The Present Illness

The Atlantic Lost Its Fact Checkers

• Alyssa Burgart & Arghavan Salles • Season 1 • Episode 10

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The doctors perform an emergency triage on the state of public health leadership this week, starting with a scathing dissection of The Atlantic's profile of RFK Jr. that seemingly skipped the fact-checking department. Drs. Salles and Burgart administer a strong dose of reality as they examine how mainstream media continues to platform dangerous health misinformation with fewer guardrails than a pediatric rollercoaster.

Their differential diagnosis extends to the newest clown to emerge from the Clown Car of Public Health - the CDC's latest deputy director Ralph Lee Abraham. An avid COVID vaccine skeptic with min-bogglingly illogical public health positions, we're in for more shenanigans out of the nation's top health administration. 

Between discussions of pertussis vaccine efficacy and the EPA's concerning moves on PFAS, asbestos, and air pollution regulations, this episode delivers a thorough examination of how public health leadership impacts everyday Americans - no insurance preauthorization required.

Joy: Take Two And Call Me In The Morning

  • Alyssa recommends the dark comedy show, Pluribus (AppleTV)
  • "Just look at the degree on that chick" and Dr. Turner’s post on Twitter
  • Distractingly Sexy - I can’t believe this trend is from 2015… In response to Nobel scientist Tim Hunt stating, “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls … three things happen when they are in the lab … You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticise them, they cry.”)

Fact check:

The large study Arghavan mentioned was Danish, not Swedish. Apologies!

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Credits

  • Production by Arghavan Salles and Alyssa Burgart
  • Editing by Alyssa Burgart
  • Theme Music by Joseph Uphoff
  • Social Media by Arghavan Salles

Alyssa Burgart (00:00)
it's such a sad, sad loss that the legacy of this MAHA movement will be that it was a scam. It's all a scam. And it's so sad that so many people have been so easily wrangled into this farce.

Arghavan Salles (00:08)
Mm-hmm.

Hey there, fellow nerds. Welcome to another episode of The Present Illness, the podcast where two physicians try to make sense of a world that's a little febrile and definitely underdiagnosed. I'm Arghavan Salles a surgeon scientist in your friendly neighborhood, doom scroller in residence.

Alyssa Burgart (00:33)
And I'm Alyssa Burgart an anesthesiologist and bioethicist who tracks news and health law like they're EKGs full of spikes and surprises. The present illness is where we dig into public health, politics, culture, and ethics with a scalpel in one hand and a meme in the other.

Arghavan Salles (00:48)
Thanks to everyone who's listened and is tuning in now. Extra love to anyone who follows or subscribes to our podcast.

And a warm welcome to anyone who just stumbled in from your tryptophan hangover from Thanksgiving. Try saying that three times fast.

Alyssa Burgart (01:02)
Well, we're glad you're here. Let's get into it.

Arghavan Salles (01:05)
Okay, what I want to talk about today has to do with one of our favorite people, RFK Jr. And, yeah, the look on your face. And some updates on what's happened in public health over the recent little period here. So part of why thought we could talk about this is this past weekend, there were two kind of major pieces that came out in which RFK Jr. plays a role. So one is a lengthy profile of him.

Alyssa Burgart (01:07)
Okay.

Arghavan Salles (01:34)
that came out in the Atlantic. And in fact, he is on the cover of the Atlantic in a photo. Yeah, and I think our listeners are just gonna have to check out that photo for themselves to really like get the gist of it. Yeah, yeah, the one with the rosary ⁓ wherein they say, ⁓ I should have pulled it up, but they say something like he's the most important man in science or something right now, if you have in front of you, but.

Alyssa Burgart (01:40)
⁓ gross.

The one with, is it the one with the rosary?

I mean, did they mean infamous? Did they? Is it a misprint? I think they meant infamous. They should really talk to their copy editor. ⁓

Arghavan Salles (02:11)
I know, right? One of the reporters

on Twitter I saw was defending it, saying like, well, how can you argue that this man, I mean, I think if they use maybe influential, that's the thing. Like he has power, obviously, in his position, but anyway, anyway, so he's on the cover for this article and clearly the writer of the article spent a lot of time with RFK Jr. and he references multiple different events that he went to. Anyway, so that's one article is this.

Alyssa Burgart (02:24)
So much power.

Arghavan Salles (02:40)
long profile that I want to talk about. And there's an article that his cousin, RFK Jr.'s cousin, Tatiana Schlossberg, published in The New Yorker, that is really about her and her health issues, but in multiple places also is pretty clear about how she and her family, her immediate family, view what RFK Jr. is doing to public health and science. And it's not favorable, just to be clear.

And we now have just this week the appointment of a new deputy director at the CDC who is meant to be the second in command at the CDC, but we don't have a director currently, right, because Susan Menares was forced to resign. And so this is even though he's supposed to be second in command, this is now like really the highest current ranking person at CDC aside from, you know, RFK Jr. himself. And so I want to talk about

that person and how that person and their views and their experiences relates to all of this stuff. So I think let's start with the Atlantic article. So basically the author, again, does this long profile. He mentions a couple different places in the article that RFK Jr., you kind of didn't want to do this in the first place because he feels like he's so maligned in all the articles that are written about him and he didn't want to just sign up for another.

Alyssa Burgart (04:04)
He didn't

want to be interviewed or followed or whatever.

Arghavan Salles (04:07)
Correct.

Right, right. He didn't want to do this profile. He didn't want to be part of this effort of this author to write a profile about him. ⁓ And the author, you know, is able to convince him, obviously, to go ahead with it.

I mention that because it seems to me in my most favorable reading of the situation that the author was heavily influenced by R.F.K. Junior's concerns about this article. ⁓ Either that or, well, I should also mention that this particular author is not a science writer. And that is very clear. It is very clear when you read R.F.K.

Alyssa Burgart (04:45)
I'm I'm sorry. Like, hang on, hang on. I just wanna...

I just wanna clarify.

The Atlantic decided that they would do a profile on someone who they, what was the word that you said they said? That he was not influential, what was it? Important?

Arghavan Salles (04:56)
Mm-hmm.

I think that they said he was the most important, but let me just pull it up and then we'll know for sure.

Alyssa Burgart (05:11)
So they said, you know what, we're gonna have you write a piece on the most important person in science. And they thought, you know what we're gonna do? Let's send someone who doesn't know a lot about science. ⁓ powerful. Well, he is the most powerful person. But again, the most powerful person in science, we should send someone who doesn't know a lot about science. And no shade, maybe this reporter took some science classes, but like.

Arghavan Salles (05:22)
powerful, sorry, powerful, the most powerful, which is fair, he does have power.

