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 The immorality of appointing KennedyI’ll Never Forget What Kennedy Did During Samoa’s Measles Outbreak Nov. 25, 2024 By Brian Deer Mr. Deer is a journalist and the author of “The Doctor Who Fooled the World,” about the anti-vaccine movement. In November 2019, when an epidemic of measles was killing children and babies in Samoa, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who in recent days became Donald Trump’s pick to lead the department of Health and Human Services — sent the prime minister of Samoa at the time a four-page letter. In it, he suggested the measles vaccine itself may have caused the outbreak. He claimed that the vaccine might have “failed to produce antibodies” in vaccinated mothers sufficient to provide infants with immunity, that it perhaps provoked “the evolution of more virulent measles strains” and that children who received the vaccine may have inadvertently spread the virus to other children. “Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of any assistance,” he added, writing in his role as the chairman of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group. At the time of his letter, 16 people, many of them younger than 2, were already reported dead. Measles, which is among the most contagious diseases, can sometimes lead to brain swelling, pneumonia and death. For months, families grieved over heartbreaking little coffins, until a door-to-door vaccination campaign brought the calamity to a close. The final number of fatalities topped 80. I was in Samoa during that outbreak as part of my more than 16 years of reporting on the anti-vaccine movement. The cause of the outbreak was not the vaccine, but most likely an infected traveler who brought the virus from New Zealand, which that year had seen the biggest measles outbreaks in decades, especially among that country’s Indigenous and Pacific Islander communities. Migration and poverty were likely factors in a sudden spread of measles in Samoa and New Zealand. But, as an editorial in the New Zealand Medical Journal reported, so too was a factor that Mr. Kennedy specializes in: “Increasing circulation of misinformation leading to distrust and reduced vaccination uptake.” Samoa’s vaccination rates had fallen to less than a third of eligible 1-year-olds. Vaccine skepticism has ballooned worldwide, and Mr. Kennedy and others who back him have encouraged it. Americans may be well aware that their possible future health leader holds dangerous beliefs about vaccines. The consequences of his views — and those of his orbit — are not merely absurd but tragic. In my reporting, parents have mentioned fearing vaccines after watching “Vaxxed,” a 90-minute documentary, which had also toured countries such as New Zealand. The film, focused on unproven allegations, was released more than three years before the Samoa measles outbreak. Among much else, it claimed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had committed fraud. Two of the filmmakers — Del Bigtree and Andrew Wakefield — are buddies of Mr. Kennedy. The director, Mr. Wakefield, is a former doctor whose medical license was revoked in his native Britain in 2010 amid charges of ethical violations. One of the producers, Mr. Bigtree, became Mr. Kennedy’s presidential campaign communications chief. In the years before the documentary was released, I revealed, in a series of articles, evidence that Mr. Wakefield’s research in the 1990s had been rigged at a London hospital to make it look as if the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine was linked to autism. This research was retracted in 2010. Mr. Kennedy certainly didn’t seem fazed by Mr. Wakefield’s professional downfall. “In any just society, we would be building statues to Andy Wakefield,” he yelled, for instance, from a platform he and Mr. Wakefield shared at an event in Washington, D.C., a few days before he sent his letter to Samoa. Reports say Mr. Kennedy is reviewing résumés for his possible Health and Human Services empire. He’s reportedly eyeing Joseph Ladapo, a Florida health official who has questioned the safety of Covid vaccines. I’d say Mr. Bigtree may get a role; Mr. Wakefield is trickier, given how discredited he is, even in the United States. But there are plenty of others in Mr. Kennedy’s circle whose claims ought to concern everyone. Consider Sherri Tenpenny, a doctor who has been declared by Mr. Kennedy as “one of the great leaders” of the anti-vaccine movement. She has falsely claimed that a “metal” attached to a protein in the Covid shots was making their recipients magnetic. “They can put a key on their forehead and it sticks,” she told Ohio state lawmakers in June 2021. “They can put spoons and forks all over them and they can stick.” I could pluck plenty more outrageous characters from Mr. Kennedy’s circle over the years, including veteran AIDS denialists. In recent days, Mr. Kennedy appears to have tried to change the conversation around his vaccine views to focus on America’s junk food diets. But his views on vaccines shouldn’t be forgotten. In January 2021, speaking to a gathering of loyalists in Ohio, he outlined a three-point checklist that had to be met for him to consider a Covid vaccine. First, he said, “you take one shot, you get lifetime immunity.” Second, side effects are only “one in a million.” Third, “herd immunity” is achieved at 70 percent public uptake — after which, he stipulated, “nobody in this society” ever gets the disease again. “If they came up with that product,” he said, “I’d be happy to look at it.” His audience laughed. But it’s not funny. |
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Kennedy Flu and MMR vaccines don’t meet his criteria. Though serious side effects to the mRNA vaccine do appear to be about one in a million. No vaccine is 100% effective. Some people don’t produce the necessary antibodies. Some do, but the infection load overwhelms the body’s defenses anyway. All kinds of things can go wrong, just as they do in pregnancy. Is RFK a moron? Pretty much. |
