Page 2 has the figure. Getting people to not smoke has been the most effective treatment in our lifetime.
Public health is a really big deal, and RFK et al are a disaster for the nation.
Getting older, I'm not subscribing to that, but it sometimes feels like the RFKjr -style interventions are calculated. Then again, this theory makes zero sense when dismantling herd status for measles (I don't think 'natural measles survivors' are genetically 'better' than the rest of us)
But on a lighter note: is there any belief more certain to spoil?? My god. Don’t underestimate the moral worth of futureYou, folks. I guess delighting in their assured regret is a bit of a guilty pleasure, but it helps!
RE:RFK, I think you’re indeed overestimating their intentionality. They intuitively feel that measles wouldn’t affect them because they’re stronger, and would do their best to dance around that belief if pressed beyond their comfort zone of cherry-picked facts.
But really, they’d much prefer to just not think about that part altogether IMO; ‘MAHA’ is much more about hypernaturalism & tradwives than it is about public health. This is all just annoying scaffolding to them.
Though I don't subscribe to utilitarianism or the notion that the value of an human being can be reduced to its economical aspects. It's not my moral compass.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-08/professor-richard-sco...
Anyways, I studied SCLC in grad school and saw lots of scans of people with tumors from their heads to their feet, and saw the enormous resources dedicated to caring for SCLC patients and to searching for a cure. It’s hard to overstate how profoundly evil the cigarette companies were and still are. They got people (children) addicted knowing what was coming for them, knowing they were killing them in horrific ways. Now we all get to pay for that in funerals and tax dollars.
The big success story, about 20 years old now, is testicular cancer. You can have metastatic testicular cancer with tumors all over your body (like Lance Armstrong had) and they can cure it. They use platinum based chemotherapy and it's not really well understood why it works for testicular cancer, but not others.
The story with childhood leukemias is similar. They figured out how to combine a bunch of chemotherapy to get the cure rate up pretty high. Leukemia in a child used to be (1990s) 90% fatal, it's like 10% now.
Besides those, most of the advances in the past few decades come from early detection/ surgery or just prevention (stop smoking).
There is some hope though. When people first started studying cancers at the molecular level, one of the first things they noticed was how often a gene called Ras was mutated in different cancers. It turns out that designing a drug for Ras was really hard, but it finally got done, it's called daraxonrasib. They just released phase III human trials with this drug in pancreatic cancer a week or two ago and it destroyed the standard of care (Chemotherapy), but that is saying people who were dying in 1-2 months were still alive after 5-6 months.
The former senator Ben Sasse was diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer last December. Historically, that's like 5% survival rate for 5 years. He is on daraxonrasib. We will see how it works out.