As hard as it is to believe, it’s been close to three months since I last added a new post to my ongoing series about how Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines. You might think that that lapse might indicate that the longtime antivax activist appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services hasn’t been busy, at least not compared to March, when I added three new entries to the series. Unfortunately such has not been the case. What has been the case is that RFK Jr. appears to have learned from the negative publicity surrounding some of his more blatant attacks on public health and federal vaccine programs, which is why his new project, a “vaccine injury clinic” at the NIH, attracted relatively little press compared to, say, his mass firing of the members of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) last year. Then, last weekend, as I was perusing Reddit, I came across a post on the NIH subreddit mentioning that RFK Jr. would be visiting the campus of the National Institutes of Health October 8:
Why RFK Jr. was going to visit the NIH campus became the big question among . Interestingly, there was little in the press, and he seemed to be keeping his visit (mostly) on the down-low. His impending visit lacked the usual hype, at least as far as I could tell. And then I saw this:
I think I’m going to steal that meme.
In the days leading up to RFK Jr.’s visit, there was nothing on any of the usual official HHS-linked X accounts, such the main HHS account, RFK Jr.’s account, or HealthGov (the new official X account supposedly dedicated to HHS-related public health announcements). That’s not to say there was zero publicity, but for the announcement of a major initiative that RFK Jr. has clearly wanted for a long time, things were rather quiet. In fact, in a development quite atypical of RFK Jr.’s usual practice, the roundtable discussion briefly shown in the video (to be linked to below) was closed-door. Nor was video of the proceedings posted to YouTube, and the parents who spoke were not identified. Very unusual, and, unfortunately, I didn’t recognize the parents in this group photo, none of whom were identified. There was, however, a brief mention of the event at the website of React19, a group that I consider to be antivax. The post included this photo:
My first thought viewing the photo above was that I recognized the man in the upper right hand corner. He sure looked like Ernesto Ramirez, father of Ernesto Ramirez Jr., whose sudden and unexpected death was one of the two stories presented in the 2023 antivax propaganda pseudodocumentary Shot Dead as evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are causing people to “die suddenly.” I wrote about the movie when it was first released and concluded that it was highly unlikely that myocarditis caused by the COVID-19 vaccine had killed young Ernesto, mainly because the autopsy report reported inflammation in his heart, as well as a congenital anomalous coronary artery (ACA). This is a condition whose first symptom, sadly, is not too infrequently sudden cardiac death as a teenager.
Don’t get me wrong. The sudden death of a teenager is a horrible thing for any parent to experience, and, although I’m sure he probably won’t believe me if he reads this, I have nothing but sympathy for Mr. Ramirez. However, as far as I can tell from information that is publicly available, including the autopsy report, in this case the sudden death was almost certainly not due to the COVID-19 vaccine. Mr. Ramirez, however, continues to fervently believe that the vaccine killed his son, which is sad, but understandable. Unfortunately, his experience has led him to generalize his belief that the COVID-19 vaccine killed his son to the belief that the vaccine is unacceptably dangerous.
Seeing Mr. Ramirez there made start looking on Facebook for others affiliated with him. The search led me to a post on her Facebook page that, first, told me that I had correctly identified Mr. Ramirez and, second, provided me with the identities of a couple of more of the attendees:
I have mentioned Brianne Dressen before in the context of a post about Peter Götzsche. She believes that she had suffered harm from the then-experimental COVID vaccine being tested by AstraZeneca, who says she became disabled after the first dose and that her case was excluded from the published results of the clinical trials. Read my post for more details, but the brief version is that Ms. Dressen was reported to have been hospitalized, but in neither Demasi’s blog post nor an email exchange referenced could I find what her disabling serious adverse event (SAE) of special interested claimed to have been due to the AstraZeneca vaccine actually was, beyond a “cascade of neurological symptoms” only vaguely described in the videos referenced. It’s impossible for me to determine from what I’ve been able to find out from publicly available sources how credible her vaccine injury anecdote is. All I know is that she’s suing AstraZeneca and that she appears to show up in articles from antivaccine organizations; well, that and that there’s an article in Science from January 2022 about questions over whether COVID-19 vaccines might cause symptoms of long COVID that features her. I have no doubt that she is suffering, but, again, it is anything but clear whether the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine caused her condition.
