I'm very glad the article contains an explanation of germ theory, miasma theory, and terrain theory. When talking to people in real life who have forgotten their middle school biology classes, I actually hear these theories referenced often but of course without the name. The idea that "diseases stem from imbalances in the internal 'terrain' of the body, such as malnutrition or the presence of toxic substances" sound plausible and intuitive, and is true to some extent, which is why people fall for it. I mean sure malnutrition causes diseases such as the lack of vitamin C causing scurvy, and substances like mercury cause poisoning; these are real. It's just that I found it astounding that both RFK Jr and several people I've met in real life would choose to believe these while discrediting germ theory.

A lot of people in those middle school classes didn't get it then, we had already segregated students by ability in middle school and even in the gifted classes there were students who didn't grok the material. One interpretation might be those mythological explanations also make sense if one does not understand basic science using empirical evidence, the best minds of the past believed in these strange to us theories until microscopes were invented and got good enough to make visible what was happening.

> The idea that "diseases stem from imbalances in the internal 'terrain' of the body, such as malnutrition or the presence of toxic substances" sound plausible and intuitive, and is true to some extent, which is why people fall for it.

Isn't that basically the theory behind Traditional Chinese Medicine?

When I've seen discussion of these in the past, belief is often connected to fear or guilt stemming from how bodies react differently to exposure and/or infection. There's an element of randomness whether you breathe in enough of a pathogen, or run into a super-spreader. It can be a relief to think that people are predisposed to do better or worse, and either you were already immune or you can control it.

At the risk of playing devil’s advocate, I think it is very weird how differently different people responded to Covid. Some people barely got a cold. Others died. I really don’t think you can write it off to “well ${dead_person} just inhaled more of it”.

But that's the case for literally every infectious disease. We all have slightly (to dramatically) different immune systems and other systems. Even without being immunocompromised, some people die from seemingly innocuous diseases while others survive the most deadly diseases there are.

Even Black Death killed "only" an estimated 50% of the population. That means that there were necessarily a lot of people that got infected and survived it, probably some of them asymptomatically. Bodies are complex and varied, and there's no 100% way to predict how they'll respond to any given situation.

The book I was just reading says that the genes for MHC (Major Histocompatibility Complex) molecules are among the most diverse genes in the human population, with even the suggestion that people find others with different MHC genes than themselves more attractive.

That's no different that with most other diseases, though. Everyone's body is different and has different levels of resistance to different things. The same disease often affects different people to different degrees.

The most dramatic examples of this are when children start going to school and bring home various colds and such. Some of them barely affect the children at all, but will leave the parents bedridden. And some barely affect the parents at all and leave the children bedridden.

Every member of this administration is thoroughly incompetent. It'd be funny if it didn't have dire consequences for the United States.

I was involved with the raw vegan community in liberal Santa Cruz California for a number of years, and this was a very common opinion there. In some presentations I felt like the local extremist for insisting that germ theory was a good thing that led to the advantages of modern medicine. I now travel more in conservative trending carnivore circles where I haven't heard germ theory denial. On the contrary they tend to take particular pleasure in referring to conventional studies, to counter accusations of their own extremism. From my own experience it seems that RFK has imported these views more from the left than the right. Do others have a different experience?

Does it matter where he got his viewpoint? He could have heard it on a bus going to Cucamonga for all we know. At this point, trying to trace back which side is at fault for RFK's incredibly absurd ideas is mute and irrelevant unless you're just looking to give some rational for why he came to those conclusions.

We need to educate people from an early age in media literacy, skepticism and science. Make The Demon-Haunted World a mandatory read for every high school student.

I'm reminded of the 'surfin bird' family guy episode where Peter is fishing for a prompt to sing surfin bird, and Brian in-good-faith bites, but Stewie yells at Brian for doing the bad thing.

It's like we've given up on the people with bad behavior to the point that we tacitly endorse them to have whatever terrible viewpoint they have, even while we admonish others like they're more responsible than the person with the bad behavior.

We have to stop giving bad-faith-actors the benefit of the doubt. RFK is a grifter. It definitely doesn't matter where he got the viewpoint from, he has 1 million terrible viewpoints that are not grounded in science. He's figured out how to pedal this as non-extremist and couch it in friendlier language, but that just makes him more of a snake.

It matters because it is in the public interest that whatever cultural process affected him doesn't happen again, not even to the most despicable idiots, because this is the kind of "incredibly absurd ideas" that kills people. For the sake of defense in depth, how he got his place despite his opinions is a very important related question.

Personally, I'm afraid it could be a deliberate propaganda pose, with the dual objective of distracting the masses with an enemy and depriving people of expensive actual healthcare.

