What a load of garbage in that 5th paragraph. The vaccines did end the pandemic….the failures of public health messaging and pitfall of endless boosters notwithstanding
A lot of what you say is true. And, remembering the time I was at the bedside caring for Covid patients, after the vaccines came out, we still had a lot of Covid patients, but they were 99% unvaccinated patients. I got Covid just before the vaccine came out, and then I got vaccinated, and I think that gave me good immunity (yes, yes an N=1 "study").
I intubated dozens of patients in the ICU, wearing an N95 or HEPA filter, and I never got covid from the hospital. I went to buy fireworks with my son in a crowded shop in July 2020 with a surgical mask, and I didn't catch it then. I think we can't throw out the baby with the bathwater, and I also agree that the public health authorities made a lot of mistakes.
And, we all were drowning from Covid patients. Our hospital nearly ran out of ventilators. We were really trying to prevent our hospital from collapsing.
As a retired (reformed?) cardiologist I have not seen expensive, utterly fruitless end of life care addressed. Horrific advanced procedures and unnecessary tests, with little data in this population, done to those who sadly have little time remaining on this earth no matter what happens causing the family grief and despair, the patient suffering and time lost that could be spent in comfort at home . Not to mention personal financial ruin and running up the national debt. I hope RFK, Jr and his staff have the bandwidth to take this on.
I certainly agree with all the aims and principles in this article but think that the proposed solutions don't go far enough. Kennedy and most others think that changing the leadership will solve the problem. But those causing the problems won't just go away. They will be back. The only real solution is to eliminate all the government departments and agencies that have anything to do with medical care. This means elimination of all "public health' agencies at every level---federal, state, and local---and establishing a true free market in medical care. I am not naive enough to think that this will ever happen, but any movement in that direction would be welcome.
This is an excellent piece. RFK Jr. has repeatedly said that he wants the data and he wants real answers. From the FDA and the CDC (and much of NIH) for the past 20 years we have gotten mountains of what have turned out to be data-unsupported/corrupted lies. CDC needs to be completely reconstituted and FDA needs serious reform. As a physician I now have a renewed desire to see the honest data on EVERYTHING -- I have gone to reading the data tables in papers to discover how often the conclusions lie. (Something brought out in Sensible Medicine regularly.)
Nothing should be beyond study. Things done to millions of people deserve studies beyond six dead mice. The real problem is, as always, the government which can legally coerce anyone to do anything. Together with companies looking to maximize profits, what we have is fascism as classically defined through and through. The grift runs entirely up and down the chain -- The journals, the medical establishment, the medical organizations -- all reading out of the same unsubstantiated (in many cases) playbooks because it is congruent with politics and graft that are the "things to support today".
I surely do not agree with RFK Jr. on many things. But the electorate has clearly shown that they want a major house cleaning and significant disruption to a system that costs far too much, empowers people far too little in their own lives, and kills squirrels "because they can" -- of course it takes 12 armed agents to do so just to make sure it is maximally intrusive and costs as much as possible.
RFK Jr. at least has the constitution to try to do this properly. Most of the others proposed by the usual "let's just do more of the same" ilk will just do more of the same. This is the time to try something different...and, with luck, better. It is not clear it can be much worse than what we have had. Covid showed how bad it is -- but now every place one looks, there is more of the same.
Good luck RFK Jr. We as physicians should be at the forefront of regaining our autonomy, our ability to do for patients what we think best, and some kind of earned respect in the eyes of our patients -- much of which we have lost due to government and commercial interference.
I’m not sure I’d frame it as an either-or proposition.
To be sure, the shortcomings of the FDA, CDC, and the “big people” (h/t to Dr. JMM) tastemakers who write guidelines etc, are many. And those have been on display and front-of-mind for the public since 2020. A course-correction in the “system” would be welcomed. Power to RFK Jr if he can do so in a thoughtful and effective way.
And there’s nothing wrong with promoting healthy lifestyles, in that motherhood-statement sort of way. It’s often been noted that the “healthcare” system merely deals with “sick-care”….after all, most people only see their doctor when they’re “sick”….but the system is not equipped to actually promote healthy lifestyles per se. Changing that paradigm could have societal benefits….although to me that would seem to require people to fulfill personal responsibilities (to the maintenance and promotion of their own good health), whereas the target audience is generally more keen to assert rights. So good luck with that. Nonetheless, RFK Jr does bring some of that advocacy to the table.
