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The Truth about RFK Jr

Dr. Jessica Knurick looked back upon public nutrition/food policy over the last seventeen years as it relates to MAHA and the midterm elections. She wrote, "In the days following that meeting, many of those same influencers began posting content that closely echoed administration messaging, clearly aimed at re-engaging their audiences and reinforcing support. One influencer, in particular, claimed she had watched every administration over the last 15 years ignore America’s health crisis, and that this administration is finally the one doing something about it. It was a remarkable example of revisionist history that requires either abandoning reality entirely or simply not paying attention to health policy over the last 15 years, which makes it worth taking an honest look at what’s actually happened over that time period."
 
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Aaron Rupar on bsky, May 10, 2026
NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya is stammering his way through a CNN hit about the hantavirus
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With a three-minute clip from CNN.

Jonathan Howard on bsky, May 10, 2026
Pretty wild to hear Podcast Jay reassure people about hantavirus by saying "this is not COVID."
So COVID turned out to be a big deal after all? Is that what you are saying, Podcast Jay?
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Bohdan A Oryshkevich on bsky, May 10, 2026
He was visibly nervous and sweaty. He mumbled and stuttered a lot.
For the first time, he understood that the expertise lay with the CDC and not with him.
He is not on the Stanford campus but in the real world facing a real virus he knows nothing about.
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American passengers from hantavirus-hit cruise ship to stop at Nebraska facility before heading home. Here is what we know (CNN, May 10, 2026)

BREAKING: Acting CDC Director Bhattacharya Speaks With CNN After Hantavirus Outbreak On Cruise Ship (Forbes Breaking News on YouTube, May 10, 2026 – 10:50 min.)
Acting CDC Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya spoke with CNN's Jake Tapper on Sunday about the outbreak of hantavirus on a cruise ship.
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I was quite impressed by the UK response for the patient on Tristan da Cunha, the most isolated island in the world, and one with no air strip. A parachute medical team were dropped in, including an ICU doctor and nurse who tandem parachuted in. Along with medical supplies.
www.bbc.co.uk

Army parachutes onto Tristan da Cunha to help Briton with suspected hantavirus

The specialist team parachuted onto Tristan da Cunha, a remote British overseas territory, to treat them.
www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk
 
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Planigale said:
I was quite impressed by the UK response for the patient on Tristan da Cunha, the most isolated island in the world, and one with no air strip. A parachute medical team were dropped in, including an ICU doctor and nurse who tandem parachuted in. Along with medical supplies.
www.bbc.co.uk

Army parachutes onto Tristan da Cunha to help Briton with suspected hantavirus

The specialist team parachuted onto Tristan da Cunha, a remote British overseas territory, to treat them.
www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk
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ICU doctor? From what I read the jump was high risk even for the military.
 
dann said:
With a three-minute clip from CNN.
American passengers from hantavirus-hit cruise ship to stop at Nebraska facility before heading home. Here is what we know (CNN, May 10, 2026)
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2 passengers test positive for hantavirus as a third shows symptoms after cruise ship evacuation (AP News, May 11, 2026)
A French woman and an American tested positive for the hantavirus, as nations around the world scrambled Monday to repatriate passengers from a cruise ship hit by a deadly outbreak and quarantine or isolate them.
Passengers from the ship began flying home aboard military and government planes Sunday after the MV Hondius anchored in the Canary Islands. Personnel in full-body protective gear and breathing masks escorted the travelers from ship to shore in Tenerife, an effort that continued Monday.
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T. Ryan Gregory on bsky, May 11. 2026
Precautionary principle. Please.
"Eight people no longer on the ship have fallen ill, according to a World Health Organization tally from Friday, of whom six are confirmed to have contracted the virus."


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About the CNN clip with Jay Bhattacharya posted by Aaron Rupar:
Prof Gavin Yamey on bsky, May 11, 2026
The one other thing I would say:
I’ve never seen a better example of how NOT to do public health & infectious disease communications
Bhattacharya broke literally every single rule of Comms 101 & we’re going to be using this interview for teaching purposes for generations
Utter train wreck🤦‍♂️
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"Public deserves to know”: Harvard Professor says official messaging contradicts hantavirus science (MS NOW on YouTube, May 11, 2026 – 9:15 min,)
Today, for the first time, passengers started evacuating the cruise ship at the center of the deadly hantavirus outbreak, which has killed at least three people onboard. Joseph Allen, Professor of Exposure Assessment Science at Harvard University, joins “The Weekend: Primetime” to discuss what he sees as contradictory messaging over how people contract hantavirus, and shares what he learned after speaking with a doctor on board the ship.
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1:30--> Some of the messaging I just heard there is incorrect – and I can tell you about this in a minute – but the messaging I've heard from the CDC and others is that this requires prolonged close contact. Now, when I go read the literature about prior outbreaks of this virus, not on a ship, it is very clear we've had transmissions that happened very rapidly and did not require close contact, so I wanted to kind of double check myself, so I reached out to this doctor – we were on a tv program earlier in the week together – and I asked him what is actually happening on the ship, and where am I off and where are other people off in this messaging, and he confirmed to me something really important, and that messaging has not broken through.
This is what he experienced as he related it to me:
Yes, as the first patients were sick and being treated, there was close contact with the treating physician on board and several other staff were helping that person. Those people got sick. In fact, the ship's doctor got removed from the ship. This other passenger, who happened to be a doctor, then stepped in to start to treat patients. As he relayed to me, the other people who got sick after that – many of whom have been removed from the hospital – did not have what he called close contact. They shared time in the dining room or in the lecture room on this ship, but they were not in physical close contact. So I find the official messaging contradicted by what we know from previous outbreaks and published in the literature and what I was told about the experience on the ship.
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So it seems that what the health authorities – or at the least the current U.S. health authorities – have learned from the most recent pandemic is that their message should always be:
There is nothing to see here! There is no real danger! Nobody but the ones who are already sick will get infected because it's not as infectious as you fear. So the most important thing of all is to stay calm and not panic. The cautionary principle is for pussies and scaredy-cats.