Yes, and...

it's not like this is the first time that a bunch ofnew age folks with a predilection for alternative lifestyles and "health" practices have quickly moved from a hedonistic "liberal" position to a shockingly right-wing position.

A lot of the mysticism and weird ideas of cultural cleanliness that we can see exhibited in the ruling classes of Germany during the 1890s-1940s are very present in the ideas in the current MAHA movement.

That similarity might push against the idea that these ideas are purely propagandistic in nature. Personally, I might feel a little more reassured if I thought that RFKs positions were pure grift, but I have been watching a lot of my woo-woo friends flat-earth their way to fascism and find it somewhat chilling.

Trying to ascribe it to "the left" or "the right" is trying to form a political weapon. The shape of the world is that we now have a clown car administration of utter retards, each pushing their own strain of feel-good harmful nonsense. The root cause of what has allowed these moronic ideas to take hold and grow ultimately comes down to affluenza and anti-intellectualism. The political leanings of the pockets where each of these strains were allowed to fester doesn't particularly matter, because the overriding commonality is that they make believers feel good and special for "knowing something others don't".

Speaking as someone who grew up in the United States Waldorf community, I would say that the type of community you and I have experience with isn't tightly aligned with the right/left political spectrum. The political environment of the 60s and 70s was such that earthy-crunchy devotees found lots of commonality on the left; as such I'd agree with your statement. But ideologically, there's no reason at all why people focused on returning older ways -- for reasons of health or otherwise -- wouldn't align with a movement that rejects modernity.

I recommend Leah Sotille's new book Blazing Eye Sees All, which looks at New Age figures who have drifted into the MAGA movement. It's kind of wild seeing the channelers I remember from my childhood going hard right.

He’s just a conspiracy theorist that deeply mistrusts the output of scientific research. If it counters medical science, it must be true. Why? Because there is a grand conspiracy at play trying to smother the truth or some such paranoid nonsense. And in true conspiracy theorist fashion, he is one of the chosen that is going to reveal the truth.

Eh, after COVID it doesn't make sense to talk like that. There actually were grand conspiracies to smother the truth in which the output of scientific research was rendered untrustworthy. The people who tried to sound the alarm were slammed as paranoid lunatics, and then turned out to be correct.

And one of the people organizing those conspiracies was Fauci. In order to protect ... virologists. We know all this because we can read the emails and Slack logs where the conspiracies were organized.

As for his other beliefs, like HIV not being the cause of AIDS, well that belief comes from renegade scientists in the 90s who alleged that a young Dr Fauci was at the center of a HIV-related conspiracy organized by virologists to give their field new relevance and grant funding, after attempts to connect viruses with the 60s era 'war on cancer' fell through. One of those scientists was himself a virologist, and another was Kary Mullis. Mullis is famous primarily for being the inventor of the PCR test, he even received a Nobel prize for it.

So where RFK Jr gets this stuff is no mystery.

Anyway the article is wrong. It quotes Paul Offit who makes the same claims in his Substack. I haven't read the book but people who have say Offit is selectively quoting Jr, who does believe germs exist; that he uses the terms miasma/terrain theory interchangeably, and that his book argues for a better balance between the notion of strengthening immune systems and targeted pathogen treatments - not that the latter shouldn't exist at all.

> Eh, after COVID it doesn't make sense to talk like that. There actually were grand conspiracies to smother the truth in which the output of scientific research was rendered untrustworthy. The people who tried to sound the alarm were slammed as paranoid lunatics, and then turned out to be correct.

> And one of the people organizing those conspiracies was Fauci. In order to protect ... virologists. We know all this because we can read the emails and Slack logs where the conspiracies were organized.

Downvoters, I was shocked to learn that was actually true: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/opinion/covid-pandemic-la...:

> Or take the real story behind two very influential publications that quite early in the pandemic cast the lab leak theory as baseless.

> The first was a March 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine, which was written by five prominent scientists and declared that no “laboratory-based scenario” for the pandemic virus was plausible. But we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely. One of the authors of that paper, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, wrote in the Slack messages, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”

> Spooked, the authors reached out for advice to Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist at the World Health Organization. In his book, Farrar reveals he acquired a burner phone and arranged meetings for them with high-ranking officials, including Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci. Documents obtained through public records requests by the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know show that the scientists ultimately decided to move ahead with a paper on the topic.

> Operating behind the scenes, Farrar reviewed their draft and suggested to the authors that they rule out the lab leak even more directly. They complied. Andersen later testified to Congress that he had simply become convinced that a lab leak, while theoretically possible, was not plausible. Later chat logs obtained by Congress show the paper’s lead authors discussing how to mislead Donald G. McNeil Jr., who was reporting on the pandemic’s origin for The Times, so as to throw him off track about the plausibility of a lab leak.