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Shiva |
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Anti-science, anti-expert The MAGA Science Agenda Reveals America’s Future Nov. 27, 2024 By M. Anthony Mills Mr. Mills is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the director of its Center for Technology, Science and Energy. The leader of the Republican Party and our country’s next president has tapped a pro-choice scion of the country’s most famous Democratic dynasty to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. In keeping with the bewildering dynamics of today’s negative partisanship, conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation have cheered the selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while liberals have near categorically denounced him. Mr. Kennedy’s transformation from left-wing vaccine skeptic to potential Republican cabinet member overseeing America’s vast health apparatus represents a profound shift not only in the character of the American right but also in the politics of science more generally. The emergent MAGA science policy agenda, driven by skepticism and anti-elitism, blends familiar conservative and libertarian ideas with a suspicion of expert power once more associated with the left. The result is a uniquely American brand of populism that has the potential to fundamentally reshape national politics. In retrospect, the science policy of Donald Trump’s first administration was remarkably conventional, at least until Covid struck. He filled many science policy posts with figures highly regarded in the scientific community, even retaining Francis Collins as director of the National Institutes of Health. There were controversies surrounding environmental policy, including the administration’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. But those were familiar Republican fare, reminiscent of disputes during the Reagan and Bush eras. When it came to health agencies, many of Mr. Trump’s picks — Scott Gottlieb for commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and Alex Azar for secretary of health and human services — had impeccable reputations in the Republican establishment. The criticism from the left was mostly the tired refrain that they were too cozy with the pharmaceutical industry. Yet Mr. Trump left office amid a virulent backlash against scientific and medical expertise, marked by sharp declines in public trust, especially among Republicans. The administration that began Operation Warp Speed to develop vaccines to defeat the worst pandemic in a century ended in an epidemic of vaccine skepticism. While most Americans still support the benefits of vaccination, Republicans today tend to be more vaccine hesitant than Democrats and more distrustful of the pharmaceutical industry generally. Compared with Democrats, Republicans are more likely to believe that the Food and Drug Administration is preventing natural cures from reaching the public because of corporate influence and that genetically modified organisms threaten public health. In short, Republican attitudes toward the scientific and medical establishment increasingly resemble the worldview embodied by Mr. Kennedy. Far from being an eccentric one-off cabinet pick, then, the choice of Mr. Kennedy for a role in the new administration reflects the discontents, distrust and even paranoia of many within the current G.O.P. Mr. Trump’s first administration now looks like a hinge moment, a point of transition between two political paradigms. The last time the politics of science underwent a similarly striking shift was in the second half of the 20th century. The federal scientific establishment in its modern form dates to the decades after World War II. Inspired by the mobilization of science during the war (exemplified by the Manhattan Project) and further catalyzed by geopolitical competition (including the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957), Congress created or expanded a range of science agencies, from the N.I.H. to the National Science Foundation to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. But by the late 1960s, the techno-optimism of the postwar years was losing steam. The Vietnam War, the politics of nuclear technology and the nascent environmental movement fueled a backlash against the alliance of science and the state. Student activists protested the co-optation of science by the so-called military-industrial complex. After the economic crisis of the 1970s, the wider public began to lose confidence that lavishly funded scientific institutions could deliver on their promises. By the end of the decade, the private sector overtook the public sector as the nation’s principal source of research funding. Yet the state remained pivotal in shaping America’s scientific enterprise, sparking new tensions. Republicans decried the innovation-stifling effects of federal regulations, and Democrats worried about the societal and environmental impacts of unchecked technological development. Amid this push and pull, federal funding of basic science — especially biomedical research — came to occupy the uncontroversial political center. And after briefly stalling in the early 1980s, this funding grew continually, culminating in the doubling of the N.I.H.’s budget over five years around the turn of the millennium. Some historians have identified the Great Recession as marking the end of a neoliberal political order that had predominated since the late 1970s. Historians may come to view the Covid-19 pandemic as marking a similar turning point in the politics of science. And Mr. Trump’s nomination of Mr. Kennedy may signal what comes next. Mr. Kennedy has migrated across the political spectrum, but he represents a stance that diverges sharply from that of the old G.O.P. If the center-right view of health policy used to be that the F.D.A. was too cautious, stifling private-sector innovation, his “Make America Healthy Again” plan aims “to dismantle the corporate stranglehold on our government agencies that has led to widespread chronic disease, environmental