Alyssa Burgart (05:40)
I don't know. mean, it feels like I'm well, I'm just guessing if I was RFK and I was intimidated by the idea that, you know, somebody who knew what they were talking about was going to talk to me and follow me around and listen to all the nonsense I say, I can imagine how he would not agree to somebody who actually knew a lot about science.

Arghavan Salles (06:02)
Right. I don't see anywhere on this person's page that they are a science reporter. And I can say from what I read that they don't write like someone who knows about science. ⁓ And so that's, think, already problematic. ⁓ so it's hard for me to tell whether there's a lot of, let me back up and say that there's a lot that I think is inappropriately written in this article.

Alyssa Burgart (06:32)
Mm.

Arghavan Salles (06:32)
⁓

And it's hard for me to tell whether it's because the author was influenced by RFK Jr's desire to not have a negative profile of him, or if it's just that the author really has less of an understanding of these issues and so goes along with what RFK Jr says because he doesn't know better. And I'm not trying to be mean or anything to this reporter, but this is a really important issue for public health and perceptions of

the credibility of RFK Jr. in the space of science and public health and health. And this article was an opportunity, I think, to really hold a mirror up to what this man has done in the way that he's destroying and dismantling public health and science in this country. And I do not think that this article did that. And the specific things I would point to, I can give a few examples of where I think it fell short. So one is near the beginning, he...

he's talking about RFK Jr. He almost seems enamored by him in some ways. He says his bronze face

Alyssa Burgart (07:35)
I mean, RFK,

he's a charismatic man with good hair. It gets you far in this world.

Arghavan Salles (07:43)
I mean, I guess so. does not, to me, he has not an ounce of charisma. But again, I've never, I mean, I've never been in his presence. Perhaps I would feel differently. mean, Mother Jones also had a piece, by the way, I haven't read about like why women fall for RFK Jr. Different issue. I haven't read it.

Alyssa Burgart (07:48)
No.

I'm sorry, I'm

gagging for those who cannot see. I'm gagging. It's gagging.

Arghavan Salles (08:05)
Anyway, this reporter or this writer says, his bronze face all chiseled angles, his eyes sky blue. He adheres to a strict uniform at work, dark embroidered skinny ties like his father sometimes wore. So shout out to a beloved figure ⁓ with suit jackets that bulge over his bodybuilders chest and biceps. Like, is this a romance novel or is this a profile of a public figure? I'm very confused.

Then he says he regularly pulls Zyn, ⁓ Z-Y-N nicotine patches from his shirt pocket or dust drawers to tuck between his lower lip and gum. And here's a key point. He says, when I asked him to square his nicotine habit in the time he spends tanning with the federal health advisories against both, right, he shifted in his chair. I'm not telling people that they should do anything that I do. I just say, get in shape. Okay, so.

That's one example of what I thought was inappropriate, right? So he's like kind of glamorizing this man. Like this is clearly a favorable portrait in a way that this person I don't think deserves and that does not meet the moment that we are in with the largest measles outbreak we've had in 25 years about to lose our measles elimination status as a country with more cases of whooping cough than we've had in at least a decade. I believe we just had a third death in Kentucky from whooping cough, but that's pertussis.

Alyssa Burgart (09:27)
Kids die of protestors every year. It's terrible. It's terrible.

Arghavan Salles (09:27)
Okay, so.

and it's vaccine preventable is the key point there. And then when the author does ask him, well, what about your unhealthy habits, right? Which I think is relevant too, because we've talked about, I think before things like Dr. Oz and others, including our future, you're talking about personal responsibility for your health and like making healthy choices. And we have this person who himself is making very unhealthy choices.

Which, I mean, he has the right to make, he's an autonomous person, he can do whatever he want, but then to sit there and judge other people for their health problems because of food choices or diet or that's the same as food choices, but or exercise, you know, it's pretty hypocritical. So that's one thing. Then the next thing that stood out to me was, and sorry, but I would just say before I go on to next one, that in general, throughout the article, it really felt like there was a favorable filter being placed on everything that.

again, I feel is very undeserved, and does the public a disservice. So he goes on ⁓ to talk about some of the things that are happening in the context that led to this moment, like going back to the early parts of the COVID pandemic. And he's talking about ⁓ the public health response. And he says,

Even some of those who led the public health response during those years admit that COVID vaccine mandates may have been counterproductive, that social distancing lasted too long, and that masking may not have done much to limit transmission.

and

Alyssa Burgart (11:00)
Just given uncritically.

Arghavan Salles (11:02)
Yeah, and this is the writer of the article. This is not from RFK Jr This is the author of this piece saying these things. And we could spend a lot of time debunking a lot of things in this article. But I do want to point out that there is a ton of data on masks and their effectiveness for reducing transmission. And he just puts that in this list of things, which I think the other questions, the other things he lists are also questionable assertions on his part. But that one, I mean, that is extremely clear.

There have been numerous studies. And to just say that as part of this article, I found disturbing that that was like in that list and that we're supposed to take this person's perspective on RFK Jr. with regard to science seriously. He also goes on later to, again, that favorable filter that he puts on RFK Jr. He says, well, in other areas he's pushed for changes that health activists and wellness influencers on the left.

as well as many in the scientific mainstream has long sought. Now listen to this list and also keep in mind, he lumped together wellness influencers and scientists, okay, which we don't generally have overlapping perspectives because we're not generally working with the same set of information. Scientists are working with facts and data and evidence and wellness influencers generally are not. So he says, this is the author of this piece saying,

that RFK Jr. launched initiatives to review baby formula ingredients, issue new guidelines for fluoride use, limit student cell phone use, stop the sale of illegal flavored vapes, and remove restrictions on whole milk sales at schools. And he persuaded governors in 12 states to ban the use of food stamps to buy sugary sodas. Now again, keep in mind, he's suggesting that both wellness influencers and scientists...

two very different groups are in favor of all these things.

The guidelines for fluoride was just like thrown in there and the scientific consensus is very much that we should have fluoride in water, which is not what RFK Jr. is advocating for. So to throw that in there felt very either again, misinformed or disingenuous. I'm not sure. And the last piece about convincing governors to disallow the use of food stamps for sugary sodas.

Alyssa Burgart (12:56)
Well, then, yeah.

Arghavan Salles (13:17)
goes back to an earlier point we made in our episode about SNAP that it is none of, it's really nobody's business what people are using their government assistance for. It is no one's place to judge. And especially someone who's sitting there using nicotine is saying people can't have sodas. You know? So I was very bothered again by that list and the suggestion that scientists all think this is good.