Here, I must point out that one thing that is clear is that Dressen is most definitely on the board of directors for React19, an organization that I consider in my not-so-humble opinion to be antivax as hell. If you visit the React19 website, it becomes clear that this is an antivaccine advocacy group. It’s full of “testimonials” blaming vaccines for serious injury and a board with a notable paucity of actual scientists and practicing physicians, which makes me wonder who will peer review applications for their “research grants,” plus a “research database” that just lists URLs to every paper under the sun about COVID-19 adverse reactions, regardless of quality. Its website also features a lot of testimony from lawyers, patients, and people denying that they are antivax. React19 does, however, have its own physician provider network where it recruits doctors to treat “vaccine injury,” something that reminds me very much of the old Defeat Autism Now! (DAN!) antivax doctors back in the day, particularly given the number of acupuncturists, “integrative” and “functional” medicine” quacks included in the list.
Lastly, who is Dr. Suzanne Gazda? I had never heard of her before. Her website bills her as:
Dr. Suzanne Gazda is one of the few neurologists in the country drawing linkages between brain health and COVID infection or vaccination. Her tireless work to research the pathophysiology of COVID and help find effective treatments to destructive neurological impacts is what qualified her as FLCCC’s Outstanding Clinical Scientist of 2024.
Oh, dear. Getting an award from antivax cranks like those as the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC Alliance, now known as the Independent Medical Alliance, is most definitely not a good sign that what Dr. Gazda does is anything resembling good science. Neither is her being on the medical board of React19. It sure does appear that there’s a tight link between this new “vaccine injury clinic” and an antivax organization like React19. After all, as Dr. Vincent Iannelli has pointed out, the React19 website is chock full of articles written by antivax influencers like Retsef Levi, Kirk Milhoan, and the like. Again, React19 looks very much like an antivax organization, or at least an anti-COVID-19 vaccine organization if you want to give them maximal benefit of the doubt.
I then found an article on The Defender, the house organ of Children’s Health Defense, the antivax organization run by RFK Jr. before he stepped down to run for President in 2023. Written by Michael Nevradakis, it was entitled NIH Will Run Vaccine Injury Research and Treatment Center, Pay Doctors to Report Vaccine Injuries and identified two of the others:
Other parents who attended Monday’s events also expressed support for the new initiatives.
Krystle Cordingley, whose son Corbyn died after receiving the quadrivalent flu vaccine, also attended Monday’s event. She said she’s “hopeful” that the initiative “will allow a broader narrative to begin where people will feel comfortable talking about vaccine injury and realize that it is real, that it’s an actual thing that happens.”
Jordan Grim, whose son, Nash, contracted vaccine-induced polio and was paralyzed after getting the diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis (DTaP) vaccine, said she’s “excited” about the new initiative.
“It was nice to feel validated that they do see us, they do believe us, and they actually do want to help in any way that they can,” Grim said.
So let me get this straight. Nash Grim’s polio occurred after he was vaccinated with the DTaP vaccine? (Hint: DTaP does not include the polio vaccine.) I initially wondered if that was a typo, but then I remember that the US stopped using oral polio vaccine, the only form of polio vaccine that can on rare occasions cause polio through reversion of the attenuated polio virus to a virulent form, over 20 years before Nash’s birth. Moreover, as Dr. Iannelli also points out, the “family openly states that ‘The CDC has not officially confirmed’ if Transverse Myelitis or Acute Flaccid Myelitis’ is the cause of Nash’s condition.” Thus, it’s not even clear whether Nash even had polio.
