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    US anti-vax stance to blame for continent-wide surge in measles, say experts

    Governments across Latin America are stepping up efforts to vaccinate their populations against measles, as outbreaks in North America drive a 34-fold increase in the number of cases reported in the region this year.Measles cases have surged worldwide to a 25-year high, due to low vaccine coverage and the spread of misinformation about vaccine safety. However, there is added concern in parts of Latin America over unequal access to healthcare and the worrying situation in the US, which is facing its worst measles outbreak in decades following a reversal of vaccine policy led by Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.“The US’s political position in relation to health and vaccination is an outrage,” said Rosana Richtmann, an infectious disease doctor and coordinator of the Brazilian Society of Infectious Disease’s immunisation committee. “It’s a problem for us.”View image in fullscreenMeasles was successfully eliminated from the Americas in 2016, and then again in 2024, but the continent is now at risk of losing its measles-free status. There have been 11,668 cases reported across 10 countries in North and Latin America, according to the latest data from the Pan-American Health Organization (Paho).More than half of these cases are in the US and Canada, with three deaths in the US and two in Canada so far.Mexico is the hardest-hit country in Latin America, with more than 4,800 cases and 22 deaths, followed by Bolivia with 354 cases. Other countries, including Brazil, Belize and Paraguay, are dealing with a few dozen infections linked to imported cases.Concern over high numbers of cases in North America has led the Brazilian health ministry to focus more on the highly contagious disease with a nationwide vaccination campaign launched for children and teenagers in October. Adults who did not have the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine as children are also being offered the jab.View image in fullscreenBrazil also has protocols in place to respond swiftly to individual cases. When a nine-year-old tested positive for measles on 7 October in Várzea Grande, health authorities were swift to act. Nurses kitted out in protective gear visited the child’s school and worked quickly to implement “ring vaccination”, inoculating everyone who had been in contact with her.The city’s health teams have also been going from door to door to identify unvaccinated people and holding vaccination drives in a shopping centre and the international airport.Richtmann said the biggest fear was imported cases. “We are much more worried about Brazilians travelling to Europe, to the US or Canada [catching measles and bringing it back], than about those who live here,” she said.Amira Roess, a professor of global health and epidemiology at Virginia’s George Mason University, agreed that the outbreaks in the US posed a threat to neighbouring countries.“Now suddenly, you’re more likely to run into someone who has some kind of infectious disease [in the US]. You visit the US, you go home with souvenirs – and you might also go home with measles,” she said.Mexico’s first measles case in February was imported from Texas by an unvaccinated Mennonite boy. Bolivia’s first cases also spread through pockets of unvaccinated people living in Mennonite settlements.Mennonites are Anabaptist Christian communities of European descent who reject many aspects of modern life, including vaccines.Daniel Salas, executive manager of Paho’s special programme for comprehensive immunisation, said: “Having close-knit communities that are often reluctant to receive vaccinations and having large flows [of people] from country to country through the region are aggravating factors.”View image in fullscreenHealth authorities should identify communities resistant to vaccination and target their efforts there, Salas said.There is no cure for measles, which can lead to serious complications and even death, but it is easily preventable with two doses of the MMR vaccine, which provides 97% protection.MMR vaccination rates in Latin America fell during the Covid pandemic and the years leading up to it but have recovered since 2022, reaching 86% last year, according to the World Bank. However, this remains below the 95% threshold needed for herd immunity, with a lag in uptake of second doses and significant disparities between countries and within them.View image in fullscreenLack of information and access to heathcare has contributed to lower vaccination rates, but doctors also blame the influence of the growing anti-vaxxer movement in the US.“A lot of South American countries look to the US,” said Carlos Paz, head of infectious diseases at the Mario Ortiz Suárez paediatric hospital in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where 80% of the country’s cases have been reported.“The population sees what a US minister says about vaccines, and some people start to say, ‘well, we shouldn’t get vaccinated here either’,” he said.While the US health secretary did endorse the MMR vaccine after an outbreak in Texas in April, Kennedy has also spread misleading information about it and misinformation about measles treatment.This month the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, now led by a biotech investor, suggested the MMR vaccine should be given as three separate jabs, even though the safety and efficacy of combined shots have been demonstrated by decades of research and going against the CDC’s own longstanding advice.Bolivia declared a national health emergency in June, extended school holidays to avoid contact between children, and launched a widespread vaccination drive, relying partly on donations from Brazil, India and Chile. But coverage in October had still only reached 45%, while the government still has 1.6m doses available.“We’ve been campaigning to increase the vaccination rate. Each doctor, each paediatrician, is a soldier advocating for vaccination,” said Paz. More

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    Where do babies come from? Robert F Kennedy Jr doesn’t seem to know | Arwa Mahdawi

    Robert F Kennedy Jr is the father of six children. He’s also the US health secretary. Two facts that might lead a reasonable person to assume he possesses a basic understanding of how foetuses develop.In a shocking development, however, it seems that Kennedy – an anti-vaxxer who says his brain was partly eaten by a parasitic worm – may not know what he’s talking about. During a cabinet meeting last Thursday, Kennedy reasserted unproven claims that taking the common painkiller acetaminophen, also known as Tylenol or paracetamol, while pregnant causes autism. Doubters of this theory, he said, were motivated by Trump derangement syndrome. To underscore his point, he referenced a TikTok video he’d seen of a pregnant woman “gobbling Tylenol with her baby in her placenta”.Foetuses, of course, develop in the uterus, not the placenta. It’s possible, if we are being generous, that Kennedy misspoke. Then again, he would hardly be the first US politician to make it clear he knows nothing about the female bodies he is so keen to legislate, would he?In 2019, for example, 25 Republicans – all white men – voted for a near-total