However, the tradeoff is the quackery. And I say this from the perspective that a lot of his “enthusiasms” are quackery due to an absence of evidence. Vaccines cause autism? Really? FFS. Prove it. Ivermectin? Really? FFS. Prove it. “Health promotion” still has the onus to prove it, to give us reason to reject the null.
So let’s hope he rejects FDA stupidity without replacing it with health-nut quackery.
Steve, I personally know two families whose kids got serious regressive autism post-vaccines, and a met a third person for which it was their niece. It's not always the MMR. It may be rare, but when kids regress - stop talking, stop making eye contact, stop acting normally - or worse start smearing feces on the wall - it upends a healthy family and the US is abandoning those families and the help they need.
The problem isn't necessarily even the serious cases, which are rare, but the steady increase of kids "on the spectrum". And the CDC pretends like the one study it did is somehow the end of the story (and there are claims that data were omitted to make it look like there is no connection), yet other information coming from practices where parents are allowed to choose their vaccine schedule where there's a difference in autism or the Amish, and yet no one talks about it.
There's also acknowledgement in the pet owner community that vaccines can cause behavioral issues similar to autism, as well as concerns over the amount of aluminum in the childhood schedule which can travel to the brain, but again no one wants to look into it. So we have plenty of stuff to look into, and the CDC refuses.
I agree not either/or. A healthy pharma and device industry is essential to a good health care system. What is unhealthy is the degree to which corporate interests are driving the agenda in US health care. We need to re-establish a healthy balance which puts “health” and “care” back at the center.
Excellent piece, and I agree with the need to counteract corporate influence in medicine. But let's not overlook the fundamental culprit - government. As Dr. Marine's COVID example shows, government was at the root of that misguided approach, as it is at the root of our rotting healthcare system. Corporations simply take advantage of the environment they find themselves in, as they do in any industry when allowed to. It seems paradoxical, but only when government limits its own involvement in healthcare (focusing perhaps on antitrust issues and access for the poorest) will healthcare work its way out of this mess.
Yes, the heavy hand of big govt is at work here too. Need to restore a more healthy balance. Health care could use a good dose of deregulation to unleash more disruptive innovation.
Recently published in National Review by Yuval Levin
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a raving conspiracist with a dangerously loose grip on reality. Maybe that makes him an ideal match for Donald Trump, but that is not the question before the Senate. The question before the Senate is whether he should run the Department of Health and Human Services, and the answer — even after accounting for some due deference to the president’s preferences — is that he very obviously should not.
There are many traditional political reasons for Republican senators to object to Kennedy’s nomination — like his support for abortion and single-payer health care and his complete lack of any relevant experience in government or in administration or management. But that he is a reckless crackpot, and that a lot of the ridiculous lies he peddles and believes have directly to do with the work of the agency he is seeking to run, are more fundamental and inescapable reasons. Most Republican senators seem to know this, but they appear to think denying the president his choice for this position would be an extraordinary and explosive move. It would not. It’s a straightforward part of their job, and if enough of them join together to announce they will do it in advance, it would just mean Trump has to choose someone else.
He's not a raving conspiracist. He's an environmental lawyer who has read the documentation that comes from discovery in the cases he's litigated. And that's what makes him so dangerous. He cares about people, not profits or Pharma, and he's spent decades learning their secrets.
Can someone explain how this movement will result in the public getting more evidence-based health care than they do now? It seems more likely to me that it will result in even more corporate capture and conspiracy theories.
About a year ago it was reported that "The Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act of 2023, which would allow schools to serve whole milk, has hit a roadblock in the U.S. Senate. After the bill passed the House last week with a vote of 330-99 and advanced to the Senate, U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) tried to have it pass by unanimous consent so it could head straight to President Biden’s desk. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, (D-Mich.), chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, rejected Sen. Marshalls request, however, stating that while she supports the dairy industry, decisions regarding nutrition in school meals must continue to be made by science." https://www.foodservicedirector.com/foodservice-operations/whole-milk-in-schools-bill-blocked-in-u-s-senate
The anti-saturated fat dogma, promoted by the American Heart Association and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion was never based on anything resembling scientific certainty.
