jpedmd2026-11-04T20:06:00-05:00November 4th, 2026|

jpedmd2026-10-06T13:21:26-05:00October 6th, 2026|

Alito, from Heather Cox Richardson’s October 5 substack:

“Alito went on to say that he does not anticipate that the court will overturn the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision recognizing the right to same-sex marriage. That case is different from Roe v. Wade, he said, because people have come to rely on Obergefell as they organize their lives.

“One of the important factors we take into account in deciding whether we should reexamine a past decision is the degree to which there has been reliance on the decision,” Alito said. “Obviously a great deal had changed in the country as a result of Obergefell. There was a lot of reliance in various ways on the decision in Obergefell.”

In fact, all but one of the justices who overturned Roe—Thomas declined to answer—said in their confirmation hearings that they considered Roe settled law. Crawford pointed out that people thought Roe was settled law and had organized their lives around it, just as people had organized their lives around Obergefell.

“After Obergefell, people of the same sex got married and entered into contracts…it was much more concrete,” Alito told Crawford. “Whereas with Roe, the argument was made that it had an effect on people’s ideas, women’s ideas about the kind of society that they were going to live in, that this would have an effect on the society. It was much more abstract than what would’ve been involved had we been asked to overrule Obergefell.””

Yes, being forced to carry a pregnancy resulting from a rape is truly an abstraction.  Forcing women to continue a pregnancy that increases their mortality risk compared to the alternative is an abstraction.  And women don’t organize their lives around unplanned pregnancies. Right.

And from RFK Jr.:

He likes to pretend Americans were much healthier 60 years ago: “I was raised in a time where we did not have a chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy testified during his confirmation hearing, suggesting that since his uncle’s presidency, the percentage of children with chronic illnesses had surged from 2% to 66%. But U.S. life expectancy has jumped from 69.7 years in 1960 to 79 years in 2024. Children are five times less likely to die in infancy or early childhood than when Kennedy was president, largely due to vaccines.

• Kristen Panthagani points out RFK Jr’s rank hypocrisy in her You Can Know Things blog. Excerpts:

“In June 2025, RFK Jr. wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal announcing his decision to fire all 17 members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel (ACIP). His main criticism? “The committee has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine,” he falsely claimed.”

and after Kennedy became HHS Secretary, he proclaimed:

“The panelists — in HHS, in FDA, CDC, and NIH, there are panels that are made up of outside individuals, outside experts, who come and set policies. They set, for example, […] the food pyramid, the nutrition guidelines, the vaccine guidelines, the medical standards of care. In the past those people, almost all of them, have severe, severe conflicts of interest.”

And now? The previous FDA panel banned compounding of peptides due to safety concerns, but

“…the new FDA panel voted to reverse that decision. That panel included new members appointed under RFK Jr.’s leadership — many of whom have direct ties to the peptide industry: a CMO of a wellness company that sells peptides, the founder of a company that provides “premier advisory in peptide therapy,” and the founder of a wellness company that provides custom protocols including peptide therapy, just to name a few (more are listed here.)”

and

“A New York Times investigation found that four of the eight new members appointed by RFK Jr. own stock in pharmaceutical companies that will likely be influenced by their decisions on the task force. Stocks were described in conflict-of-interest waivers granted to these members, and include stock ownership in Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer, Cigna, CVS Health, and others. Before RFK Jr., candidates would have been asked to sell these stocks rather than being granted waivers. And if they refused, they would not have been granted a position on the task force.”

• A good op-ed by virologist James Alwine appears in MedPage Today where he argues that while the threat of man-made viral bioweapons created by AI is real and should be mitigated, the threat of a dangerous virus generated via zoonosis is much greater – but we are doing very little to ward against it:

“In nature, viruses have multiple means to randomly mutate, thus enabling them to quickly create millions of variants while infecting and spreading in animals or people. Some of these random changes weaken the variant and it does not survive; other changes make no difference. However, now and then a random change makes a variant that is “better”; for example, it is more efficient at infecting us or at evading our immunity. These more efficient variants are selected and propagate; they become the source of more variants, and the evolution of the virus proceeds…Nature is infinitely better at creating viruses than humans and computers are. At this moment, the generation and spread of viruses in nature, by random change and worldwide mass replication, remains a far greater threat than AI-designed viruses.

The U.S. is presently unaware of what is happening with viruses in nature; we are unprepared for the inevitable next zoonotic epidemic or pandemic. The government’s denial of science and nonchalance toward both known and emerging infectious diseases leaves us in great danger.”

• Worth reading: Eliot Cohen, writing in the Atlantic, “Hegseth’s One Percent“; an excerpt:

“What is even worse than biblical illiteracy and historical ignorance from this product of Princeton and Harvard Universities is a project about which he seems to be deadly serious: the cultural isolation of the military. His speeches subtly denigrate the general officer corps and focus on the most impressionable segment of the military, those old enough to have bought into the system but young enough to be naive about its merits…It is profoundly dangerous stuff, the antithesis of what soldiers such as George C. Marshall or Dwight Eisenhower believed, that the soldier is a citizen first, that one cannot adequately defend this society without believing in its values and its essential goodness, that an air of contempt is incompatible with a life of self-abnegation.”