The saga of the Alcohol Intake & Health Study reveals a lot about how public health and science collide with politics and corporate interests in Washington, DC:
It was fascinating to see how effectively the alcohol industry and its allies commandeered the narrative about these alcohol health studies. People were really treating the one that actually got commissioned first as if it were duplicative and suspect:
“The thing that the alcohol industry fears more than increased taxes is increased knowledge about the risks associated with drinking alcohol, particularly around cancer,” Mike Marshall, CEO of the Alcohol Policy Alliance, who was not involved, told me:
I reviewed hundreds of media clips and spoke with public health experts who were hired by the DeSantis administration or who spoke with the governor directly to write this story of what really happened in Florida during the pandemic:
In the span of one month, DeSantis went from being so concerned with Covid that he kept his distance in a private meeting to lecturing public health experts about the virus at a later closed-door meeting:
"For every outcome we analyzed, women who received an abortion were either the same or, more frequently, better off than women who were denied an abortion.”