RFK Jr. is not a serious person. Don't take him seriously.

Well, president-elect Trump has announced that he will nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), putting him in charge of most of the nation's public health and medical research.

I can't say strongly enough how unqualified RFK Jr. is for this job. He isn't qualified to come anywhere within a thousand miles of any medical or science-related issue, much less to be in charge of health policy for the whole country. Virtually everything RFK says about science is wrong–actually, it's worse than that, because he speaks with such absolutely certainty, despite being wrong, that he convinces people to take actions that end up hurting themselves. To a normal person, someone not accustomed to lying so boldly, these claims can be convincing.

Since Trump's announcement of the nomination, I've been seeing columns in major media outlets (I'm looking at you, New York Times and Washington Post) saying things like "hey, some of RFK's ideas aren't entirely wrong." 

Just. Stop. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Don't take RFK Jr., or his nomination, seriously.

I don't want to try to list all of RFK's mistaken views, which would require a book-length column, but here are a few. Just last year he said, on the Lix Fridman podcast, that "there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective," and that the polio vaccine did more harm than good. (Both of those statements are wildly wrong.) In 2005, he wrote a long essay for Rolling Stone and Salon which claimed that thimerosal-containing vaccines cause autism (they don't), and that the government knew about it and had been covering it up:

“The story of how government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public is a chilling case study of institutional arrogance, power and greed.” [quote from RFK Jr.]

The article was full of dramatic claims like this one. The only problem was, all of them were false. Rolling Stone and Salon eventually retracted the article and deleted it from their websites. 

In 2019, Kennedy visited the island nation of Samoa to spread his anti-vaccine message, sponsored in part by his anti-vaccine organization, Children's Health Defense. (The name is highly misleading.) Vaccination rates plummeted, and just a few months later a tragic measles outbreak began, causing 83 deaths and 1,867 hospitalizations. Kennedy published an article afterwards calling it a "mild measles outbreak," and in the same article claims (falsely) that vaccines themselves, rather than measles, caused the deaths.

RFK Jr. is someone who never admits he was wrong, even (or especially) when his mistakes cause the deaths of innocent children. Instead, his conspiracy-addled brain blames someone else.

And that's only a tiny sample of RFK's misinformation. He also loves raw milk, which I wrote about in 2014 and again in 2023. Raw milk sometimes contains nasty bacteria and viruses, but fortunately Louis Pasteur solved this problem in the 1860s, when he invented what we now call pasteurization. As I pointed out in my 2023 piece, bacteria just love raw milk. And you know what else is in raw milk but not pasteurized milk? Cow poop. Just don't tell this to RFK Jr. 

By writing columns saying "RFK Jr. has some good ideas" (which I won't link to, since that's just feeding the beast), media organizations are falling into a trap: they're taking RFK seriously. I'd like to ask these journalists: if Trump nominated a first-grader instead, would you write similar stories? Maybe something like "hey, this nominee has some good ideas about nutrition!" 

Don't do it. This nomination deserves ridicule and scorn, nothing more.

I've written multiple columns (both on this site and at Forbes, my former site) warning about RFK Jr. and his dangerous anti-vaccine craziness, starting with this 2014 piece where I called him out for his efforts to lobby Congress against vaccines. His primary obsession then–and he still has this obsession–was the mistaken notion that thimerosal, a harmless preservative that isn't even used in vaccines today, causes autism. This claim has been thoroughly debunked in multiple studies. 

In 2017, I wrote about "Trump's lovefest with anti-vaxxer RFK Jr." – a lovefest that apparently still continues, seven years later. That column was about Trump's promise to put RFK in charge of a commission on vaccines. Fortunately, that vaccine commission never happened, but today we face a much more dangerous threat, if RFK Jr. is confirmed as Secretary of HHS.

I've also pointed out that Kennedy is one of the "Disinformation Dozen," a group of twelve people who, as reported by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, was responsible for 65% of all the anti-vaccine disinformation online. And earlier this year I asked how he could possibly be so arrogant as to think he's qualified to be President, given that his only claims to fame are his name, which he inherited, and his anti-vaccine notoriety.

My problem with RFK Jr. is not just that he is wrong about vaccines, although that is the most immediate threat to public health. But he's also an idealogue, someone who holds onto his mistaken ideas despite mountains of contradictory evidence, and someone who simply makes up things to "prove" his points. 

