Part the First: MAHA in Action Leads to Fatal Inaction. Vitamin K was discovered nearly a hundred years ago as a compound necessary for efficient blood clotting. From the Nobel Foundation:
In addition to carbohydrates, proteins and fats, our bodies need vitamins to function well. When Henrik Dam conducted experiments on chickens that were given food with a low fat content, he noted that they suffered from bleeding that took a long time to stop. In 1934 he showed that an addition of hempseed counteracted the bleeding and concluded that the seed contained a substance, vitamin K (Koagulationsvitamin in German), that was needed for the blood to coagulate. This knowledge became especially important in treating bleeding among small children.
Henrik Dam’s revelation that a substance he called vitamin K was needed for blood to coagulate was followed by a number of investigations into how this substance can be obtained. In 1939 Edward Doisy succeeded in producing two variants of vitamin K in pure form, allowing him to determine its structure and to produce it by artificial means. This became especially important in treating bleeding among small children.
Since the early-1960s it has been standard practice in the United States to give newborns a shot of vitamin K at birth. This prevents bleeding that can be catastrophic, in some cases causing irreversible brain damage or death. Naturally, this practice is now suspicious, because it is “not natural,” and this has been picked up in the MAHA universe. I suppose it all depends on the definition of “natural.” Hand washing before going from one delivery to another in the maternity clinic was not natural at one time. Ignaz Semmelweis lost his career as a physician because of his “crazy” intervention that lessened the incidence of puerperal fever in Vienna in the mid-19th century, before widespread acceptance of the germ theory of disease after Pasteur won the argument with Béchamp and Koch established his postulates.
The drumbeat against vitamin K injections has had predictable consequences, as covered by ProPublica in An 11-Day-Old Baby Couldn’t Stop Bleeding: For Hours the ER Did Not Provide the Critical Shot, by Duaa Eldieb. The story is long, heartbreaking, and above all tragic. Those affected will never be the same as they were before. Could things have gone differently? Yes. Should they have gone differently? Of course. There is no blame to be placed on those devastated by this tragedy. But in the current world:
Since the 1960s, the vast majority of newborns in the United States have received a vitamin K shot. The injection virtually eliminated vitamin K deficiency bleeding, a rare condition that can cause catastrophic bleeding and even death.
But a shift in recent years has threatened to upend the unwavering protection that many doctors and hospitals had taken for granted. Families — mistrustful of medical interventions, misled by social media and devoted to a birth experience they deem natural — have begun to shun the vitamin K shot.
A pair of studies published last week, both of which involved millions of births, found that babies who didn’t get the vitamin K shot had an increased risk of bleeding. One of the studies found that between 2017 and 2025, the rate of vitamin K deficiency bleeding increased a staggering 347%.
Without the single, inexpensive shot — which is not a vaccine — babies are dying. Autopsies reveal how babies’ systems shut down without warning and well-meaning parents who declined the vitamin K shot were left mourning the loss of their children.
A related story about Dr. Joseph Mercola is illustrative: A Popular Doctor Had Long Warned Against Vitamin K Shots. Now He’s Changed His Tune:
For more than a decade (which means pre-MAHA in the formal sense), Dr. Joseph Mercola cautioned parents against a potentially lifesaving shot of vitamin K for their newborn babies: “Vitamin K shots are completely unnecessary for your newborn.”
But now, in a break from his past warnings, Mercola is saying he no longer believes that (we should note here that “belief” had nothing to do with his defective advice).
…
“Vitamin K deficiency bleeding is rare, but when it occurs, the consequences can be devastating and irreversible,” Mercola wrote. “A single injection at birth can prevent it. Please talk to your doctor.”
Mercola is a leading vaccine skeptic and an ardent supporter of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He is a popular figure online, with a Facebook page that has some 1.7 million followers. He sends out a daily newsletter and sells alternative treatments for a variety of ailments.
His reversal comes at a critical moment. Hospitals and research studies have documented an alarming jump in babies not receiving the vitamin K shot, which has been recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics since 1961 to help newborns’ blood to clot. Without it, research shows, babies are 81 times more at risk for late vitamin K deficiency bleeding, which can be fatal.
Just as has happened with measles and other vaccines, vitamin K shots have become the target of a deluge of false information online. That has caused some parents to view it as an unnecessary pharmaceutical intervention amid a lingering mistrust of the medical system following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr. Mercola recommended Vitamin K drops, but they are not as effective as the shot and have not been approved by the FDA (yes, I am perforce aware the FDA has not covered itself in glory over the past six years, and that it may never recover; ditto for CDC and NIH). The method of delivery always matters, especially for a compound like vitamin K (organic chemistry alert) that is not very water soluble. And I do wonder, how are these genies released by Dr. Mercola and his comrades going to be put back in their bottles?
Finally, for the strong willed, Duaa Eldieb published this piece last May: Tiny Footprints, a Blue Blanket: What I Can’t forget About the Babies Who Died of Vitamin K Deficiency.
We can expect more of the same, along with stories about babies who have died of measles, not with measles, for no good reason!