What I think a lot of us would agree is that it would be helpful if more people had access to healthy food. I think we agree with that, right? So it would be great to have ⁓ fewer food deserts, for example. That's something we could get behind, right? I think a lot of scientific community and a lot of the public health community would get behind that. But this list of things that I don't know specifically what he was referring to about baby formula, maybe there was something very reasonable there, I'm not sure. And I'm not saying this whole list was bad or wrong, but...

Alyssa Burgart (13:46)
Absolutely.

Arghavan Salles (14:10)
It just stood out to me that these are not things that many scientists I know agree with RFK Jr. on, or not necessarily the whole list anyway. And that's kind how it was being painted in this article. Which again, if you don't know, like I only know this because I'm in this space, right?

Alyssa Burgart (14:28)
And I think that's the other aspect too, right? Is that in terms of, know, where do we get our expertise from? What is the role of expertise in recommendations? And what counts for consensus? And what does consensus mean? And that's the other thing. I think the term consensus gets thrown around a lot without necessarily thinking through like, well, consensus of who? Consensus of what groups? Consensus of groups with what expertise?

Arghavan Salles (14:47)
Mm.

Alyssa Burgart (14:57)
and based on what evidence. And so I think that it's very, I agree with you, it is very interesting to hear that specific list ⁓ rattled off.

It's not a list I would have put together.

Arghavan Salles (15:12)
Yeah, I agree. And I think back to this, my impression that this author gave a more than necessary favorable review here includes a section where he's talking about, the author is talking about how RFK Jr. really is interested in science and has some kind of unsatiable hunger for learning more. he quotes,

Or he repeats, should say, what RFK Jr. has told him, which is that he read 70 scientific articles over a weekend around the time that they were making those, ⁓ you know, non-scientific claims about Tylenol and autism. And the author of this article just says it as though that is true.

Alyssa Burgart (15:55)
Well,

also, it doesn't matter if it's true. mean, a huge, and you know this, I mean, there's such a huge portion of medical education and of my, that was extended into my residency education has been a big part of my career, which is that you actually have to understand how to recognize a bad article. And that is not something, like there are a lot of things that are published. For example, when we think about the origins of the modern anti-vaccine movement, right?

Arghavan Salles (16:14)
Mm-hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (16:24)
Wakefield study being published in the Lancet and not being retracted for a very long time. And so, you you have to be able to learn, you can't just read everything and assume that every single article that you read is accurate, is scientifically sound, is not.

Arghavan Salles (16:25)
Yeah.

Alyssa Burgart (16:44)
not a subject of undue influence from certain industries that may have a stake in the outcome or what is presented as the data. And so like, even if he did read 70 articles, who cares? Like I could read 70 articles. I should be able to also recognize what are the scientific problems with any of those articles? What are the claims that are made that just don't pass the smell test? How did those researchers get to that conclusion? And is that conclusion enough to actually change my practice?

And the reality is that like, I don't believe that RFK is capable of doing that. What I will say yet again, and we have said this on the show, RFK, do you wanna come to med school? Because I think that you could really benefit from a better education. And you know, I think there's time. You could go to med school. I think that that might be helpful.

Arghavan Salles (17:28)
Yeah.

mean, honestly, even if you got an MPH, I think that would be helpful. That would be a step in the right direction. But the thing is, yes, I agree with you that the number itself is not necessarily super meaningful, but again, thinking about people who are not in science who read this article, to them, that's going to sound like, ⁓ he's a very serious man and he takes this responsibility very seriously because he's reading 70 articles. And I would bet my house that he did not read 70 articles. He may have, may have.

Red 70 abstracts, maybe, maybe, maybe red 70 summaries, maybe even cat GPT summaries of 70 articles. I don't know, but,

Alyssa Burgart (18:14)
Well, we know

his group use chat GPT to write their reports sometimes, so.

Arghavan Salles (18:18)
So I do not believe that he read that number and it gives him an air of seriousness that I don't think is deserved. And to your point about the interpretation of these studies, the way, so there's a couple of different places in the article where the author shares what RFK Jr. says about a study and then shares that experts don't interpret it that way and here's what experts have said about it. And one other thing that I was disappointed in this article is that he presents that as a false equivalency.

Like RFK Jr. says this, experts say this, let's move on. Not, RFK Jr. says this, experts say this, RFK Jr. is wrong, yet again. And one example of this is a study that I don't think we've talked about on here is a Swedish study that came out earlier this year, looking at the amount of aluminum in vaccines to look at how that relates to development of neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism. And the conclusion of the study was that

Alyssa Burgart (19:07)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Arghavan Salles (19:17)
really it doesn't. There was no difference in the rates of various neurodevelopmental disorders based on the amount of aluminum exposure from vaccines that these patients had. And at the time the study came out, RFK Jr. had this long ⁓ explanation on Twitter about ⁓ what was wrong with that conclusion. And he asked for the study to be retracted altogether from the Annals of Internal Medicine.

and he fixated on a specific figure in the supplement, which was one of numerous comparisons, and it looked like that one was slightly statistically significant for like a 1 % increase in this one thing for autism, right? And that was his big diatribe that actually what the study showed was that aluminum does cause autism. That was what he argued. And the authors and other people have done very clear and elegant

⁓ responses explaining why that is not the appropriate conclusion to draw from the data. And you and I both know that when you do a large number of comparisons, you have to correct for the fact that you're doing a large number of comparisons and then something that looked like it may have been statistically significant may no longer be statistically significant. But again, he doesn't understand this because he's not, he doesn't have, as you said, the requisite education and expertise to understand these data.

And in this Atlantic article, I really did not appreciate that the author did not make that clear. Again, if you did not know going into the article what the reality is, you might have come away thinking that, it's just like a difference of opinion. Like he interprets it this way, they interpret it that way, everything's fine. And that is not at all true. Like how he, as someone who was not educated in this field, interprets a study versus how an expert interprets a study.

These are apples and oranges. And it is insulting to the scientists who do this work to give so much weight to his impressions without giving any context. By the way, this article does not talk about what happened in American Samoa where RFA Jr. convinced them to stop doing measles vaccinations that led to a lot of people, mostly children, dying. There is zero mention of that in this article.

Alyssa Burgart (21:35)
Yeah, and they don't even try to talk to him about it. I mean, he constantly is saying that he's unfairly maligned in that, but it's like the evidence is ⁓ pretty significant. If we care about things like evidence, I mean, I don't know.

Arghavan Salles (21:46)
Yeah.

Well, right, and so the author does say, that's a good point, the author does ask him, what if you're wrong about vaccines and people die because you're discouraging people from getting vaccines? And like 10, 15 years from now, we find this out. And he says something like, I don't have that one screenshotted, so I can't give you the exact verbiage, but he says something like, if someone could show me the evidence that I am wrong, I would adjust my position. And that is so not true.