And in that quote from him above, where he uses the phrase "institutional arrogance," highlights another danger: RFK Jr. is the one who is arrogant. He believes that he can substitute his own unsubstantiated beliefs for the knowledge of genuine experts, and why? Because he's a Kennedy, a man who has lived a life of great privilege, getting into Harvard as a "legacy" despite being expelled from prep school over his drug use, all the while pretending to be fighting against the system. He is too arrogant to listen to others, or to admit his mistakes.  

So no, I cannot take this nomination seriously. Children will die if RFK Jr. is put in charge of HHS. There are tens of thousands of people who are far, far more qualified than Kennedy, and I hope the Senate will refuse to confirm him. I'm not optimistic, but I hope a few Senators will look at the man's record and treat him with the scorn he deserves.

The Physics of Golf

[Herman Erlichson was a physicist and a historian of science (he had Ph.D.s in both). He was also an avid golfer, and he was my uncle.  He passed away just over a year ago, and I've been wanting to write this column ever since.  We corresponded frequently when I was a teenager, in a time when hand-written letters were still common.  Here is a small anecdote.]

Everyone who plays golf knows that the driver hits the ball the farthest of any club.  It also has the lowest launch angle, or "loft."  Clubs with high loft, such as a sand wedge, pop the ball very high up in the air, but don't hit it very far.

The universe of people who both play golf and also know college-level physics may not be very large, but everyone in this club has puzzled over this conundrum: why is it that a driver has a loft of only about 10 to 12 degrees?  That seems far too low.

Exactly 30 years ago this month, my uncle Herman Erlichson figured this out.  It's the spin.

He published the answer in a serious physics journal [1], but I'm guessing that most golfers don't read physics journals.  So here is what he found.

Everyone in freshman physics learns that the optimal launch angle for a projectile - the angle that makes a ball fly the farthest - is 45 degrees, in a vacuum.  But in the game of golf, 45 degrees is the angle of a pitching wedge, which (as every golfer knows) hits the ball only a short distance, about half as far as a driver.

Now the physics calculation assumes that the ball is in a vacuum, but still: how come the presence of air makes the optimum angle so much lower?  Or as my uncle put it, in his classic understated style:

"The large discrepancy between the approximately 11 deg of loft for the golf driver club and the 45 deg maximum range angle for a vacuum was the motivation to begin a study of the question of maximum projectile range in the presence of air resistance, with particular application to the flight of a golf ball." [1]

The analysis itself is technically very complex, involving 3 forces: gravity, drag (resistance caused by air friction), and lift, caused by the backspin on the ball.  All three are big factors, but the theoretical result of 45 degrees only accounts for gravity.  

Air friction (or drag) turns out to have a quadratic effect, as my uncle showed.  In other words, the drag increases in proportion to the square of the velocity of the ball.  So hitting it harder causes a very rapid increase in drag.  Here's his graph showing how the angle is affected by quadratic drag:

One consequence of "quadratic drag" is that hitting the ball a lot harder only yields a modest increase in distance.  More important, though, is that if we just consider gravity plus drag, the best angle to launch a golf ball is 35 degrees.  Lower than 45, but still nowhere near the angle of a modern driver.  And the distance here is still too low, only 336 feet (112 yards).

My uncle Hymie figured out that backspin makes a huge difference. Backspin generates lift, keeping the ball in the air much, much longer.  My uncle derived equations that allowed him to calculate how the lift force increases with the rate of spin and the speed of the ball.  This produced a very different picture of how far the ball would carry at different angles, shown here:

After accounting for lift, the optimum angle is 16 degrees, and the ball flies about 200 yards.  (This assumes a typical launch speed by the standards of 1983. The much longer drivers used today create a much greater speed off the tee.)  The remaining different between the actual loft of 10-12 degrees can be explained by the fact that for a drive, the teed-up ball is struck just past the bottom of the swing. This makes the launch angle slightly higher than the loft of the club.

There you have it: when you account for all the forces at play, the optimum angle for a golf driver really is around 10-12 degrees.

My uncle Herman Erlichson loved the game of golf and played often, despite having a seriously weakened leg, the after-effect of a polio infection that he contracted in the 1950's.  He might have struggled to master the game itself, but when it came to the physics of golf, he solved a mystery that had puzzled physicist-golfers for decades.