There's more.

It's not the "liberal" mindset, it's the mindset of being open to conspiracy theories like Pizzagate or QAnon and circulates in similar circles. The number of suburban moms that fell for all that does not fit your hypotheses. It made the news cycle for a while: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/qanon-conspiracies-moms-life...

And free trade agreements was the cornerstone of right wing - while the left derided it as a way to offshore jobs. Now Trump is running with it.

At this point it doesn't matter which "side" it came from. Even if it came from the "left", people knew this was pseudoscience and relied on anecdotal evidence and it never went mainstream. You never had a HHS Secretary espousing the goodness of unchecked pseudoscience in the name of "challenging the status quo".

Assuming you hadn't been laid off by DOGE, imagine having to work for this stupid clown.

Maybe the Emperor can appoint a Moon Landing Denier to run fucking NASA.

I can imagine being a stable minded MD right now, especially one working on policy, must be especially horrible.

That would fit, actually.

I didn't flag this, but it looks like the typical slop reporting that comes with the topic (do you really need to spend the first page talking about brain worms?).

I didn't read the article after the first couple paragraphs, but I think it's safe to say there is no quote where RFK says germs aren't real.

The point is that we've spent a lot of resources focusing on infectious disease. We've had some successes, and yet we are less healthy than ever. So rather than continue the same shit and expect a different result, we are going to divert resources towards making people more robust, so that they get better results when they do get sick.

It's not controversial enough when you say it that way, so ars has to dress it up.

Indeed. I wonder who profits the most from vilifying RFK. ;)

> I didn't flag this, but it looks like the typical slop reporting that comes with the topic (do you really need to spend the first page talking about brain worms?).

It's from Ars Technica, which I used to like but kinda got tired of. They regularly have kind of "two minute hate" columns against their house villains, and revel in schadenfreude.

There is a very real possibility that RFK has brain damage from long-term drug abuse.

I don't know about drug abuse but the brain worm, the mercury poisoning... I'm certainly confident in saying he's not right in the head.

He has admitted in interviews that he was addicted to narcotics for 14 years and claims that it made him a better student (while now saying kids should not be taking any drugs)

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rfk-jr-heroin-addict/

not from the brain worm that ate part of his brain?

Drugs, worm, and mercury poisoning. None of it has been good for his brain.

FYI, the game "Plague, Inc." has a new game type: misinformation.

Oh, to be Madagascar.

Or Greenland. Freaking Greenland.

I swear, it's like a ship goes there only once every two years, and the crew scrubs it down with bleach every day.

Same has been speculated about Trump. And Musk is pretty open about drug use.

The "just say no" party, is pretty baked.

Trump is a famous teetotaler so I'd be skeptical there.

When I started getting worried about Elon around 2018 the drugs were part of it but also the persistent sleep deprivation. But there's also the way his father went a bit crazy in his 40s which I only learned about recently.

Just looked up why Trump is sober. I think this is the first time I've ever read anything about him and felt some admiration.

Yeah. Basically, his horrid, abusive father drove Don’s older brother, Freddie, to alcoholism. I read Mary Trump’s “Too Much and Never Enough” and it actually made me sympathetic toward Donald. That's not to say I forgive him or that he gets a free pass. But wow, I'm not sure how he could've ended up any different.

The world would be better if Fred Trump Sr were emotionally capable of saying “I love you, son.”

No to Alcohol, yes. Drugs, maybe. Think of stimulants as performance enhancers.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trum...

Along with his ultra rich but antisocial upbringing and the exploitation he was exposed to from a young age with the mines, apartheid and everything I’d say there is no hope for him.

He doesn't drink alcohol or do recreational drugs, but it's surprising that he's aligned with RFK because Trump seems to love fast food and refined sugar. His terrain must look pretty rough!

He doesn't care about a person's beliefs as much as he cares about their loyalty. RFK gave up his presidential run and endorsed Trump, so he proved his worth to get him into power and is rewarded with getting to do his dream job of dismantling agencies that have kept us safe for decades. His father must be spinning like a yo-yo in his grave.

So? A lot of people have brain damage and don't pursue evil professionally. I myself have a TBI-related disability and yet have not rejected germ theory. I was a long term drug abuser as well! None of these are explanations for his policies.

The scale of ignorance among those in charge of the federal government now is astonishing.

Even President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho deferred to smarter people.

Not only that, he ran a program to actively find them and didn't exclude the prisoners. More clever and progressive than many real people.