Alyssa Burgart (22:18)
But he doesn't.

He doesn't. The evidence has been shown to him again and again and again, and he insists on these outrageous claims that are not supported by evidence. The studies get done. The number of studies that have been done in this country specifically to try to undo the nonsense whims of fantasy that this gentleman has put out into the ether and helped to fund with all of his nonsense lawsuits. I mean, he...

Arghavan Salles (22:19)
Exactly.

Alyssa Burgart (22:46)
It's not true. He's not willing to change his mind because he is not willing to actually consider actual evidence.

Arghavan Salles (22:54)
Again, that's exactly right. And it was so frustrating to me because this is known. Like this article portrays him as a vaccine skeptic when you and I both know that he is fervently anti-vaccine.

Alyssa Burgart (23:08)
Well, and this is something that's really interesting too. So when I've talked with acquaintances and friends who have these like vaccine skepticism to anti-vaccine sort of ideas, it is so fascinating to me where they're like, no, no, he's not anti-vax. He's not anti-vax. He says vaccines are okay sometimes. And I was like, but like, not really. I mean, even when he said during the height of the initial measles outbreak,

I mean, it was barely, I mean, to call it an endorsement is, I think, really an overstatement of what he said and the tone that he used. you know, as somebody who, you know, I'm, as an anesthesiologist, as a pediatric anesthesiologist, we are, you know, part of my role at the beginning of a surgery is to, you know, have a patient go to sleep and then to take a special device.

and put a literal breathing tube into people's airways. And so for example, during COVID, much like with people who are working in ICUs like you did during COVID, it's an incredible amount of exposure. When you really think about like I'm in someone's airway, if I have somebody who's sick with a, we take care of a lot of kids, have acute, they have RSV, they have pneumonia, they have the flu, and they also have a surgical emergency. So I just think so much about how many kids

are going to develop these conditions that are absolutely preventable and how many more children are going to be exposed and how many other children even who are vaccinated are gonna start to see more breakthrough infections because we're gonna have more exposure for people. And so the people who are gonna pay the price are gonna be children. Some children are gonna die from these conditions.

Some children are gonna have permanent disabilities from these. They're gonna have long-term respiratory illnesses. They're gonna have other complications. They're gonna have encephalopathy from things like measles. You there's so many complications that are gonna come and they will, these are gonna happen long after RFK is out of this position. And you know, it is so upsetting to be able to see the writing on the wall. Recently, I had to take care of someone who had been exposed to a vaccine preventable illness that I have.

not seen in my practice. It has been suppressed for all this time, very effectively. And so to see some of these conditions, it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart. And these families are having to navigate these. We've got to put all, it's just terrible. It's so terrible. is unacceptable and it is unforgivable, the behavior that he has been allowed to put at the highest levels of our public health infrastructure. We,

Arghavan Salles (25:32)
Good night.

Alyssa Burgart (25:58)
I am profoundly alarmed that we will never quite come back from this.

Arghavan Salles (26:04)
And I mean, if we do, be generations. It will be generations because of not just this public health aspect of what we're talking about, but all the grants that have been terminated, the scientists whose work has been severely negatively affected.

All the mRNA research that was terminated, despite promising data using those mRNA vaccines for the treatment of cancer, out of nowhere, mean, just to be clear, we all have mRNA in our bodies. That's a part of how our cells function is they use mRNA to turn. mean, anyway, whatever. That's part of our basic cellular functions. We all have mRNA. It's part of...

Alyssa Burgart (26:19)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Love a messenger.

Don't shoot the messenger.

Arghavan Salles (26:50)
Yeah, this stands for messenger RNA for anyone who doesn't know. ⁓

Alyssa Burgart (26:54)
Wah

wah.

Arghavan Salles (26:59)
For any of our listeners who are part of the COVID Conscious Committee, think just to be clear, you and I both understand that we still are in a COVID pandemic. Just some people get triggered with the phrase during COVID. We both understand that we are still during COVID. We're both wearing masks. Yeah, and so I just want to point that out in case anyone listening is like upset. Yep, yep. We are both very, very.

Alyssa Burgart (27:07)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Yeah, we're both masking still.

I just bought all new air filters.

Arghavan Salles (27:27)
concerned and conscious, conscious, conscious, concerned, whatever about COVID. So that was a lot on that article, but what you were just saying about how many children will be harmed and how many people with, who are immunocompromised, keep in mind for our audience, there are a lot of, ⁓ there's a big window of susceptibility for newborns before they get.

Alyssa Burgart (27:31)
Yeah, conscious.

Arghavan Salles (27:55)
certain vaccines, right? Not everything is given right at birth. ⁓ And so not all children, even if they are going to be vaccinated on the vaccine schedule, would have immunity just yet, depending on which condition you're looking at. These are at different times, right, within the first few years of life. And it's just a vast number of people. And you don't know by looking at someone if they have a condition that puts them at increased risk for

getting sick from one of these things, like if their immune system was able to mount an appropriate response after they were vaccinated, or if they're on medications that suppress their immune system. You just have no way of knowing when you look at a person what the function of their immune system is. And so that's why, it's part of why you and I both try to be safe and protect ourselves and those around us. So I want to connect that article, because that came out this past weekend, but another article came out, so that was in the Atlantic.

Alyssa Burgart (28:48)
Okay.

Arghavan Salles (28:50)
I want to connect this conversation about this Atlantic article with another article that came out over the weekend in the New Yorker. It's written by RFK Jr.'s cousin, Tatiana Schlossberg, and it's called A Battle with My Blood. The story, I would really recommend that people read this article, whatever you think about whatever we've just said. It's a very well-written article about the end of life and facing our own mortality.

Alyssa Burgart (28:53)
Mm-hmm.

Mmm.

Arghavan Salles (29:17)
Basic story that's not the reason I'm mentioning it is that she unfortunately found out when she was delivering her second child that she has a form of AML that is pretty resistant to treatment. And she goes from delivering her baby to pretty immediately going into figuring out what the treatment needs to be and starting treatment. For medical folks, her white blood cell count was about 130,000 at the time of delivery.

Alyssa Burgart (29:30)
Hmm.

Arghavan Salles (29:46)
That's very high. Yeah, normal is depending on the lab somewhere in between 5 and 12,000 ish. She's over 10 times ⁓ higher than that. So she she it's very well written. It's very compelling. It's very sad because she describes everything that she's gone through since that delivery, the various rounds of treatments, the different kinds of treatments that she's had, how little time she's been able to spend with her baby. ⁓ And

Alyssa Burgart (29:47)
That's bad. That's bad, folks.

