RFK Jr's gold-standard propaganda
The cruel obsession of anti-vaxxers
Upon assuming the role of Secretary of HHS, RFK Jr promised to elevate America’s public health agencies by conducting “gold-standard science.”
The illusion was quickly dispelled, when his “monumental” commission report was riddled with AI-generated fake studies. His agency “corrected” the report only to make more errors. When confronted in front of Congress, Kennedy admitted he never factchecked the report. A day later, a CDC presentation included a nonexistent study.
Then there’s a SCOTUS ruling from last week that gives Kennedy extraordinary power. On its face, Kennedy v Braidwood Management protected an aspect of Obamacare. Brought by a group of Christian-owned businesses to challenge the constitutionality of insurers providing no-cost preventive care, a controversial point about the Preventive Services Task Force came up. This (now formerly) independent body mandates insurance coverage for preventive treatments.
In the decision, the court handed all power to the HHS Secretary—in this case, Kennedy. That means he’ll have sole discretion over what can and cannot be covered under the preventive screenings clause.
An example: the conservative Braidwood team loathes PrEP, which prevents HIV infection. Kennedy, a longtime AIDS denialist, can now simply remove it from coverage. He could also add ivermectin to the list, if he so chooses.
This amount of power should never be given to one person. It’s especially daunting that Kennedy has that power.
Back to gold-standard science. Kennedy’s promise to Americans: randomized controlled trials will be conducted (as if they haven’t been, for generations).
Only when it suits him, apparently.
Last Wednesday, Kennedy announced the withdrawal of America’s $1.6B financial support to GAVI, a global public-private health alliance that increases vaccine access in low- and middle-income countries. Since 2000, the organization has immunized over over a billion children. Their work has saved millions of lives.
The New Yorker puts the importance of such vaccination efforts into perspective:
Global vaccination work has nearly halved the global infant-mortality rate, saved more than a hundred and fifty million lives, prevented innumerable costly hospitalizations and long-term disabilities, and strengthened local health services in many remote places.
Kennedy’s reasoning for the withdrawal? A 2017 observational study of Guinea-Bissau, which used data on children receiving the DTP vaccine during the early 1980s, and whose own authors said that randomized controlled trials should be conducted to prove causality—which their study does not do.
The WHO has given the same advice, especially considering confounding factors, such as the fact that the children were likely malnourished. All the study found was that children who received the DTP vaccine were more likely to die than unvaccinated children due to all-cause mortality, not from the vaccine. Correlative, at best.
Here’s how Kennedy spins it.
Kennedy repeats that this study was conducted by “vaccine gurus,” even saying that the DTap vaccine is far superior. He blames Gavi for not updating this vaccine, and is therefore withholding US funding. Hundreds of thousands of lives are now at risk in countries with high mortality rates. Kennedy keeps referring to the researchers’ supposed stature in the vaccine world to deflect from the caveats of the research.
If weaponizing a study on malnourished children in Africa sounds familiar, that’s because Kennedy’s response to the measles outbreak in Texas, in which he recommended using vitamin A, is also based on one 1991 study on 60 poor, malnourished children in South Africa.
That recommendation ended up sending American children to the hospital with vitamin A toxicity. Because they’re not malnourished African children, macrodosing vitamin A might not be the right protocol. But there is a protocol that absolutely helps: the MMR vaccine.
While shocking that Kennedy is laying this out in public, it’s not surprising: he’s been doing it via his (former?) nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, for years. He was just never in charge of a nation’s public health apparatus. He could speak to the fringes while making millions in speaking fees, book deals, and lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers.
Kennedy’s promise of gold-standard science was always a joke, but now it’s putting the lives of millions of children across the planet in danger. The worst possible scenario is speeding at us, and all his stans can do is focus on food dyes and seed oils as the people they never cared about in the first place continue to suffer.
What is it about malnourished African children that Kennedy loves to exploit?
Or is this really not about vaccine safety after all?
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