“New president of US Space flight rejects the Newton’s law of gravity”

Eventually you hit a point where something or someone is so stupid you can’t comprehend that what they say is what they really think. Like you may intellectually ‘know’ with near certainty that they are that stupid but the emotional centre of your brain can not accept it.

I hit that point with the politics of the US a long time ago, in the back of your head you think these are capable-ish people just grifting off the stupid people but that’d require such a malicious intent it’s from an emotionap standpoint nearly impossible again.

This is a paradox that will never be answered with certainty but given the track record of the current US president (and his pre political business ventures) I’d say it is stupidity, I’m nearly certain of it.

Imagine a flat earther nasa president, it's kinda the same here

Don't care about RFK Jr one way or another, but I checked a few claims in the article and every fact check failed. This is the most maliciously written article I've ever seen on Ars Technica :(

Examples:

> Kennedy published a story in Rolling Stone and Salon.com titled "Deadly Immunity," which ... described Offit as "in the pocket" of the pharmaceutical industry and claimed RotaTeq was "laced" with thimerosal.

They don't link to the article but the only place "in the pocket" appears is a direct quote from Offit himself arguing that he is immune to conflicts of interest [1].

> Rolling Stone and Salon amended some of the article's problems, but eventually Salon retracted it and Rolling Stone deleted it.

The wording implies that the article had so many factual errors by RFK Jr it was pulled shortly after publication, but Salon actually deleted it six years later in sync with the release of a new book on public health by a Salon staffer. Nor were any of the errors material to the case the article made, and Salon apologized to RFJ Jr in writing for introducing them as they reduced the word count of his article. None of this section is remotely close to what really appears to have happened.

> Looking back, Offit said he was sandbagged. "He's a liar. He lied about who he was; he lied about what he was doing. He was just wanting to set me up," Offit said.

Nothing in the article "sandbags" Offit in any way. He's treated with kid gloves and only appears twice, both times via direct quotes from himself.

> But Kennedy has frequently used thimerosal as a vaccine bogeyman over the years, claiming it causes harms (there is no evidence for this).

It's literally toxic.

> he doesn't believe in a foundational scientific principle: germ theory ... Kennedy is a germ theory denialist and terrain theory embracer

And yet Ars admits (much later) that "Kennedy seems to accept that bacteria and viruses are real" and that terrain theory obviously does have merits. People who have read his book (I haven't) have said Kennedy just wants a better balance between improving people's general health and specifically pathogen-targeted pharmaceuticals.

[1] https://archive.org/stream/deadly-immunity-by-robert-f.-kenn...

We know there are crazy people out there. We know people have wild ideas and beliefs. Even smart and logical people can latch on to things that seems radical or don't follow common sense. It's part of being human.

The problem we face today is that the we no longer have adults or rational people in the US government. As a nation, the US did an okay-ish job at keeping people like Marjorie Taylor Greene out of government positions. We didn't let people like Musk take control over everything. The writing was on the wall for a while we were headed in this direction. They were quickly gaining ground to take control of everything. The Republican side during the Trump impeachments were a spectacle. There is obviously a very large population in favor of the spectacle.

The US has simply failed repeatedly to get out and vote and keep the wackos out power. Well, here we are. It truly is a shame and we're paying the price.

Link to the article in case the anti-science flagging brigade brings it down: https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/04/rfk-jr-s-anti-vaccine...

What a gross misrepresentation of RFK Jr.'s views. He thinks that people who are healthy, by means of nutrition, sports and absence of contact with environmental toxins, are much more resilient to germs and other health conditions. Which is obviously true. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

> Empiricism is dead, credentialism gutted it to make a skin suit that academia now wears, so it's the science now!

What does this mean? I’d imagine you can’t just buy the credentials (there’s no lack of trying though), but like… what’s the litmus test? There’s also a concept called peer-reviews, which generally gets people of varying credentials who work in the field to weigh in on the matter.

> I look forward to the day when we can just label anyone who doesn't trust "the science" as insane so we can lock them up.

There’s no such thing as “the science” as much as you want it to be. Science is a process, it changes with more data. You trust the data, not the science.

> Preventative care is only legitimate if you pay the health industry for it!

Nobody is saying that. For example, people have been taking some form of lemon and honey to ward off things common cold, fever, etc. But for new diseases, there’s no preventative care (by definition).

> Maybe if I'm a good boy they'll give me a weekly vaccine to protect me from misinformation.

Now you’re talking like an idiot. Nobody ever in the scientific field says shit like this. Shame on you. Where did your critical thinking skills go?

RFK Jr. " “Right now we have about 842 cases, Chris. And Canada, they have about the same number. They have one-eighth of our population. Europe has ten times that number. Our numbers have plateaued.”