Outside pressure to correct this perpetual mistake in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans prompted federal nutrition scientists in the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion and the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion to write an article entitled ‘Addressing misinformation about the Dietary Guidelines for Americans’. The authors wrote, “Unfortunately, misinformation about the scientific basis, transparency, and relevance of the DGA for the United States population threatens its credibility. The main objective of this article is to correct this misinformation with factual information about the process used to develop the DGA.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38522617/
Actually, the only issue is the scientific basis for the Government’s dietary advice regarding fat intake. A 2012 article begins, “Is a particular dietary recommendation harming people in the U.S.? For almost 20 years, scientists have been arguing over whether Americans and others on a typical Western diet are eating too much of omega-6s, a class of essential fatty acids. Some experts, notably ones affiliated with the American Heart Association, credit our current intake of omega-6s with lowering the incidence of cardiovascular disease. Others, which include biochemists, say the relatively high intake of omega-6 is a reason for a slew of chronic illnesses in the Western world, including asthma, various cancers, neurological disorders and cardiovascular disease itself.” https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/science/110212/an-essential-debate
The ‘Addressing Misinformation’ article says, “A large body of evidence reviewed by multiple DGACs, including strong and consistent evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) reviewed by the 2020 DGAC, shows that replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fats, especially polyunsaturated fat, significantly reduces total and LDL cholesterol in adults.”
While the above may be true, the evidence from observation and experiment suggests that swapping saturated fats for polyunsaturated fats makes people more vulnerable to COVID-19 complications. For example, in a June 18, 2020 interview, Vijay P. Singh said, "Separately, on analyzing global COVID-19 mortality data and comparing it with 12 risk factors for mortality, they found unsaturated fat intake to be associated with increased mortality. This was based on the dietary fat patterns of 61 countries in the United Nations' Food and Agricultural Organization database. Surprisingly, they found saturated fats to be protective." https://www.medpagetoday.com/reading-room/aga/lower-gi/86940
In a 2021 article entitled 'Adipose saturation reduces lipotoxic systemic inflammation and explains the obesity paradox' the authors concluded, "... diet-induced visceral fat unsaturation increases lipolytic generation of unsaturated monomeric NEFA that cause cell injury, systemic inflammation, and organ failure. Long-chain SFAs like palmitate, however, interfere with this lipolysis, generating lower amounts of monomeric NEFA, making pancreatitis milder despite excess adiposity, thus explaining the obesity paradox. The FDA guidelines to reduce saturated and increase unsaturated fat intake could therefore potentially contribute to worsening systemic inflammation and organ failure." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7846167/
A 2022 reseaarch paper says, "Fatty acid composition in the Western diet has shifted from saturated to polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), and specifically to linoleic acid (LA, 18:2), which has gradually increased in the diet over the past 50 y to become the most abundant dietary fatty acid in human adipose tissue. PUFA-derived oxylipins regulate a variety of biological functions. The cytochrome P450 (CYP450)–formed epoxy fatty acid metabolites of LA (EpOMEs) are hydrolyzed by the soluble epoxide hydrolase enzyme (sEH) to dihydroxyoctadecenoic acids (DiHOMEs). DiHOMEs are considered cardioprotective at low concentrations but at higher levels have been implicated as vascular permeability and cytotoxic agents and are associated with acute respiratory distress syndrome in severe COVID-19 patients." https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2120691119
Clearly, the government-sanctioned dietary advice that promoted the increase in the polyunsaturated fatty acid content of the food supply has made much of humanity vulnerable to COVID-19 complications.
Was Dr Marine in the hospitals when the pandemic was raging prevaccination ? It was a very stressful and scary time..previously healthy people under 40 years old needing ECMO support to survive a new highly contagious virus. Supposing it had been a new airborne variant of Ebola ? Hindsight is always 20:20. How quickly we forget. It may be the death of us.
