As someone who was all but born on a copy desk – my mother always said she wasn’t the first woman copy editor on the Houston Chronicle, but she was the first pregnant one – I grew up with the myths, the realities, and the ethics of journalism at the core of my being.
I may have picked up much of the same sort of beliefs about the legal profession in law school, but to be completely honest, I’ve always believed in journalism more than I believed in the law. I do know a lot of lawyers who really believe in the law and right now some of the finest of those are using it to fight the abusive regime that’s trying to destroy our democracy.
There are some journalists who believe in true journalism doing that as well.
But then there are the others.
I had never heard of Olivia Nuzzi until the scandal broke about her relationship with the Kennedy scion who is now dismantling our health resources, a relationship that went on while she was supposedly reporting on his presidential campaign. (I’m using the word “relationship” because I don’t know the details and really don’t want to find out what they are, but what went on between them was not a simple matter of reporter and subject of interest.)
She was “cancelled” – lost her job, was criticized heavily in many corners – but now she’s back. It’s been about a year. She’s written a book and The New York Times did an elaborate feature piece on her. Apparently she also has a new job at Vanity Fair.
I have not read her book. As far as I know, I’ve never read anything she’s written and from what I’ve read about her I can’t think of any reason why I would. I have, however, read a few pieces about her, which caused me to reflect on what journalism is and should be.
In the piece that brought her to my attention, Colby Hall (who I also never heard of before) compared her to Hunter S. Thompson. He was talking about the kind of political coverage Nuzzi did and he meant it as a huge compliment, an assessment that she broke the rules in the same effective way that Thompson did back in the day.
It’s possible she is equally outrageous. Maybe she’s an asshole in a manner similar to Thompson. (I read Thompson religiously during the Nixon and Reagan years, but while I loved his savage reporting, I never wanted to meet him.)
But here’s the thing that makes me question that comparison – and question the judgment of anyone who would make it – Thompson never had anything approaching a friendly relationship with the political people he covered. In fact, he mostly hated them and made no bones about it.
Yet, the U.S. is different in a meaningful way. Here, abortion has historically been framed as a personal right to privacy. In many other countries I’ve studied, abortion is viewed more as a collective right that is inextricably tied to broader social and economic issues.
Initially, for some of those autocratic leaders, limiting access to abortion and contraception was a strategy to gain the approval of the nation’s religious leaders. The Catholic Church held great power in Italy and Spain, as did the Orthodox Church in Romania. At the time, these faiths opposed artificial birth control and still believe life begins at conception.
Restrictions on reproductive rights also aimed to increasebirth rates following two world wars that had stamped out some of the population, particularly in the Soviet Union and Italy. Many political leaders saw procreation as a national duty. They designated women – white, heterosexual women, that is – specific roles, primarily as mothers, to produce babies as well as future soldiers and workers for their regimes.
In the past two decades, countries in Europe and the Americas have been following this recognizable pattern. Nicaragua and Poland have both banned abortion. Hungary, Turkey and Russia have all clamped down on access to it.
Restricting reproductive freedoms has helped Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stoke lasting political divisions within society that help them consolidate their own power.
These politicians have also taken power away from a significant portion of the population by reinstating earlier, fascist-era restrictions on bodily autonomy. As feminist scholars have pointed out, strong reproductive rights are central to functioning democracies.
Restrictions on reproductive freedoms often necessitate other kinds of restrictions to enforce and maintain them. These might include free speech limits that prohibit providers from discussing people’s reproductive options. Criminalizing political dissent enables the arrest of people who protest restrictions on reproductive freedoms. Travel bans threaten prison time for individuals who help young people get abortion care out of state.
When these civil liberties weaken, it becomes harder to defend other rights. Without the right to speak, dissent or move freely, people cannot engage in conversations, organize or voice collective grievances.
Putting the US in a global context
In 2022, the U.S. joined the likes of Poland and Hungary when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending 50 years of federal abortion protections.
President Donald Trump was not in power when this happened. Yet the Supreme Court’s conservative majority was shaped during his first term.
Since then, both the second Trump administration and many states have enacted their own regulations or bans on abortion. This has created a divided country where in some states abortion is as restricted as it is under some of the world’s most autocratic regimes.
Yet, there’s a key difference.