Thank

Arghavan Salles (30:16)
because she's been in the hospital so much of the time since then. And also what it means to have her life be ending so soon. She's in her 30s, she's young. So I think it's a piece that's very compelling on its own. Again, would recommend folks read it. And in this article, there are a few different times when she references her own cousin's efforts to undermine

Alyssa Burgart (30:30)
Yeah.

Arghavan Salles (30:44)
people like her accessing treatments like the ones that she was able to get. So she says that during a time when she was receiving CAR-T treatment, which is a very, it's a newer treatment, ⁓ she says, a method developed over many decades with millions of dollars of government funding, my cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,

was in the process of being nominated and confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Throughout my treatment, he had been on the national stage. Previously a Democrat, he was running for president as an independent, but mostly as an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family.

Alyssa Burgart (31:17)
⁓ That's a sick burn. That's a sick burn. just, you know, I wanted to bring it up.

Arghavan Salles (31:18)
I mean.

I was like, don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel. ⁓ I think that's really remarkable because she obviously is at, she's just been going through a lot for a long time. She's physically ill, facing the end of her life. And she's using this opportunity to call out what her own family member is doing. And she goes on.

to talk about how her mother, Caroline Kennedy, had sent a letter to the Senate prior to RFK Jr.'s confirmation, hoping to prevent his confirmation. And then she talks about what was happening with healthcare system. She says, suddenly the healthcare system on which I relied felt strained and shaky. Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including her husband, didn't know if they would be able to continue their research or even have jobs. She's referring to all the changes that happened in the spring.

as they were holding federal funds over the head of these universities ⁓ and also specifically revoking federal grants. ⁓ And she talks about not knowing if she had to change insurance, whether she would be able to get coverage now that she had this pre-existing condition. ⁓ And she was concerned that she wouldn't be able to get vaccines again after she had treatments that were wiping out her immune system. So if she were to survive, that she would have needed new vaccines and was

concerned about whether she'd be able to get them because of her own cousin. And she goes on to talk about this for a while. And then she says, I watched as Bobby cut nearly half a billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers and slash billions in funding from National Institutes of Health, the world's largest sponsored medical research and threatened to oust the panel medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings.

I worried about funding for leukemia and bone marrow research at Memorial Sloan Kettering, which is one of the hospitals she went to. I worried about the trials that were my only shot at remission. Early in my illness, when I had a postpartum hemorrhage, I was given a dose of mesoprostol to help stop the bleeding. This drug is part of medication abortion, which at Bobby's urging is currently under review by the Food and Drug Administration. So anyway.

Alyssa Burgart (33:41)
god,

how much of a betrayal must it be?

I mean, the entire American people are being betrayed by this person's actions. to be in that family and to be going through what she's going through and be so directly influenced by someone that I'm sure she had to sit through Thanksgiving dinner with, ⁓ gosh, that's brutal.

Arghavan Salles (34:07)
It's brutal and she is very aware about this outside of herself. I just want to be clear for folks who haven't read the piece, this is not a self-centered woe is me piece. She really writes about this broadly, about who else is being affected, whose trials for whatever condition were interrupted or ended because of her own cousin. In that part that I was just reading you, she goes on to say, I freeze when I think about what would have happened.

if the mesoprostol had not been immediately available to me and to millions of other women who need it to save their lives or to get the care they deserve. Anyway, I it's, I wanted to mention that because she, first of all, is an excellent, incredible writer, and to use this opportunity to not only share about her experience, which is moving, and I think probably very insightful for a lot of people, she's also using it to say,

my own family member is causing a lot of harm and that's part of my experience too and it's affecting a lot of other people. So I thought it was very powerful and to see that she is able to write about him more clear-headedly and more clearly than an Atlantic writer who really should have no allegiance to him, right? It was very striking to me and it points to such a failure of our media that have let us down.

Alyssa Burgart (35:16)
Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Arghavan Salles (35:29)
time and time again with these false equivalencies thinking that that is journalism when in fact, when the house is burning. Yeah, when a house is burning, you don't have a responsibility to represent the side that says no, it's not burning. That's not what journalism is. I mean, I know that I'm not a journalist.

Alyssa Burgart (35:35)
both sides-ism?

represent the side

who lit it on fire to represent the arsonist?

Arghavan Salles (35:50)
Right.

Like I am just baffled at how in this moment in time in particular, again, with the measles and the whooping cough all the things that are happening, a journalist, a writer, a reporter, I don't know how he can self-identify, but a person writing for the Atlantic would choose this as the way that he's going to write about this man. And at the end,

Alyssa Burgart (35:52)
⁓ brutal.

Arghavan Salles (36:20)
of the article in the Atlantic, RFK Jr. compares himself to Rachel Carson. Rachel Carson, for people who don't know, is a woman who identified that DDT was toxic and DDT was used on a lot of plants. yeah, mm-hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (36:34)
I'm sorry.

Arghavan Salles (36:40)
Yeah, for real, that's what he says. I'll tell you exactly what he says. have the screenshot. He says,

He says, a few months earlier at a White House event, RFK Jr. compared Trump to President Kennedy, who had worked with the biologist Rachel Carson in the early 1960s to reduce the use of pesticides. My uncle tried to do this, but he was killed and it never got done, Kennedy said. And ever since then, we've been waiting for a president who would stand up and speak on behalf of the health of the American people.

says the man who is actively harming the health of the American people. And in the meantime, since we're talking about pesticides, a couple other things that happened recently are the EPA, so Trump's EPA has approved the use of two different pesticides that scientists say are part of these forever chemicals, or the PFAS or PFAS or whatever people wanna call them. They're isocyclosiram and cyclobutyrefluram.

That's in the last two weeks. They've approved the use of both of these, which these so-called forever chemicals have been associated with worsening fertility, high blood pressure during pregnancy, cancer, developmental delays, high cholesterol, and a host of other negative health outcomes. And so we're supposed to believe that this administration is working to make Americans healthy again, that Trump is like Kennedy and that RFK Jr. is like Rachel Carson.

when they're approving these forever chemicals to be used on food that we ingest. Also, the EPA has now decided to try to undo one of the Biden regulations that was ⁓ requiring a decrease in what's called particulate or particle pollution. So particles down to the size of like nine microns instead of 12, which is what the breaking point was for under the Obama administration. So they want to reverse that because it's too expensive to get rid of all the ⁓

particles that are bigger than nine microns instead of 12 microns.

Alyssa Burgart (38:44)
I mean, honestly,

but Arghavan like how are rich people supposed to get richer if you're going to make them do things that are harder?