ban on abortion in Alabama. During the debate, Clyde Chambliss, one of the bill’s sponsors in the Senate, noted that while he didn’t have medical training, “from what I’ve read, what I’ve been told, there’s some period of time before you can know that a woman is pregnant … It takes some time for all those chromosomes and all that.” Chambliss went on to say the generous bill allowed a woman to end her pregnancy “up until the point she is known to be pregnant”. Yeah, I don’t know what he means either.Then there’s the Ohio Republican John Becker, who once co-sponsored a bill prohibiting insurers from covering abortion services, except for a procedure “intended to reimplant” an ectopic pregnancy in a woman’s uterus. This is medically impossible. After this was pointed out, Becker said he’d never actually researched the issue.And there’s the Idaho lawmaker who once asked if a woman could swallow a small camera so doctors could conduct a remote gynaecological exam. No, he was told by a doctor, because swallowed pills don’t end up in your vagina. “Fascinating,” he replied.I could go on; I’m afraid there are endless examples. But I’ll end with the late Todd Akin, a conservative Missouri Republican, who said in 2012 that “legitimate rape” rarely results in pregnancy because “the female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down”. Yep, that same crafty female body that grows babies in its placenta. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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    Six former US surgeons general warn RFK Jr is ‘endangering nation’s health’

    Six former US surgeons general – the top medical posting in Washington – warned in an opinion column published on Tuesday that policy changes enacted by the health and human services (HHS) secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, are “endangering the health of the nation”.The surgeons general – Jerome Adams, Richard Carmona, Joycelyn Elders, Vivek Murthy, Antonia Novello and David Satcher – who served under both Republican and Democrat administrations, identified changes in vaccine policy, medical research funding, a shift in priorities from rationality to ideology, plunging morale, and changes to staffing as areas of concern.Referring to their oaths of office, both Hippocratic as physicians and as public servants, the former officials wrote in the Washington Post that they felt “compelled to speak with one voice to say that the actions of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are endangering the health of the nation”.“Never before have we issued a joint public warning like this. But the profound, immediate and unprecedented threat that Kennedy’s policies and positions pose to the nation’s health cannot be ignored,” they said, adding that they could not ignore the “profound, immediate and unprecedented threat” of his policies.Under a “Make America Healthy Again” (Maha) agenda, Kennedy has accelerated vaccine policy changes despite opposition from scientists, including narrowing eligibility for Covid-19 vaccine shots and dismissing members of a vaccine advisory panel.He has cut federal funding for mRNA vaccine research for respiratory illnesses and instituted a review of vaccine recommendations. Kennedy also sought the dismissal of Dr Susan Monarez, former head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).Monarez testified before Congress last month that her firing by Donald Trump came after refusing a request from Kennedy to dismiss CDC vaccine experts “without cause”.Kennedy said in June that waning public trust in US healthcare and conflicts of interest between the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry are behind a mission to put “the restoration of public trust above any pro- or anti-vaccine agenda”.“The public must know that unbiased science guides the recommendations from our health agencies. This will ensure the American people receive the safest vaccines possible,” he said.The surgeons general pushed back on that characterization in their letter, noting that they had uniformly “watched with increasing alarm as the foundations of our nation’s public health system have been undermined.“Science and expertise have taken a back seat to ideology and misinformation. Morale has plummeted in our health agencies, and talent is fleeing at a time when we face rising threats – from resurgent infectious diseases to worsening chronic illnesses,” they said.They accused Kennedy of failing to ground public healthcare policy in science, pointing out that Kennedy “has spent decades advancing dangerous and discredited claims about vaccines” and referred to the recent measles outbreak in parts of the US.“Secretary Kennedy is entitled to his views,” the authors concluded. “But he is not entitled to put people’s health at risk. He has rejected science, misled the public and compromised the health of Americans.”Last week, two psychiatric organizations – the Southern California Psychiatric Society and a grassroots startup, the Committee to Protect Public Mental Health – called for Kennedy’s removal as health secretary in a statement, arguing that the HHS had “been damaged in ways that directly endanger lives, degrade scientific integrity, and obstruct effective treatment for mental health and substance use disorders”.The groups pointed to Kennedy’s restructuring of the agency including changes to the substance abuse and mental health services administration (Samhsa), which the secretary plans to place under the control of a new entity, titled the Administration for a Healthy America (AHA).Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for the federal health department, said in a statement to NPR that “Secretary Kennedy remains firmly committed to delivering on President Trump’s promise to Make America Healthy Again by dismantling the failed status quo, restoring public trust in health institutions, and ensuring the transparency, accountability, and decision-making power the American people voted for.” More

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    A critique of pure stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0

    The first and second Trump administrations have provoked markedly different critical reactions. The shock of 2016 and its aftermath saw a wave of liberal anxiety about the fate of objective knowledge, not only in the US but also in Britain, where the Brexit referendum that year had been won by a campaign that misrepresented key facts and figures. A rich lexicon soon arose to describe this epistemic breakdown. Oxford Dictionaries declared “post-truth” their 2016 word of the year; Merriam-Webster’s was “surreal”. The scourge of “fake news”, pumped out by online bots and Russian troll farms, suggested that the authority of professional journalism had been fatally damaged by the rise of social media. And when presidential counsellor Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts” a few days after Trump’s inauguration in early 2017, the mendacity of the incoming administration appeared to be all but official.The truth panic had the unwelcome side-effect of emboldening those it sought to oppose. “Fake” was one of Trump’s favourite slap-downs, especially to news outlets that reported unwelcome facts about him and his associates. A booming Maga media further amplified the