Just Keep Swimming
Speedy Sperm Linked to Longer Life
Where’s DOGE when you need them? I have a perfect example of government waste that could be cancelled before we piss away money on it, but that seems unlikely since it was just announced last week and appears to be an RFK Jr. wet dream.
Apparently, the CDC is going to conduct yet another study on whether vaccines cause autism. The study—if allowed to use legitimate scientific methods and report actual results—will find that vaccines do not cause autism. How do I know that? Because we’ve already wasted decades—and millions of dollars—refuting one study that was… wait for it… entirely made up.
I’m sure you’re all sick of me ranting about vaccines, so I’m going to make this one short. In 1998 British “researcher” Andrew Wakefield came out with a “study” of 12 kids with developmental delays, eight of who he claimed had autism. He “concluded” that the MMR vaccine was the reason. Four years later, the same researcher did another study of 75 kids and came to a similar conclusion but cited different (also dubious) reasons.
In the years since, dozens of studies involving millions of children have looked for the link and no one else has found it.
Why?
I’m just guessing here, but it might have to do with the fact that it was a fiction created for financial gain. Wakefield had invested in a new kind of MMR vaccine and was hoping to discredit the existing one to make his more popular. He has since admitted to fabricating the data in that original study and pulling the conclusions directly out of his own ass. As a result, Wakefield had his medical license revoked and got to go to Trump’s first inaugural ball.
A new CDC study that finds nothing might seem like a harmless waste of money even if it sticks out like a sore thumb amid the rhetoric of ending government overspending. But it’s dangerous anyhow. Every study on this topic lends credence to the possible already disproven connection. As we’ve learned too many times in recent years, even definitive results can’t stop the power of, “Wait, didn’t I hear that vaccines cause autism?”
But instead of saving money on studies we don’t need, Trump and DOGE are going after studies they don’t understand. In his official address to Congress last week that no force on earth could have made me watch, Donald Trump talked about studies on transgender mice. More specifically, he blamed the Biden administration for spending $8 million “making mice transgender.”
That’s not how it f**king works on two entirely different levels.
We know from his inane definition that Trump doesn’t get the difference between sex and gender in people, but mice make it simple. They have a biological sex that is based mostly on their rodent DNA and their tiny little peckers (or lack thereof). Like people, mice can be born intersex. But mice don’t have an internal sense of being male or female because their brains are the size of a pea. Gender is at least partly a social construct, and the mice I’ve met have not been smart enough to grasp that. (To be fair, I’m irrationally afraid of all things rodent, so I’m usually too busy running away and screaming to even attempt an intellectual conversation. Maybe mice have a deep inner life that I’m not giving them credit for.)
Yes, humans have done experiments on mice that seek to discover the roles hormones play in sex/gender/reproduction/cancer/Parkinson’s/whatever by giving a male mouse some estrogen or pumping a female mouse full of testosterone, but I assure you this wasn’t about making them trans. Yes, we’ve done experiments with/for/about transgender people, and some of them might have had a mouse component. But in true Trump fashion, it looks like neither of these are the categories of which he spoke.
Many Trump watchers believe that his comments on transmice represent confusion about the difference between transgender and transgenic. (They’re transitioning the mice, they’re transitioning the rats.)
In the early 1970s, scientist figured out that you could put foreign (i.e. human) DNA into the nucleus of a fertilized mouse egg and that the resulting rodent would have that DNA in every cell and all of their tissue. This was considered a major scientific breakthrough because it makes the mice more human-like and therefore more valuable for studying human genetics. Transgenic mice can be used for research on diseases like osteogenesis imperfecta, sickle-cell anemia, and ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease).
When they were called out on their scientific semantic slip-up, the Trump administration doubled down. They put out a press release lambasting the woke liberal media for making fun of their leader titled “Yes, Biden Spent Millions on Transgender Animal Experiments.” Their release offers a list of studies that include the word transgender and/or mice and add up to approximately $8 million dollars. I can’t help but wonder whether this was the original list that they added up before the speech or if some poor intern was sent to the library after the fact. Either way, it will not come as a surprise that none of the listed studies is about making mice transgender (or making transgender mice).
