Lobbying the Quacks

Is a story a nothingburger if mystery meat is involved?Based on a story about the corporate sponsorships behind the MAHA Summit in Washington next week, we're about to find out.Politico reports (HT: Jasmine Nisar):Walmart, America's biggest retailer and a leading purveyor of the ultraprocessed [sic] foods MAHA decries, is among the sponsors. So are two artificial intelligence giants, OpenAI and Anthropic, whose chief executives recently asked Washington to regulate them in order to prevent their tools from wiping out humanity.In exchange, they'll get to attend a private dinner with summit speakers, which include Health and Human Services Department officials. Other sponsors are less well known, but also have interests before Kennedy's health department, including makers of psychedelic drugs, diagnostics technologies and peptides that need government approval.We can borrow a phrase from Faye Flam to reflect the conventional view of the above as tainted by the influence of ...…