A major problem during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been the claim that the virus isn't airborne. The same claims is now being told about the much more virulent hantavirus, but the literature makes it clear that it doesn't require prolonged closed contact to spread.
The first set of human-to-human transmission with this exact virus happened at a birthday party. And at that birthday party, which was only 90 minutes, there are reports where one person transmitted it to another, where they did not have any physical contact and, in fact, simply said hello to each other in passing. Now, that doesn't sound like prolonged close contact to me. It fact, it's not. There were also people who sat at different tables at the birthday party and got sick.
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The New York Times reported, "Working behind the scenes, Mr. Kennedy is spearheading an intense push, across health agencies under his purview, for government scientists and federal data contractors to examine his long-held theory that vaccines are helping to fuel an epidemic of chronic disease, according to multiple people familiar with the effort...The effort is being led by Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician and vaccine safety expert who rose in prominence during the pandemic as a critic of Covid restrictions and vaccine mandates, and is now the health department’s chief science and data officer..."

The NYT continued, "As part of the new effort, Mr. Kennedy has tasked some government scientists with studying the health status of vaccinated children compared with those who were not vaccinated. Mr. Kennedy coauthored a book, “Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak,” calling for such studies, which he believes will prove harm from vaccines. Researchers say that such comparison studies would be riddled with pitfalls. Vaccinated children are more likely to receive medical care than those who are unvaccinated, and are thus more likely to receive additional medical diagnoses that could be wrongly attributed to vaccines."
 
Jon Stewart yesterday was a disappointment. He is usually very good at presenting the idiocy of the U.S. news media, but this time he fails.
Hantavirus Is Not the Next Covid, But Try Telling That to the News Media (The Daily Show on YouTube, May 12, 2026 – 18:56 min.)
Jon Stewart dives into the hantavirus cruise ship panic sweeping the news cycle, the landfill visit that appears to have sparked the spread, whether we’re getting a pandemic sequel, and the media’s eagerness to sensationalize the virus while health experts urge calm. Plus, Trump gets his own version of the golden calf, and cruise ships offer free norovirus.
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What he gets right is the alarmist headlines:
2:04--> REPORTER 1: Breaking tonight, the deadly outbreak of a rare rodent virus on board a cruise ship. The race to contain a deadly virus outbreak.
REPORTER 2: The public health threat so dangerous.
REPORTER 3: Nightmare at sea.
REPORTER 4: Cruise chaos.
REPORTER 5: A cruise from hell.
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But instead of simply pointing out that they are obviously hyperbolic – for instance, there doesn't appear to have been any "chaos" – he contrasts them with the calm-mongers, much like RFK Jr. and the Trump administration:
3:25--> – It's not like COVID. It's not like measles. It's not a very efficient transmission.
– The overall risk to the public is low.
– You don't need to be hysterical about it.
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When he gets to what should have been the point: What exactly is it? What characterizes this virus? Instead of: Should we be worried? He, unfortunately, gets it wrong:
3:52--> COVID was a respiratory virus, passes easily, often when the person isn't symptomatic.It was a brand new virus we had never seen before, and we weren't allowed to know where it came from. I mean, we didn't know.
(...)
While the hantavirus is a known virus, it's difficult to transmit. It's mostly spread by rat infestation, which does raise the question: How did a cruise ship end up with hantavirus on it?
(...)
The point is, some people may get pretty sick, but forget COVID. This ain't no pandemic. Hell, this hantavirus-- and not even in monkeypox territory.
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No, of course it's no pandemic, but the same thing could be (and was) said about the brand-new coronavirus in 2019. The question is if it could become a pandemic if not handled correctly, and that seems to be the case. Jon Stewart doesn't think so, but instead of looking into it, e.g. by having somebody who actually knows more about the virus than somebody, even a medical doctor, who doesn't know much about this particular variant of the hantavirus and thinks that transmission to humans only occurs in prolonged and close proximity to infected rodents, he doesn't think of doing so, apparently, and relies on his clips of the calm-mongers, who may or may not know that the Argentine variant is something other than the hantavirus found in the rest of the world – and apparently, much like Covid, spreads from infected pre-symptomatic individuals.
6:50--> Yes, we might have a right to be nervous, but I guess the question the news might want to ask is, do we have a reason?
And your assignment, news, should you choose to accept it, is to help the public discern the difference.
So may we hear from the experts again?
– The potential to spread beyond an outbreak is very small.
– Should be pretty limited.
– Should keep it contained.
– Shouldn't really have any concern at all.
– I have no concern about that.
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More calm mongering follows, e.g. at 16:40:
– What is your message to Americans who are still scared?
– We have been repeating the same answer many times. This is not another COVID, and the risk to the public is low. So they shouldn't be scared, and they shouldn't panic.
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Where Stewart should have let his crew do a little investigative journalism – they are usually very good at it even though they are mostly comedy writers – instead he had them find alarmist vs. 'calmist' news clips – and without further ado he decided to side with the calm mongers, unfortunately without a clip from the calm mongering administration and without looking properly into what this particular virus (or variant of the virus!) is: see post 3,706.
 
