In social science, the Overton Window refers to the range of ideas considered socially acceptable at any given period in time. In medical science, Heidi Overton refers to a complete lunatic with ideas that should not be acceptable at any period or at any time … and who will soon be in charge of the CDC.
Overton is a very, very far-right surgeon (man, something about surgeons!) and anti-abortion-rights activist who has been working in the Trump White House as the deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy. Prior to that she was director of the Center for a Healthy America at the oxymoronic MAGA think tank the America First Policy Institute. It was there that she co-authored a policy memo with Trump spiritual advisor Paula White about how abortion rights activists are the real radicals, not people like her who want to take everyone’s reproductive rights away.
Here is a video of Paula White exorcising demons out of a bunch of people by blowing into a microphone. Definitely someone you want to listen to about public health policies and what is and is not a normal thing to believe.
In 2024, Overton wrote a Newsweek op-ed in which she claimed that a Kamala Harris presidency would be a disaster for women, as she would allow them to make their own decisions about their reproductive futures in consultation with their doctors. Imagine the horror! She was very upset that Harris refused to denounce late term abortions, probably because Harris was aware that the reason people have late term abortions is because of serious health concerns that are none of Heidi Overton’s damn business unless she is the one having or performing it.
Most Americans don't support aborting babies in the seventh, eighth, and ninth months of pregnancy. Does Vice President Harris disagree? Her prior support for the Women's Health Protection Act—which has no limits on abortion—is a clue. She's also shown a willingness to gloss over inconvenient facts. The vice president said last year that criticism of her party's support for late-term elective abortion was a “mischaracterization of the point.” Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show at least 4,382 abortions beyond 21 weeks occurred in the U.S. in 2020, with evidence of clinics offering elective (not “medically necessary”) abortions up to 34 weeks. Yet Harris routinely dodges the issue.
Does Heidi Overton think that women are really going through 34 weeks of pregnancy and then going “Nah, I’ll pass”? Really? No. First of all, abortions after 21 weeks (24-25 weeks being the point at which the fetus is viable) are extremely rare and account for only about one percent of all abortions. When someone is having an abortion after 25 weeks, it’s almost always going to be because of a very serious health concern or a fatal fetal anomaly. The reason we support not having limits on abortion in this way is because we understand that this needs to be a conversation between patient and doctor, and because we understand that time is of the essence in these situations. We have seen what happens when women are denied care because the doctor has to worry about what the state will do to them if they perform a medically necessary abortion (or treat a miscarriage), and it is not pretty. We would like to avoid that.
There are only about 60 clinics in the United States that perform abortions after 24 weeks and just five that will perform them after 28. A 1992 study found that abortions after 26 weeks accounted for just 0.02 percent of all abortions, and there was a lot more access to abortion then than there is now. The only reason this is an “issue” is because people like Overton want to use it to eliminate access to abortion entirely.
You may be thinking “Well, since she hates late-term abortions so much, she must love medication abortion and the way recent rules changes have allowed it to be so accessible to those who need it, letting them get abortions very early in pregnancy without having to jump through 87,000 hoops that could cause them to have to wait until later in their pregnancies.” You would be wrong! She also hates medication abortion and wants that to be outlawed as well.
Overton also used that opportunity to show the world how grotesquely transphobic she is, writing that “there is one important reason voters can't trust Harris to commit to women's health: her party won't even define what a woman is.” Such a sick Matt Walsh burn!
It depends on the day and on which audience she's trying to please. At a speech in May, Harris asked the audience “Do we trust women?” But official documents from the Biden-Harris administration instead use the term “birthing people.” Which is it? The answer matters—millions of women's lives and billions of dollars in federal health care spending turn on such things.
And yet she doesn’t do anything at all to explain how acknowledging the existence of transgender people and the ability of transgender men to get pregnant could possibly affect that. Why? Because it doesn’t and wouldn’t.
Yet another disturbing stance was found in a brief talk she gave on an America First podcast about how the reason the Left has so much more scientific evidence on our side is because evil liberals are controlling science through peer-reviewed journals. Her solution? Conservatives making their own science journals that will confirm their beliefs instead, and they need their own credentials and licensing.
“We need alternate systems. We have for too long said that ‘Well, conservatives are going to stay in the current system and just continue to fight and hope our ideas are heard,’ but in the meantime the Left starts journals called the Journal of Adolescent Transgender Medicine and what do you think they publish in that every month week after week, month after month? Articles that support all of their positions. And so when you go to criticize, and you might have one study that was funded that says ‘No, that’s wrong,’ and they bring you 50. And so you’re up, you’re up against this mountain of evidence.”
It will surely shock you to know that there is no such thing as the “Journal of Adolescent Transgender Medicine.”
It seems as though Overton might not understand how all of this is supposed to work.
