The Truth about RFK Jr

Fortune Well wrote, "Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. doubled down on his support for non-pharmaceutical health treatments during a recent podcast appearance, saying, “We’re going to end the war at the FDA against alternative medicine.” Speaking on the Ultimate Human podcast with host Gary Brecka, a “renowned Human Biologist, biohacker, and longevity expert,” according to the website, Kennedy said he would fix the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s bias against the following: stem cell treatments, chelating drugs, vitamins and minerals, amino acids, peptides, and hyperbaric chambers."
 
arthwollipot said:
I have to say, that's a pretty stigmatising way to refer to involuntary confinement for mental health treatment.
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True, and I apologise to anyone for whom mental health issues are an ongoing problem. Zeus knows, I probably have enough of my own. But in the case of RFK Jr., his own demonstrated mental inadequacies, peculiarities, obsessions and completely kooky weirdness clearly disqualify him from any position whatsoever to do with good management of a major nation's health. He is not qualified for it, and obviously not up to the task.
 
Chris_Halkides said:
The New Republic wrote, "During the confirmation process [Senator] Cassidy explicitly guaranteed that “if confirmed, [RFK Jr.] will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes.” Either Cassidy was lying, or RFK Jr. was lying to Cassidy."
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They were both lying.
 
Chris_Halkides said:
Fortune Well wrote, "Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. doubled down on his support for non-pharmaceutical health treatments during a recent podcast appearance, saying, “We’re going to end the war at the FDA against alternative medicine.” Speaking on the Ultimate Human podcast with host Gary Brecka, a “renowned Human Biologist, biohacker, and longevity expert,” according to the website, Kennedy said he would fix the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s bias against the following: stem cell treatments, chelating drugs, vitamins and minerals, amino acids, peptides, and hyperbaric chambers."
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So the new "gold standard" of science is speaking to and promoting idiot scammer influencers? America's ◊◊◊◊◊◊.
 
At SBM Dr. David Gorski wrote about dubious stem-cell therapies and other issues. He concluded, "That’s because none of this is about “making America healthy again,” other than perhaps in the deluded minds of some MAHA true believers. Rather, it’s about making America safe for wellness influencers, health grifters, antivaxxers, and quacks. In this context, “health freedom” means freedom for quacks and charlatans to sell their wares unbothered by standards or law enforcement."
 
Chris_Halkides said:
At SBM Dr. David Gorski wrote about dubious stem-cell therapies and other issues. He concluded, "That’s because none of this is about “making America healthy again,” other than perhaps in the deluded minds of some MAHA true believers. Rather, it’s about making America safe for wellness influencers, health grifters, antivaxxers, and quacks. In this context, “health freedom” means freedom for quacks and charlatans to sell their wares unbothered by standards or law enforcement."
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Nor being bothered, apparently, about killing people unnecessarily. Health = death??
 
At Substack, Unbiased Science (Jess Steier and colleagues) wrote, "In RFK Jr.’s op-ed, he stated that the ACIP committee members all have serious conflicts of interest that impact their vaccine decision-making. However, the data he cites is 15-25 years old and is missing critical context. For example, he specifically cites a 2009 report. However, he failed to give the true context of this report. The report focused on all 17 CDC advisory committees, not just ACIP. The report did NOT find serious conflicts of interest. Instead, it showed that many forms (97%) had errors and omissions due to form errors, such as putting information in the wrong sections, or failing to initial and date in the correct places. A further dive into the data suggested that only 3% of the votes included some form of COI, and a member who should have recused themselves did not. But we don’t know how many votes within the ACIP were among those impacted. This is an important piece of context RFK Jr. failed to include in his statement."
 
The problem with RFK is some of what he says is sensible. The US has a huge health budget with really poor returns, this needs addressing. Chronic health issues are important and need addressing. The solutions are known, address poverty and move to some form of universal health care. Regulatory capture is a real issue, but I suspect not to the extent RFK thinks. His brand of libertarian health care, where people can promote vitamins or stem cell transplant or another whacko idea and it is caveat emptor favours the wealthy and educated, but is also an opportunity for scams. On the one hand he demands increased evidence from big pharmaceutical with independent placebo controlled replicated studies, then he says the health industry should be able to promote vitamins and chelating agents with minimal evidence.

The broad brush strokes are hard to argue with but once you look at the details there is no coherence or logic, but there is clearly a large self reinforcing clique that disbelieves in viruses, that think vaccines are harmful, that believe in activated crystals and mega vitamins etc. Who will cheer RFK on.
 
RFK Jr. will ultimately kill large swathes of Americans, whether through direct withholding of proven medical interventions or by promotion of outright quackery, and the majority of victims will be women and children. He is a menace to society. He is the USA's Lysenko. And like Lysenko, millions will die who do not need to.
 