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Robert B. Shpiner discussed two recent studies regarding the Hepatitis B vaccine at The Hill: "The first modeled a single U.S. birth cohort, made up of 3.6 million infants. Even under perfect adherence, a two-month delay of this vaccine projects 90 additional acute hepatitis B infections, 76 chronic infections, 29 hepatitis B-related deaths, and $16.4 million in lifetime healthcare costs from a single year’s births. And these are best-case numbers. Adherence is never perfect, and the same delay reaches infants whose mothers’ hepatitis B status is unknown. Both gaps drive the toll up."

He then made the following point: "Every American newborn nursery delivers three universal interventions in the first hours of life: the hepatitis B vaccine, intramuscular vitamin K, and erythromycin ophthalmic ointment. They are administered together, consented for together, and refused together. When the federal government says one is now optional, the other two come under suspicion by association. The pediatric literature is consistent on this: refuse one, refuse all. Vitamin K deficiency bleeding late form presents at four to eight weeks of life as catastrophic intracranial hemorrhage in a previously well infant. Mortality runs near 20 percent. Survivors are often neurologically devastated. Clusters of this malady have already been reported in the U.S. and Australia in regions with active vaccine skepticism. Ophthalmia neonatorum, untreated, blinds a newborn within days. Erythromycin costs mere pennies, yet refusals are climbing alongside vaccine refusals."

Dr. Shpiner concluded, "The Senate HELP Committee and House Energy and Commerce Committee both have oversight authority here, and both have used it sparingly...I watched science survive bad presidents and bad administrators. But it will not survive a captured advisory committee without a fight from the branch that built it."
 
At Science-based Medicine Henry Miller covered a Kennedy-backed proposal to include more nutrition/diet information in the medical school curriculum. He wrote, "Every new innovation and requirement competes with existing content. Medical educators often describe the curriculum as “a suitcase that is already overpacked.” Adding something new almost always requires removing or truncating something else. But the biggest flaw in the HHS prescription is the focus on “functional medicine” competencies for physicians under the guise of nutrition, which, as Kevin Klatt, PhD, RD, has observed, not only risks integrating pseudoscience into medicine but also distracts from realnutrition competencies. It has the distinctive stench of the influence of HHS Secretary RFK, Jr. and the Means grifter twins..."

He continued, "Another problem with the framework is the implicit assumption that nutrition education is inadequate in current medical training. In reality, nutrition already permeates many aspects of medical education, although it may not appear as a separate course labeled “nutrition.”"
 
Makary out.

Washington — Marty Makary resigned as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday, according to two sources familiar with the matter, stepping aside amid a swirl of reports that his tenure was coming to an end over internal policy disagreements.

His departure follows reports of conflict and tension over the FDA's agenda. On May 6, the FDA approved some flavored e-cigarettes from the vaping company Glas Inc., and touted its safety restrictions to limit use by young people. According to The Wall Street Journal, the move came only after Mr. Trump pressured Makary to approve the fruit-flavored vapes, which he had been refusing to do.

One of the sources said Makary is leaving over the e-cigarette dispute, adding that Makary didn't want to approve the flavored varieties but had been forced to by other members of the administration.

CBS News and other outlets had reported in recent days that President Trump had signed off on a plan to fire him. Makary didn't appear Monday in the Oval Office alongside the president and other top public health officials for an event on maternal health.
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For stupid reasons.
 
CIDRAP at University of Minnesota reported on a study published in the journal PLOS One. CIDRAP wrote, "About 28% of older people in England who died of COVID-19 in the first 2.5 years of the pandemic would likely, if uninfected, have lived at least another five years, a new model-based analysis estimates...This study, they said, differed from previous research on COVID-19 excess mortality in that it considered factors such as underlying illnesses, vaccination status, and pandemic wave."
 
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