Maybe RFK Jr. Has A Point, Episode Too Many
By I have a simple heuristic for trying to understand whether people have a good point. If they suggest injecting bleach or if they bundle a roadkilled bear cub into their car to eat later, you don’t need to take anything else they say seriously.
But there’s a pundit industry that shies away from such unnuanced thinking. It allows them to write more words.
Some of the words that the bleach-injectors and bear-cub-eaters emit occasionally resemble word-strings that others have constructed. Chatbots do so with equal regularity. This is not the same as “having a point.”
In the May 19 New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr distorts the history of ACT UP to try to convince us that RFK Jr. has a point. The point seems to be that challenging authority is a good thing. Immerwahr and RFK Jr. are just asking questions.
That pattern of words may seem familiar. They are not exactly what Immerwahr has said. I have simplified them. But he comes close, and that seems to be his message.
Gregg Gonsalves wrote a long Bluesky thread that works through the whole article. I’ll include highlights here. Here is an unroll of the entire thread.
Immerwahr claims that nonpharmaceutical interventions (like masks) have been shown not to have worked. His evidence is thin and selective.
And his ending:
I’ve tried to figure out why COVID contrarianism is catnip for some liberal commentators like Immerwahr, Macedo and Lee. It’s baffling in the extreme and has sent at least the last two into the arms of a man who is helping to destroy American science. 33/
Some of it is displacement of their own anger, grief about the pandemic on to “scientific insiders,” the field of “public health,” rather than a virus that has killed over a million people in this country. 34/
Some of it was the fact that many of the well, laptop class, had their lives turned upside down like everyone else but had never had to think of their liberalism in terms of any real sacrifice before and they resent it deeply. 35/
Whatever it is, the wave of COVID contrarianism sweeping through places like the @NewYorker is troubling because so much of it is scientifically illiterate, representing clear-cut cases of motivated reasoning. 36/
And articles like Immerwahr’s, Macedo and Lee’s book are playing footsie with the right, and claiming progressive bona fides for doing so. 37/
They are driving a narrative that is unhelpful in preparing us for future threats as @weparmet.bsky.social, @drsinhaesq.bsky.social & I discuss in @NEJM. While it may feel good to find someone to blame for COVID, in the end these pieces lead us dangerously astray. end/
Significant numbers of COVID cases and deaths continue. RFK Jr. and his picks for HHS posts, like Jay Bhattarcharya, are weakening the public health structures that protect us. The Washington Post today reports on an E. coli outbreak that affected 80 people. No public notice was given.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner