal of a woman in art from Southwest Asia, Davin said.

The goose is positioned on the crouching woman’s back with its wings spread in a typical mating posture. The scene offers insight into this prehistoric culture’s belief system, Hebrew University archaeologist and study co-author Leore Grosman said.

“We interpreted the interaction scene as the depiction of the imagined mating between an animal spirit and a human. This theme is very common in animistic societies across the world in specific situations such as erotic dreams, shamanistic visions and myths,” Grosman said.

Animism is a belief system holding that natural things – living organisms such as plants and animals and inanimate objects like rocks and rivers – possess a spiritual essence.

“The scene itself – depicting a sexualized interaction between a human and an animal – is part of a long tradition in myth. Such imagery is rarely meant to be literal. Instead, it often symbolizes fertility, spiritual beliefs or the sacredness of life,” University of Connecticut anthropologist and study co-author Natalie Munro said.

“In many myths across history and cultures, gods or beings take on hybrid human-animal forms to convey symbolic meanings, not actual sexual activity,” Munro said.

This is something we can never know, but that people were doing sculpture 12,000 years ago may be evidence of a mind not much different from our own.  Julian Jaynes would probably disagree, and his The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is a very interesting book.

The PNAS paper is here (not yet behind a paywall but that is probably coming): A 12,000-year-old clay figurine of a woman and a goose marks symbolic innovations in Southwest Asia.  The illustrations show archeology at its best.  And later in the Levant, the goose had become a swan, sort of.  Continuity of the human psyche?  We can be our own judge of that.

Part the Fifth: Responses to The Making of the MAGA Right.  I rarely have time to engage the commentariat on alternate Wednesdays, so I would like to take this opportunity to do so.  First, thank you all for reading and your thoughtful comments.  I always come away from them knowing a lot more than I did before.

DJG, Reality Czar – Carpet tack, meet 16-oz carpenter’s hammer in a direct hit:

This is the usual religious / patriotic gore: “One of the postliberal changes that Deneen advocated in this vein was the embrace of an overtly Christian state, with holy holidays and tax-funded religious public works.”

Yep, I’m in favor of the U S of A putting Mary, the Theotokos, the Gran Madre di Dio, on the nickel. I’ll wait… And Saint Joseph’s Day as a national holiday, with traditional fritters of chickpeas. I’ll wait.

What these clowns want is power. What they don’t want is the Beatitudes getting in their way or inconvenient behavior by Saint Francis of Assisi — kissing lepers and using a stone for a pillow.

steppenwolf fetchit – Part of me wondered about this.  I think you have gotten to the point in response to Judith:

Vance wants to be President. The Legions of Saint Kirk will not accept a Hindu First Lady.

If Mrs. Vance won’t convert to Catholicism, then Mr. Vance will find a way to get divorced from her. Maybe he will try forcing her into seeking the divorce.

Henry Moon Pie – Absolutely on Richard John Neuhaus and First Things, and this gem, which I will use during a talk somewhere, sometime, with attribution:

Authority is the refuge of the frightened and the lost, and the calling card of the sociopath. Better to seek harmony, to reconcile with reality rather than trying to hide behind the skirts of some strong man or institution.

Henry Moon Pie – I agree that the common good can be defined, and this has been done by Kate Raworth, Herman Daly, and many others mostly unappreciated by the establishment.  This is a task for the remnant before the world becomes a remnant.

And thank you for appreciating my appreciation of the great Curt Flood.  There are few of us Little Leaguers left who had teachers who let us watch the World Series on a snowy black & white television during the middle of the day when the games rarely lasted much more than two hours.  My fourth-grade teacher was one of those!  We were the only fourth-grade class in my school that did not have to use a battery-powered transistor radio with the earplug. My sixth-grade teacher had the same view of baseball and I watched two games of the Orioles against the Dodgers – in a Series that seems to have had a dozen Hall of Famers.

And don’t forget, the late, great Bob Uecker – Mr. Baseball – was also on that 1964 Cardinals team as McCarver’s backup.

Gulag – Thank you for reminding us The Wizard of Kalorama recommended Deneen.  He would have.  You are certainly correct that Deneen was, and should have remained, in sympathy with Christopher Lasch and Wendell Berry.  Deneen was a founder of Front Porch Republic if I remember correctly.  FPR is hit or miss, but the hits are often resounding.

Shockley Jensen – Very interesting handle.  Is your middle name Herrnstein?

Hard to judge without reading, but it sounds like more willful misreading of the situation by liberal academia. No one with tenure had anything to do with what is happening on the right.

To begin to understand what is happening, it might be helpful to look at a list of every conservative thinker and writer that was cancelled by Buckley and his minions. It’s a long list but at the top there’s Sam Francis, Joe Sobran, Peter Brimelow and John Derbyshire.

Francis, Brimelow, and Derbyshire make their fleeting appearances in Furious Minds, as New Right racists.  Sobran is not in the index and I do not remember any mention of him.  According to LKF, “the ‘particularist’ nationalism (related to Abraham Lincoln) that Sam Francis defended was white nationalism.”  That is about as racist as it gets.

Plautus (Julius Krein) of Journal of American Greatness (seriously?) “quoted well-known racists – Steve Sailer, Peter Brimelow, and John Derbyshire – approvingly and mocked anyone – especially establishment conservatives – who might be squeamish about nativism and racism.”  LKF is not the only observer who knows these men are racists.  They are not bashful about it.

Derbyshire was fired in 2012 from National Review for a racist article he published at Taki’s Magazine (no, I did not look it up).  Bill Buckley died in 2008, so how Derbyshire was cancelled by Buckley is a mystery.  Buckley was a force of nature and I quite enjoyed Firing Line in my relative youth.  But I don’t think he came back from the grave to defenestrate these men.  Buckley’s minions?  Probably not, either.  Buckley’s legacy has little influence on most of the New Right.  Their “conservatism” is mere appurtenance to their animus toward The Other, and they have burdened themselves with a lot of Others.  This is in no way a modern conservatism worth considering.  I trust LKF.

One other thing, LKF is not “liberal academia.”  She was an academic from a legitimate conservative philosophical background who had second thoughts for very good reason.  Read her preface.  She left academia to become a scholar, that is, a person who begins with the world as it is instead of herself in relation to the world when trying the make sense of it all.

Cheers!

Happy Thanksgiving to our American friends!  See you next week.