This will go down as the month that American public health crawled under the bed and refused to come out again.
I dangled its favorite thing: A longitudinal double-blind study linking brain worms with the tendency to stuff dead bears in car trunks. With pictures.
No luck.
Pat Beall is an editorial writer and columnist for the Sun Sentinel, focusing mainly on Palm Beach County issues.
I get it. RFK Jr. has been science ‘splaining, suggesting that circumcision causes autism. Not to be outdone, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary is speculating out loud that government labs cause Lyme disease: One is close to one of the original Lyme disease outbreaks. Or maybe it was just close to a deer tick. Or maybe just close to a deer that once knew a tick. The logic works either way.
In Washington, Congress is fretting that fish are swimming in a sea of women’s hormone blockers, an obsession of Marco Rubio. On the mental health front, Marjorie Taylor Greene is channeling AOC’s speechwriter.
Closer to home, Mother Jones weighed in with an exposé on Joseph “Vaccines are slavery” Ladapo. Our state surgeon general’s guiding light is his wife, which is quite sweet. The part about her getting advice from the Archangel Michael and Mary Magdalene is a bit off the science scale, but who am I to judge? Our president gets missile advice from a defense secretary who gets missile advice from Zeppelin & Sons and haircut tips from 1979 and you don’t hear anyone but me and 73 million other Americans complaining about that.
But then you get to Ms. Ladapo’s musings on pandemic prevention. Some hated masks. Some worried about shots. To the woman influencing the most influential man in Florida health, it brought to mind “nefarious intention.” Humans, she wrote, are “controlled by dark actors who have a keen interest in keeping humanity’s collective vibration low.”
Hum on, America.
I know you expect me to explain all this.
What makes you think I can explain all this?
But it’s the job, so: Fins first. Fish and all their little aquatic friends are the new anti-abortion frontier.
Last year, Marco Rubio was among other congressional representatives asking the EPA to investigate whether mifepristone is an eco-hazard seeping stealthily into America’s waterways and maybe coming back again in kitchen faucets.
This year, since Rubio is busy shrinking into big sofas during awkward Oval Office moments, others stepped up. GOP members of Congress asked the EPA this summer if there wasn’t a way to track the abortion-inducing drug in water. They didn’t actually say let’s find a way to track it back to the house it came from and the woman who lives there, but small steps, small steps.
And so we come at last to MedBeds.
MedBeds regrow toes and arms and cure cancer and reverse aging and are the reason why John Kennedy Jr. is still alive and don’t exist at all and so of course our president posted an ad for them on his Truth Social channel. MedBeds for all.
Bold claims, said soft-spoken reporters for France 24 public broadcasting, who undertook a pixel by pixel deconstruction of the most powerful man in the free world using bad AI and a worse QAnon theory to punk said free world.
The images are not real. The Fox News logo isn’t real. The president’s lips move, but they, too, are not real. Perhaps they never have been.
This is how we make American health truly great again. Slap a fish in a magic bed. Give a tick a Tylenol. Take two circumcisions and call an archangel in the morning.
And for goodness sake, start vacuuming dust bunnies from under the mattress. We’re going to need the space.
Pat Beall is a Sun Sentinel columnist and editorial writer. Contact her at beall.news@gmail.com.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2025/10/17/to-your-health-pat-beall/