As for Corbyn Cordingley, she came to my attention in 2025 due to her her testimony was at one of Sen. Ron Johnson’s Senate subcommittee hearing, Voices of the Vaccine Injured. I’ve written about this case in detail on my not-so-super-secret other blog. Two things stand out. First, Ms. Cordingley seems to assume that because her pediatrician reported the case to VAERS it must mean that the vaccine caused her son’s death. No, not necessarily. Her pediatrician did the right thing reporting the death, given its close temporal proximity to vaccination, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the vaccine caused the death. As I said at the time, any death that occurs so soon after vaccination (around 14 hours, if the timeline related is correct) needs to be reported and investigated, and, in this case, it was. No link to vaccination was found. Second, Ms. Cordingley claims that a neuropathologist had found that Corbyn’s brainstem was so “scarred over” that she couldn’t understand how Corbyn had been alive as long as he had. Cordingley further claims that the pathologist had described the brainstem as having been “eaten away.” My thought was: If that were true, then it sure sounds like a preexisting neurological condition unlikely to be related to vaccination. Whatever the truth is, I feel just as much empathy for Ms. Cordingley as I do for Mr. Ramirez. I believe their stories. It’s just that I don’t necessarily accept their interpretation of their story, which is that vaccines killed their children.
Given who was in attendance, I now don’t wonder why this event was kept as on the down-low as possible:
It is not clear why his visit to the N.I.H. was a secret. He was accompanied on Monday by Dr. Mehmet Oz, who runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; Dr. Erica Schwartz, the new head of the C.D.C., and Kyle Diamantas, the acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
The entire Bethesda campus was encouraged to work from home. An email warned of “increased traffic and security,” without saying why.
Given who took part, I’d want to slip this under the radar too, at least while it was going on. Why RFK Jr. waited three days to issue a press release and social media posts, I have no idea. Maybe it was the stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal two days afterward.
What do we know about the event?
But what about the event itself? We know that there were at least three people associated with React19, including two board members, in attendance. Let’s start by taking a look at the announcements on X after the ribbon-cutting ceremony:
And a video:
That video above made me curious. First, RFK Jr. calls vaccine injury an “invisible disease” because, of course, in his view the mothers, parents and people who have suffered adverse events from vaccines have been “marginalized, vilified, demonized, and gaslighted.” Returning to his greatest hits, RFK Jr. then claims that we have “not done the studies that need to be done to understand who’s vulnerable to those kinds of injuries.” It was also curious to me that they waited three days to post this stuff. The event was held on October 5, but the social media posts and press releases are all dated October 8, and the earliest news stories I could find about the event were two days later, on October 7, before the press release. Curiouser and curiouser.
One thing that also bothered me, aside from the closed-door proceedings and delay in public announcements by HHS, was how the new CDC Director, Dr. Erica Schwartz framed the what this clinic will do:
And at the CDC we recognize that the best way to protect Americans is to listen to them, and we’re doing exactly that. When they share their stories with the CDC, we listen, we investigate, we believe them, and we go where the evidence shows us. That is our commitment to the American people.
On the surface, her description sounds quite benign, but consider the part about how “we believe them.” Longtime readers who have paid attention to the antivax movement for a long time will know that when antivaxxers say “believe the parents,” they don’t just mean that we should believe their stories about their children’s health issues as being honest recounting of what happened and not deception or lies. The unspoken second part of that sentence is what they really mean, namely that we should also accept unquestioningly the parents’ belief that vaccines had caused their children’s health issues. This is a separate issue that this framing conflates with the question of the anecdotes themselves. Specifically, it is a call that we must accept the parents’ interpretation of their story, which is that vaccines were the cause of their child’s problems. Whether Dr. Schwartz realizes that or not, I don’t know. Whether she’s playing along hoping to mitigate the damage that this clinic will cause, I don’t know. What I do know is that this particular frame is very seductive and deceptive to people not familiar with the rhetoric of the antivax movement. Scientists actually do believe the parents’ stories, for the most part. What they don’t do is to accept unquestioningly the parents belief that their child’s autism, for instance, was caused by vaccines. This framing, however, is entirely consistent with the involvement of React19 in the proceedings.