president’s lies and denials. The tools of liberal expertise appeared powerless to hold such brazen duplicity to account. A touchstone of the moment was the German-born writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt, who observed in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism that “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … no longer exists”.In 2025, the denunciations have a different flavour. To many of us, the central problem is that we live not so much in a time of lies as one of stupidity. This diagnosis has credibility across the political spectrum. In January, the centrist columnist David Brooks wrote a column for the New York Times titled “The Six Principles of Stupidity”. The new administration, he wrote, was “behaving in a way that ignores the question: What would happen next?”In March, Hillary Clinton – not, perhaps, ideal counsel – weighed in with an op-ed in the same paper, with the headline: “How Much Dumber Will This Get?” “It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me,” Clinton wrote, “it’s the stupidity.” And in April, the Marxist writer and intellectual Richard Seymour posted an essay on “Stupidity as Historical Force”. In place of Arendt, Seymour quoted Trotsky: “When the political curve goes down, stupidity dominates social thinking” – once the forces of reaction predominate, so reason gives way to insults and prejudice.Trump’s lying is no less constant or blatant than in 2016, but by now it feels familiar, already priced in. What more is there to say about the “war on truth” a decade into Trump’s political career?Still, at least two aspects of his second administration are newly and undoubtedly “stupid”. One is shambolic incompetence of a degree that led the editor of the Atlantic magazine to be accidentally added to a Signal group chat about US military operations, a group whose other members included the vice-president and the secretary of defence. A second is its incomprehensible determination to press ahead with policies – such as tariffs and the defunding of medical research – that will do deep harm without any apparent gain, even for Trump’s backers and clients, still less his voters.The spectacle of a prominent vaccine sceptic and wellness crank as secretary of health and human services goes beyond an abandonment of truth; it feels like an assault on human progress. Bans on fluoride in tap water, passed by legislators in Utah and Florida at Robert F Kennedy Jr’s behest, mark a new hostility to the very idea of evidence-based government. The escalation from Trump One to Trump Two has seen irrationality spread from the deliberative public sphere to flood the veins of government.When we interpret the actions of others, a basic principle is to assume that people have reasons for behaving as they do, even if those reasons may be emotional, shortsighted or cynical. In the wake of the group chat fiasco and the tariffs upheaval, social media posters made a kind of parlour game of cramming the Trump administration’s actions into their favoured explanatory paradigm. Signalgate must have been deliberate; tariffs must be a grand plan to crash the dollar in the interest of one economic faction or another. The risk is that ever-more elaborate explanations for stupid actions end up wrongly according those actions a kind of intelligence – rather confirming the insight of the political scientist Robyn Marasco that “conspiracy theory is a love affair with power that poses as its critique”.Such speculations are often met with a retort that leans even harder into the stupidity allegation. No, Trump and his people are not playing four-dimensional chess, the response goes – we are simply witnessing the consequences of allowing a deranged man into the highest office, backed by a coterie of dim and unqualified cronies. When political sociology falls short, medical psychiatry and an unspoken social Darwinism fill the void.Not for the first time, the early months of the second Trump administration drew comparisons to Mike Judge’s 2006 movie Idiocracy, in which a soldier of average intelligence wakes up 500 years into the future to discover a US governed by idiocy. Culturally, technologically and ecologically, the depiction feels grimly prophetic. Waste and pollution are out of control. The president is a TV celebrity with the manner and style of a pro-wrestling star. Doctors have been replaced by clunky diagnostic machines. Consumers sit in front of screens flooded with ads and slogans that they repeat like memes. When the soldier advises people to stop trying to irrigate their failing crops using a Gatorade-like drink and to use water instead, they swiftly abandon this practical suggestion when the drink manufacturer’s profits collapse. “Do you really want to live in a world where you’re trying to blow up the one person who is trying to help you?” the soldier asks in desperation, after people turn on him. And, yes, it turns out they do.View image in fullscreenWe might recognise stupefying consumerism and profit maximisation as symptoms of our own age of idiocy, but the premise of Judge’s satire is a politically ugly one. The reason the US has descended into this abyss over the centuries is that smart people (depicted as neurotic professionals) have stopped reproducing, while dumb people (depicted as violent trailer-park trash) can’t stop, eventually overwhelming the gene pool with stupidity. At a time when racial eugenics, natalist policy and IQ fixation are ascendant once more, this is scarcely a line of thinking that many liberals or leftists can endorse. Then again, who can be sure that opponents of reactionary “stupidity” don’t sometimes harbour eugenicist fantasies of their own? The aftermath of the Brexit vote – like tariffs, a seemingly senseless act of economic self-harm – witnessed liberal mutterings that typical leave voters were so elderly that by the time Brexit finally came into effect, many had already died.One needn’t indulge in such dark fantasies to hope that official stupidity eventually meets its comeuppance. Surely stupid economic policies must lead to stupid political strategy, resulting in the loss of power. Again, Britain’s recent experience offers a precedent: when the then prime minister, Liz Truss, put her own fiscal dogmas above the judgments of the bond markets in September 2022, she was swiftly ejected from office (with the help of the Bank of England) a mere 49 days after entering it. With Trump, many have looked to the bond markets as the final backstop of intelligence in a stupid world, the power that eventually forces idiots to confront consequences. This works up to a point, especially when financial pain is visited upon corporate executives who have the president’s ear – but it only trims away at the stupidity, warding off its worst excesses. Trump’s lack of basic causal understanding, of how policy A leads to outcome B, is not limited to economic policy, nor to Trump himself.The challenge posed by this political crisis is how to take the stupidity seriously without reducing it to a wholly mental or psychiatric phenomenon. Stupidity can be understood as a problem of social systems rather than individuals, as André Spicer and Mats Alvesson explore in their book The Stupidity Paradox. Stupidity, they write, can become “functional”, a feature of how organisations operate on a daily basis, obstructing ideas and intelligence despite the palpable negative consequences.Yet it’s hard to identify anything functional about Trumpian stupidity, which is less a form of organisational inertia or disarray than a slash-and-burn assault on the very things – universities, public health, market data – that help make the world intelligible. Trumpian stupidity isn’t an emergent side-effect of smart people’s failure to take control; it is imposed and enforced. This needs to be confronted politically and sociologically, without falling into the opposite trap of “sanewashing” or inflating strategic cunning to the point of conspiracy theory.