There is a huge industry - somewhere between $50 to $100 billion - of alternative medicine that is behind the attack on Fauci. It's an odd world. Ivermectin for river blindness earned a Nobel Prize; ivermectin for COVID failed its large randomized trials. Chiropractic for lower back pain has decent evidence; chiropractic for allergies doesn't. This is why "alternative medicine" resists being a category of things: it's a category of claims relative to evidence. Alternative medicines are claiming UNPROVEN effects.
And of course this is something consistent with the brand of MAHA and MAGA . Claims are made without the tiresome burden of evidence. You might classify Trump's promise to lower inflation by imposing tariffs as alternative politics.
One of the ways that I know pharmaceuticals approved by the FDA are real and alternative medicine is not? Real drugs that make real changes to your body have a variety of side effects. They are changing your body and that always includes unexpected outcomes. How do we know that alternative medicine is not real? It doesn't make enough change in your body to trigger side effects, much less make one healthier.
What do we see in the attacks on Fauci? An attack on the burden of proof as a bar alternative medicine has to clear before it can be sold. There is big money that comes from getting people to disregard the - yawn - tiresome burden of evidence that can make your brain hurt and lower your expectations of magical outcomes. Real changes - in pharma or politics - carries with it uncertainty that promised changes do not. For millions of Americans, honesty about the fact we live in a world filled with probabilities and if-then outcomes is too large a burden and they embrace the snake-oil salesmen who make promises that defy reason or facts.
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