“Stupid” has never been the first adjective that comes to mind when discussing the Cleveland Clinic’s wellness program. Obviously, they’re stupid, as the display below shows. (144,000 people does not equate to “1 out of 19 people in the “United States.” 144,000 would barely be 1 out of 19 people in greater Cleveland.)  But, until now, just mainstream wellness vendor stupid, not stupid-as-a-business-strategy stupid like Wellsteps.

Likewise, until now, a strategy of competing on the basis of stupidity wasn’t a major priority for them.  They preferred to compete on the basis of the three other pillars of the wellness industry — weight-shaming, fabricating outcomes and alienating employees.  Now, though, they have thrown their hat into the ring in the race to outstupid the rest of the wellness industry…and against stiff competition have jumped into the lead, as described below.

By way of background, the wellness industry spends most of its energy hyperdiagnosing employees by screening the stuffing out of them.  Their informal motto is “overprevention today, overprevention tomorrow, overprevention forever.”  Vendors can and do provide as many USPSTF D-rated screens as they can get a company to pay for.

In reality, of course, among clinical prevention tools (meaning, excluding lifestyle-based prevention), vaccination against preventable disease is the only major prevention tool with incontrovertible results dating back to 1796. Consequently there is 100% agreement about the value of vaccination.

Oops. Make that 99.99% agreement.  The Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute’s medical director, Daniel Neides, just came out against them. Sure, the Cleveland Clinic claims he didn’t mean a word of it and made him retract it. They said they would take appropriate measures in response, by which I guess they mean anointing Dr. Neides as a “Cleveland Clinic Wellness Expert.”

So it’s not enough that the wellness industry wants to subject us to all sorts of unnecessary medical interventions. Now this Cleveland Clinic “Wellness Expert” (synonym: see “idiot”) wants to discourage us from getting necessary medical interventions.  While ranting about vaccines generally, he especially targets the flu vaccine, because it contains formaldehyde.  And a good thing, because formaldehyde is the ingredient that inactivates the flu virus in the vaccine, so that we don’t get injected with the flu itself.  (If you’re worried about formaldehyde, try eliminating pears from your diet. Each one contains enough formaldehyde to supply 100 flu vaccines.)

Normally I debunk each point these blithering wellness experts make one at a time. However, in this case I’m yielding the floor to Tara Haelle of Forbes, who shows, much better than I could, that this guy is an even bigger wellness expert than the rest of the wellness experts running their program.