And, of course, there was a press release, HHS Launches Agency-Wide Actions to Strengthen Vaccine Injury Research, Reporting, and Patient Care, which I’ll discuss now, the better to compare the contents of the press release with some of the antivax influencers who were invited to the event. Again, the press release sounds fairly benign, and, on the surface, it doesn’t even have all that much that I would strongly object to if this were a normal administration and HHS wasn’t being run by an antivax loon like RFK Jr. and the NIH by his willing useful idiot lackey Jay Bhattacharya. Unfortunately, this is not a normal administration, and HHS is being by an antivax loon like RFK Jr. and the NIH by his willing useful idiot lackey Jay Bhattacharya. That colors my interpretation, and it should color yours. In other words, be suspicious, my friend. Be skeptical. Read between the lines:
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) this week launched a series of actions to strengthen how the federal government identifies, documents, investigates, and responds to health problems reported following vaccination, with a focus on improving patient care and generating better evidence about potential vaccine-related injuries.
To address health problems Americans report after vaccinations, HHS:
- Opened a new National Institutes of Health (NIH) clinic dedicated to studying and caring for patients experiencing health problems following vaccination;
- Proposed reimbursing physicians for reporting suspected vaccine-related injuries to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) through a new Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) policy, bringing vaccine reporting in Medicare in line with typical Medicare reimbursement policies;
- Will require electronic health records to capture vaccine-related adverse events so that information can follow patients across the health care system; and
- Is modernizing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) VAERS to make reporting simpler and improve the tools available to researchers and medical professionals investigating potential safety signals.
“We must listen to patients and families who report vaccine injuries—not dismiss or gaslight them,” said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “President Trump and I are building a health system that takes them seriously, follows the evidence, and uses what we learn to make vaccines safer. This is how we earn back trust in our public health institutions.”
Remember, this is coming from an HHS Secretary who recently said:
During a recent keynote address at a Children’s Health Defense conference, the antivaccine group Kennedy previously chaired, he claimed vaccines were linked to the chronic disease epidemic. The secretary went on to link vaccines to a collection of adverse conditions, including “diabetes, death, sudden infant death syndrome, anorexia, allergic reactions, allergies, asthma [and] autoimmune diseases.”
And people wonder why, even though I don’t find the specific ideas of a vaccine injury program to be problematic, I do not trust RFK Jr. or any of his minions to set up such a program in a manner that is scientifically rigorous and not biased towards extreme antivax views! It’s only rational to wonder how much this program is intended as a fishing expedition to find any evidence RFK Jr. thinks he can twist into evidence that vaccines are dangerous.
Stepping back a bit, I do note that there was a story in Science about a month ago about how this effort was taking shape that cited some scientists who didn’t sound too concerned. On the one hand, they have a point. On the other hand, they are ignoring who is setting up this clinic. They also didn’t know what we know now, that stories such as those of the guests invited to the roundtable event associated with the ribbon cutting ceremony would be front and center. Still, from the Science article:
Still, some worry the program could become politicized by groups seeking to present vaccines as unsafe. NIH sits within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), whose secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a longtime critic of vaccines and has questioned the safety of the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines that were widely used during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s really laudable,” Kathryn Edwards, a pediatrician at Vanderbilt University, says of the effort. “But if it’s not done in a scientific way it will be more antivaccine propaganda.”
Trust me, Dr. Edwards, it won’t be done in a scientific way. I’m sure you probably know that. Anyone who has observed RFK Jr. over the years will recognize immediately that the very purpose of this new program is to create a “scientific” case that vaccines are dangerous. For example, let’s look at the second bullet point about reimbursing physicians and healthcare professionals for reporting suspected adverse reactions to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). Of. course, we at SBM, myself in particular, have long discussed how VAERS is a passive reporting system intended as an early warning system. Any safety signals identified from VAERS data must be confirmed with more rigorous investigation because anyone can report anything to VAERS. Need I even mention again the incident where someone reported that a flu vaccine had turned him into the Incredible Hulk? Moreover, VAERS can be—and has been—extensively gamed by antivaxxers. Indeed, as hard as it is for me to believe that it was that long ago, over twenty years ago I wrote about how antivax litigation against vaccine manufacturers for “vaccine-induced autism” had distorted VAERS. During the pandemic, antivaxxers did what antivaxxers love to do and weaponized the VAERS database against COVID-19 vaccines, just as they had long tried to weaponize it against established vaccines, such as the MMR, and more recent vaccines, such as HPV vaccines.