Some of the studies are about using mice to learn more about transgender humans like whether HIV treatments are impacted by hormone therapy and what could be done to mitigate breast cancer risk. The largest study on the list, however, was about asthma. Yes, transwomen were included in the study along with cisgender men and women. And yes, the researchers did use mice. But the goal of the study was to “investigate the mechanisms by which estrogen triggers inflammation in the male and female asthmatic lung.”
We can all sleep better knowing that DOGE put a stop to that (unless, of course, we’re having an asthma attack).
Missourians Could Give All Their Tax Money to Crisis Pregnancy Centers
Missouri voters want access to abortion. We know that because in November they voted in favor of a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion and other reproductive health decisions. Missouri lawmakers disagree. We know that because they passed one of the strictest abortion laws in the country and fought like hell to keep it even after voters said, “no thank you.” But in February, a judge overturned the legislatures attempts to regulate abortion providers out of existence, and abortion procedures started up again.
Missouri has a new Republican governor and both houses of the legislature are dominated by the GOP (24 to 10 in the Senate and 110 to 52 in the House). Not surprisingly, they’re still trying to steamroll the voters on this issue. For one thing, they’re working on a new proposed constitutional amendment that would restrict abortion and ban gender-affirming care for minors (in the apparent hopes that voters’ hatred of all things trans will overpower their desire for abortion rights). For another, they’re propping up crisis pregnancy centers.
Missouri already gives a lot of money to these so-called pregnancy resource centers. Governor Kehoe has proposed $12 million dollars for these groups in the next fiscal year, which represents an almost 50% increase. His office explained that the governor wants to fund abortion alternatives because he “is committed to supporting services that help women choose to carry their unborn child to term.”
But direct funding is only part of the game. Missouri was also the first state to use tax credits to incentivize individuals to give to these far-right charities. Taxpayers who donate to crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) can claim some of the money as a dollar-for-dollar reduction in their tax bill. This isn’t a deduction. It doesn’t just lower your taxable income. Essentially, it lets you make a donation instead of paying some of your taxes.
For many years, taxpayers could claim a 50% tax credit for donations to these organizations, meaning for every $1,000 dollars they donated, their state tax bill dropped by $500. Beginning in 2021, the dollar-for-dollar tax credit went up to 70%, meaning for every $1,000 they donate, their state tax bill dropped by $700. A new bill proposes raising that again to 100% and caps the donations at $50,000.
That would mean that all but the wealthiest Missourians could choose to donate rather than pay any state income taxes. It allows residents to say “f**k roads, fire departments, libraries, and schools, the only thing I want to pay for is talking women out of abortions.” Anyone who can do math can see how this might become a problem for a state that needs roads, fire departments, libraries, and schools.
When the increase to 70% was proposed a few years ago, nonpartisan legislative oversight staff calculated that it would raise tax credits (also known as the money not given to the state) from $3.5 million to $4.9 million. What they didn’t count on was a rise in donations. Last year, the state lost $11.8 million dollars of potential revenue to this tax credit. It’s unclear how the new bill will impact taxes and whether it will encourage more people to donate or the same number of people to donate more.
The bill was introduced by Rep. Christopher Warwick (R-Bolivar) who likes the idea of people being able to support the important work of CPCs without the state meddling by, you know, “trying to verify what programs work.” He also doesn’t like the idea of making those charities report back on how they spent the money because bureaucracy is bad. Warwick’s bill would also include tax credit for diaper banks and maternity homes. (Anyone else flashing to 1950s Ireland.)
CPCs first crossed my radar in the late 1990s and early aughts when many of them got federal abstinence-only-until-marriage and used it to lie to kids about the dangers of premarital sex. It tracks because these organizations were founded on lying.
According to a 2018 study, most CPCs are affiliated with evangelical Christian networks and national antiabortion organizations but few of them tell potential customers about this. Instead, they position themselves as unbiased, comprehensive health centers; advertise free pregnancy services; say they offer options counseling; and often open near legitimate abortion providers. In the old days, they advertised in the phonebook under “abortion services.” Today, they’re really good at using search engine optimization and other interweb tactics to attract women looking for real abortion providers.