Reference

[1] Maximum projectile range with drag and lift, with particular application to golf

H Erlichson. American Journal of Physics 51:4 (1983), pp. 357-362.

For all 95 of Herman Erlichson's scholarly papers, including his paper on the physics of golf, see his Google Scholar page.

A surprising triumph in the fight against polio

Source: polioeradication.org

The last case of polio in India occurred exactly one year ago, on January 13, 2011.  In the decades-long battle against this devastating disease, this is one of the best pieces of news in a long time.  Just two years ago, health officials counted 741 polio infections in India, and it seemed that the battle was far from over.  It may yet be, but in 2010 the cases dropped dramatically, to just 42, and last year there was only one, on January 13.


As recently as the 1950s, polio was a dreaded, incurable disease that killed or paralyzed millions of children each year.  The U.S. alone had 58,000 cases in 1952. Then came the invention of a vaccine by Jonas Salk, one of the great medical breakthroughs of the 20th century.  By the 1960s, widespread vaccination campaigns had virtually eliminated polio from Europe and the U.S.  Polio lingered in the U.S., mainly in the Amish population who refused to accept vaccinations, but it finally disappeared in 1979.

The worldwide campaign to eliminate polio started in 1988, when 350,000 infections were recorded.  Polio is extremely difficult to control, because a large majority of infected people show no symptoms, but they can still spread the virus.  Vaccination campaigns need to treat everyone who comes in contact with an infected individual in order to break the cycle of transmission.  This is especially hard to do in remote areas of poor countries, especially when the populace is suspicious and uncooperative.

The greatest challenge in India came in the desperately poor, crowded regions of the north, where health care, hygiene, and education are all very poor.  The vaccination efforts were made even more difficult by conspiracy theories among the Muslim population.  As Simon Denyer wrote in the Washington Post this week:

"Rumors spread among the region's numerous Muslims that the polio vaccination campaign was an American conspiracy to wipe them out, by making their sons impotent and their daughters infertile.... Vaccinators were stoned as they approached Muslim neighborhoods. 'The general mind-set was that the immunization campaign was aimed at ending our lineage,' said Anwar Ahmad, the head of a madrassa in a Muslim neighborhood in the city of Meerut."

The campaign turned around after UNICEF and Rotary international launched a major education effort that first convinced Muslim leaders, and then everyone else, that the vaccine would benefit their communities.  With this success in India, polio is now endemic in only three countries in the world: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria.  The same rumors and conspiracy theories that plagued India have spread within Muslim populations in these countries as well, but India shows that the misinformation - and polio - can be defeated.

Unfortunately, even here in the U.S. we have our own conspiracy theorists: the anti-vaccination zealots over at Age of Autism, where Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill recently posted a series of articles claiming that polio is "a harmless intestinal bug" that only causes disease when triggered by pesticides or by arsenic.  Never mind that there is no evidence to back this truly wacky assertion; these two anti-vaxxers seem happy to invent facts to support their single-minded campaign against all vaccines, even when the vaccines are demonstrably saving tens of thousands of lives.

Polio is still with us, and it could return.  Besides the 3 countries with endemic polio, 9 other countries continue to suffer polio cases that were imported from endemic countries.  Without widespread vaccination in those countries, polio could re-establish itself in any of them.

If polio stays out of India, we can thank the thousands of health care workers who traveled to remote villages, in extremely difficult conditions, to dispense lifesaving vaccines.  Their heroic efforts have paid off for everyone.  We should also thank the combined efforts of the WHO, UNICEF, Rotary International, the Gates Foundation, and the CDC, all of whom are backing the worldwide effort to eradicate polio.  Let's root for humanity to win this one.

The Baltimore Sun dives into the anti-vaccination pool

In recent weeks, the Baltimore Sun, once an excellent newspaper, has dived headfirst into the pool of anti-vaccination pseudoscience. With two prominent opinion pieces, the Sun has given a platform to the anti-vaccine movement that they probably didn't expect, and that they certainly didn't deserve. The puzzle is, why? Who on the Sun's editorial board decided to offer their pages to the voices of fear and unreason?