Thank you for your comment. Yes I was in the Johns Hopkins Hospital almost every day of the pandemic. My office is 50 feet from the unit that was used as the main Covid ICU. I served in it for 8 days in the first wave. I also volunteered as a Hospitalist while continue my work as a cardiologist. I never closed my outpatient clinic. None of us had any fear and, to the best of my knowledge , no one got seriously ill from Covid. It was a strain on the hospital, to be sure, but manageable and we were never at risk of “collapse”. Our 1000-bed hospital had a peak covid census of about 150. All hospitals are filled with very sick people every day. The only difference was that some of them had Covid. The other difference was that the public health community, aided by the media, decided to terrify the public in order to comply with their futile zero covid control scheme. From my perspective, Covid was a serious but manageable health event but was never an existential threat. The framing of it has such was fraudulent.
I love this piece so much. Thank you for articulating so well what so many of us are thinking. I pray more doctors will now have the courage stand up and speak out.
Please. There are many choices for this position who could address root causes of the chronic illnesses that plague Americans, the corporate influences on government, and Washington group think who don't say insane things like vaccines cause autism or "Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people". And for the love of Pete please stop litigating the pandemic. Yes, mistakes were made, usually by well meaning individuals. I realize I'm preaching to the knee jerk oppositional defiant club, but every time I read one of these reductionist screeds by a sub specialist of a subspecialty (who could never suffer a cognitive bias), I reach for the cancellation button.
The autism link is real, just speak to a parent whose happy, normal child became autistic within a few days of the mmr shot. Isn’t it worth further investigation? Sure most kids do fine, but we need to know what children might be at risk. That’s where rfk comes in. He is not opposed to truly safe vaccines that have been transparently, appropriately tested, which has not been the case.
I loved reading this - this strikes me as the most forward-thinking, optimistic posture to take on the controversial pick. The public has been ill-served by the pharmaceutical special interests for decades. The system is begging for disruption; one could argue it couldn’t get much worse. So I’m thrilled by the physicians that are embracing the chance to improve the system to which they’ve devoted their lives.
What a load of garbage in that 5th paragraph. The vaccines did end the pandemic….the failures of public health messaging and pitfall of endless boosters notwithstanding
A lot of what you say is true. And, remembering the time I was at the bedside caring for Covid patients, after the vaccines came out, we still had a lot of Covid patients, but they were 99% unvaccinated patients. I got Covid just before the vaccine came out, and then I got vaccinated, and I think that gave me good immunity (yes, yes an N=1 "study").
I intubated dozens of patients in the ICU, wearing an N95 or HEPA filter, and I never got covid from the hospital. I went to buy fireworks with my son in a crowded shop in July 2020 with a surgical mask, and I didn't catch it then. I think we can't throw out the baby with the bathwater, and I also agree that the public health authorities made a lot of mistakes.
And, we all were drowning from Covid patients. Our hospital nearly ran out of ventilators. We were really trying to prevent our hospital from collapsing.
I'm sorry this is off topic but I can't find the protocol for DMSO and arthritis.
As a retired (reformed?) cardiologist I have not seen expensive, utterly fruitless end of life care addressed. Horrific advanced procedures and unnecessary tests, with little data in this population, done to those who sadly have little time remaining on this earth no matter what happens causing the family grief and despair, the patient suffering and time lost that could be spent in comfort at home . Not to mention personal financial ruin and running up the national debt. I hope RFK, Jr and his staff have the bandwidth to take this on.
We tried in the past and were met with accusations of creating death panels.
I certainly agree with all the aims and principles in this article but think that the proposed solutions don't go far enough. Kennedy and most others think that changing the leadership will solve the problem. But those causing the problems won't just go away. They will be back. The only real solution is to eliminate all the government departments and agencies that have anything to do with medical care. This means elimination of all "public health' agencies at every level---federal, state, and local---and establishing a true free market in medical care. I am not naive enough to think that this will ever happen, but any movement in that direction would be welcome.
This is an excellent piece. RFK Jr. has repeatedly said that he wants the data and he wants real answers. From the FDA and the CDC (and much of NIH) for the past 20 years we have gotten mountains of what have turned out to be data-unsupported/corrupted lies. CDC needs to be completely reconstituted and FDA needs serious reform. As a physician I now have a renewed desire to see the honest data on EVERYTHING -- I have gone to reading the data tables in papers to discover how often the conclusions lie. (Something brought out in Sensible Medicine regularly.)