“Since the beginning of this century, the growth of meaninglessness has been accompanied by loss of common sense,” wrote Arendt in 1953. “In many respects, this has appeared simply as an increasing stupidity … Stupidity in the Kantian sense has become the infirmity of everybody, and therefore can no longer be regarded as ‘beyond Remedy’.”Arendt’s argument contained a glimmer of hope. Stupidity on a social scale had to be remediable, if only because it was no longer explicable as a mere cognitive deficiency among individuals. She believed that people – intellectuals as much as “the masses” – had stopped exercising their powers of judgment, preferring to mouth platitudes or simply obey orders, rather than think for themselves. But what are the social and political conditions that normalise this? One is a society where people wait for instruction on how to think, which Arendt saw as a key characteristic of totalitarianism.This social model of stupidity – crystallised in the Orwellian image of brainwashed drones, trained to obey – has a superficial plausibility as a depiction of contemporary authoritarianism, but it misses a critical dimension of liberal societies as they took shape in the late 20th century. Judgment was not replaced by dictatorship, but rather outsourced to impersonal, superintelligent systems of data collection and analysis.Over the middle decades of the 20th century, the neoliberal argument for markets, made most potently by Friedrich Hayek, always emphasised that their primary function was to organise a society’s knowledge. Where markets ran smoothly and prices were set freely, there would be no need for anyone to exercise judgment beyond their own immediate wants, desires and expectations. The “stupid” person has just as much potential to thrive in a neoliberal society as the “smart” person, because the price system will ultimately decide on collective outcomes.In the early 21st century, similar arguments have been made for “big data” by Silicon Valley ideologue and former Wired editor Chris Anderson, and for randomised control trials by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Abhijit Banerjee: that they will happily render the theories, judgments and explanations of human beings – with all their biases and errors – redundant. Once everything is quantified, right down to nanodetails, not even measurement is needed, just algorithmic pattern recognition. You don’t need a concept of “rabbit” to identify the furry thing with big ears; you just design machines to identify which word most commonly appears alongside such an image.View image in fullscreenThus when people look to the bond markets to rescue us from stupidity, they are not expecting the return of “common sense”, but merely that certain behaviours and policies will receive lower scores than others. Similarly, large language models, which promise so much today, do not offer judgment, let alone intelligence, but unrivalled pattern-processing power, based on a vast corpus of precedents. (Large language models such as ChatGPT are intelligent within their own limits, but comically stupid when stretched beyond them. Google’s AI-generated search feature has been asked to explain the meaning of nonsensical made-up idioms – such as “you can’t lick a badger twice” and “erase twice, plank once” – which it confidently proceeded to do, producing torrents of bullshit. Professors will also be familiar with the experience of reading student essays that are neither very good nor very bad, but that uncanny combination of the intelligent and the stupid that is the mark of AI writing.)From the neoliberal critique of planning in the 1970s to Elon Musk’s Doge, political attacks on governmental and professional forms of human authority serve the parallel project of opening space for overarching technologies of quantification, comparison and evaluation. Yet the technological quest to “go meta” on the rest of society, thus reducing the role of human judgment, is not new. In The Human Condition, Arendt identified the launch of Sputnik in 1957 as a historical turning point, offering the possibility of an unworldly perspective on worldly affairs, downgrading the latter in the process. The cold war, which gave birth to the internet and myriad tools of control and surveillance, was a battle to achieve the most complete global viewpoint. No behaviour or movement was deemed irrelevant to uncovering the enemy’s intentions. Musk’s fixation on space (Starlink now has about 8,000 satellites in orbit) is of a piece with his flippant approach to human judgment. Pressed on why he falsely claimed, as a pretext for slashing its budget, that USAID spent $50m on condoms for Gaza, Musk casually responded: “Some of the things I say will be incorrect.”The transition of human activities on to surveillance platforms means that truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, become mere data points of equal value. False information and stupid policies can move markets at least as much as accurate information and smart policies, and so offer equal opportunity to speculators. One morning in April, the S&P 500 jumped 6% after a viral rumour that Trump’s tariff policy was being paused – a rumour the Financial Times traced back to a pseudonymous X user named Walter Bloomberg, based in Switzerland, with no offline credentials whatsoever. A Hayekian might point out that the error was quickly corrected – the market dropped 6% again within the hour – but this was a manifestly stupid turn of events.In a fully platform-based world, everything shrinks to the status of behaviours and patterns; meaning, intention and explanation become irrelevant. One of the most incisive accounts of this tendency in contemporary US politics comes from political scientists Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead, in their analysis of the “new conspiracism”.Classic conspiracy theory (regarding, say, the JFK assassination) rests on an overelaborate theoretical imagination, with complex causal chains, strategies and alliances. Its demands for coherence and meaning are excessive, while its tolerance for contingency is stunted. By contrast, “The new conspiracism dispenses with the burden of explanation. Instead, we have innuendo and verbal gesture … not evidence but repetition … The new conspiracism – all accusation, no evidence – substitutes social validation for scientific validation: if a lot of people are saying it, to use Trump’s signature phrase, then it is true enough.”The new conspiracism has its technological basis in digital platforms and the rise of reactionary influencers and “conspiracy entrepreneurs”. Outlandish and pointless fantasies, such as the