Arghavan Salles (38:52)
I know, I know, but how are we going to pretend we're going to try to make America healthy again while we are increasing pollution?

Alyssa Burgart (38:58)
But this

is, but this is, this is the scam, right? And this is one of the things that makes me so, so sad about the MAHA movement is that it's

Now, I never thought that Kennedy would be successful in his run for president. I never thought that he would be successful. I think he's he was fringe, whatever, at the time. He but I was very curious about this like make America healthy again idea. And it's so unfortunate that it is driven by so many wellness influencers who are in alignment with the nonsense.

that RFK spouts because the idea that we could actually have a government that was united in improving our health and improving our access to clean food, improving our access to reliable healthcare, those are all things that I can get behind. And then those are all things that, you know, in the practice of medicine, I am desperate for our kids to have access to clean food, for families to be able to afford the kinds of healthy food that he claims he wants people to have access to.

Arghavan Salles (39:57)
Mm-hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (40:10)
for people to not have to worry that when they go to the hospital, they're not gonna get the care they need or that it's gonna bankrupt them, which is what the experience is of many people in this country. And so it's just, it's such a sad, sad loss that the legacy of this MAHA movement will be that it was a scam. It's all a scam. And it's so sad that so many people have been so easily wrangled into this farce.

Arghavan Salles (40:16)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

And they still are. That's the part that I have a harder time wrapping my head around. Like I can understand hearing, make America healthy again and being like, yeah, that sounds good. I would like that. I can understand hearing things like we wanna make our food supplies healthier. Great, I can get behind that.

I can understand why people would want to get behind a movement that they think is about making healthy food more available to folks and helping people actually get healthier. Like, I totally understand that. And from the beginning, it's been led by a person who is against one of the most important interventions to help us be healthy, which are our childhood vaccines. So

Alyssa Burgart (41:03)
Absolutely.

Hmm.

Arghavan Salles (41:17)
I think it was clear to a lot of us that this wasn't going to actually make America healthy, but it could have made this movement and this man and his leadership, if we're gonna call it that, could have made some positive changes even alongside the harm that he's causing. ⁓ But that hasn't really been what's happened. It's really been all harm, no upside, along with what I said about the PFAS or PFAS and the pollution.

Alyssa Burgart (41:22)
Absolutely.

Arghavan Salles (41:46)
The other thing that's happened recently is that the administration now wants to withdraw a proposal that had been put in place to test talc products for asbestos, which is known to be in some talc products. And that was what the Biden administration put forth that these products should be tested. Talc is used a lot in cosmetics. ⁓ And this administration says, no, actually, we don't need to do that. We want to make mesothelioma great again or something like that.

⁓ You have to laugh because it's just so absurd. ⁓ But anyway, so these things are not consistent, right? He can sit there and say all he wants that his goal is for Americans to be healthy. And then he takes all these actions and makes these ⁓ policies that are directly going to make America unhealthy, including, I hadn't mentioned earlier what it meant to mention is now we now have a new CDC Deputy Director.

Alyssa Burgart (42:46)
about to say, I mean, A new clown has emerged from the clown car of public

Arghavan Salles (42:50)
just never ending right there's always one more that's the whole point of the clown car ahead

Alyssa Burgart (42:54)
was

going to say, so we've mentioned before on the show that the person who's the acting deputy director of the CDC is Peter Theil's friend, Jim O'Neill, who's a, I like to think him as a libertarian goon. He's somebody who thinks you should be able to like sell your organs to make money. And so now this person, Ralph Lee. Yeah. Why are you poor when you could sell a kidney? What could possibly go wrong?

Arghavan Salles (43:14)
That's your excuse for being poor and you still have two kidneys?

Alyssa Burgart (43:22)
Now, and he's literally said things and we're talking about Jim O'Neill here has literally said things like, yeah, don't you want to be able to take that nice vacation after dad dies? I'm like, the fuck are we? What? just, who are these people? They have too much money and too little sense, too little sense.

Arghavan Salles (43:41)
I know they

don't have real world problems. That's the issue, right? They don't actually have the problems that most of us have of like, how am going to pay my bills? How am going to feed myself and my family? And so they start inventing all sorts of problems that we don't actually have and trying to find solutions for problems that most of us are not facing.

Alyssa Burgart (43:58)
unethical

solutions to those problems. Well, so the replacement is Ralph Lee Abraham, who you're going to be totally shocked to find out history of being kind of opposed to vaccines. Turns out not down with a bunch. I know, I know you're surprised. I know you're surprised. Ugh.

Arghavan Salles (44:01)
correct.

starting.

Alyssa Burgart (44:19)
So on November 23rd, he was, like, guess listed internally to be this principal deputy director, which basically makes him like the number two leader because of course, you know, we don't have an actual director of the CDC right now.

Arghavan Salles (44:31)
because Susan Monarez was pushed out.

Alyssa Burgart (44:34)
Correct. I mean, for, it sounds like trying to do the right thing and not allowing some of this nonsense to happen Anyway, so this guy, he used to be the Surgeon General of Louisiana's Department of Public Health, and then he was a US representative for a while, until 2021. And get this, get this, okay? I mean, again, you're not gonna be surprised, but you will probably still be horrified.

So he ordered the Louisiana Health Department to stop promoting mass vaccine campaigns, literally including during an influenza rise.

Arghavan Salles (45:06)
I think that was in.

it was in February, right? Which was like one of our, this past year was one of our worst flu seasons in a really long time. And in the middle of all that, he's like, you know what, let's stop. We need to stop promoting vaccination.

Alyssa Burgart (45:19)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, he thought that was a good idea. I'd have to look up exactly how many kids in Louisiana died from the flu, but the number of pediatric deaths from last year's flu outbreak was quite high. ⁓ It's always it's never zero, unfortunately, but it was pretty darn high and it was really sad. ⁓ He also said that COVID-19 vaccines were dangerous. ⁓ He pushed a bunch of unproven COVID treatments, including hydro,

Arghavan Salles (45:45)
Yep.

you

Alyssa Burgart (45:54)
hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and did a bunch of like, you know, media stuff where he talked about being very skeptical of a bunch of, you know, COVID therapeutics that actually had some evidence. ⁓ he delayed notification of a pertussis outbreak. So we were just talking earlier about whooping cough and pertussis and he said, ⁓ no, we should not tell people about that right away. Like that's bananas.

Arghavan Salles (46:06)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

I believe they had two deaths from whooping cough and that was more than they'd had in 35 years and he delayed notifying people for who knows what reason for a disease that is vaccine preventable.

Alyssa Burgart (46:27)
Hmm.

