Lysenkoism persisted in the Soviet Union because people who pointed out the inconsistencies too straightforwardly would find themselves in hot water. Anyone who wanted to discuss the issue had to approach it somewhat obliquely. Most people were unable to comprehend this discourse - a necessary precondition to avoid trouble.

You could try looking very closely at your middle paragraph and looking for analogies with contemporary bio-politics.

Merriam-Webster changed their definition of "vaccine" in 2021. They did this so the COVID shots could still be called "vaccines" despite not preventing infection, not preventing transmission, and providing only a moderate therapeutic benefit. In doing so they cannibalized and damaged public trust in "vaccines" which the medical community had built for so many years, and at such great expense.

As is often the case, the problem was not a dumb public "losing trust in [thing]" but managers playing sleight-of-hand with the meanings of words. See also: racism.

> He also pushed ivermectin which studies show has no statistically significant effect on COVID.

Studies showed that it had a statistically significant effect on COVID. The problem is that with hindsight it is obvious any sufficiently powerful study will show it has a statistically significant effect so the existence of that effect isn't particularly interesting evidence.

There will be people who have both COVID and parasites. If you give them Ivermectin around the time they catch COVID, they will get better outcomes. Statistics will pick that up, it is a real effect. AND it has real world policy implications, there are a lot of people in the world who should immediately be given Ivermectin if they catch COVID (or, indeed, any disease). The more important political issue was when people noticed that (very real) effect without understanding the cause they were attacked rather than someone explaining what was happening.

It is a good case study of evidence being misleading, but the statistical significance of that evidence is indisputable. Any study that doesn't find that effect is just underpowered - it is there. In fact as a baseline it turns out we would expect any effective drug will have a statistically significant positive effect on COVID outcomes.

> He also pushed raw milk when prior to pasteurization, milk was the cause of 25% of all communicable diseases (it’s a great medium for bacteria, it has avian flu viruses, parasites, etc). We invented pasteurization for a reason.

Raw milk is legal to sell in most of Europe and they still have overall better health outcomes, so at the very least it’s a triviality.

> the real reason for US health decline is too much sugars/carbs, too little exercise, and addiction to opioids and nicotine.

I think a more fundamental root cause is that US regulation has failed to adequately keep up with the playbooks of large companies that stand to profit from various products that result in compromised health.

Take a look at what's being heavily advertised/marketed. If it contains ingredients people haven't been consuming for thousands of years, I think it's suspect and should be subject to intense scrutiny. (Same goes for widely used B2B products that affect what people consume.)

Unfortunately, there's too much "we only test in prod" going on, so it's hard to isolate widespread problems to a single source. That's why (in my opinion) the FDA should require clinical trials and use an allowlist-based approach to food additives. Currently it's a denylist, which amounts to testing in prod.

I'll also say that this is not unique to him, it's how conspiracy minded people operate.

You'll see exactly this playbook playout with flat earthers. "We can't know the earth is round because it's not been tested." or "It's actually industry captured" or "The US government prevents people from doing real tests to see if the earth is flat".

You see, if you asked them "what would it take for you to abandon this theory" their honest answer is "nothing" because any counter evidence to the theory will just get wrapped up in more conspiracy.

What would it take for me to abandon my belief in evolution? Evidence that explains why things appear to evolve and shows what actually happens instead.

What will make me abandon my support of vaccination? Evidence that shows vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they protect against.