IT’S BEEN ALMOST a hundred years since God created The Three Stooges, who taught us the first rule of humor: If you can’t make people laugh with a joke, then hit each other over the head with a mallet. According to their cinematic archive, no job was too challenging to fail at spectacularly, including plumber, painter, carpenter, chef, and even surgeon. They could not succeed in these endeavors because they were utterly unqualified, a can’t-do attitude that fits right in with today’s Trump administration. But the good news is, any moment now we should start laughing.
A can’t-do attitude that fits right in with today’s Trump administration.
In fact, had Moe, Curly, and Larry lived into their second century, they might have been chosen as members of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, ACIP for short. Since so many of RFK Jr.’s new hires have been sorely mistaken as respected experts in the field of immunology, why not The Three Stooges, whose disqualifying ineptitude could stand shoulder to shoulder with their own.
The original members of ACIP were summarily dismissed for — as far as we can tell — a strong commitment to scientific inquiry and making fact-based decisions. Also, their surprising aversion to prescribing Vitamin A as a wonder cure. (RFK Jr. is a huge vitamin A fan. He can’t get enough of it. Nor, apparently, can he get enough time in tanning beds despite the proven risk of melanoma. To his credit, RFK Jr. will put up looking tanned and fit against a cancer risk any day.)
Like RFK Jr. (let’s call him Moe), ACIP’s new hires bring a long history of public skepticism against the research that, despite their best efforts, led to covid vaccines that have saved countless lives. Interestingly, most of these people were educated at some of the nation’s finest universities, universities who of late quickly cross the street when approached by nosey journalists asking about their alums.
OF PARTICULAR NOTE among the new appointees is Martin Kulldorff (we’ll just call him Larry), who gained notoriety during the last pandemic by advocating a remedy that many scientists felt compelled to quibble with: Do nothing.
No lockdowns, no physical distancing, and certainly no vaccines. His bright idea was just to let nature take its course. He argued that after enough people had contracted the virus, the population would reach herd immunity by building up antibodies that made them healthy enough to easily step over all the dead people not benefitting from this protocol. In Kulldorff’s view, “Hey, you can’t make an omelet without a couple million corpses. Am I right?”
Other new appointees to the commission similarly spent the last pandemic claiming, variously, that the covid vaccine caused AIDS and made you infertile. It’s only a matter of time before this rogue gallery of conspiracists bring out their Greatest Hits for the Cure, including silver oxide toothpaste (wintergreen is the most popular flavor), vitamin megadosing, and ivermectin, used to treat parasitic worms — regrettably, not the one who rented a timeshare in RFK Jr.’s brain.
And my personal favorite, that I still remember fondly: bleach. (Maybe it was just a question of dosage. Would a teaspoon a day be such a bad idea? Although you’d want to take it with food. It’s great for bathtub mold, but a little hard on the tummy.)
Yes, I’m probably being too hard on these woefully underqualified “scientists” who can’t seem to get it right. The simple truth might lie in a prophetic statement uttered long ago on their behalf, when Curly admitted: “I’m tryin’ to think, but nothin’ happens.”
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