In the U.S., abortion is viewed by the law and the public as a matter of individual rights. The debate often boils down to whether a person should be allowed to terminate their pregnancy.
In many other contexts, reproductive rights are understood as a collective good that benefits all society – or, conversely, harms all society when revoked.
This perspective can be a powerful driver of change. It’s how, for example, women’s and feminist groups in places such as Argentina, Colombia and Mexico have successfully pressured their governments to decriminalize abortion in recent years.
The Latin American feminist activists have also documented how restricting abortion intensifies authoritarianism and worsens both individual and collective rights.
In a region where many citizens remember life under military dictatorship, highlighting the relationship between abortion and authoritarianism may be particularly galvanizing.
This was basically what the mainstream pro-choice movement advocated for at the time. White feminists saw abortion rights as a personal liberty. This framing has real limitations.
As Black and brown reproductive justice advocates have long pointed out, Roe never served women of color or poor people particularly well because of underlying unequal access to health care. Their work has, for decades, illustrated the strong connection between racial, economic and reproductive justice, yet abortion is still largely regarded as solely an individual issue.
When debates about reproductive freedoms are framed as fights over individual rights, it can engender a legal quagmire. Other entities with rights emerge – the fetus, for example, or a potential grandparent – and are pitted against the pregnant person.
Recently, for instance, a pregnant woman declared brain dead in Georgia was kept alive for several months until her fetus became viable, apparently to comply with the state’s strict anti-abortion law. As her mother told the press, her family had no say in the matter.
Narrowly focusing on abortion as an individual right can also obscure why banning it has societal impacts.
Research worldwide shows that restricting reproductive freedoms does not lead to fewer abortions. Abortion bans only make abortion dangerous as people turn to unregulated “back alley” procedures. Maternal and infant mortality rates rise, especially in marginalized communities.
Other kinds of suffering increase, too. Women and their families tend to become poorer when contraception and abortion are hard to get.
Abortion bans also lead to discriminatory practices in health care beyond reproductive health services, such as oncology, neurology and cardiology. Physicians who fear criminalization are forced to withhold or alter gold-standard treatments for pregnant patients, for example, or they may prescribe less effective drugs out of concern about legal consequences should patients later become pregnant.
As a result, abortion bans decrease the quality and effectiveness of medical care for many patients, not just those who are pregnant.
Defending reproductive freedoms for healthy democracies
These findings demonstrate why reproductive rights are really a collective good. When viewed this way, it illuminates why they are an essential element of democracy.
Already, the rollback of reproductive freedoms in the U.S. has been followed by efforts to limit other key areas of freedoms, including LGBTQ rights, freedom of speech and the right to travel.
Access to safe abortion for pregnant people, gender-affirming care for trans youth, and international travel for noncitizens are intertwined rights – not isolated issues.
When the government starts stripping away any of these rights, I believe it signals serious trouble for democracy.
This story is published in collaboration with Rewire News Group, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering reproductive and sexual health.
It’s going to be Thanksgiving in the United States in a couple of weeks, and that got me to thinking about the people who worked hard and made sacrifices to make sure “we the people” means everybody. Given the way the current regime is trying to destroy those rights, it seems important to remember how we got them and what we need to do to keep them.
I’m thinking about these things in the United States because that’s the history I know best and it’s also where rights are under attack right now. But you can find similar histories in many countries.
Me, I thank the suffragists who made it possible for me to vote and led to many more women in positions of authority. That happened 105 years ago now, which may seem like ancient history if you were born in this century, but doesn’t seem that long ago at all if you’re my age.
I mean, my grandmothers were born before women could vote in the United States. My mother was born just three years afterwards.
I also thank the predecessors of the suffragists, the women who organized for their rights back in the 1800s, often working alongside abolitionists. I looked up the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and discovered that Frederick Douglass – who was the only African American at the convention – argued strongly for the inclusion of women’s right to vote, which was why they included it in their statement.
Douglass’s efforts in this regard are just one reason I think the abolitionist and the later civil rights movement were critical to rights that I have, and that we all share these days.
It’s not really freedom if it’s not freedom for all. The activism that finally implemented some of the rights set out in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments not only expanded the freedom of Black people, but expanded the rights for everyone.
