“Alternate theory.” Oh dear god, it’s miasma, isn’t it.
Ok… he was aiming for miasma, but missed. We’re doomed.
He wrote an entire section on it in his 2021 book vilifying Fauci, titled The Real Anthony Fauci. The section is titled “Miasma vs. Germ Theory,” in the chapter “The White Man’s Burden.” […] Kennedy contrasts his erroneous take on miasma theory with germ theory, which he derides as a tool of the pharmaceutical industry and pushy scientists to justify selling modern medicines. The abandonment of miasma theory, Kennedy bemoans, realigned health and medical institutions to “the pharmaceutical paradigm that emphasized targeting particular germs with specific drugs rather than fortifying the immune system through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition.”
Edit: Apparently “The White Man’s Burden” is a racist poem by Rudyard Kipling from 1899 about how the US should colonize the Philippines… the “half devil, half child” people of the Philippines… Curious what that has to do with antiquated ideas about illness, but I’m afraid reading his book might give me brain worms. That’s how contagions work, right…?
Excuse me? In the chapter “The What, Now!!!” Holy fucking christ… dude is pre-Darwinian in his takes.
Edit: autocorrect
Also, I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.
It’s worse than you think.
The miasma part is pre-germ. The worst part is what’s following. The immune system and healthy living part is an ideology that is popular in the New Age beliefs. It was very popular in some communities in the 60s and 70s. But, it’s an older ideology about health. The Nazi themselves used this and believed (at least partially) in the immune system bullshit. They all base their beliefs on a German umbrella term and movement, the Lebensreform (German Wikipedia for a longer article )
It was promoted by wealthy bourgeois that lived in urban and industrialized areas of Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The intent was a natural and healthy lifestyle to counter the detrimental effects of industrialization, urban living, and “modernity” on health and overall well-being. It included for example organic food, alternative medicine but also spiritual and religious beliefs.
I highly recommend reading some lines about it. It helps to understand RFK Jr. and where his bullshit comes from.
It looks like these things are all over the board, going from useless and detrimental, to actually good, most of them contextual.
It’s like rfkj got brain damage and then tried to make sense if it. It’s like he almost gets it but then veers off to the side.
I was actually just talking to a person about this. How it’s pretty easy to pursue truth of a topic and continue down the wrong road, all just from a wrong premise or even a missing fact that gives you the wrong perspective and direction. Continuing to deepen an “understanding” of something, stubbornly. Add cognitive biases to a deep impairment, and now you’re ready to run the United States apparently.
I hate that in part because as someone who’s health has been damaged by industrialization (and by illness in my youth) they get even that part wrong.
Yes, a healthy diet and frequent exercise help me, but more important is avoiding pathogens and avoiding harmful pollutants.
When there was an outbreak of cholera in London in the 18th century, leading physicians of the time came up with the idea that sewerage was creating a “deadly miasma” and advised people to move to the country. This of course simply spread the outbreak to the rural areas where it was even more deadly.
The London sewerage system was created to deal with miasma, it wasn’t until late in the 19th century that it was discovered that cholera was spread from contaminated water supplies.
The white man’s burden is also used referentially to call out people who do things like travel to poor countries to build houses even though they have far less building experience than locals and the money they paid to get there would have gone much further, had it simply been donated in the form of building materials.
I don’t know how RFK Jr. is using it, but it almost certainly makes no sense.
Edit: oh, voluntourism! I knew there was a term for it
Ah yes, that makes sense. I pointed out this problem when I was a church kid on a mission trip to build shitty houses. I was told “it’s ok, it’s not really about the money spent now on flying you all here and feeding and housing you for two weeks, it’s that people who went on missions as teens are 500% more likely to donate to missions later.” It was the beginning of the end for me in the religious world.
The silver quicksilver lining is that plague doctor masks might be making a comeback, at least?
In science a theory is not enforced, it’s proven. If he believes whatever his worm is thinking to be true, go to a lab and get evidences for it. It’s not the European middle age anymore.
The rest of the world will be fine like when mao had the birds shot or when USSR relied on Lysenko instead of Vavilov. The US…people are going to have to get ok with shitty living real fast. Ironically, this giant reduction in the ability to consume will likely be great for the average carbon footprint.
I’m so glad there’s an ocean between us for when the shooting starts… Not that the collapse of the US won’t have enormous geopolitical ramifications, most of them bad.
Now we’re at the core of it. These morons never believed in germ theory at all. Nevermind the fact that at this point you can actually look at germs in a microscope.
They don’t believe in things they don’t understand, and they don’t understand things they can’t see with their own caveman senses.
We crawled out of 30,000 years of trying and failing to start a civilization, we almost went extinct, we lost countless billions of lives to war, murder, famine, disease and hardships of a natural world that doesn’t want us to live. Just to get to this point where a handful of coked-up, mentally handicapped rich fucks can decide all those countless sacrifices were for nothing.
It genuinely boggles me that Americans are at all accepting of this. Where the FUCK are my countrymen who see how stupid and dangerous this is? We should all be storming HHS and dragging RFK and his unqualified goon squad out to the lawn. Seriously. I am not kidding. Modern medical knowledge is too valuable to let some unelected clown who has zero knowledge or training to just decide to roll the entire thing back because his other clowns sowed distrust among our stupidest.
If we don’t rise up and do something, I strongly feel you all deserve what the consequences will be.
You can also just expose someone to a pathogen and predict the outcome based on the pathogen. Like the doctor who proved that Helicobacter pylori causes stomach ulcers and cancer by taking a shot of broth laced with the bacteria and, predictably, got stomach ulcers, which he successfully treated with antibiotics.
Remember an M.D… voted to install this dipshit because he’s a Republican.
Reject germ theory, embrace worm theory
