For the first time in his Teflon presidency, Trump has seemingly become mired in allegations that have stuck: the Epstein files. He is getting attacked from MAGA stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Greene as well as Democrats.
The reason is that 23% of Americans, including almost a third of Republicans, believe in the conspiracy theory known as QAnon, which posits that there is a secret โDeep Stateโ syndicate of Democratic politicians, wealthy powerbrokers (especially Jews) such as Jeffrey Epstein, and Hollywood stars that is kidnapping children, trafficking them for sex, and even eating them. Many QAnon believers also thought that Trump was clandestinely fighting this cabal. After the attack on the Capitol following the 2020 election, Kash Patel โ now our countryโs FBI director โ reached out to QAnon followers to join Trumpโs social media platform, Truth Social, and wrote childrenโs books like โThe Plot Against The King,โ in which Kash the wizard helps a noble hero named King Donald foil characters like Hillary Queenton and Comma-la-la-la.
Throughout history, conspiracy theories, the supernatural, and fairy tales have risen to prominence when societies have been under stress and civilizations have been in decline. The scurrilous text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion โ supposedly revealing the plans of a secret Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, and still popular with millions of people globally โ was fabricated in Russia at the turn of the 19th century, a time of turmoil in the empire. Belief in conspiracy theories often become mixed with belief in the mystical. During this same period, the last emperor of Russia, Czar Nicholas II, brought into his family the charismatic mystic and sexual predator Grigori Rasputin, who had reportedly helped his hemophiliac son recover from a serious bleeding episode.
The person standing at the helm of our nationโs health care system is infatuated with both of these worlds. RFK Jr. famously believed that the medical establishment and pharmaceutical companies conspired to keep the harms of vaccines secret from the American people. Like many Trump supporters and followers of “Q,” he has been a believer in the accusation that Bill Gates and others have installed microchips in the Covid vaccine to spy on shot recipients.
And RFK is a big believer in โnatural cures,โ including supplements and vitamins, for treatment and prevention of measles, for example. In this he is like the right-wing radio host Alex Jones, who promoted the theory that the 2012 massacre of school children in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, was a hoax, and pushes herbs and supplements on Infowars and Amazon. His beliefs are also akin to rising right-wing ultra-nationalists around the world, like Cฤlin Georgescu, who did surprisingly well in last yearโs presidential election in Romania. As documented in the February issue of The Atlantic, Georgescu has touted the mystical effects of water and warned that nano-chips are sending us messages through carbonated beverages.
The tragic irony of RFK Jr. is that there is a kernel of truth in some of his assertions. For example, he wants artificial food colorings (AFCs) out of processed food. AFCs have been banned or at least have carried warning labels in the European Union for years because of their well-documented detrimental effects on attention and impulse control in children. Yet by and large, the American pediatric community has ignored this evidence.
The standard belief in the medical community was heavily influenced by a meta-analysis (an examination and evaluation of all the peer-reviewed studies done on a subject) published in The Annals of Child Psychiatry in 2012, which discounted the effects of diet on ADHD. But the primary sources โ the studies that these authors chose to evaluate โ came to quite different conclusions, showing that AFCs do play a role in ADHD. Why the difference? The funding sources of the meta-analysis were the International Confectionery Association and the International Life Sciences Institute โ the latter being a controversial organization frequently described as a lobbying arm of the food and beverage industry.
For decades the standard treatment for ear infections (otitis media) in children was to give antibiotics for 10 days, despite the lack of good evidence for this length of treatment. Many children returned with recurrent infections and needed repeated doses of stronger, more broad-spectrum antibiotics to clear up the infections. Now we know that 75% of ear infections resolve on their own, that overuse of antibiotics is a big cause of antibiotic resistance and the emergence of โsuperbugs,โ and that if an antibiotic is needed, 5โ7 days of treatment is usually sufficient.
It is true: The medical establishment is at times obstinate, arrogant, and unduly influenced by the food industry and Big Pharma. It is sometimes wrong โ as in the case of recommending school closures for inordinate lengths of time during the Covid pandemic โespecially with a disease that is brand new. And physicians should be more open to evidence-based therapies beyond medicine and surgery for ailments that are inadequately addressed by modern Western medicine, like back pain, irritable bowel syndrome, headaches, and sleep disorders.
But to ignore the mountains of evidence for the efficacy of vaccines, to ignore the benefits of antibiotics that have saved millions of lives, and to fire thousands of some of the best research scientists in the country โ even though it was medical researchers who discovered the ill effects of AFCs and the overuse of antibiotics for ear infections โ is as disastrous as Czar Nicholas making Rasputin his chief advisor.
Dr. David Gottsegen is a pediatrician who focuses on the interrelationship between mind body and spirit. He lives in Belchertown.