Pseudoscience, Subterfuge, and Civil Resistance

With each passing day, the US federal government introduces yet another policy that threatens, rather than promotes, the health and wellbeing of the American people.A prime example is the recently enacted federal budget bill that makes severe cuts to Medicaid funding, cripples the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and limits the extension of the premium tax credits under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to January 31, 2026.As a result of this legislation, millions of Americans will lose their health insurance coverage in 2026, and many will experience food insecurity, with the likelihood that their health will be at risk.While these avoidable consequences are troubling in themselves, even more disturbing are the underlying motivations that seem to be driving them, most notably a blatant disregard by elected members of Congress for the welfare of citizens, particularly low-income families, in order to finance tax cuts for the wealthy.Federal policy actions involving public health show a similar disregard for the wellbeing of citizens and have been characterized by a relentless assault on science and truth led by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has defunded valuable cuttingedge biomedical research, dismissed experts from federal health advisory committees, and launched scientifically questionable studies in the face of counterfactual evidence, exhibiting strong elements of pseudoscience and political subterfuge.According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, subterfuge is "deception by artifice or stratagem in order to conceal, escape, or evade."Counter to promises made to Senator Cassidy at Mr. Kennedy's confirmation hearing, vaccine skeptics now hold key roles in DHHS 1 and Kennedy remains aligned with Children's Health Defense, an anti-vaccine organization he founded, that is seeking to upend the childhood vaccination schedule and abolish vaccine mandates. 2seudoscience has been defined as "a pretended or spurious science; a collection of related beliefs about the world mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method or as having the status that scientific truths now have." 3It is "a system of theories, assumptions, and methods erroneously regarded as scientific" 4 and "consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be scientific or factual but are inherently incompatible with the scientific method, and is often characterized by contradictory, exaggerated or unfalsifiable claims." 5Pseudoscience also relies on confirmation bias (the tendency to search for and favor information in a way that confirms or supports