Part the Second: All Things Old Political Economy are New Again, if Only in Theory. “Michael Lind the Heterodox” has been discussed here before in Reflections on the War on Work as a War on Workers. He has an article in UhHerd, Democrats should forget growth (click on “Reader View” for access). He makes a good case that goosing GDP is not going to work, especially not in the full world we inhabit:
From the beginning, many economists have warned against the promotion of GNP or GDP growth rates as the focus of national economic policy. One of them was Simon Kuznets, who played a major role in the development of the system of national income accounts and pioneered the term GDP. As early as 1934, Kuznets (often mentioned at NC) told Congress that “the welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.” Subsequently, he warned: “Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.” (Amen)
GDP not only ignores externalities, like the costs of pollution to society, but makes no distinction between bad and good economic activity. Car accidents can increase GDP by generating more income for emergency responders, hospitals, lawyers, and towing companies, for example.
I would add that sales of Keytruda ($37.1B in 2025) for the treatment of lung and other environmental cancers should be deducted from sales of chemical carcinogens. The list of corrections for negative externalities is endless, even if the calculations are impossible.
Still:
For Republican champions of “supply-side economics,” the chief constraint on growth was the supply of capital. The solution was to cut spending on the many and to cut taxes on the rich, who would invest their greater share of national income in growth-promoting private enterprise. But the shortage of capital for investment is a myth. In fact, there has been too much American and global investment capital in search of too few opportunities for high returns. The result of cutting taxes on the rich and corporations may have been the funding of genuinely beneficial new technologies, in some cases. But another result has been reckless gambling in assets, leading to a series of bubbles and crashes in stocks and real estate for the past three decades.
Among Democrats, Left (sic) neoliberals of the Clinton-Obama school had their own version of supply-side economics, based on the false claim that the biggest constraint on American economic growth was a supposed shortage of crucial skills by Americans: “Learn to code!” This mistaken analysis led to two policies that harmed the American economy, while enriching two important Democratic constituencies: educators and Silicon Valley donors.
All true, but sometimes one wants to just reply, “Whatever…” The futility of economic growth as the solution to our problems has been pointed out by many, but most effectively in my view by Herman Daly. He and John B. Cobb, Jr. described their Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) in For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (1989, 1994; still in print). From the publisher: “Economist Herman Daly and theologian John Cobb, Jr., demonstrate how conventional economics and a growth-oriented industrial economy have led us to the brink of environmental disaster, and show the possibility of a different future.” Yes, they have. No one has listened, yet. But eventually the message will get through to current readers of UnHerd by way of Michael Lind. Maybe they will listen? Probably not.
Part the Third: Some Things in Politics Are New, Period. After the political tsunami of last week, I remembered a conversation I had with my unforgettable young German teacher. A quick search revealed that she is now a professor at CUNY. Back in the 1980s, as we discussed politics in the Age of Reagan, she could not imagine the Berlin Wall would ever come down. Sometimes the world does strange things.
Here is something I could not imagine three months ago, from Salvation South, the online magazine published by Chuck Reece, who is redeeming himself for working for the Democratic Governor of Georgia Zell Miller, who gave this speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention. The heartfelt article is Eight Black Women Will Run A Southern State.
I am already hearing mumbling from the usual suspects regarding the Blue Tsunami, but this is astonishing. Unlike Mr. Reece, I am just old enough to remember the Benighted Old Ways, which were by no means strictly Southern, when a friend had to get her chocolate sundae from the side window at the Dairy Queen. This turn of events almost makes me believe that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” For example, see South Carolina and Mississippi and Texas.
Part the Fourth: One Thing Old Might Be Going Away? Newt Gingrich, now mostly forgotten as the spouse of a serial Ambassador from the United States, was a prime mover in the coarsening of American politics. I remember him well as the longish-haired rhetorical bomb thrower in Georgia politics during the late-1970s, as he struggled to transcend his fate as a failing history teacher (Tulane must be very proud) at a then-small state college.
The man, though, he did have a vision he expressed in “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” (complete version is here). Well, yes, but it would be somewhat surprising if Newt has ever read his George Orwell. But he really didn’t need to. Scurrilous comes naturally to the man who views himself as a savior of Western Civilization:
In fact, the new speaker of the House—who once described his goal as “reshaping the entire nation through the news media” (New York Times, 12/14/94)—has given a great deal of thought to the media and how to manipulate them. One Newtonian axiom is “fights make news” (Boston Globe, 11/20/94). Another skill he has taught to Republican candidates through his political organization, GOPAC, is how to create a “shield issue” to deflect criticism:
“A shield issue is just, you know, your opponent is going to attack you as lacking compassion,” a GOPAC training tape advises. “You better find a good compassion issue where, you know, you show up in the local paper holding a baby in the neonatal center, and all you’re trying to do is shield yourself from the inevitable attack.”
But the clearest expression of Gingrich’s philosophy of media came in a GOPAC memo entitled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Distributed to GOP candidates across the country, the memo’s list of words for Democrats and words for Republicans was endorsed by Gingrich in a cover letter: “The words in that paper are tested language from a recent series of focus groups where we actually tested ideas and language.” Next time you hear Gingrich complain about media focusing on the negative, refer back to these lists.