Nothing should be beyond study. Things done to millions of people deserve studies beyond six dead mice. The real problem is, as always, the government which can legally coerce anyone to do anything. Together with companies looking to maximize profits, what we have is fascism as classically defined through and through. The grift runs entirely up and down the chain -- The journals, the medical establishment, the medical organizations -- all reading out of the same unsubstantiated (in many cases) playbooks because it is congruent with politics and graft that are the "things to support today".
I surely do not agree with RFK Jr. on many things. But the electorate has clearly shown that they want a major house cleaning and significant disruption to a system that costs far too much, empowers people far too little in their own lives, and kills squirrels "because they can" -- of course it takes 12 armed agents to do so just to make sure it is maximally intrusive and costs as much as possible.
RFK Jr. at least has the constitution to try to do this properly. Most of the others proposed by the usual "let's just do more of the same" ilk will just do more of the same. This is the time to try something different...and, with luck, better. It is not clear it can be much worse than what we have had. Covid showed how bad it is -- but now every place one looks, there is more of the same.
Good luck RFK Jr. We as physicians should be at the forefront of regaining our autonomy, our ability to do for patients what we think best, and some kind of earned respect in the eyes of our patients -- much of which we have lost due to government and commercial interference.
I’m not sure I’d frame it as an either-or proposition.
To be sure, the shortcomings of the FDA, CDC, and the “big people” (h/t to Dr. JMM) tastemakers who write guidelines etc, are many. And those have been on display and front-of-mind for the public since 2020. A course-correction in the “system” would be welcomed. Power to RFK Jr if he can do so in a thoughtful and effective way.
And there’s nothing wrong with promoting healthy lifestyles, in that motherhood-statement sort of way. It’s often been noted that the “healthcare” system merely deals with “sick-care”….after all, most people only see their doctor when they’re “sick”….but the system is not equipped to actually promote healthy lifestyles per se. Changing that paradigm could have societal benefits….although to me that would seem to require people to fulfill personal responsibilities (to the maintenance and promotion of their own good health), whereas the target audience is generally more keen to assert rights. So good luck with that. Nonetheless, RFK Jr does bring some of that advocacy to the table.
However, the tradeoff is the quackery. And I say this from the perspective that a lot of his “enthusiasms” are quackery due to an absence of evidence. Vaccines cause autism? Really? FFS. Prove it. Ivermectin? Really? FFS. Prove it. “Health promotion” still has the onus to prove it, to give us reason to reject the null.
So let’s hope he rejects FDA stupidity without replacing it with health-nut quackery.
Steve, I personally know two families whose kids got serious regressive autism post-vaccines, and a met a third person for which it was their niece. It's not always the MMR. It may be rare, but when kids regress - stop talking, stop making eye contact, stop acting normally - or worse start smearing feces on the wall - it upends a healthy family and the US is abandoning those families and the help they need.
The problem isn't necessarily even the serious cases, which are rare, but the steady increase of kids "on the spectrum". And the CDC pretends like the one study it did is somehow the end of the story (and there are claims that data were omitted to make it look like there is no connection), yet other information coming from practices where parents are allowed to choose their vaccine schedule where there's a difference in autism or the Amish, and yet no one talks about it.
There's also acknowledgement in the pet owner community that vaccines can cause behavioral issues similar to autism, as well as concerns over the amount of aluminum in the childhood schedule which can travel to the brain, but again no one wants to look into it. So we have plenty of stuff to look into, and the CDC refuses.
I agree not either/or. A healthy pharma and device industry is essential to a good health care system. What is unhealthy is the degree to which corporate interests are driving the agenda in US health care. We need to re-establish a healthy balance which puts “health” and “care” back at the center.
Excellent piece, and I agree with the need to counteract corporate influence in medicine. But let's not overlook the fundamental culprit - government. As Dr. Marine's COVID example shows, government was at the root of that misguided approach, as it is at the root of our rotting healthcare system. Corporations simply take advantage of the environment they find themselves in, as they do in any industry when allowed to. It seems paradoxical, but only when government limits its own involvement in healthcare (focusing perhaps on antitrust issues and access for the poorest) will healthcare work its way out of this mess.