Once they get women through the door, “counselors” spew misinformation about abortion like the widely debunked links between it and breast cancer, mental health issues, or fertility problems. They also offer unnecessary ultrasounds designed to manipulate women. One study of CPCs in Ohio found that some even discouraged early abortions by telling women to wait because they’d likely have a miscarriage anyhow. (Abortions later in president are harder to find and less safe.) Counselors do not offer referrals to actual abortion providers should a woman not be persuaded by these falsehoods.
Democrats in the Missouri legislature oppose giving these centers so much money that would otherwise go to the state. Rep. Steve Butz (D-St. Louis) describes himself as pro-life and has actually given to crisis pregnancy centers (and received a 70% tax credit). Still, he opposes the new bill. In a hearing he argued that donors who receive full tax credit aren’t really giving their own charitable donation, they’re giving away the state’s money.
The bill advanced to the next step in the House but has not yet moved forward in the Senate.
Can you imagine the outrage if any politician—in any state—suggested that taxpayers could choose to give to Planned Parenthood rather than pay state income tax?
Men With Better Sperm Live Longer
A new study out of Denmark finds that men with better sperm quality at young ages seem to live longer than those who have weak swimmers. Before you ask the men in your life to provide semen samples for predictive purposes, however, you should know that researchers still don’t understand why this association exists or exactly what it means. (Other than, you know, the obvious: healthy men make healthy sperm and healthy men tend to live longer connection.)
The study is based on 78,284 men who had their semen tested at the public semen analysis lab in Copenhagen between 1965 and 2015. (Yes, Copenhagen has a public semen analysis lab.) The men ejaculated into a cup not for science, but because they and their female partner were experiencing infertility. This means that there was a wide variety in the semen samples. Some men may have been shooting blanks, but others had perfectly healthy sperm that were being thwarted by any number of female infertility issues. In addition to having a public semen analysis lab (can we take a field trips?), Denmark has a national health register. This allowed researchers to follow the health of these same men for decades.
Men who are experiencing infertility are often tested for three things: sperm count, sperm shape, and sperm motility. This study was most interested in motility which is the ability of sperm to swim efficiently. Remember, sperm are very little and have to go a long way to get through the cervical mucus (Hi, Cecily!), cervix, and uterus to the fallopian tubes where they may or may not find an egg waiting to be fertilized. Motility tests look at how fast the little guys swim (at least 25 micrometers a second is required to get to the egg goal) and whether they’re going full speed ahead or full speed around and around in useless circles. The more goal-oriented speedsters, the better: >120 million motile sperm per milliliter of ejaculate (referred to as total motile sperm count or TMSC) is considered healthy.
This study found that men with a TMSC of 120 million or more had a life expectancy of 80.3 years compared to 77.6 for men who had 0 to 5 million sperm per milliliter. As motile sperm count went down, mortality risk went up. Men with a TMSC of 80 to 120 million had a 16% higher mortality risk, 40 to 80 million a 27% higher mortality risk, and 10 to 40 million had a 38% higher mortality risk.
Some men in the study had azoospermia meaning their semen samples had very few or no motile sperm. Men with a TMSC of 0 to 5 million had a 39% higher mortality rate than those with the swimmiest sperm. Interestingly, though, the highest mortality risk (61%) was for men with a TMSC of 5 to 10 million. The researchers believe this is because their study didn’t distinguish between azoospermia caused by sperm quality and that caused by an obstruction. Men with the lowest TMSC may be producing healthy sperm but not able to release them. This would be problem for getting someone pregnant, but possibly not an indication of poorer overall health. In contrast, men with some—but not many—swimmy sperm are likely not hiding healthier ones back in the ball sack.
The association between lower semen quality and lower life expectancy remained after researchers controlled for education levels. It was also not explained by diseases in the 10 years before the semen was tested. However, in each category of sperm health, men with pre-existing conditions fared a little worse than their peers.
Sperm quality as a marker of overall health is an interesting finding and one that countless startups will undoubtedly try to capitalize on. (I see an ad campaign built around a fortune teller looking into a microscope instead of a crystal ball.) The problem is that we don’t yet know what it’s telling us. The correlation is clear, but the connection is just as murky as those public semen samples.