The words recommended by the serial adulterer to describe his opponents included “sick, pathetic, traitors, radical, corruption, incompetent, selfish, disgrace…” Projection much, Newt? Maybe we can transcend this immaturity, now? The one hope I see is that the slightly older Baby Boomers of my generation (looking at you, Senator Schumer with the perfect SAT score) are losing their grip on their wing of the Uniparty. One can hope. Anyway, when I mentioned to a close colleague who was a high-level elected State Representative in the Georgia House until last Tuesday but now is only a Representative, that I still resented being called a sick, selfish traitor by Newt and his minions, he agreed. But, as a thoroughly decent human being in every way, he always did agree. It is not lost upon him or any sentient local politician that their downfall has one primary cause that was long in coming to fruition. We, all of us, as a polity either grow up or the abyss wins.
Part the Fifth: American Science in the Age of Stephen Miller and Russell Vought. The political destruction of American science is one more reason I am happy to be old. As an exercise in curiosity I opened the file that is my final (unsuccessful) grant application to the National Science Foundation. Yes, just as I remembered, the final page of fifteen was entitled “Broader Impacts.” Until last year, NSF expected a successful applicant to “spread the wealth” through outreach to the community. No “Broader Impacts” section and the grant automatically goes (or went) into the large reject pile (80-90% of the total). Mine would have been collaboration with a high school biology program to introduce young students, many from disadvantaged backgrounds, to high-level biological research in cell biology and evolution. In addition to the goal of having them learn to “do science,” they would have also presented their work at an international scientific meeting close to their school. Such opportunities were unheard of where I lived when I was their age. As it happened, my Broader Impacts were hosed by a reviewer who didn’t think my particular high school students needed an introduction to research – they were not disadvantaged enough. Imagine that.
This is exactly what the leading astrophysicist Kelly Holley-Bockelmann was doing when her research was upended by the Current Administration, The American Brain Drain Claims Another Scientist:
She had never expected to be starting over halfway across the world at age 55, just as she reached the pinnacle of a career that was often celebrated as uniquely American. She’d grown up in Montana, lying in the grass beneath the night sky and trying to feel the Earth spin. She dreamed of becoming an astronomer before she knew the word for it. Nobody in her house growing up had finished college. She’d never met a scientist. But she made herself into a theoretical astrophysicist, a leading expert on gravitational waves, a top adviser to NASA, and a chaired professor at Vanderbilt. She helped begin a new graduate program for astronomers and raised millions in federal money to recruit American scientists with backgrounds as unlikely as her own, only to watch that pipeline be dismantled piece by piece.
Her research funding was threatened after President Trump took office in 2025. Graduate students were squeezed out of the field. The space observatory that had become her life’s work was marked for elimination in the federal budget, twice. One by one, the scientists around her did the math and chose to leave, until she decided to move to Europe with a husband who had just become an American citizen and two teenagers who had spent their childhoods in Tennessee. She had devoted her career to studying the most violent events in the universe as galaxies merged and black holes collided, sending gravitational waves rippling through space for billions of years. Now the disturbance was closer to home, and she was still measuring the damage.
Our loss is Leiden’s gain, while the astrophysics community continues to support one of their very best. A comment to the article summed up our peculiar American attitude very well. Dr. Holley-Brockelman was bringing students, in this case from Fisk University (a short linear distance from Vanderbilt) into astrophysics as part of her research program. The commenter asked if she is an astrophysicist, what does such outreach have to do with it (paraphrase)? I suppose if you are not to the manner, or manor, born, you are just sh*t out of luck. Now and forever more, and that’s that. Sheer madness on exhibition, and this will not end well.
Part the Sixth: On the Importance of Basic Scientific Research, Again. I came across this paper while reading my current online issue of Nature: UNC13A splice correction rescues synaptic dysfunction induced by TDP-43 loss. That title is a mouthful and the paper is complex. The importance of this research is that it identifies an intervention that may eventually be used to treat or prevent amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, frontotemporal dementia, and perhaps other similarly devastating neurological diseases.
UNC does not stand for the University of North Carolina. UNC is an abbreviation of “uncoordinated,” as a description of a mutations that cause movement defects in the small nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. As it turns out, we have the same gene in an organism with which we had a last common ancestor at least 500 million years ago. Would any of this have been figured out if Sydney Brenner and other scientists had not established C. elegans as an experimental model for animal development and function? Probably not.
I can hear the incredulity of certain politicians now, “How can research on a small roundworm be useful?” Well, here is your answer. The same goes for research on yeasts (genetics, control of cell division and cancer), molds (genetics – one gene, one enzyme), the fruit fly (genetics, development, body plan formation, evolution), sea urchins (embryology and cell control of cell division), slime molds (immune cell function), salamanders (hormone function, development, and regeneration), and jellyfish (stem cells, regeneration).
Parting Shot: Clarke & Dawe Explain the Modern Economy. For those of you who have not come across Clarke & Dawe in your peregrinations through YouTube, here they explain our economy here in the first two minutes. Enjoy!
Thank you for reading! See you in the Comments and next week at the same time.
