Best of times, worst of times: our ability to fight cancer and other diseases using new mRNA and other technologies are nearly limitless, but they are being systematically crushed by pernicious MAHA ideologies and conspiracies…all to influence election outcomes and line the pockets of the wellness influencers, so frustrating

Last night @SecKennedy defended the President’s claim that children receive vaccinations the size of a soda bottle. His explanation was that the President meant the cumulative volume of the whole schedule when he said he’d seen vaccinations “the size of a soda bottle being poured into a child.” OK, then let’s do the whole schedule. A vaccine dose is 0.5 milliliters. One tenth of a teaspoon. Every parent who has taken their kid in for shots has seen the syringe. It’s not a soda bottle. That’s absurd. The biggest visit of a child’s life is the 2-month visit. Five injections, about 2.5 milliliters, half a teaspoon. Everything a baby receives by injection in the first 6 months of life adds up to roughly 2 teaspoons. The whole schedule, birth through age 18, every recommended vaccine, including a flu shot every single year, comes to roughly 55 injections and under 30 milliliters. A shot glass holds 44. Eighteen years of childhood vaccines do not fill a shot glass. A 20-ounce soda bottle holds 590 milliliters. That is more than 20 times the entire schedule, more than 200 times the biggest visit, and more than 1,000 times an actual dose. No version of this claim comes anywhere near a soda bottle. An executive order was signed anyway. @SecKennedy also repeated that childhood vaccines were never tested in placebo-controlled trials. My colleagues and I have systematically reviewed every randomized trial of childhood vaccines back to 1940. Nearly all were placebo-controlled, every vaccine on the schedule was evaluated in at least one placebo-controlled trial, and close to half used plain saline or the equivalent. The mumps vaccine inside the MMR was proven against placebo in the 1960s. The first hepatitis B vaccine was proven in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980. The 1954 polio trial randomized roughly 600,000 children to vaccine or placebo, still the largest medical experiment ever conducted. So here is where we are. The President described something that does not exist and could not exist, a soda bottle of vaccine poured into a child, the same instinct as suggesting people inject disinfectant. And when the Secretary of Health and Human Services was asked a simple yes-or-no question about whether it was accurate, he couldn’t say no. He defended it. The nation’s top health official either doesn’t know what a vaccine dose looks like or won’t say so, and I honestly don’t know which is worse. Nobody around this president will correct him, even about a syringe, even with children’s health on the line. So the fantasy stands, the executive order stands, and parents are left frightened of something that was never real, in the middle of the worst measles year since 1991, with over 2,500 cases and counting. The arithmetic takes five minutes. The fear takes five seconds. That’s the whole strategy.

I was pregnant and got COVID during my first trimester in April, 2020, while working at Rikers. I’d had 2 miscarriages and a failed round of IVF before, and as I lay in bed, I mostly worried that I’d lose this pregnancy, too. I didn’t - 4th time’s a charm. But by the end of that year, it was clear that infection during pregnancy in a woman with no immunity really did raise the risk of serious COVID and pregnancy complications, including preeclampsia. Vaccination during pregnancy, conversely, has been shown not to cause serious harms in pregnant women or to contribute to their miscarriage risk. The Fauci emails under discussion today show a thoughtful exchange between scientists navigating uncertainty at a time when they had to offer guidance to the public. This was one of the areas where the recommendations they arrived at turned out to be extremely sound: the risk of infection really did (does) outweigh the risk of vaccination. Everyone who is taking messages out of context to inspire rage and regret in women who lost pregnancies during the pandemic is doing those women a great disservice. There’s enough second guessing that goes on in those situations; and Fauci is neither directly nor indirectly responsible for anyone’s pregnancy loss.

JUST IN: You do not fire your Army Chief of Staff in the middle of a war for no reason. You fire him because of what comes next. Pete Hegseth called General Randy George on April 2 and told him to retire immediately. The Pentagon confirmed it within hours. No reason was given. Not publicly. Not privately. A senior Army official told Fox News that Hegseth offered George nothing: no misconduct, no operational failure, no policy disagreement on the record. Just a phone call and a career ending in the middle of the most significant American combat operation in two decades. George is the 24th general or admiral Hegseth has removed. But he is not the 24th. He is the one that matters. The Army Chief of Staff. The man whose signature sits between a president’s intent and the order that sends soldiers across a beach or into a tunnel complex. The 82nd Airborne is deploying right now. Marines from the 31st MEU are staged on the USS Tripoli. JSOC operators are at forward bases in Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Kharg Island, 90 percent of Iranian oil exports, sits 16 kilometres off a coast that someone will have to decide whether to approach. And the four-star general whose job it was to advise whether that approach should happen was removed 48 hours after Trump told the nation the war would continue for two to three more weeks. The replacement is Vice Chief General Christopher LaNeve. He was Hegseth’s senior military aide before this appointment. The man who carried the Secretary’s briefcase now commands the Army the Secretary is reshaping. The chain of command did not break. It shortened. The distance between a television studio and a combat order just collapsed to zero intermediaries who were not personally selected by the man giving the order. No reason was given. That is the tell. When someone is removed without explanation during a crisis, the explanation is the crisis itself. George either objected to something or was about to. The ground option. The power plant strikes. The Kharg raid. The escalation that turned a highway bridge in Karaj into rubble on the same day he was told to leave. Something in the next two weeks requires a chief who will not push back, and the Pentagon solved that problem by installing one trained as Hegseth’s aide. A former Fox News weekend host just fired a four-star general with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, replaced him with his own former assistant, and did it during a live war in which the next decision could put American soldiers on Iranian soil for the first time in history. No hearing was held. No misconduct cited. The Army woke up on April 3 with a new chief it did not choose, in a war it did not start, preparing for a phase the previous chief apparently could not be trusted to execute. The question is not why George was fired. Every general in the building knows why. The question is what order is coming in the next fourteen days that required removing the one man in the chain of command who might have said no. The war has no perimeter. The chain of command has no objectors. And the next phase has no one left to stop it. open.substack.com/pub/shanak…