I also thank unions for my freedoms. I’m personally grateful to the News Guild, my union, which enabled me to retire in reasonable comfort, but I’m grateful in general to all those people who fought for workers’ rights over many years, and who are still hanging in the fight right now. Continue reading “Feeling Thankful”…
As energy use rises and the planet warms, you might have dreamed of an energy source that works 24/7, rain or shine, quietly powering homes, industries and even entire cities without the ups and downs of solar or wind – and with little contribution to climate change.
The promise of new engineering techniques for geothermal energy – heat from the Earth itself – has attracted rising levels of investment to this reliable, low-emission power source that can provide continuous electricity almost anywhere on the planet. That includes ways to harness geothermal energy from idle or abandoned oil and gas wells. In the first quarter of 2025, North American geothermal installations attracted US$1.7 billion in public funding – compared with $2 billion for all of 2024, which itself was a significant increase from previous years, according to an industry analysis from consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.
As an exploration geophysicist and energy engineer, I’ve studied geothermal systems’ resource potential and operational trade-offs firsthand. From the investment and technological advances I’m seeing, I believe geothermal energy is poised to become a significant contributor to the energy mix in the U.S. and around the world, especially when integrated with other renewable sources.
A May 2025 assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey found that geothermal sources just in the Great Basin, a region that encompasses Nevada and parts of neighboring states, have the potential to meet as much as 10% of the electricity demand of the whole nation – and even more as technology to harness geothermal energy advances. And the International Energy Agency estimates that by 2050, geothermal energy could provide as much as 15% of the world’s electricity needs.
For generations, Maori people in New Zealand, and other people elsewhere around the world, have made use of the Earth’s heat, as in hot springs, where these people are cooking food in the hot water. Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images
Why geothermal energy is unique
Geothermal energy taps into heat beneath the Earth’s surface to generate electricity or provide direct heating. Unlike solar or wind, it never stops. It runs around the clock, providing consistent, reliable power with closed-loop water systems and few emissions.
Geothermal is capable of providing significant quantities of energy. For instance, Fervo Energy’s Cape Station project in Utah is reportedly on track to deliver 100 megawatts of baseload, carbon-free geothermal power by 2026. That’s less than the amount of power generated by the average coal plant in the U.S., but more than the average natural gas plant produces.
There are several ways to get energy from deep within the Earth.
Hydrothermal systems tap into underground hot water and steam to generate electricity. These resources are concentrated in geologically active areas where heat, water and permeable rock naturally coincide. In the U.S., that’s generally California, Nevada and Utah. Internationally, most hydrothermal energy is in Iceland and the Philippines.
A drilling rig sits outside a home in White Plains, N.Y., where a geothermal heat pump is being installed. AP Photo/Julia Nikhinson
Enhanced geothermal systems effectively create electricity-generating hydrothermal processes just about anywhere on the planet. In places where there is not enough water in the ground or where the rock is too dense to move heat naturally, these installations drill deep holes and inject fluid into the hot rocks, creating new fractures and opening existing ones, much like hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas production.
A system like this uses more than one well. In one, it pumps cold water down, which collects heat from the rocks and then is pumped back up through another well, where the heat drives turbines. In recent years, academic and corporate research has dramatically improved drilling speed and lowered costs.
Ground source heat pumps do not require drilling holes as deep, but instead take advantage of the fact that the Earth’s temperature is relatively stable just below the surface, even just 6 or8 feet down (1.8 to 2.4 meters) – and it’s hotter hundreds of feet lower.
These systems don’t generate electricity but rather circulate fluid in underground pipes, exchanging heat with the soil, extracting warmth from the ground in winter and transferring warmth to the ground in summer. These systems are similar but more efficient thanair-source heat pumps, sometimes called minisplits, which are becoming widespread across the U.S. for heating and cooling. Geothermal heat pump systems can serve individual homes, commercial buildings and even neighborhood or business developments.
Enhanced geothermal systems can be built almost anywhere and can take advantage of existing wells to save the time and money of drilling new holes deep into the ground. U.S. Geological Survey
And converting abandoned oil and gas wells for enhanced geothermal systems could significantly increase the amount of energy available and its geographic spread.
Those projects include repurposing idle oil or gas wells, which is relatively straightforward: Engineers identify wells that reach deep, hot rock formations and circulate water or another fluid in a closed loop to capture heat to generate electricity or provide direct heating. This method does not require drilling new wells, which significantly reduces setup costs and environmental disruption and accelerates deployment.