He noted that for years, the CDC has insisted the only way to manage measles is through universal vaccination. But Kennedy challenged that approach.

He argued that people who have concerns about the MMR vaccine—whether it’s due to aborted fetal debris or DNA particles—deserve access to treatment options.

“And that’s what we’re developing at CDC right now,” Kennedy said, “protocols for treating measles.”

-----

"Terrain theory" holds that "you are what you eat." Well, uh...yeah, that's true.

"Terrain theory" also holds that ingesting pollution and poisons...poisons a living creature. Well, uh...yeah, that's true.

mRNA is dangerous, very dangerous. It was abandoned as such during animal trials. The large drug companies have been facing "patentagedon", the expiring of patents on which their profits are based. Traditional drugs are somewhat analogous to salves. What do drug companies want? Does it benefit them to prevent/solve disease or is it more economically advantageous for them to always be "needed?"

There is no substitute for healthy food, a clean environment, and exercise. No amount of synthesized chemicals artificially introduced to a human body will/can replace that.

Some drugs are highly useful, some are barely marginal. What's a multi-billion dollar company to do if/when it "solves" the majority of major problems?

The answer is "perverse incentive." Factory food, factory pharma, big tech, political parties, etc., etc., etc....any entity which becomes too large AND whose major reason for existance disappears...fights to survive, including creating false need. It's the story of human existence through all societies.

So...maybe, just maybe, both terrain and germ theory, like all theories, are an attempt to reduce totality into a useful modeling tool.

WRT that article, it's a desperate shill hack job, not structured well at all, and full of logical fallacies and lies.

As I recall, most of the complaints about big pharma were about price-gauging. This is entirely different.

I do so wish practical probability was a required class for all students.

Yes, vaccines — as with all medical procedures — have bad outcomes for some people. You can't inject everyone with saline without someone having a bad reaction, if only because it ended up stabbing a tendon or something.

However, the risk of injuries for all common vaccines are orders of magnitude less than the harm from the things they decrease. For ever 1 person harmed by a vaccine, 100 people don't get seriously ill from the disease it counters. And while it’s an enormous bummer for that 1 person, the other 100 experienced a modern miracle of public health.

No one’s ever said vaccines can't make you sick. (Well, they've said that they provably do not cause autism, but that's a different claim.) They've said that if you go to Vegas and have an option to bet where you have a 99% chance of winning $1000 and a 1% chance of losing $1000, you take that bet every time.

> No one’s ever said vaccines can't make you sick.

Except all the people who ran around yelling "100% safe and effective" four years ago.

I have never heard any actual expert say any such thing.

Perhaps some non-experts were spouting such nonsense, but nobody should be putting any real importance on what they say.

You're right. They said that vaccines are safe and effective, and they are. Nothing in this world is perfectly safe and effective, and no one qualified to speak on any healthcare option would ever claim otherwise.

Tap water is safe, but non-zero people get sick from it. That just means it's not completely safe.

Penicillin is effective, but some germs are resistant now. That just means it's not completely effective.

There are certainly situations where specific vaccine formations have caused measureable harm. For example in Japan there was a specific formulation of MMR vaccine that led to high rates of sepsis. Experts certainly were involved in the messaging around the changes that Japan applied to resolve this issue (the results also helped provide evidence that vaccines don't cause autism).

Public messaging around human health, especially with respect to powerful tools that modify the immune system, has always been extremely challenging. Public health officials typically want to maximize health for a whole population, and we know that messaging can lead to society-level changes in behavior around vaccination. So experts are typically quite careful when they talk about harms from vaccines.

Who do you think sells Ivermectin and all those supplements? The idea that RFK is in opposition to "big Pharma" is not based in reality.

Can you expand on what makes it shallow? To my reading it is a thorough accounting of a passage in a book RFK wrote about germ theory and how his beliefs run counter to scientific consensus. What's wrong with that?

If repeating the words a person themselves has written makes something into a "hit piece" what does that say about the words?

How is it a hit piece to quote from a book written by the man where he espouses the exact beliefs he is accused of?

Kennedy himself claims he doesn't believe in the germ theory of disease, or at least in the ability of modern medicine to cure many diseases. He is a crank and an idiot who has gotten hundreds of people killed, and will probably get many times more.

RFK and Trump supporters consider it slander and targeting to literally repeat their beliefs back to them. Sometimes, even directly after they have articulated those beliefs.

At this point, they have ascended the plane of humanity and now exist in quantum superposition. They're both everything they say they are, and nothing at all.

Hit piece on?

Hit pieces on anti-vaxxers I guess. I don't see the problem.