Some years ago, I was kicked out of a local moms group on Facebook. It was at the very height of Facebook popularity among normies, and all sorts of drama was kicking off there. There was the woman whose marriage fell apart over the course of a morning after she sent up the alarm that her husband was missing, then revised it an hour later: No, he had apparently spent the night with a stripper, everybody stand down. That was a good one. My banishment doesn’t even compare, but it went like this:

The school district announced it would provide free FluMist flu vaccines for any child whose parents wanted it. Permission slips, etc., nothing out of the ordinary, but it set off a huge outcry on this particular mom group, who all seemed to post in all caps about VIRUS SHEDDING and BIG PHARMA PROFITEERING and WHY WEREN’T WE NOTIFIED and ISN’T THIS A VIOLATION OF MEDICAL ETHICS, and THESE COMPANIES WILL STOP AT NOTHING, etc. At the height of this back-and-forth a new voice parachuted in, a woman who said she had honey for sale from her own bees, and that this honey had “anti-viral and anti-fungal properties,” and that it could be a natural, organic, healthy way to protect your child from influenza. The clamor immediately shifted from BIG PHARMA to OMG DO YOU DELIVER and various forms of SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY.

And then along came me, who wondered why it was evil for a pharmaceutical company to offer a vaccine, but OK for this lady to sell her honey. Well. The honey lady complained to the admins, and I was bounced from not only this group, but another that the same admin ran.

“And that,” my friend Dustin said at the time, “is when you got your teardrop tattoo, right?” Ha ha ha.

I could not have known at the time, in the innocent era of the Obama administration, that these women were proto MAHA moms. The anti-vax movement was making itself known, but they didn’t have a spokesman other than Jenny McCarthy and some Hollywood twits, certainly not an actual Kennedy. And that Kennedy, HHS Secretary Croaky, made all their dreams come true this week when he nominated Casey Means as the U.S. Surgeon General. Means is being identified as a doctor, and she did graduate from med school (Stanford! Impressive!) but never finished her residency, which my doctor friend tells me makes her not-quite-a-doctor. His text:

You don’t become a physician in medical school. Med school is a hazing ritual that earns you the right to become a physician over the ensuing years of residency (+ fellowship, etc.) if you survive.

Whatever. Apparently Means became disenchanted with otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat, for you people who don’t speak Medical) and dove headfirst into so-called functional medicine, which many consider pseudoscientific, and I know you will be astonished to learn that she is very suspicious of these “vaccines,” and is cut from the same cloth as Croaky, i.e. it’s the pollution and the seed oils and blah blah blah. And now she’s on deck to become the nation’s top doctor. Wikipedia:

(Means’) book’s central claim is that a single mechanism which the authors call “Bad Energy”, which they describe as a uniquely common form of mitochondrial dysfunction caused by improper lifestyles (contrasted with scientifically-established, genetics-based mitochondrial diseases), which causes disorders as diverse depression, anxiety, acne, infertility, insomnia, heart disease, erectile dysfunction, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, as well as “most other conditions”, because “it can show up in different cell types” and thus causes different symptoms.

As I believe we’ve discussed here about a million times, I have no problem with eating better, and I believe a healthy diet will improve one’s own health, but I don’t recall this being kept secret by the AMA. In fact, I think they’re the ones who are always handing us a copy of this or that diet on our way out of the exam room. And those of us who remember the Obama years also remember the conservative response when Michelle Obama dared to suggest school lunches could be healthier, and that exercise was a good thing.

(Cul-de-sac: A friend sent me a years-old story about a school lunch staple of our youth — Johnny Marzetti. This story goes into the rise and fall of Johnny Marzetti, best described as sort of a baked ziti, but more downmarket. Apparently it has nearly disappeared from school cafeterias, driven out in part by the nutritional reforms pushed by Mrs. Obama. I had NO idea.)

Conservatives bitched up a storm over those reforms, and now they’ll be obligated to support a quack who believes Bad Energy is what causes illness. Tell that to the sick folks in Kentucky and West Virginia, you cowards. Offer them a jar of honey instead. It’s delicious on toast.

Best social-media joke I heard this week: I don’t want to alarm anyone, but the orcas now have two F-18 Hornets.

The weekend awaits, doesn’t it? Think I’ll clean three bathrooms and go for a bike ride. You do what you like.