degradation and rampant public distrust.” This language is closer to the leftism of Ralph Nader than to the market-friendly posture of the Chamber of Commerce. Meanwhile, the onetime bipartisan consensus on biomedical research can no longer be taken for granted, with Republicans on Capitol Hill now poised to tighten the reins on the N.I.H. If Mr. Kennedy succeeds Xavier Becerra as health and human services secretary, N.I.H. overhaul will probably be a major focus of the new administration. The naming of Covid lockdown critic Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as a potential N.I.H. director suggests as much. One might be tempted to interpret Republicans’ shifting stance on the N.I.H. as an expression of conventional small-government conservatism. But it is better understood as an expression of the right’s push for greater oversight of health agencies since the Covid-19 pandemic. Tellingly, the former House speaker Newt Gingrich — who spearheaded the G.O.P.’s rise to power in the 1990s and oversaw the doubling of the N.I.H. budget — has come out in favor of congressional Republicans’ proposed cuts to the agency, citing the pandemic as the reason for his volte-face. To be sure, the MAGA approach to science echoes some traditional Republican concerns. Right-wing disdain for intellectual elites is hardly new. Social conservatives have long expressed unease about appeals to scientific authority that ignore moral and religious values. And fiscal conservatives and libertarians have always resisted the unchecked growth of federal bureaucracies. But the MAGA science policy agenda represents something novel in our national politics, blending discontents from the right and the left. It remains, at this stage, more a bundle of instincts than a coherent agenda, reflecting a coalition of forces marked by internal tensions and even contradictions. If there’s a thread tying this coalition together, it’s a suspicion that expert authority hides elite power. This points to a future of science shaped by clashes between the establishment and its challengers. The distrust driving this new politics of science is a response to the technocratic hubris and at times gross incompetence that have too often characterized America’s institutions in recent years. Were this animus channeled into constructive policies and reforms, it could offer a needed corrective. In its unvarnished form, however, it is more radical than conservative, more destructive than constructive and more corrosive than restorative. If this is what winds up driving the science policy agenda of the second Trump administration then the prescriptions that follow will almost surely be worse than the diseases they are meant to cure. Yet any alternative that dismisses rather than speaks to the concerns that have driven so many Americans away from the expert establishment and toward a figure such as Mr. Kennedy will surely fail. M. Anthony Mills is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the director of its Center for Technology, Science and Energy. |
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Kennedy echos Michelle Mr. Kennedy, who recently criticized Mr. Trump’s penchant for fast food, has been clear about his plans to go after ultra-processed foods that contribute to the growing rates of diabetes and obesity in the United States. Those goals sound familiar to anyone who lived through the Obama administration, when Michelle Obama started the Let’s Move! campaign as first lady to encourage healthier diets and lifestyles among children. |
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Mr. Bloomberg, speaking at the two-day Bloomberg American Health Summit in Washington, called on Senate Republicans to persuade President-elect Donald J. Trump to “rethink” his choice of Mr. Kennedy for health secretary. If Mr. Trump cannot be persuaded, he said, the Senate has “a duty to our whole country, but especially to our children,” to vote against confirming him. Mr. Bloomberg also assailed Mr. Kennedy for discouraging measles vaccination during an outbreak in the island nation of Samoa, where 83 people died. “Parents who have been swayed by vaccine skepticism love their children and want to protect them, and we need leaders who will help them do that,” he said, “not conspiracy theorists who will scare them into decisions that will put their children at risk of disease.” |
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Unnecessary Regulation On the other hand, denying federal funding to schools with vaccine mandates only makes sense. America needs more measles and rubella, to weed out the less fit. Survival of the strongest. No wonder podunk nations like Afghanistan can kick our ass. Our soldiers are raised on fruit loops, protected from nasty diseases that take out all inferior Afghani children, leaving only the hardy, muscular lads for laying roadside bombs and IEDs. |
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Kennedy on Groper Kennedy went on: “And only one person has the genius and the capacity to solve these things. And I’m not gonna tell you how I’m gonna do it. Just trust in me, vote for me and everything will be great again. And of course, that whole thing is like a carnival barker.” He also called Trump racist and compared him with former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, an infamous segregationist. “Wallace’s appeal … was to White middle-class men who had experienced the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s as a social demotion, and who found their lives in turmoil,” Kennedy said, according to CNN. “And that kind of insecurity, I think, is the target of the summons that Donald Trump has sent out to the American public.” |
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Shiva 06:09 Yep. Create turmoil. Create doubt. Make everyone wonder what next week is going to bring. CREATE CHAOS!! Then promise to be the only person who can provide security against that chaos. So bloody transparent that a ten-year-old can see through it; but tribalism is the greatest blindfold on the planet. |