Scientists do studies so that they can better understand how to best help people, not to provide evidence for people seeking to win arguments on social media. There really isn’t any need to have funding for what Overton wants. I mean, she’s comfortable enough just letting the president dictate the vaccine schedule based on his own personal conviction that vaccines cause autism without any evidence, why should she need evidence for anything else? Plus, it’s hard to imagine how one would configure a study to “prove” that transgender people are not real. That’s just an opinion. A weird, weird opinion.
“We need alternate forms so that doctors who speak out are not afraid that they’re going to lose their medical license or their livelihood that is the greatest threat to doctors that I’ve seen. We had one of the Frontline doctors with us on Wednesday night, and so many of them have had their medical licenses under fire and we should have an alternate system of credentialing and licensing.”
They had their medical licenses “under fire” because they were promoting harmful pseudoscience. How do you license that? Will it just be that they say “Oh, I went around prescribing Ivermectin to people with COVID who weren’t my patients because I’m a conservative” and then the board goes “Oh, okay, then do whatever you want”? Will this work for every possible scenario? Like could a surgeon say “Oh, I got drunk before surgery and cut off the wrong leg, but I did it because I’m a conservative. Yay Reagan! MAGA!” and the board is like “Yes, please continue doing this job!”
The Trump admin actually soft-launched Overton just a few weeks ago during the press conference in which Dr. Trump announced his new plans for the vaccine schedule, which he, being a genius, believes will end autism, despite the fact that autism does not have fuck-all to do with vaccines. I didn’t even get to her in my write-up of the event, because there was so much other crazy going on in those 40 minutes that it practically felt like overkill. But hey! Let’s take a look now at what she said then, shall we?
“In December, the presidential memorandum directed HHS to produce the scientific assessment that they did and then they overhauled the vaccine schedule. Those actions have since been held up in court. And so right now, Americans don’t have access to that information. and you are correcting that wrong today and saying I am giving Americans this information directly so that they know what HHS found in the scientific assessment themselves.”
So she’s a lying liar. Their “assessment” — which wasn’t especially scientific — has been available for people to read since January. What has been held up is the vaccine schedule itself, as Judge Brian Murphy just did not think that Trump, RFK Jr., and their merry band of internet “wellness influencers” and other assorted kooks were qualified to make that change.
Also, they didn’t “find” anything beyond the fact that there are countries on an entirely different continent, with different vaccination needs and also universal health care.
“But most importantly, states are the place where school vaccination requirements are implemented. It’s state laws and regulations and the CDC would advise the states on those policies. Since January 2026, 28 states have no longer agreed with the CDC and they recommend their own policies. A lot of those states are blue states, and they’re working with outside entities such as the American Academy of Pediatrics that still rely on recommendations that were in place in 2024 with the 72 injections by age 18.”
Love how she’s trying to paint the American Academy of Pediatrics as some rogue group of ne’er-do-wells relying on outdated information, while the Trump administration is looking towards a super cool future with self-driving cars, hepatitis babies, and more teenagers contracting bacterial meningitis, which could kill them in a matter of hours.
“So you are saying, especially to states that are willing, take a look at this scientific assessment. These are the gold standard childhood vaccine recommendations and you should put this into your state law so that when parents go to enroll their kids in school, they do not have to meet some of the requirements for the vaccines that are no longer recommended for all children. That brings us in line with European nations.”
How about we get in line with the universal socialized medicine in Europe before we start emulating their vaccine policies, which clearly aren't that great across the board given that they have their own issues with measles and other vaccine-preventable illnesses.
“And importantly, those nations do not have vaccine mandates for school. A lot of those nations maintain vaccination rates for measles above 90 percent. Denmark, Ireland, Spain, Portugal all have vaccination rates for measles above 90 percent without mandates for school. And so they do that through increased public trust and education and letting parents be informed and make those decisions.”
That’s great, except for the fact that we need the measles vaccination rate to be over 95 percent in order to get back to that nice herd immunity place, as opposed to the 2,566 cases we’ve had so far this year.
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Additionally, the reason we have low public trust in our health institutions is because we have a for-profit healthcare system, a long and storied history of medical racism that is ingrained so deeply that there are, to this day, white medical students who think Black people feel less pain, a long and storied history of women being told they are imagining things, and, on the other end of things, the kooks.
RFK Jr. believes that the key to restoring public trust in the healthcare system is by catering to kooks like himself — which has resulted, so far, in a 50 percent drop in trust in the CDC and federal public health recommendations. That’s actually a good thing for now, as trusting anything he’s involved with could be dangerous, but it seems pretty unlikely that putting Overton in charge will do much to change that.
OT before I forget: friends had a baby, named her Halcyon Moonbeam.
Interesting choice, I thought.
It's bad enough that Joe is fighting metastasized prostate cancer. Every scumbag in Poopy Pants Posse keeps blaming him for everything that's going wrong.
NEWSNATION: New polling shows over 60% of Americans disapprove of the economy under President Trump and puts his approval rating on 33%, the lowest it has ever been. How do you convince people you're the right choice?
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