This week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that his running mate would not be any of the 87 names he tossed out there in recent weeks but rather Nicole Shanahan, an attorney and “avid surfer” who, so far, has donated lots of money to his campaign, including spending $4 million on that Super Bowl campaign ad that Kennedy had to apologize to his family for. She was also the “creative force” behind that ad.
Like RFK Jr., Shanahan say that she is not an anti-vaxxer, just that she wants to have conversations about vaccines.
She said part of her motivation was concern about the environment, vaccines and children’s health, and her belief that Mr. Kennedy was willing to challenge the scientific establishment.
“I do wonder about vaccine injuries,” she said, although she clarified that she is “not an anti-vaxxer,” but wanted more screening of risks for vaccinations. “I think there needs to be a space to have these conversations.”
I don’t know that she actually does want to have these conversations, at least not with anyone who will ask her what it is, specifically, that she “wonders” about vaccine injuries or asks what she knows about how vaccines are screened for risks now versus what she thinks would need to be done to screen them properly. Like we all don’t know how this game is played by now.
Shanahan, who was previously married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, is also a big fan of “alternative medicine” and has also been vocally opposed to IVF, calling it “one of the biggest lies that’s being told about women’s health today.”
Via Politico:
At the same time, she has also been a vocal proponent of and financial backer for unconventional research into the possibility of helping women having children into their 50s and exploring no-cost interventions to help women conceive, such as exposure to sunlight.
“I’m not sure that there has been a really thorough mitochondrial respiration study on the effects of two hours of morning sunlight on reproductive health. I would love to fund something like that,” Shanahan said to a 2023 panel with the National Academy of Medicine, a group to which she had previously donated $100 million.
The statement was met with chuckles, “Yeah, let’s do it,” she added. “I just have an intuition that could be interesting and maybe work.”
There has not been any really thorough research into how putting cotton balls soaked with cod liver oil into one’s ears or starting each day with a ten-minute twirl-a-thon affects one’s reproductive health either, because that would just be silly.
To be fair, it’s not quite that ridiculous. We do know that Vitamin D (which you can also get from milk or supplements or by other means), like many other vitamins, can have a positive effect on fertility and pregnancy in general. There was also one study showing women over the age of 30 have higher levels of anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) in spring and autumn than they do in winter. (AMH is related to egg count.)
The levels of AMH during months of moderate solar radiation exposure were overall higher than months that had high or low-intensity solar radiation levels.
They also found that participants in the 30–40-year group who had AMH levels collected during the summer months had much higher AMH levels than participants who had AMH levels collected during the winter months.
Researchers further divided participants into 30–35-year and 36-40-year groups. In the 30–35-year group, they did not find a significant correlation between solar radiation intensity or season and AMH levels. In the 36–40 group, they discovered that AMH levels were higher in the months of moderate solar intensity and higher in the summer compared to winter.
That doesn’t exactly translate into “maybe you can be more fertile if you spend two hours in morning sunlight every day.” It certainly does not suggest that it would be better than IVF.
Much like her vaccine takes, Shanahan’s thoughts on IVF, though critical, are astoundingly vague.
Via Politico:
“It became abundantly clear that we just don’t have enough science for the things that we are telling and selling women,” Shanahan told the Australian Financial Review. “It’s one of the biggest lies that’s being told about women’s health today,” she said.
And in a personal essay for People Magazine in 2022, in which she detailed her split from her ex-husband and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, she said, “I believe IVF is sold irresponsibly, and in my own experience with natural childbirth has led me to understand that the fertility industry is deeply flawed.”
It seems that her own experience was that a fertility clinic told her that she wasn’t a good candidate for IVF due to her polycystic ovary syndrome, which actually isn’t entirely true. Many people with PCOS have conceived with the help of IVF and one bad experience with one fertility clinic is not exactly a reason to try to replace it with a heavy dose of sunshine.
Admittedly, I am not an expert in these matters, but those who are experts are quite certain that Shanahan is full of it.
“Reasonable people could have concerns with bioethics, or a lot of us have concerns with how a lot of science is marketed and mass produced, right?” Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All told Politico. “I’m sure there’s a tiny little kernel and rationale behind all of this. But at the end of the day, IVF has been a long-established reproductive health technology, and Nicole Shanahan, bless her, is not a medical expert.”
It does feel worth mentioning that a lot of anti-vaxxers these days are also very anti-sunscreen. It’s a whole thing where they insist that the Left is trying to keep people out of the sun to make them unhealthy, and an extension of the “if it’s natural it’s good, if it’s unnatural it’s bad” branch of junk science.
Some have even gone so far as to claim that sunglasses are bad for you.
To be clear, for the 47,000th time, you have to wear sunscreen every day, if you are going outside, even when you are not going to burn.
This also seems like it might be somewhat related to Tucker Carlson’s ball-tanning habit, though I couldn’t tell you for sure. It truly doesn’t seem like a fully-formed idea on either end.
Now, we all know that this woman is not going to be vice president, because Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not going to be president. But it seems like a good idea, if she’s going to be somewhat in the national spotlight, to cut this nonsense off at the pass before we have a bunch of acolytes out there risking skin cancer in hopes of getting knocked up.
PREVIOUSLY:
What do you mean, you're pregnant? It can't possibly be mine. I wear sunscreen.
“It became abundantly clear that we just don’t have enough science for the things that we are telling and selling women,” Shanahan told the Australian Financial Review. “It’s one of the biggest lies that’s being told about women’s health today,” she said.
Since childbirth and wanting children is a reasonably common thing, and science has been around for a while, I'd say the opportunity to Do Science on fertility and understand it has been rather large.
So the statement "abundantly clear that we just don’t have enough science" - while also being illiterate - is, frankly, just wrong. Maybe you are unaware of 99.9% of the research, sure, I'll buy that.
tl;dr: shut up.