Agreed. We could stop with the government prebuying doses of vaccines and medications.
Yes, the heavy hand of big govt is at work here too. Need to restore a more healthy balance. Health care could use a good dose of deregulation to unleash more disruptive innovation.
Recently published in National Review by Yuval Levin
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a raving conspiracist with a dangerously loose grip on reality. Maybe that makes him an ideal match for Donald Trump, but that is not the question before the Senate. The question before the Senate is whether he should run the Department of Health and Human Services, and the answer — even after accounting for some due deference to the president’s preferences — is that he very obviously should not.
There are many traditional political reasons for Republican senators to object to Kennedy’s nomination — like his support for abortion and single-payer health care and his complete lack of any relevant experience in government or in administration or management. But that he is a reckless crackpot, and that a lot of the ridiculous lies he peddles and believes have directly to do with the work of the agency he is seeking to run, are more fundamental and inescapable reasons. Most Republican senators seem to know this, but they appear to think denying the president his choice for this position would be an extraordinary and explosive move. It would not. It’s a straightforward part of their job, and if enough of them join together to announce they will do it in advance, it would just mean Trump has to choose someone else.
He's not a raving conspiracist. He's an environmental lawyer who has read the documentation that comes from discovery in the cases he's litigated. And that's what makes him so dangerous. He cares about people, not profits or Pharma, and he's spent decades learning their secrets.
Can someone explain how this movement will result in the public getting more evidence-based health care than they do now? It seems more likely to me that it will result in even more corporate capture and conspiracy theories.
About a year ago it was reported that "The Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act of 2023, which would allow schools to serve whole milk, has hit a roadblock in the U.S. Senate. After the bill passed the House last week with a vote of 330-99 and advanced to the Senate, U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) tried to have it pass by unanimous consent so it could head straight to President Biden’s desk. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, (D-Mich.), chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, rejected Sen. Marshalls request, however, stating that while she supports the dairy industry, decisions regarding nutrition in school meals must continue to be made by science." https://www.foodservicedirector.com/foodservice-operations/whole-milk-in-schools-bill-blocked-in-u-s-senate
The anti-saturated fat dogma, promoted by the American Heart Association and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion was never based on anything resembling scientific certainty.
Outside pressure to correct this perpetual mistake in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans prompted federal nutrition scientists in the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion and the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion to write an article entitled ‘Addressing misinformation about the Dietary Guidelines for Americans’. The authors wrote, “Unfortunately, misinformation about the scientific basis, transparency, and relevance of the DGA for the United States population threatens its credibility. The main objective of this article is to correct this misinformation with factual information about the process used to develop the DGA.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38522617/
Actually, the only issue is the scientific basis for the Government’s dietary advice regarding fat intake. A 2012 article begins, “Is a particular dietary recommendation harming people in the U.S.? For almost 20 years, scientists have been arguing over whether Americans and others on a typical Western diet are eating too much of omega-6s, a class of essential fatty acids. Some experts, notably ones affiliated with the American Heart Association, credit our current intake of omega-6s with lowering the incidence of cardiovascular disease. Others, which include biochemists, say the relatively high intake of omega-6 is a reason for a slew of chronic illnesses in the Western world, including asthma, various cancers, neurological disorders and cardiovascular disease itself.” https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/science/110212/an-essential-debate
The ‘Addressing Misinformation’ article says, “A large body of evidence reviewed by multiple DGACs, including strong and consistent evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) reviewed by the 2020 DGAC, shows that replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fats, especially polyunsaturated fat, significantly reduces total and LDL cholesterol in adults.”
