By Cory Franklin | February 18, 2026

For nearly fifty years, Dr. Arthur Caplan has been the preeminent medical ethicist in the United States. A pioneer in the specialty, he helped popularize the field of medical ethics and has authored authoritative books and articles on diverse topics including organ transplantation, genetics, human experimentation and in vitro fertilization.

He has been honored as one of the 50 most influential people in American health care by Modern Health Care magazine and one of the 100 most influential people in biotechnology by Scientific American magazine.

During his career, especially during the COVID pandemic, he has not shied away from controversial opinions such as mandatory COVID vaccination, the physician’s right not to treat the unvaccinated and revoking the licenses of doctors who opposed vaccination. For patients who refused vaccination, he proposed charging them more for their hospital bills, life insurance and disability insurance.

Though unpopular with some, those opinions did not diminish his reputation. After retiring from his directorship of medical ethics at New York University, he continues to write and lecture as an eminence grise in medical ethics.

However, as his career winds down, Dr. Caplan may have gone off the rails. In a recently penned article in Bioethics Today, he comes down hard on the Federal government campaign to promote drinking whole milk: “Milk drinking is political. Drinking whole white milk has played a big role in racist and far-right thinking…Racism and eugenics, sadly, may be playing a role in the sudden drive to fetishize drinking whole milk. Drinking whole milk is a dog whistle to far right, white nationalists. The campaign to promote whole milk may have many factors behind it, but at a time when eugenics, racism, and white nationalism fuel too much of our political rhetoric, the whole milk campaign must be swallowed with care.”                                                                                                  

That’s right, drinking whole milk is now a dog whistle.

It’s hard to know where to begin. But let’s start with:  This is stupid.  As George Orwell said: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” From the department of “Everything is Racist,” The London Daily Telegraph has catalogued some of the many things that have been branded racist: everything from ballet to geology to libraries to dogs to Jingle Bells to just being nice to other people. Welcome to the club, Milk.

It’s unnecessarily political: There was a time when medical ethics was supposed to be about medicine and ethics, not politics. No longer. This is making a mountain of bias out of a molehill of an eagerness to rally the woke. In fact, Dr. Caplan is sloppy in attempting to assert his progressive bona fides.

During the 1990s, there was a popular ad campaign, “Got Milk?” promoting whole milk. Notorious white supremacists featured in the ads included Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Serena and Venus Williams, Rihanna, Demi Lovato and Sara Ramirez.

It’s trivial: Ethicists have many far more serious things to write about instead of a made-up crisis. This medical journal article is basically one step above clickbait. There is more than a whiff of social media and Tik-Tok videos here.

It’s anecdotal selection bias: Dr. Caplan all but admits in the article that he’s been on the lookout for this “trend.” He offers no evidence that most or even many racists/white supremacists truly care whether they’re drinking whole milk or lower-fat varieties.

Are they the only ones who have succumbed to the temptation of the taste of whole milk? Dr. Caplan himself has conceded that he has drunk whole milk because he enjoyed the taste. Have all the other progressives rejected that good taste?

It’s not even good science: For a scientist/ethicist to trash milk is especially puzzling, because whole milk is one of the healthiest foods there is, especially for children. The greater caloric and fat content of whole milk is generally acceptable when consumed in moderation.

Yes, a significant fraction of the populace, especially in minority populations, cannot tolerate whole milk because of lactose allergies (although some lactose intolerant individuals report being able to drink whole milk).  Really now, does that require invoking Mussolini and the Nazis as Dr. Caplan did in his article?

Many years ago, I attended several medical ethics conferences where Dr. Caplan was the keynote speaker. Invariably incisive and articulate, he offered some of the best insights in the field.  In the twilight of his professional life, has it really come to this?  Milk as racist? Of course, now that he has launched his fusillade at white whole milk, the question that demands asking is, “Does this mean we must give up chocolate milk, as well?”

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About the author:

Cory Franklin, physician and writer, is a frequent contributor to johnkassnews.com. Director of Medical Intensive Care at Cook County (Illinois) Hospital for 25 years, before retiring he wrote over 80 medical articles, chapters, abstracts, and correspondences in books and professional journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. In 1999, he was awarded the Shubin-Weil Award, one of only fifty people ever honored as a national role model for the practice and teaching of intensive care medicine. 

Since retirement, Dr. Franklin has been a contributor to the Chicago Tribune op-ed page. His work has been published in the New York Times, New York Post, Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times and excerpted in the New York Review of Books. Internationally, his work has appeared internationally in Spiked, The Guardian and The Jerusalem Post. For nine years he hosted a weekly audio podcast, Rememberingthepassed, which discusses the obituaries of notable people who have died recently. His 2015 book “Cook County ICU: 30 Years Of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases” was a medical history best-seller. In 2024, he co-authored The COVID Diaries: Anatomy of a Contagion As it Happened.

In 1993, he worked as a technical advisor to Harrison Ford and was a role model for the physician character Ford played in the film, The Fugitive.