Mark Hyman's “reasonable” junk science

Beware the measured man

In a recent appearance on Bari Weiss’s podcast, Honestly, Mark Hyman said:

The way vaccines are studied is against other vaccines; it's not against a placebo.

Blatantly false. Alarming that someone who started their career as a family physician would get something this wrong.

Rubella, pneumococcus, Hib, HPV, polio, measles, Tdap, and COVID-19 vaccines have all been tested against placebo.

Hyman might have been referencing updates to existing vaccines, which are typically not tested against an inert placebo when an effective vaccine is available. Medical professionals consider it unethical to withhold proven protection from those in need.

But that’s not what Hyman said, and Weiss didn’t have the chops to challenge him. All she offered over two hours was inquisitive head nods, even as Hyman continually got things wrong.

The “not tested against placebo” playbook was well-defined by RFK Jr, who often says the same thing about children’s vaccines—and which is also a misnomer. While Kennedy has claimed otherwise, many childhood vaccines have been tested in placebo-controlled trials, particularly when no effective vaccine previously existed for the disease in question.

Take the Salk polio vaccine. Hundreds of thousands of children were randomly assigned to receive either the polio vaccine or an inert saline injection. Placebo-controlled trials have been conducted for rubella, pneumococcal, Hib, HPV, measles, Tdap, and COVID-19 vaccines in children. The KidCOVE study for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine is one recent case.

Yet when I criticize Hyman, I often receive messages from fans of his work claiming that I’m not being fair. And I understand why.

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Reasonable junk

Mikki Willis recently hosted a webinar in which he claimed that the measles outbreak “in Texas is caused by a “bioweapon” targeting the Mennonite community.”

The outlandish assertion helped pitch Willis’s “immune fortifying” supplement line. The Plandemic maker adapted Covid-19 marketing to measles, which makes sense: his initial emails for the product line promised that his magic pills would help protect “against the next pandemic.” Such a pitch is unlikely to rope in new customers, though it will keep the fever pitch high for the base.

There are smarter—much smarter—marketers in the contrarian health space. Like Mark Hyman.

After the Weiss appearance, I received a text from a friend not as immersed in the alt-med world. They mentioned that Hyman sounds reasonable. I agreed. He’s quite good at coming across as logical while employing two key techniques:

• He regularly begins answering science-based questions with an anecdote, which serves to disarm the interviewer and make it sound like, hey, I’m a just a guy who went through this stuff, too

• More often than not, his appeal is to emotions, not reason

Unlike Willis and others, Hyman doesn’t need to go for the jugular with every email. In fact, he rarely does, which makes pinpointing misinformation more challenging, especially because he employs a third technique:

• He’s not wrong about a lot of things

Hyman is right that our for-profit healthcare system doesn’t serve patients as much as profits. Incentives throughout the bureaucracy are horrendous, leading to perverse outcomes.

He’s also right that food conglomerates have a ton of lobbying power and work behind the scenes to affect legislation. While ultra-processed foods (UPFs) aren’t the devil he and others make them out to be, no one’s diet should predominantly rely on them.

So if you’re like me and nod affirmatively at some remarks while listening, it’s easy to overlook when Hyman’s own incentives come into play.

One moment your righteous anger is stirred by his disdain for food companies doing everything possible to maximize profit, then you miss the fact that the Environmental Working Group—which he praised throughout the episode and sits on the board of—has its own perverse incentives and profit maximization schemes that play loose with science. Replicating the techniques of horrible business practices at a smaller scale doesn’t give any organization a free pass.

Being right about the many systemic problems with for-profit healthcare doesn’t mean millions of trained medical professionals aren’t doing incredible work. They’re certainly not selling supplements to treat hypothetical conditions like “leaky gut” or straight-up pseudoscience like “adrenal fatigue,” yet these diagnoses dominate the alt-med health genre Hyman champions: functional medicine.

Being right about problems in our food system doesn’t mean you can ignore the “root cause” (to use functional medicine’s term du jour) of food deserts and lack of healthcare access.

Whether or not UPFs are clinically addictive is still being studied. Healthcare professionals wouldn’t recommend making them the majority of your diet, and without investigating the social determinants that often drive people to consuming them, you’ll only ever stare at an incomplete picture.

Sounding reasonable is part of Hyman’s charm. Unlike other MAHA activists, he often qualifies statements and rarely raises responds feverishly. He comes across as empathic and caring, no doubt stemming from his time working in family medicine.

All of which makes him more dangerous. He’s hitched his train to longtime friend RFK Jr’s MAHA train and stands to profit further from his $28M empire when his friend “ends the suppression” of supplements. Raging against problems with vaccinology plays very well for a man who specializes in treating made-up conditions with “solutions” he’ll profit from.

Does it matter that those problems aren’t real? Not at all. It’s been part of Hyman’s playbook for decades, and he’s very good at it. Which means you have to spend more time sifting through the marketing hyperbole to distinguish fiction versus fact.