So, so sad. It is so sad. We're run by these clown car, this clown car of fools. They are just making us sick. ⁓ He said that a bunch of ⁓ public health interventions during the height of the COVID ⁓ pandemic were tyrannical and coercive.

Arghavan Salles (46:58)
⁓ yes, of course, of course. How dare public health officials want us to protect ourselves and each other? What tyrants they are. ⁓ The other thing is the one thing about the Ivor Meckton that you mentioned that he was a proponent of that. So he was one of the highest prescribers of Ivor Meckton in the state of Louisiana. So he's really like going for it. Yeah, all star performance ⁓ from him. So yeah, so this is the guy who is basically

Alyssa Burgart (47:10)
Mm.

So embarrassing. So embarrassing.

Arghavan Salles (47:26)
kind of the highest ranking person now at the CDC. And I wanna point out something, since we're talking about the CDC, another thing in that Atlantic article was that RFK Jr. says in that article that scientists won't debate him. And he actually says that people in the CDC would not come talk to him about vaccines. Whereas some of those people who resigned around the time that Susan Monarez had resigned,

explicitly posted publicly that they had tried multiple times to talk to RFK Jr. about vaccines and that he refused to talk to them. But was that in this Atlantic article? No, no, you're right. It was not. It was not. It was.

Alyssa Burgart (48:05)
It's so

weird what counts for reporting though.

Arghavan Salles (48:11)
I know, you just say what the guy said to you and that's all you have to do,

Alyssa Burgart (48:17)
Is the Atlantic hard up for fact checkers? Like I did nobody.

Arghavan Salles (48:23)
I mean, I honestly don't know. The whole article as I was reading it, was like, but there was so much more to this. Why are you only presenting this or acting like this side of it is the full truth? I don't know. But yeah, to that point though, just for our listeners, many people have tried to tell RFK Jr. what the data actually show about things like vaccines and he does not want to hear it. But in his mind, the narrative is that people won't talk to him. And so that's the real problem, but that's not true.

Alyssa Burgart (48:24)
weird.

Arghavan Salles (48:53)
Many people have talked to them.

Alyssa Burgart (48:53)
Maybe the issue

is that he, maybe the issue is not that they won't talk to him, but that he won't listen.

Arghavan Salles (49:01)
No, you mean like maybe he has entrenched views? You're saying he has entrenched views that are recalcitrant to facts and evidence and data?

Alyssa Burgart (49:03)
I'm just saying there's a poss- it's possible. It's possible.

Maybe. I mean, I'm just saying it's possible.

Arghavan Salles (49:13)
Ha ha!

I think it's not just possible, I think it's probable. I mean, I think that's exactly what's You're right.

Alyssa Burgart (49:19)
possible.

Well,

know, and the thing is, that I, you know, and again, we talk about false equivalences and like you and I have talked before, like obviously there are, ⁓ you know, physicians and scientists who have spoken with perhaps too much ⁓ certainty or been not loud enough in sticking with their I don't knows or I'm not sure's or we don't have enough evidence. ⁓

Arghavan Salles (49:43)
Mm-hmm. ⁓

Mm-hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (49:53)
But I do think that there is an incredible false equivalence that also happens there where it's this, well, those doctors told us that we needed to do things that it turned out we didn't need to do, or we don't agree with what. And I think that there's ⁓ such a difference of we have to change the way that we respond over time as new evidence emerges and how challenging the earliest parts of the pandemic in particular were because we didn't know. I mean, that's why there were

Arghavan Salles (50:15)
Mm-hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (50:22)
genuine legitimate studies of ivermectin because how freaking cool would it have been if that worked? If that had, I mean, people would have celebrated. so absolutely, absolutely. And so it's incredibly frustrating, you know, the...

Arghavan Salles (50:25)
Yep. Yeah. Or hydroxychloroquine.

Alyssa Burgart (50:42)
Again, the multiple false equivalences are made and how hard it is to undo false information.

Arghavan Salles (50:49)
Right, once it's out there, it's very hard to roll it back in.

Alyssa Burgart (50:55)
Yeah. And so this, you know, this new guy, Ralph Lee Abraham, like I'll be honest with you, my hopes are not high.

Arghavan Salles (51:04)
My hopes are not high either, and I do want to share what the last person who had that role at the CDC said about Ralph Abraham, which I came across in an article earlier today that I was reading just to try to understand a little bit more about who this person is who's going to have great influence over our public health. And this person, Dr. Nirav Shah is the predecessor at the CDC and Dr. Shah said,

Dr. Abraham's prior job performance and his prior judgment calls are disqualifying as it relates to being the principal deputy director of the United States, CDC on a number, sorry, of the US CDC on a number of critical and pivotal issues in public health. He doesn't have a good grasp of understanding scientific data as evidenced by the fact that he embraced the use of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID. He has labeled the COVID-19 vaccines as dangerous. All of that tells me he is unable to grasp and process scientific and medical data."

That, my friends, is the Deputy Director of the CDC. Fantastic.

Alyssa Burgart (52:09)
So, you know, interesting, he is not a board certified family medicine physician. ⁓ There have been claims, but he is absolutely not. I mean, I have yet to find any evidence that he is board certified. There was a certified letter that was sent. New Orleans Public Radio had sent him a letter trying to investigate, like, are you board certified? And his response was "Not once have I ever claimed to be board certified by the American Board of Family Medicine." ⁓

Arghavan Salles (52:15)
Correct.

Alyssa Burgart (52:38)
So there you have it folks, that was in February, 2025.

Arghavan Salles (52:42)
Yeah, he has a medical license to be clear for folks. He does have a medical license, he, yeah, is not board certified. He also interestingly was a veterinarian. I think that's kind of cool. don't know, you don't hear too many people who are veterinarians and then go to medical school. But anyway.

Alyssa Burgart (52:57)
That

was actually one of, that was actually my dream was to attend, but there are a few programs where you can learn to be both a veterinarian and a physician. And I wanted to be able to like live out in the country and like be a large animal veterinarian and a human animal veterinarian. ⁓ It's too late for that dream.

Arghavan Salles (53:13)
You know what? It's not too late. It's never too late to live your dream.

It's not, we can all move. You can treat the animals. I will, I don't know, I'll run the farm. I don't know. Can't there be a farm wherever we are? And then maybe you just treat the animals on the farm. I feel like this is some kind of like rom-com from the 90s taking place here.

Alyssa Burgart (53:39)
We can come up with our own next version of "All Creatures Great and Small"

Arghavan Salles (53:43)
is that

I don't know what that is.