Despite its challenges, geothermal energy’s reliability, low emissions and scalability make it a vital complement to solar and wind – and a cornerstone of a stable, low-carbon energy future.
I keep seeing memes go by on social media that list changes we need to make once we get the fascists out of office. There are some good items on those lists and the people sharing them have good intentions, but at least two of the items drive me nuts: term limits for the Supreme Court and ending the electoral college.
It’s not that I disagree with those ideas – the electoral college should have been tossed out long ago and while I’m generally skeptical about term limits the lengths suggested are reasonable – but rather that they aren’t going to happen.
The Constitution provides for appointment for life for Supreme Court justices (and all federal judges) and it also sets up the electoral college. To get rid of those things, you need a constitutional amendment.
Getting a constitutional amendment is hard and in the current political climate probably impossible even if we throw all the bastards out in 2028.
However, there are things we can do that do not require amending the Constitution, and one of them would do a much better job of fixing the current disaster of the supreme court than term limits.
We need to expand the court.
There is no limit on the size of the court in the Constitution. The size of the court was set at nine members – eight associate justices and a chief justice – in 1869. At the time, the population of the United States was about 39 million, or roughly 10 percent of what it is now.
We actually need a larger court to get to all the issues the Supreme Court should handle. We need more judges on the federal district courts and the courts of appeal as well.
Further, term limits wouldn’t even apply to the current judges we need to get rid of, because any amendment would likely exempt them. We need to change the Supreme Court immediately and expansion would do that. Continue reading “The Changes We Need”…
Some weeks the world is so full of pain that it’s difficult to write something small and sensible.
I used to deal with such things by inviting friends to dinner. I love cooking and chatting and it was the perfect solution. In Australia right now, it’s only the perfect solution for someone who is close within the Jewish community. I am not this person, although I sued to be. That’s another story.
So many of my friends say “Sorry, too busy,” or “Next time.” Add that to my illnesses arguing with each other (a squabbling family, with no respect for their physical host) and I need a different way through. My US friends are often dealing with much worse – Australia’s antisemitism might be pretty cruel, but as long as I don’t go out much, it’s safe, and Albo is not good news but compared with the US President, he’s goodness personified. I’m caught in a strange little bind.
A friend explained that this whole thing felt pretty much like the first two years of COVID. That was my breakthrough moment. My illnesses meant that I saw no-one during COVID unless they were delivering things. Compared with that first two years, I live in a whirligig and leave my flat once a week, sometimes twice! I have friends online. And, the biggest thing of all… my TV works. During COVID I watched all the Stargate TV. I muttered when the history was so badly off. I wanted to know what Daniel Jackson’s PhDs were in and how they gave him such an ill-balanced understanding of history.
One of my many bugbears with the show was that it would have been nice to have at least maybe one or two Jews in the ancient Middle East. Stargate helped me see where some bigots get their bigotry from. If all they know about ancient history was first presented to them by Stargate or something like it, then they do not see our world, but a fictional universe.
And I’m off-topic. I was going to talk about how that COVID suggestion led to me watching much Star Trek. When I can do all my regular work, I watch less. When isolation pushes me towards cliff edges, I watch more. I argue about the world building with myself, and use the stories to help understand why we got where we are.
I always used to do this, but I’d watch or read whatever it was my writing and history students needed to know and find ways through popular TV to get them to analyse. I so miss that. But locally, no-one wants me to teach or talk anymore. This means that the thing I do best – help people understand the cultural and social basis of their own decisions – is one of the things lost unto me because I’m too Jewish and not physically robust.
The other day I emerged from hiding a little and asked people if they had more sources for what’s happening in Israel/Gaza so that I could balance out what I was learning. The main critical sources I have access to are all from pro-Israel analysts. I can (and do) pull them apart and make sense of them, but I’ve not been able to find anything nearly as solid in the analysis of data from anywhere else. Instead of giving me more sources, so that I could balance when I knew and be fair in how I see things… I lost friends. I don’t know what they saw and why my request was so impossible (they didn’t tell me), but from my end I was using my teaching methods on myself. I asked for more sources so that I could compare language and belief, look for patterns of speech, check where terms come from and how they’re used, and, above everything, when people claim this or that, drill down and find the source of the numbers and the origins of the claims, and pull them to pieces and balance them with views from other places and in other languages. Add to this checking the path ideas travel, for instance, find a translation of an article in Al Jazeera in Arabic and then compare it with the English version.
