• Anti-Science America in a Demon Haunted World

    From ltlee1@21:1/5 to All on Fri Apr 4 21:52:12 2025
    1. WSJ article today:

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ousted Vaccine Chief Says RFK Jr.’s Team Sought Data to Justify
    Anti-Science Stance
    Dr. Peter Marks says the new health secretary’s team wants to show
    vaccines aren’t safe while promoting dangerous and unproven treatments

    By Liz Essley Whyte

    April 4, 2025 2:02 pm ET

    The top vaccine regulator ousted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the
    health secretary’s team has sought nonexistent data to justify
    antivaccine narratives and pushed to water down regulation of unproven stem-cell treatments.

    “I can never give allegiance to anyone else other than to follow the
    science as we see it,” said Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug
    Administration official. “That does not mean that I can just roll over
    and take conspiracy theories and justify them.”

    ..
    The outgoing official said he was speaking out to encourage parents to vaccinate their children against measles, as cases mount in Texas and
    New Mexico. ...

    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

    2. A prescient Carl Sagan wrote 30 years ago in "The Demon-Haunted
    World: Science as a Candle in the Dark,"

    “Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I
    have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when
    nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very
    few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the
    issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas
    or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our
    crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties
    in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s
    true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

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