Alyssa Burgart (53:47)
All Creatures Great and Small was a book series that was written by a veterinarian. He used a pen name to write these stories and he wrote about his life as a veterinarian ⁓ in, I believe, rural England. ⁓ And so it's a lot of stories of fictionalized accounts of his patients and dogs he took care of and cats he took care of and animals he helped to rescue. anyway, I loved those books when I was a little kid.

Arghavan Salles (53:59)
Hmm.

I somehow miss those. What about a ranch in, okay, this is a little far afield. Why don't we just get a ranch down in Santa Barbara?

Alyssa Burgart (54:21)
Oh yeah, I mean, I'm sure that we can both just afford to buy a ranch in Santa Barbara, but sure, I would do it. I would do it. I did. I know, I know, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I should allow us to live in the fantasy. Now, I did work at a ranch in my 20s. I worked at a ranch that was owned by the Boy Scouts of America, and I helped feed the horses every day and got to hang out with a bunch of like, you know.

Arghavan Salles (54:28)
There you go bringing money back into the equation.

Alyssa Burgart (54:51)
burros It was great.

Arghavan Salles (54:54)
you have actual relevant experience of which I really have none, but I'm willing to learn.

Alyssa Burgart (55:00)
We're gonna have fun and we'll be in Santa Barbara, so it's fine.

Arghavan Salles (55:04)
I think we have ⁓ spent probably too much time talking about people who don't deserve a lot of our attention except for the fact that they are in positions of power unfortunately over us. ⁓ So with that what is bringing you joy this week?

Alyssa Burgart (55:10)
You

⁓ you know, I have been watching this show on Apple TV called Pluribus, like E Pluribus Union, like Pluribus, Pluribus. See, I don't even, I don't speak Latin. Pluribus, and I will tell you, when I saw the preview for it, I wasn't sure if it would be for me, but I am really digging it. I am loving the lack of clarity of like, is this, and I don't want to make spoilers for people, but it's basically about a woman

Arghavan Salles (55:28)
Pluribus! Pluribus.

Alyssa Burgart (55:52)
Who?

An unusual event happens that impacts almost every human in the world. She is one of 12 people who are not impacted. And so you are trying to learn about what has happened and like, it good or is it bad? And it's fascinating. What about you? ⁓ ooh.

Arghavan Salles (56:07)
I agree, I've been watching it. No, I've been watching it and I 100 % agree.

They put out the first two episodes together and I was like, where's episode three? And so it's so good, because you just want to know what is happening in this version of our world. So yeah.

Alyssa Burgart (56:15)
Mm-hmm.

Arghavan Salles (56:22)
plus one, that recommendation. ⁓ What has been bringing me joy is in the last like week or so is there's a trend on Twitter that was started by a woman who did the unconscionable thing of getting a doctoral degree and she posted it on the internet. Well, I guess that was the unconscionable part was that she posted about her degree on the internet. ⁓ And so people got, certain kinds of people got very riled up about it. So this woman's name is Juliet Turner and she posted like a perfectly normal

Alyssa Burgart (56:26)
fabulous.

Arghavan Salles (56:53)
I just want to be clear, a perfectly normal and appropriate post. "She said, I passed my Viva exam after four years of research. I successfully defended my thesis. You can call me doctor." And there's just a picture of her standing in front of presumably one of her. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is not Allie Luke's who you might be thinking of. That was maybe like a year-ish ago that the same thing happened. Very similar. ⁓

Alyssa Burgart (57:03)
And this is recent. This is recent.

But again,

I I think it's funny in the context of like you and I keep talking about these jackasses with podcasts who were like, women belong in the home doing what they're naturally supposed to do.

Arghavan Salles (57:24)
Right. So she posted this and then she got a lot of nasty responses that she posted to share. And what ended up happening was this guy, I think Richard Cooper is his name, if I find it here, "He said, he said, just look at the degree on that chick, said no man ever." That was what his post was. He like, quote, tweeted her post about her, her defense.

As though, right, the implication is that she thought or that any woman who gets a degree thinks that they're doing it like to get men or that men are in any way involved in our decisions about like what we're going to do with our careers or what we're going to say.

Alyssa Burgart (57:58)
He sounds,

he sounds like a snowflake.

Arghavan Salles (58:02)
He sounds very ill-adjusted to the reality of the modern world. So what happened though after, so that part obviously is not bringing me joy, but what happened after is what is bringing me joy, which is that lots and lots of women from all over the world started posting, just look at the degree on that chick and then pictures of themselves either in their regalia or with their degrees.

And that has been just all over my feed for the last like week. Every time I scroll, I see a new person, new woman has joined the trend and has another beautiful picture with her degrees or at her university or whatever. And, and I'm loving it.

Alyssa Burgart (58:38)
That's amazing. You know what that reminds me of is when there was that Distractingly Sexy science, or I forget exactly what the hashtag was, but there was some, this is a number of years ago, it was also on Twitter, and there was a senior scientist who was like, I don't like women in my laboratory because they're just distracting in the way that they behave and the way they look or whatever. And so was all,

Arghavan Salles (59:02)
Mmm.

Alyssa Burgart (59:07)
There was this huge trend of women scientists showing themselves in all of their laboratory gear, their hazmat suits, in their white coats, pipetting things, and it all said, I think, Distractingly Sexy or something like that. It was really fun.

Arghavan Salles (59:22)
I should go find that. I don't remember that. I probably missed it, but that sounds fantastic ⁓ and very So yeah, folks can check that out if you happen to be on Twitter, not that I'm asking anyone to be there for obvious reasons, but if you are there, just look up the phrase, "just look at the degree on that chick" and I think you'll find quite a lot of lovely posts of really intelligent, educated women.

Alyssa Burgart (59:27)
It

makes me, it makes me,

Arghavan Salles (59:47)
So that's it for this week's episode. If you didn't like what you heard, this has been Revisionist History.

If you did like what you heard, please go ahead and subscribe or follow The Present Illness, leave us a review, tell anyone who will listen about how much you enjoyed this podcast. We'd really appreciate it.

Alyssa Burgart (1:00:04)
You can follow us on all the places we're on TikTok and Instagram at The Present Illness to stay on top of all our TPI related news.

Arghavan Salles (1:00:10)
And we'll be back next week with more headlines, hot takes, doom scrolling, and hopefully some more laughs.

Alyssa Burgart (1:00:17)
And until then, agitate, hydrate, take a nap. We'll see you next time on The Present Illness. Don't take medical advice from random people on the internet, including your podcasts. This shows for informational purposes. It's meant to be fun, and it's certainly not medical advice. So please take your medical questions to a qualified professional.


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Alyssa Burgart, MD, MA

Host
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Arghavan Salles, MD, PhD

Host