From my perspetive, anyone who makes claims about happenings at the other side of the world without doing this is doing what writers do when we world build lazily. When we world build lazily, we draw on our preconceptions of a place and time or a type of book and build up from there. This is why there is a shortage of ancient Jews in Stargate. And it’s why I’ve been accused (personally) of genocide and other things.
I can deal with the illnesses, even though they have entirely changed my everyday. I cannot deal nearly as well with people who are bright, yet will not question and try to understand how things happen, and who blame me for their own lack of thought.
I could have just said at the start of this post, “Oh, how I miss teaching!” but the reason I miss teaching is fairly important. These things are, I admit, difficult. My Richard III class at the Australian National University was both loved and hated . I got hold of such a range of primary sources for the last 3 years of his life, and the whole course comprised of students learning about the nature of the sources and pulling them apart, and then crating their own arguments on whether Richard was good, bad, a demon, a human being… whatever they wanted… as long as they could convince the rest of the class. It was an extension class, so the only result they had was their fellow students’ approval. The class felt that there wasn’t enough class time, so adjourned to coffee or dinner nearby and argued for two more hours. This is the polar opposite of conversations that cannot ever happen.
While there are things we need to hurry up and deal with – climate change and fascism spring to mind – the efforts to address both those areas seem to be plodding along. Meanwhile, the broligarchs are trumpeting what they’re calling AI and claiming that their concept of the future – one built on bad reading of “Golden Age” science fiction – is just a few years away.
Their ideas range from living on Mars in the next five (ten? twenty? thirty?) years to destroying the Earth so we can live throughout the Universe by the trillions, which I assume they think will happen in their lifetimes, though perhaps only if the singularity happens or some other form of immortality comes along to give them (but probably not the rest of us) infinite time.
It’s easy to poke holes in their lack of knowledge of any area except computer programming (and maybe even that). Even their physics seems wonky and as for their biology – well, let’s be real: we humans evolved on and with this planet. There is no place else in the Universe where we will fit as well. Destroying the Earth is taking away our perfect home.
It may be possible for us to live on other planets or in orbiting satellites, but there are a lot of challenges to that, challenges rooted in our biology and in physics in general, not to mention in the fact that we really know so damn little. There’s so much more we need to understand before we set out to colonize the universe, perhaps starting with whether we should be colonizing anything at all.
I wrote a novel about that: The Weave, which is about humans finding a habitable planet with an asteroid belt chock full of useful elements, a planet that turns out to be inhabited by intelligent beings who do not have human levels of technology, but have something else. I was thinking about the conquistadors in the Americas when I wrote it – the working title was Seven Cities of Gold and there are names and jokes on that theme throughout.
It is science fiction, meaning it is a thought experiment about how humans should approach meeting other intelligent beings, especially given some of the disasters in our history of meeting each other here on Earth. I’ll just note that the Earth I imagined was not destroyed to make this exploration possible, though it was far from a perfect society.
Biology. Physics. Ethics. Just a few of the things we have to consider as we explore beyond our planet or, for that matter, build future systems here on Earth.
There’s no need to be in a hurry about space exploration.
We have a perfectly good planet to live on – even with the challenges presented by our lack of attention to climate change – and, in fact, we could and should spend a lot of time and effort making sure we keep it livable for all and improve the infrastructure that makes a good modern life possible without destroying the core systems that make any kind of life possible.
It would make sense to get a properly balanced system working on Earth before we try to live anywhere else, because by doing that we’d figure out exactly what is necessary. Continue reading “Slow Down and Build Good Futures”…
Some people think that’s a good thing, that if people get angry enough they’ll do something.
I think that’s bullshit. Dangerous bullshit.
Back in my karate days, my teacher sometimes tried to make me angry to make me fight better. It never worked.
Here’s the thing: I get angry when I feel like there’s nothing I can do.
Now maybe if you made me angry enough to trigger blind rage, I might act, but I’m pretty sure the resulting action would not be a good thing. In general, people responding out of rage cause a lot of harm, even if their rage is justified.