While the above may be true, the evidence from observation and experiment suggests that swapping saturated fats for polyunsaturated fats makes people more vulnerable to COVID-19 complications. For example, in a June 18, 2020 interview, Vijay P. Singh said, "Separately, on analyzing global COVID-19 mortality data and comparing it with 12 risk factors for mortality, they found unsaturated fat intake to be associated with increased mortality. This was based on the dietary fat patterns of 61 countries in the United Nations' Food and Agricultural Organization database. Surprisingly, they found saturated fats to be protective." https://www.medpagetoday.com/reading-room/aga/lower-gi/86940
In a 2021 article entitled 'Adipose saturation reduces lipotoxic systemic inflammation and explains the obesity paradox' the authors concluded, "... diet-induced visceral fat unsaturation increases lipolytic generation of unsaturated monomeric NEFA that cause cell injury, systemic inflammation, and organ failure. Long-chain SFAs like palmitate, however, interfere with this lipolysis, generating lower amounts of monomeric NEFA, making pancreatitis milder despite excess adiposity, thus explaining the obesity paradox. The FDA guidelines to reduce saturated and increase unsaturated fat intake could therefore potentially contribute to worsening systemic inflammation and organ failure." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7846167/
A 2022 reseaarch paper says, "Fatty acid composition in the Western diet has shifted from saturated to polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), and specifically to linoleic acid (LA, 18:2), which has gradually increased in the diet over the past 50 y to become the most abundant dietary fatty acid in human adipose tissue. PUFA-derived oxylipins regulate a variety of biological functions. The cytochrome P450 (CYP450)–formed epoxy fatty acid metabolites of LA (EpOMEs) are hydrolyzed by the soluble epoxide hydrolase enzyme (sEH) to dihydroxyoctadecenoic acids (DiHOMEs). DiHOMEs are considered cardioprotective at low concentrations but at higher levels have been implicated as vascular permeability and cytotoxic agents and are associated with acute respiratory distress syndrome in severe COVID-19 patients." https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2120691119
Clearly, the government-sanctioned dietary advice that promoted the increase in the polyunsaturated fatty acid content of the food supply has made much of humanity vulnerable to COVID-19 complications.
Was Dr Marine in the hospitals when the pandemic was raging prevaccination ? It was a very stressful and scary time..previously healthy people under 40 years old needing ECMO support to survive a new highly contagious virus. Supposing it had been a new airborne variant of Ebola ? Hindsight is always 20:20. How quickly we forget. It may be the death of us.
Thank you for your comment. Yes I was in the Johns Hopkins Hospital almost every day of the pandemic. My office is 50 feet from the unit that was used as the main Covid ICU. I served in it for 8 days in the first wave. I also volunteered as a Hospitalist while continue my work as a cardiologist. I never closed my outpatient clinic. None of us had any fear and, to the best of my knowledge , no one got seriously ill from Covid. It was a strain on the hospital, to be sure, but manageable and we were never at risk of “collapse”. Our 1000-bed hospital had a peak covid census of about 150. All hospitals are filled with very sick people every day. The only difference was that some of them had Covid. The other difference was that the public health community, aided by the media, decided to terrify the public in order to comply with their futile zero covid control scheme. From my perspective, Covid was a serious but manageable health event but was never an existential threat. The framing of it has such was fraudulent.
I love this piece so much. Thank you for articulating so well what so many of us are thinking. I pray more doctors will now have the courage stand up and speak out.
Get rid of TV pharma ads and PBM’s I’ll be good w that! And he is a fit senior!!!
MAHAnow.org has caps and winter beenies
Please. There are many choices for this position who could address root causes of the chronic illnesses that plague Americans, the corporate influences on government, and Washington group think who don't say insane things like vaccines cause autism or "Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people". And for the love of Pete please stop litigating the pandemic. Yes, mistakes were made, usually by well meaning individuals. I realize I'm preaching to the knee jerk oppositional defiant club, but every time I read one of these reductionist screeds by a sub specialist of a subspecialty (who could never suffer a cognitive bias), I reach for the cancellation button.
The autism link is real, just speak to a parent whose happy, normal child became autistic within a few days of the mmr shot. Isn’t it worth further investigation? Sure most kids do fine, but we need to know what children might be at risk. That’s where rfk comes in. He is not opposed to truly safe vaccines that have been transparently, appropriately tested, which has not been the case.
Julian Simmons
I loved reading this - this strikes me as the most forward-thinking, optimistic posture to take on the controversial pick. The public has been ill-served by the pharmaceutical special interests for decades. The system is begging for disruption; one could argue it couldn’t get much worse. So I’m thrilled by the physicians that are embracing the chance to improve the system to which they’ve devoted their lives.