Planigale said:
The problem with RFK is some of what he says is sensible.
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this is, i think, a big part of how republicans manage to win elections. they can identify problems. their solutions are insane and make the problem worse, and by the opposition pointing this out they become against fixing the problem. the republicans then have won the election, and made the problem worse. whereby they can identify the problem again.
 
dirtywick said:
this is, i think, a big part of how republicans manage to win elections. they can identify problems. their solutions are insane and make the problem worse, and by the opposition pointing this out they become against fixing the problem. the republicans then have won the election, and made the problem worse. whereby they can identify the problem again.
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Sounds about right.

Here in the UK, the Conservatives won a series of elections promising to fix problems created by their own austerity policies. Of course they blamed immigrants and the EU for the problems. Heck, each new Tory leader has promised to fix the omnishambles created by their predecessor - in whose cabinet they were a prominent member.
 
  • Joseph R. Hibbeln, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who worked on nutritional neurosciences at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
  • Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist formerly at Harvard Medical School.
  • Retsef Levi, a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.
  • Robert W. Malone, a biochemist who took part in early research of mRNA vaccine technology.
  • Cody Meissner, a professor of pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College who previously served on ACIP.
  • James Pagano, an emergency medicine physician.
  • Vicky Pebsworth, the Pacific region director of the National Association of Catholic Nurses. She formerly sat on the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.
  • Michael A. Ross, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University.
The above are the eight new members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), and they will meet on 25 June. Dr. Kulldorff was a co-signer of the Great Barrington Declaration. According to TheHill, Dr. Robert Malone "promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for treating the coronavirus and repeatedly claimed the COVID shots did not work." PBS wrote, "The new appointees include Vicky Pebsworth, a regional director for the National Association of Catholic Nurses, who has been listed as a board member and volunteer director for the National Vaccine Information Center, a group that is widely considered to be a leading source of vaccine misinformation."

NPR wrote, "Public health advocates are wary. "Kennedy did not pick people with strong, current expertise in vaccines," says Dorit Reiss, a professor at UC Law, San Francisco, who studies vaccine policy. "It tells me that Kennedy is setting up a committee that would be skeptical of vaccines, and possibly willing to implement an anti-vaccine agenda."...Dr. Retsef Levi, who's at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has stoked concerns about the shots. In a social media post in early 2023, Levi said that all "COVID mRNA vaccination program should stop immediately…because they completely fail to fulfill any of their advertised promises regarding efficacy" and there was "mounting and indisputable evidence that they cause unprecedented levels of harm, including the death of young people and children.""
 
MedPageToday reported, "HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. distributed the document to lawmakers on Capitol Hill in recent days, Politico reported. The document says that studies have shown women who received the COVID vaccine during pregnancy had higher rates of complications. It also stated that "a number of studies in pregnant women showed higher rates of fetal loss if vaccination was received before 20 weeks of pregnancy," citing a population-based cohort study from Ontario, Canada. However, the lead author of the study, Maria Velez, MD, PhD, of McGill University in Montreal, told Politico in an email that "the results of our manuscript were misinterpreted," as there were adjustments made for "variables that can confound a crude association," such as age, rurality, neighborhood income quintile, immigration status, comorbidities, and other factors. "Our large population-based cohort study in Ontario, Canada, found no association between SARS-CoV-2 vaccination and risk of miscarriage," Velez confirmed in an email to MedPage Today."
 
SBM's founder Steven Novella wrote about RFK's "retiring" seventeen members of the ACIP, "This is part of his justification – he needed to take this unprecedented action because of waning public trust in the CDC and vaccines. This is an old-school strategy often used by anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, and pseudoscientists – do everything you can to undermine public trust or to create questions, then use waning public trust as justification for taking action. Perhaps no individual has done more to undermine public trust in vaccines, so it’s rich that he is using that to justify attacking the vaccine infrastructure. Of course, this is all by design."
 
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Chris_Halkides said:
SBM's founder Steven Novella wrote about RFK's "retiring" seventeen members of the ACIP, "This is part of his justification – he needed to take this unprecedented action because of waning public trust in the CDC and vaccines. This is an old-school strategy often used by anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, and pseudoscientists – do everything you can to undermine public trust or to create questions, then use waning public trust as justification for taking action. Perhaps no individual has done more to undermine public trust in vaccines, so it’s rich that he is using that to justify attacking the vaccine infrastructure. Of course, this is all by design."
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I find myself skipping over your posts at times, not because there'sany misinformation in them, but because reading the truth of what RFK is doing is so depressing.
 
The AP reported, "Abram Wagner of the University of Michigan’s school of public health, who investigates vaccination programs, said he’s not satisfied with the composition of the committee. “The previous ACIP was made up of technical experts who have spent their lives studying vaccines,” he said. Most people on the current list “don’t have the technical capacity that we would expect out of people who would have to make really complicated decisions involving interpreting complicated scientific data.” He said having Pebsworth on the board is “incredibly problematic” since she is involved in an organization that “distributes a lot of misinformation.”"

The AP continued, "Kennedy has ignored some of the recommendations ACIP voted for in April, including the endorsement of a new combination shot that protects against five strains of meningococcal bacteria and the expansion of vaccinations against RSV. In late May, Kennedy disregarded the committee and announced the government would change the recommendation for children and pregnant women to get COVID-19 shots."
 
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