First, on June 16, the Sun printed an Opinion article by Mark Geier, where he argued that his unfounded theories about the causes of autism make it okay for him to chemically castrate young boys. (I know this sounds shocking, but it's all too true.) I wrote about Geier two years ago: he and his son David administer what they called the "Lupron protocol" to autistic boys. They charge $5000-$6000 per month for their treatment, which is based on their belief that autism is caused by an excess of testosterone. Lupron, the drug they give to children, is a testosterone-suppressing drug that is the chemical equivalent of castration. It is a harsh treatment used to treat advanced prostate cancer. There is no evidence that it helps autistic boys. When the Chicago Tribune interviewed Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor and director of the Autism Research Center at Cambridge University, here was his reaction:

"The idea of using it [Lupron] with vulnerable children with autism, who do not have a life-threatening disease and pose no danger to anyone, without a careful trial to determine the unwanted side effects or indeed any benefits, fills me with horror."

Finally, after Geier had spent many years of selling his quack treatment to vulnerable families, the state of Maryland suspected his medical license suspected in April. Now, for reasons I cannot fathom, the Baltimore Sun has given him a huge billboard to ask for his license back so he can resume his discredited Lupron protocol.

(Geier also claims that mercury in vaccines causes the rise in testosterone levels that he claims to treat. He ignores the overwhelming evidence, re-affirmed again last year, that there is no link between mercury-containing vaccines and autism.)

This wasn't enough bad science for the Sun, which just a few weeks later published another Opinion piece, this one by anti-vaccine activist Margaret Dunkle. In her article, Dunkle claims that the vaccine schedule includes too many doses, and she further claims that these are harmful to children. This "too many, too soon" argumen is a constant refrain of the anti-vax movement (particularly Jenny McCarthy), despite the lack of science to support it. The evidence on her side: a new study published by Gayle Delong, claiming that autism rates and vaccination rates are linked. Who is Gayle Delong? It turns out she is an economist, not a scientist, and she's a board member of SafeMinds, a well-known anti-vaccination group. Delong's study has already been thoroughly debunked by Neuroskeptic, Sullivan, Liz Ditz, and others, who pointed out its deeply flawed statistics and other problems. Dunkle, though, was happy to jump on this junk science and ignore the real science.

The real science tells just the opposite tale. For example, a thorough review published in Pediatrics in 2002 showed that infants today are exposed to fewer antigens than they were 40 years ago, due to better vaccine formulations. It also found that vaccines "prevent the weakening of the immune system." Countless other articles have shown the efficacy of vaccines; the Immunize for Good site is a good source for a realistic picture of the risks versus the benefits.

Is the Baltimore Sun responsible for the anti-vaccination stories appearing on its Opinion pages? I can imagine their response: "we're just presenting both sides," they might argue. Debates are just fine when political opinions are concerned, but you don't get to argue about facts. Scientific facts are not debated from "both sides" - for example, we don't waste time arguing that diseases are caused by "miasmas" as was once believed. And when the subject is vaccines, presenting the anti-science, anti-vaccine argument has real, and harmful, consequences.

The science is clear: vaccines have been the single greatest boon to public health in the history of mankind. Vaccines have saved millions of lives, and allowed parents to live without the fear that their children will sicken and die. Here are some facts: pre-vaccination, whooping cough caused 9000 deaths per year in the U.S. Post-vaccine, this has dropped to 20 deaths per year. Pre-vaccination, there were 350,000 polio cases worldwide in 1988. In 2009, there were just 1,604, and there's a chance we can eliminate polio entirely. Back in 1921, diptheria caused 206,000 cases in the U.S. alone. In 2001, there were just 2 cases.

If we stop vaccinating, these diseases will return. And make no mistake about it: if measles, whooping cough, polio, and other vaccine-preventable diseases return, children will die. I'm sure that the editors of the Baltimore Sun don't want this to happen. But through their ignorance of the science around vaccines, they have allowed their newspaper to become a voice for a dangerously misinformed group of activists whose main goal is to stop vaccines.

How to correct the damage? Well, the Sun could publish multiple articles on their Opinion pages explaining how many lives vaccines have saved. They could help to re-educate parents about how valuable these medicines are, so they will demand them for their children, rather than refusing them as some parents now do. I have only a faint hope that the Sun's editors will take such action, but I'm calling for it anyway. They owe it to the public.