What I need in order to act is to be centered enough to see options.
And it’s really fucking hard to keep my center these days in spite of forty years in martial arts, because there’s just so much destruction and harm going on and many of the tools we have available are slow and ineffective or – even worse – compromised.
So I’m angry, though I’m struggling to find enough center to do something constructive.
On the “how to deal with the destruction of the United States” front – a major reason why I’m angry – I have become involved with Unbreaking, which is an organization documenting the damage done to our government and the responses to it.
It took me awhile, but I’ve found a niche there working on summarizing litigation in the data security area. I spent years working as a legal editor and reporter, so combing through opinions and dockets is something I know how to do.
Figuring out what’s happening and summarizing it: that’s something I can do. So it helps.
But some of the other things I’m angry about are not directly tied to the current regime destroying most of what actually worked in the U.S. government. Rather, they are things that would exist even if we had responsible leadership in Washington. Continue reading “So Tired of Being Angry”…
At a Senate hearing on Sept. 9, 2025, on the corruption of science, witnesses presented an unpublished study that made a big assertion.
They claimed that the study, soon to be featured in a highly publicized film called “An Inconvenient Study,” expected out in early October 2025, provides landmark evidence that vaccines raise the risk of chronic diseases in childhood.
The study was conducted in 2020 by researchers at Henry Ford Health, a health care network in Detroit and southeast Michigan. Before the Sept. 9 hearing the study was not publicly available, but it became part of the public record after the hearing and is now posted on the Senate committee website.
At the hearing, Aaron Siri, a lawyer who specializes in vaccine lawsuits and acts as a legal adviser to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said the study was never published because the authors feared being fired for finding evidence supporting the health risks of vaccines. His rhetoric made the study sound definitive.
As the head of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, when I encounter new scientific claims, I always start with the question “Could this be true?” Then, I evaluate the evidence.
I can say definitively that the study by Henry Ford Health researchers has serious design problems that keep it from revealing much about whether vaccines affect children’s long-term health. In fact, a spokesperson at Henry Ford Health told journalists seeking comment on the study that it “was not published because it did not meet the rigorous scientific standards we demand as a premier medical research institution.”
The study’s weaknesses illustrate several key principles of biostatistics.
Study participants and conclusions
The researchers examined the medical records of about 18,500 children born between 2000 and 2016 within the Henry Ford Health network. According to the records, roughly 16,500 children had received at least one vaccine and about 2,000 were completely unvaccinated.
The authors compared the two groups on a wide set of outcomes. These included conditions that affect the immune system, such as asthma, allergies and autoimmune disorders. They also included neurodevelopmental outcomes such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, autism and speech and seizure disorders, as well as learning, intellectual, behavioral and motor disabilities.
Their headline result was that vaccinated children had 2.5 times the rate of “any selected chronic disease,” with 3 to 6 times higher rates for some specific conditions. They did not find that vaccinated children had higher rates of autism.
The study’s summary states it found that “vaccine exposure in children was associated with increased risk of developing a chronic health disorder.” That wording is strong, but it is not well supported given the weaknesses of the paper.
Timeline logic
To study long-term diseases in children, it’s crucial to track their health until the ages when these problems usually show up. Many conditions in the study, like asthma, ADHD, learning problems and behavior issues, are mostly diagnosed after age 5, once kids are in school. If kids are not followed that long, many cases will be missed.
However, that’s what happened here, especially for children in the unvaccinated group.
About 25% of unvaccinated children in the study were tracked until they were less than 6 months old, 50% until they were less than 15 months old, and only 25% were tracked past age 3. That’s too short to catch most of these conditions. Vaccinated kids, however, were followed much longer, with 75% followed past 15 months of age, 50% past 2.7 years of age and 25% past 5.7 years of age.
The longer timeline gave the vaccinated kids many more chances to have diagnoses recorded in their Henry Ford medical records compared with the nonvaccinated group. The study includes no explanation for this difference.
When one group is watched longer and into the ages when problems are usually found, they will almost always look sicker on paper, even if the real risks are the same. In statistics, this is called surveillance bias.
The primary methods used in the paper were not sufficient to adjust for this surveillance bias. The authors tried new analyses using only kids followed beyond age 1, 3 or 5. But vaccinated kids were still tracked longer, with more reaching the ages when diagnoses are made, so those efforts did not fix this bias.
