May 14, 2025

The Poisoning of the American Mind

In the emptiness of Antarctica, on a desolate stretch of that desolate continent known as Adélie Land, a man struggled across a crevassed plateau, hoping against hope to reach the refuge of his winter quarters, where his crew awaited. His two companions had died. He was alone in the howling white waste. It was 1913, and Douglas Mawson, commander of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, faced one of the most harrowing odysseys in the history of polar exploration, a journey of three hundred miles over terrain so treacherous that it was more crevasse than plain. He was on foot. His sled dogs had dropped in their traces. His food and fuel had been lost, with his companion Belgrave Ninnis, into the fathomless blue depths of an icy void.

He was facing starvation, frostbite, and snow-blindness. But as he continued his laborious trek—reduced to eating the flesh of the sled dogs he had once relied on for transport—something worse, something inexplicable, began to happen. One night, worried about the pain in his feet, Mawson peeled back the multitudinous layers of boots and socks that swathed them—and found that the soles of his feet had simply fallen off.

Skin was sloughing off from all over his body, in fact: his ears; his nose; his scrotum. The flesh of his fingers and palms peeled off in “large sheets,” as he wrote in his expedition account, In the Home of the Blizzard. Incredibly, Mawson struggled on—he rubbed the abraded bottoms of his feet with lanolin, tied the old “skin soles” that had been part of him back on with bandages, fell into a crevasse, climbed out again and then fell in again and then climbed out again, recited passages of the Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam to stave off the desire for suicide, and eventually made it all the way back to Cape Denison, the headquarters of his remaining crew in Commonwealth Bay, on one of Antarctica’s windiest shores. It was a feat so legendary he spent decades gracing Australia’s hundred-dollar bill.

Much of Mawson’s physical deterioration can be explained by the extreme conditions—the freezing and starvation and psychological distress of being alone on the ice. But later scientists, examining his peculiar symptoms, came to the conclusion that the excruciating ordeal came from a separate, but crucial, error in Mawson’s desperate survival tactics. In his starving state, Mawson had eaten the livers of his sled dogs—Greenland huskies whose diets were primarily carnivorous—as he walked alone through the ice. Unbeknownst to him, these seemingly tender morsels contained an insidious poison, which was neither understood nor named until years later. Mawson had suffered a toxic overdose of vitamin A.

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Hypervitaminosis A had been experienced by explorers in both the Arctic and Antarctic (Danish explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen, Mawson’s rough contemporary, also suffered sled-dog liver poisoning, on Greenland’s ice cap, although with less dramatic results. Other explorers, like the somewhat maniacal American explorer Elisha Kent Kane, ate the livers of apex-carnivore polar bears and nearly died. The native Inuit knew better). Vitamin A is fat-soluble, meaning that it sticks around longer than other vitamins and can build up in the body with significant exposure, such as in polar bear liver consumption. Or in other scenarios entirely. 

In the US, in temperate climes far from the extremis of polar exploration, hypervitaminosis A has started to rear up again, with cases throughout the country, primarily in children. This time, the cause isn’t a starvation march through the wastes of Antarctica, or a duel to the death with a polar bear. It’s misinformation, coming straight from the Secretary of Health and Human Services. This does not, unfortunately, make it less dangerous.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—who is appearing before Congress today—is the vaccine skeptic’s vaccine skeptic: someone who has dedicated decades of his life to spreading anti-vax propaganda across the globe. Before he became Secretary of HHS in an ugly fillip on our unfolding national nightmare, the organization he founded, Children’s Health Defense, was primarily responsible for exacerbating a measles outbreak in Samoa by discouraging vaccination. 83 Samoans died, mostly children under age 5. Not content to leave a trail of preventable deaths abroad, Kennedy has continued to actively discourage measles vaccination in the US, sowing doubt about its efficacy and safety even as the disease has reached epidemic levels in the Southwest.

Measles can really fuck you up. For life, immunologically. There aren’t any legitimately effective antiviral treatments, and it is particularly devastating to the very young. Moreover, the vaccine is safe and so effective that the US considered the disease a thing of the past until persistent anti-vax sentiment reduced herd immunity to the point that the disease has seen a resurgence. This year marked the first death due to measles in the US in ten years. The following month, there was a second, an eight-year-old girl. 

In the interim, Kennedy continues his campaign against a remedy so safe and effective it effectively eradicated an endemic disease. (This is little surprise from someone who, in a book published via his reprehensible nonprofit, claimed that the polio vaccine causes cancer, and cast doubt on the veracity of germ theory.) He also blamed the dead for dying.

“It’s very, very difficult for measles to kill a healthy person,” Kennedy told Fox News in March, effectively shitting directly in a grave he helped to dig. He later said, “we see a correlation between people who get hurt by measles and people who don’t have good nutrition or who don’t have a good exercise regimen.” 

On the subject of “good nutrition,” RFK Jr.’s unproven and frankly dangerous approach to measles treatment comes straight from the world of woo—to wit, encouraging parents to administer unspecified doses of vitamin A and cod liver oil (which contains vitamin A) to their measles-ridden or -exposed children. Again, there is no effective antiviral treatment for measles. Vitamin A is neither preventative nor curative. But it can, in doses above the recommended daily volume, fuck you up real bad. Ask the parents in West Texas. A hospital in Lubbock, experiencing an influx of pediatric patients who were suffering liver toxicity as a result of hypervitaminosis A, warned the public to stop stocking up on cod liver oil—or risk damaging their children’s liver function. Hundreds of minors have already come down with measles in 2025, and an unknown number of them have been subjected to unproven, harmful treatments like vitamin A megadoses—an outcome directly traceable to Kennedy and the loathsome cadre of disinformation peddlers who sell bad health advice and unregulated supplements.

Christopher Holstege, MD, medical director of UVA Health's Blue Ridge Poison Center in Charlottesville, noting a nearly 40% uptick in vitamin A exposures since last year, felt the need to address the situation in a briefing. “Megadosing vitamin A certainly is not going to help you from contracting measles," he told reporters. Hypervitaminosis A can lead to death in extreme cases, he said; chronic or more moderate overexposure can cause "injuries to the liver, bone problems, and more central nervous system problems that may or may not be reversible."

No parent, wracked with anxiety over the health of their child, deserves to be misled by someone in a position of such authority—misled to the point of harming their child instead of helping them. No child deserves to die of a disease so preventable it was nearly eradicated years ago. No child deserves to lose their hearing, their liver function, their immune system, to something that could so easily be avoided, if only there weren’t so many people using big megaphones to blare out blatant lies. No one wants to feel they’re being fooled or foxed by big interests into doing something unsafe for their child. 

Anti-vaxxers like Kennedy exploit these fears, and add “cures” that range from the dubious to the actively destructive in the process. Fundamentally, using one’s power to prey on the most vulnerable among us—children, and the parents who desperately want to do right by them—is unforgivable. This is the crime RFK is perpetuating. For good measure, he has a tendency to blame his victims. He and his ilk specialize in generating a fog of doubt, by first sowing fear about treatment, and then claiming the dead were “unhealthy” and thus—inferentially—undeserving of life in the first place. He’s an agent of pestilence, a jerky-skinned Malthusian ghoul in a too-tight suit. 

But don’t let his bullshit snow you, or anyone you know. Vitamin A can’t cure measles. It can make your hair fall out, or make you have to tie the soles of your feet back on. Just ask Douglas Mawson. In the meantime, we all have to help one another over this crevasse, this white waste that keeps expanding in front of us. Remember that nobody deserves to be lied to; and no child deserves to be rendered ill. Retain your humanity. Pull your boots back on. And keep going.