conspiracies circulated by QAnon or the alleged staging of the Sandy Hook school shooting, exist to be recited and shared, acting as instruments of online influence and coordination rather than narratives to make sense of the world. They may identify enemies and reinforce prejudices, but they don’t explain anything or provide a political plan. The only injunction of the new conspiracist is that their claims get liked, shared and repeated. Engagement – and revenue – is all.View image in fullscreenThis analysis takes us beyond the 2016-era panic over “truth” to help us chart the current political flood waters of “stupidity”. When Republican politicians go on TV and make absurd claims about tariffs, vaccines or immigration, is it best understood as “lying”, or as something else altogether? Often they are simply repeating lines that have already been circulating, filtering outward from nodes – Trump and RFK Jr especially – in the conspiracist network. Some claims act as loyalty oaths (affirmations that the 2020 election was stolen), but more are just deranged and bizarre, not to mention sick, such as the claim that DEI hiring policies were responsible for the fires that devastated Los Angeles in January, and the fatal aircraft collision that killed 67 people that same month. Taken as judgments or explanations, they raise questions about the cognitive faculties of the speaker, but perhaps they are better seen as memes. The individuals might sound stupid, but they are not the architects of a media sphere in which causal explanation has been sacrificed for symbolic mimicry, to fill time and generate content.In the same essay reflecting on stupidity, Arendt distinguished between “preliminary” and “true” understanding. Because it involves applying existing concepts to particular situations, preliminary understanding has a kind of circularity. It can be clever and correct, but it falls short when confronting the genuine novelty of human actions. One can escape the most brute form of stupidity, yet not truly understand the significance of the political and historical moment. Even the cleverest person or system can get trapped in a “preliminary” understanding of events.Arendt argued that there was a second human faculty, in addition to judgment, that allowed understanding to progress to a truer grasp of meaning: imagination. Imagination, for Arendt, is the uniquely human capacity to grasp truth via speculative leaps, drawing on empathy and creativity in the process, as opposed to scientific methods. Politics requires us to navigate situations which are incomparable and immeasurable, because they are genuinely new. This in turn requires something closer to aesthetic judgment than to scientific judgment.“Imagination alone,” Arendt wrote, “enables us to see things in their proper perspective.” The challenge Arendt poses to us is to think of truth and meaning not from the perspective of the economist, financial analyst, data scientist or sociologist, but of the historian, the kind who sees human events as a series of breaks, anomalies and initiations.This is what the “closed world” of platform and market surveillance can’t provide: a kind of understanding that is not reducible to empirical data. Artificial or market “intelligence” has the capacity to learn at ultra-high speed from existing data, but its range of possible outcomes, while extremely large, is nevertheless enumerable and therefore finite. In the gamified space of such “closed worlds”, history is finished, and all that remains is lots and lots of behaviours. Every conceivable event, utterance or idea is already out there, whether in the real-time computer of the market or the archival one of the data bank, waiting to be discovered.Trump and his administration are undoubtedly stupid. They don’t know what they are doing, don’t understand the precedents or facts involved and lack any curiosity about consequences, human and non-human. The tariffs fiasco has been the greatest fillip to the legitimacy of the economics profession in living memory, showing by a series of brute experimental results that international trade does, on balance, enhance prosperity and efficiency. It turns out that the foundational concepts of macroeconomics do have some empirical grip upon the world after all, and that to ignore them is an act of stupidity. Tragically, a similar process is under way in public health.But if our only alternative to stupidity is to reinstall the “preliminary understanding” of expert orthodoxy (welcome as that might be in some areas), then there will be no reflection on the wider historical conditions of stupidity, nor on the extent of stupid policy and process not only tolerated but valued by contemporary capitalism. The outsourcing of judgment to financial markets, digital platforms and fusions of the two is also an invitation for people to behave stupidly, albeit within systems that are governed by some esoteric form of mathematical reason. It would be absurd to seek hope in Trump and Trumpism, but perhaps stupidity on such a world-historical level can at least offer an opportunity for “true” understanding. Nothing – markets, bots or machines – can rescue us, except our imagination.A longer version of this essay appeared in n+1 magazine More

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    The abortion pill is safe. But why should Trump let facts get in the way of his agenda? | Moira Donegan

    Robert F Kennedy Jr’s health department is conducting a new review of mifepristone, the drug used in the majority of American abortions, claiming that a new study from a conservative thinktank has raised concerns about its safety.Mifepristone, which was approved by the FDA 25 years ago this month, has repeatedly been proven safe and effective for use terminating pregnancies in both multiple medical trials and in widespread patient use over the past quarter of a century. The report cited by Kennedy, meanwhile, comes from the Ethics and Public Policy Center – a group that applies “the Jewish and Christian traditions” to modern law and pushes back “against the extreme progressive agenda while building a consensus for conservatives” – and was not peer reviewed. The study has been heavily criticized by medical experts for its methodology and lack of transparency regarding how it obtained and analyzed its data. The report appears to have dramatically inflated the rate of serious adverse health outcomes in patients who took mifepristone – in part by seemingly conflating the bleeding that occurs in the normal course of a medication abortion with hemorrhaging, and in part by relying on unclear terminology. The Ethics and Public Policy Center report classified “serious adverse events” as occurring in almost 11% of mifepristone patients. More reliable studies, subject to data transparency, peer review, and a more rigorously honest set of definitions, have found that such adverse health events happen in fewer than 0.5% of users. In a meta-analysis of more than 100 studies, the vast majority found that more than 99% of people who use mifepristone have no serious complications.Mifepristone is safe. But why let the facts get in the way of the Trump administration’s political agenda? The review of mifepristone marks the second time in less than a week that the Trump administration has marshalled false medical