More opportunities to be diagnosed
Not all cases of chronic disease are written down in the Henry Ford records. Kids who go to a Henry Ford doctor more often get more checkups, more tests and more chances for their diseases to be found and recorded in the Henry Ford system. Increased doctor visits has been shown to increase the chance of diagnosing chronic conditions, including autism, ADHD, asthma, developmental disorders and learning disabilities.
If people in one group see doctors more often than people in another, those people may look like they have higher disease rates even if their true health is the same across both groups. In statistics, this is called detection bias.
In the Henry Ford system, vaccinated kids averaged about seven visits per year, while unvaccinated kids had only about two. That gave the vaccinated kids many more chances to be diagnosed. The authors tried leaving out kids with zero visits, but this did not fix the detection bias, since vaccinated kids still had far more visits.
Another issue is that the study doesn’t show which kids actually used Henry Ford for their main care. Many babies are seen at the hospital for birth and early visits, but then go elsewhere for routine care. If that happens, later diagnoses would not appear in the Henry Ford records. The short follow-up for many children suggests a lot may have left the system after infancy, hiding diagnoses made outside Henry Ford.
Apples and oranges
Big differences between the groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated children can make it hard to know if vaccines really caused any differences in chronic disease. This is because of a statistical concept called confounding.
The two groups were not alike from birth. They differed in characteristics like sex, race, birth weight, being born early and the mother experiencing birth complications – all factors linked to later effects on health. The study made some adjustments for these, but left out many other important risks, such as:
• Whether families live in urban, suburban or rural areas.
• Family income, health insurance and resources.
• Environmental exposures such as air and water pollution, which were concerns in Detroit at that time.
Many factors can affect how often a child visits a health care provider.
These factors can affect both the chance of getting vaccinated and the chance of having health problems. They also change how often families visit Henry Ford clinics, which affects what shows up in the records.
When too many measured and unmeasured differences line up, as they do here, the study is unable to fully separate cause from effect.
Bottom line
The Henry Ford data could be helpful if the study followed both groups of kids to the same ages and took into account differences in health care use and background risks.
But as written, the study’s main comparisons are tilted. The follow-up time was short and uneven, kids had unequal chances for diagnosis, and the two groups were very different in ways that matter. The methods used did not adequately fix these problems. Because of this, the differences reported in the study do not show that vaccines cause chronic disease.
Good science asks tough questions and uses methods strong enough to answer them. This study falls short, and it is being presented as stronger evidence than its design really allows.
According to Rob Hopkins, whose book How to Fall in Love With the Future is my current morning read, that’s something people said on the barricades in Paris in 1968.
Since he quoted it in English, it must have spread far beyond Paris .(I’m sure even Parisian students in the Sixties would use French for their slogans on account of they are, in fact, French, and French people care about their language, even the radicals.)
It certainly reminds me of my experiences back in those days that we label the Sixties even though they extended into the 1970s. And it’s yet another reminder that much of what underlies progressive work in the United States (and other places, but I know the U.S. stuff) today is built on what we did back in the 1960s.
Part of the reason I’m writing about this is that I’m really, really tired of the “OK Boomer” nonsense on social media, a phenomenon that is inaccurate and ageist and shows a true lack of knowledge about recent history (which makes me worry about the lack of knowledge of history going back more than my lifetime).
But this is not a “kid’s today” post accompanied by headshaking and tut-tutting. From my perspective, the kids of today are great, and I suspect a lot of the generational name-calling is produced by bots and provocateurs.
It’s just that a lot of what the extremists running our country right now condemn as “woke” and “DEI” grew out of work we did toward making the United States a better place, and I’m damned if I want to let them destroy it.
I’m talking about the Civil Rights Movement, which actually started quite a long time before the 1960s (there’s some fascinating history of the legal strategies that led up to Brown v. Board starting in about 1920, just as an example) though a lot of things came to fruition then – some laws on equal opportunity and voting rights with teeth in them, plus some significant activism with groups like SNCC and the Black Panthers.
I’m talking about second wave feminism, which also owed quite a bit to the suffragists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
I’m talking about Stonewall and the gay rights activism that developed from that.