claims and junk science in an effort to constrain the freedoms of pregnant women and curtail their access to relief. On Monday, in a bizarre, rambling and frequently nonsensical press conference, the president appeared alongside Kennedy Jr to claim, falsely, that Tylenol use during pregnancy can cause autism in the resulting children, and to instruct pregnant women to avoid the painkiller and instead “tough it out”.The Trump administration has long been under pressure from the anti-abortion movement – which, not satisfied by the end of Roe v Wade (in a decision delivered to them by Trump’s appointees, hand-selected for the purpose), has continually pushed the administration to further limit access to abortion. Donald Trump has seemed unwilling to directly attack abortion, appearing to think that the issue is a political loser for him. But his administration has already curtailed access nationwide. His massive domestic spending bill included a provision barring most abortion providers from receiving Medicaid reimbursements for any services they provide – abortion related or not – for a year, a move that makes it dramatically more expensive for clinics to offer abortion services. As a result, clinics are already shutting their doors in Democratically-controlled states like California. In Wisconsin, where the battle for abortion legalization led to a fantastically expensive state supreme court race and massive voter mobilization, the state Planned Parenthood affiliate made the decision to stop providing abortions in order to retain access to the Medicaid funding they need to stay open – even though that enormous political effort succeeded in re-legalizing abortion in the state.But that’s not enough for the anti-choice right. Three Republican-controlled states – Missouri, Idaho and Kansas – are suing the FDA, seeking to reverse changes to mifepristone regulations that allowed the drug to be prescribed via telemedicine and sent through the mail, and to restore other restrictions on the drug. Texas, Florida and Louisiana are seeking to join and expand that lawsuit to further restrict mifepristone. The new regulations, which have been endorsed by leading health experts, have made mifepristone dramatically more accessible in the years since the Dobbs decision, as women living in states that ban abortion seek out ways to have the medication prescribed and mailed to them by physicians abroad or in Democratically controlled states.Kennedy’s move against mifepristone could restrict access even further. Compared with surgery, the pill is a more accessible, safer and less resource-intensive way for clinics to provide abortions. It does not require a surgical room or very much of a provider’s time; patients can take the pills and have their abortions in the comfort and privacy of their own homes. Getting rid of the abortion pill, or making it harder to access, would put even more strain on abortion providers who are already having a difficult time keeping their heads above water.Even more tragically, the move could be devastating for women’s health and lives. In the pre-Roe era, when abortion was illegal and mifepristone had not yet been invented, many women in need of abortions sought out surgical procedures on the black market. But surgery is much riskier than taking a pill, and many of these women experienced injuries and infections that killed or permanently maimed them. There is exactly one reason why the US has not yet seen a return to those bad old days of unsafe surgical abortions and mass female death: that reason is mifepristone. The drug saves women’s dreams and dignity by allowing them to control their own reproduction; it saves their lives by allowing them to avoid a dangerous surgery in an illegal market. Even in liberal states, abortion has become much harder to access than it was before Dobbs; that alone is an injury to women’s citizenship and status. With mifepristone under threat, it looks like the Trump administration is threatening their lives, too.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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    Why is the Trump administration obsessed with autism? – podcast

    Archive: Good Morning America, NPR, NBC News, WHAS11, BBC News, CBS News, Jimmy Kimmel Live, LiveNowFox
    Listen to Science Weekly’s episode factchecking Trump’s claims about paracetamol
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    Trump says Ukraine could regain all territory lost to Russia since 2022 invasion after meeting Zelenskyy at UN – live

    In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump said that Ukraine is in a position to “fight and win back” all of the territory it has lost since the beginning of the 2022 Russian invasion.“Why not? Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win,” Trump wrote, in a rare full-throated endorsement of Ukraine’s potential.“Ukraine would be able to take back their Country in its original form and, who knows, maybe even go further than that! Putin and Russia are in BIG Economic trouble, and this is the time for Ukraine to act,” Trump said in his lengthy social media meditation. He added that the US will continue to supply Nato with weapons for purchase.Earlier, in a bilateral meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump said that the “Russian economy is terrible right now” and Ukraine has done a “pretty amazing” job at staving off the Kremlin’s forces.Donald Trump’s meeting with Arab and Muslim leaders at the United Nations has concluded. The president did not answer any questions, but White House pool reporters noted that he said he had a “very good meeting” and teased his intention to follow up with a meeting with Israel.The Associated Press also noted that special envoy Steve Witkoff offered a thumbs-up in response to a question about how the meeting went.China’s representative to the Security Council criticized the use of sanctions, a strategy that the Trump administration has shown renewed interest in at this meeting of the UN General Assembly.“Abusing unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction under the pretext of the crisis does not contribute to a political settlement,” the representative said.The United States has previously levied sanctions against China, and Chinese companies, for supporting Russia.Secretary of state Marco Rubio touted Donald Trump’s role in negotiations to end the war in Ukraine during a meeting of the UN Security Council, while also noting that the president was open to levying “additional economic costs” on Russia and selling additional defensive weaponry and “potentially offensive weaponry” to Ukraine.“The president is a very patient man,” Rubio said, “but his patience is not infinite.”“The United States remains as committed as it has ever been to a peaceful resolution to this dangeorous conflict, but there will come a moment where we will have to conclude that perhaps there is no interest in a peaceful resolution,” he added.Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has decided to close a Defense Department advisory committee dedicated to recruiting and retaining women in the military.In a social media post announcing the closure of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson wrote: “The Committee is focused on advancing a divisive feminist agenda that hurts combat readiness, while Secretary Hegseth has focused on advancing uniform, sex-neutral standards across the Department.”The advisory committee was founded in 1951 under Harry Truman’s presidency. The Military Times reported earlier this year that the committee was one of 14 defense advisory committees flagged for potential termination, though many of those would require congressional approval to be disbanded.Here’s more from my colleague Rachel Leingang:Speaking to the UN General Assembly today, South African president Cyril Ramaphosa said that “trade is now being used as a weapon against a number of countries in the world.”The comment may have been a reference to Donald Trump’s tariffs – which include a 30% levy against South Africa. In May, Ramaphosa met Trump in the Oval Office, where the president played Ramaphosa a video that he falsely claimed proved genocide was being committed against white people under “the opposite of apartheid”.Here’s more on the state of the US-South Africa relationship from my colleague David Smith:Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer criticized Donald Trump for canceling a meeting with top Congressional Democrats, scheduled for Thursday, ahead of an approaching government funding deadline at the end of the month.At a press conference, Schumer said Trump should “stop ranting” and that “time is of the essence” as the 30 September deadline approaches.“Mr. President, do your job,” Schumer said.Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is also speaking currently at a UN meeting of the Security Council. “One of the prominent members of this council is doing everything to prolong the largest war in Europe since World War II,” Zelenskyy said. “Russia does this with its veto power.”“China is also represented here, a powerful nation on which Russia relies completely,” he added. “Without China, Putin’s Russia is nothing.”Zelenskyy also nodded to his recent meeting with Donald Trump. “We expect America’s actions to push Moscow toward peace,” he said.Donald Trump’s multilateral meeting with several leaders of Arab and Muslim countries has begun.In brief remarks to reporters, Trump said, “We want to end the war in Gaza.”“This is my most important meeting,” he added. “We’re going to end something that should have probably never started.”During his pull aside with Macron, Donald Trump flagged that his next meeting – a multilateral sitdown with several leaders of Arab and Muslim countries – will be crucial to address the ongoing crisis in Gaza.“We’re going to see if we can do something about it. We want to stop that. We want to get our hostages back, or their hostages back.”Much like his address to the general assembly today, the president said that we can’t “forget” the October 7 attack by Hamas in his meeting with Macron. In response, the French president said “nobody forgets the seventh of October”.This week, France joined Britain, Canada, Portugal and Australia to formally recognize Palestinian statehood. For his part, Donald Trump has branded the move as a “reward to Hamas”.In a meeting with French president Emanuel Macron, Donald Trump reiterated his recent comments on Truth Social that Ukraine has the potential to win back all the territory it has lost to Russia in the three and a half years since the most recent war in the region began.Trump said that Ukraine’s ability to fight back might prove that Russia is a “paper tiger”.“I feel that way. I really do feel that way. Let them get their land back,” the president added.In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump said that Ukraine is in a position to “fight and win back” all of the territory it has lost since the beginning of the 2022 Russian invasion.“Why not? Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win,” Trump wrote, in a rare full-throated endorsement of Ukraine’s potential.“Ukraine would be able to take back their Country in its original form and, who knows, maybe even go further than that! Putin and Russia are in BIG Economic trouble, and this is the time for Ukraine to act,” Trump said in his lengthy social media meditation. He added that the US will continue to supply Nato with weapons for purchase.Earlier, in a bilateral meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump said that the “Russian economy is terrible right now” and Ukraine has done a “pretty amazing” job at staving off the Kremlin’s forces.Earlier, president of the EU commission Ursula von der Leyen said that Donald Trump was “absolutely right” about European countries continuing to buy Russian energy products. A move the president described as “inexcusable” in his address to the UN general assembly today.“We’re on it. We have reduced already massive gas supply from Russia, completely gotten out of Russian coal, and massively also reduced the oil supply. But there’s still some coming to the European continent,” von der Leyen said during a pull aside meeting with the presiden. “So what we do now? We put sanctions out to those ports where, for example, energy is coming from Russia. And we want to put tariffs on oil supplies that are still coming to the European Union.”Ryan Routh, the man who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at the president’s Florida golf course last year, has been found guilty in federal court today.Routh, 59, was convicted on five counts, including attempting to assassinate a major presidential candidate and possessing a firearm as a convicted felon. In September 2024, he was spotted with a rifle hiding in the bushes at the president’s West Palm Beach club as Trump’s golfing party approached. Routh represented himself in court, and prosecutors accused him of plotting for months to kill Donald Trump during his successful run to return to the White House.“Today’s guilty verdict against would-be Trump assassin Ryan Routh illustrates the Department of Justice’s commitment to punishing those who engage in political violence,” said attorney general Pam Bondi.Jurors deliberated for just a few hours before returning with a guilty verdict. According to reports from the courtroom, as the verdict was being read, Routh attempted to stab himself in the neck with a pen.Fox News reports that four marshals then dragged Routh out of the court room, shackled him, and brought him back. More

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    Trump’s absurd Tylenol claims heighten the suffering of pregnant women in the US | Moira Donegan

    Robert F Kennedy Jr continued his futile search for a single pharmaceutical cause of autism on Monday, when the Trump administration claimed that distorted recent studies and misstated scientific evidence to allege a link between women’s Tylenol use during pregnancy and the development of autism in children. Kennedy has long spoken with disturbing disgust about autistic people, claiming at one press conference that autistic children “destroy families” and “will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date.” He had previously pledged to find the cause of autism by this month.As part of his apparent quest to eliminate this vast and varied group of people – who do, in fact, pay taxes, hold jobs, play baseball, write poems, go on dates, and function as beloved and caring members of functional families – Kennedy has already sought to restrict access to common vaccines. In June, he fired every member of the advisory committee on immunization practices, an influential group of vaccine experts whose recommendations had long shaped policy for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In place of the experts, he reconstituted the panel with a number of vaccine critics and cranks, whose incompetence has led to chaotic meetings and bizarrely changing vaccine recommendations. Donald Trump has recently joined his health secretary in casting aspersions on childhood vaccines – safe and effective treatments that have saved countless lives and are among the more wonderful miracles of human innovation. “It’s too much liquid,” the president said of the early childhood immunizations on Monday. “Too many different things are going into that baby at too big a number. The size of this thing, when you look at it.”Trump’s remarks came at what was supposed to be the debut for Kennedy’s new tactic: discouraging pregnant women from taking a common over-the-counter medication to ease pain or reduce fevers. At a rambling and shambolic press conference issued from the White House, Trump was unambivalent in his unproven assertions of the drug’s dangers. “Taking Tylenol is, uh, not good,” Trump said, flanked by Kennedy and Dr Mehmet Oz. “I’ll say it. It’s not good.” The president also offered his opinion that the weight-loss drug Ozempic doesn’t work, offering that his friends who take the drug are still fat. Kennedy, his face an uncanny color, stood awkwardly behind Trump, wearing a suit jacket that was visibly too small and with his head hanging slightly to the side; he looked a bit like a bored child at a prep school assembly. “Don’t. Take. Tylenol,” Trump continued, addressing pregnant women. “And don’t give it to the baby after the baby is born.”There is no evidence suggesting that Tylenol causes autism. A small number of studies have shown a correlation – not a cause – between acetaminophen use and incidents of neurological development disorders in early childhood. But these studies, aside from being inconclusive in their results, are also flawed in their methodologies: because pregnant women cannot be easily or ethically sorted into control groups, it is impossible for researchers to isolate Tylenol as a causal factor in the ensuing health of their children. There is as much evidence to suggest that those women whose children later developed autism got it from the Tylenol they took as there is to suggest that they got it because of a gust of wind, or because their mothers wore the color green. Fevers, however – which Tylenol is used to treat – pose proven risks to a fetus, and have been linked to cleft lip and palate, spina bifida, and congenital heart defects. “The conditions that people use acetaminophen to treat during pregnancy are far more dangerous than any theoretical risks and can create severe morbidity and mortality for the pregnant person and the fetus,” Dr Steven Fleischman, the president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a statement.Pregnant women do not lack for judgmental, frightening and dubiously factual instructions about their health. Everywhere, they are told that they risk the health of their fetus by partaking in a series of banal everyday activities – be it jogging or having coffee or eating a certain cheese – that they are told will lead, by obscure mechanisms that are never quite explained, to impossible and devastating health outcomes for their children-to-be. The admonishments are multiple and often contradictory, but they all tend to agree on one thing: that it is always good for women to deprive themselves of joy and relief – and to suffer more – for the sake of their fetuses.Health misinformation has thrived on the ignorance in which most women are kept about their bodies, particularly during pregnancy, and it feeds on the cruel combination of neglect and lack of interest with which many women have been treated by the medical system and the maximally judgmental and punitive treatment that they receive from others while pregnant. Frightened women, scared both for the health of their pregnancies and for the ways they will be blamed if something goes awry, seek out a way to secure a good outcome, and are met by charlatans, grifters and quacks who are happy to tell them lies in exchange for their attention and money. It is this very dynamic, fed like a sourdough starter in the damp and fecund social media environment of the pandemic, that Kennedy used to revive his own career after decades of scandal and disgrace.Now, this cynical exploitation of pregnant women’s fears, deployed to them at a time when they are most vulnerable, is coming from no less a place of authority than the White House itself.At the press conference, Trump advised pregnant women to simply endure their suffering. “A mother will have to tough it out,” he told them. Readers will forgive me if I posit that perhaps pregnant women in the US are already suffering enough. Six justices of the supreme court, three of them appointed by Trump himself, ruled in 2022 that they no longer have the federally protected right to terminate their pregnancies. The laws that have gone into effect since have cost several pregnant women their lives, as laws prohibit the medical interventions that could easily save them and allow them to die painful, premature and needless deaths. Other women have had their corpses desecrated for the sake of Trump’s anti-choice agenda, as hospitals and lawmakers use them as incubators against their will. Others are being forced to wait for care while they bleed and develop sepsis, risking their organs and their lives. The Trump administration has cut off Medicaid funding to some of the largest providers of sexual and reproductive healthcare, meaning many of the clinics that pregnant women rely on will now have to close. With doctors who provide gynecological and obstetric care fleeing states with strict abortion bans, many pregnant women in the US do not have access to competent medical care at all. As a result, more babies are being born sick, and more of them are dying. Women from states such as Florida report being forced to carry fetuses that have no chance of surviving, and then being forced to watch those infants suffer and die in the moments after birth. As Kennedy continues with his search for the causes of autism, his eugenic project will inevitably extract more and more coercion and violence on the bodies of pregnant women. Today’s fearmongering about Tylenol is only the beginning.It can seem darkly comedic at times how laughably incompetent Trump and his administration are. Kennedy’s ill-fitting suit; the president’s ramblings about his fat friends; the brazen indifference to truth in the absurd claim that Tylenol, perhaps the paradigmatic over-the-counter drug, is somehow this lurking danger. Trump’s idiocy and vulgarity give the lie to the pomp and dignity of his office; his now near-total capture of American political life mocks the promise of democracy. But pregnant women are not a punchline. Their hopes for their families, their fears for their bodies, their health, their comfort and their dignity – all of these are things Trump is willing to sacrifice at the altar of his own ego. Tylenol isn’t dangerous, but he is.

    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More