Basically, to antivaxxers, VAERS is the be-all and end-all of vaccine safety monitoring precisely because of its limitations and how easily it can be gamed. That’s why, likely, this proposal ignores the VSD and all the other vaccine safety monitoring systems, both here and in other countries, that you haven’t heard of. The antivax narrative is that vaccine safety is understudied and that we know practically nothing about it or adverse reactions. This narrative is false. That’s not to say that more research wouldn’t be desirable, particularly in the wake of the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. Unfortunately, this administration initiative does not sound like the sort of rigorous science that would be desirable. Moreover, existing evidence indicates that vaccine injury is extremely rare and dwarfed by the harm that vaccines prevent.
Getting back to reimbursement, as a physician I’m also somewhat torn by this proposal. We physicians do a lot of work for which we are not reimbursed. For example, whenever a lawyer takes a phone call, it’s more billable hours, baby. When we phone patients or spend hours on the phone trying to get a prior authorization for our patient we don’t get paid extra for it. So I get it. It would be nice to be reimbursed for doing extra work and submitting a report to VAERS, and the groundwork for this policy seems to have been laid early this year wth a CMS proposal for a new ICD10 code for vaccine injuries, even though there are a number of ICD10 codes for reactions to vaccines already in the system, an idea pushed by—you guessed it!—React19.
My concerns about physician reimbursement notwithstanding, I can’t agree with this proposal, for the simple reason that it’s difficult for me not to see this new proposed policy as a potential profit center for antivax quacks all over the country, incentivizing them to report as many “adverse events” due to vaccines as they possibly can. We already know that, for example, in California after the passage of SB 277, the law that eliminated nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates, a veritable cottage industry of quacks writing medical exemption letters was born. This policy seems custom-designed to produce the same result for quacks submitting dubious reports of “vaccine injury” to VAERS. As a result, I expect that reports to VAERS will increase, even though there will almost certainly not be an increase in true rates of vaccine adverse events. Basically, this proposal seems custom-designed to add more chaff to what little wheat can be found in the VAERS database when it comes to linking vaccines to specific adverse events.
Add to that the plan to “modernize” VAERS:
CDC is modernizing VAERS to make adverse-event reporting simpler, more accessible, and easier to use.
In August, CDC solicited bids for a new contract to overhaul the system. On September 28, CDC announced a new contract to make VAERS accessible on mobile devices and improve the tools available to researchers and medical professionals investigating potential safety signals. Earlier this year, CDC also added a VAERS QR code to Vaccine Information Statements provided to parents and patients for each vaccine administered.
In a recurring theme, I will say that actually modernizing VAERS would not be a bad thing; that is, it would not be a bad thing under almost any other administration. I very much want to see what company (companies) end(s) up being hired to “overhaul the system.” That will give me an indication of where this is going.
Another problem with this proposal is in the third bullet point. VAERS, as we’ve described before, is a passive reporting system. It does not automatically scan data for potential adverse events attributable to vaccines, which is why, ironically enough, it is subject to underreporting even as it can be gamed with overreporting by antivaxxers. While suspected adverse events that are severe, such as death, seizures, and the like, are not underreported because they are so dramatic and so serious, more suspected reactions that are less serious do tend to be very much underreported to VAERS. Indeed, the infamous “Harvard study” was cited during the proceedings, whose findings were represented as saying that only 1% of vaccine reactions are reported to VAERS. Let’s just say that that is a gross and deceptive exaggeration, as Dr. Vincent Iannelli has described.
That is why we have the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), which is a system that is maintained as a joint project with the CDC by several large healthcare systems, with the vast majority of the data coming from Kaiser Permanente. The VSD automatically scans the electronic health records of its patients for events that seem to happen more frequently soon after vaccination. Thus, the VSD is an active surveillance system that does not depend on potentially unreliable reporting from patients, parents, and healthcare workers.
RFK Jr. has long eyed VSD data ever since he became HHS Secretary. However, the data are not owned by the CDC, HHS, or the government. The patient records exist on servers owned by the healthcare systems providing their data to the VSD. Kaiser Permanente has long jealously guarded—and appropriately so!—the privacy of the patient records in the VSD, which contain patient-identifiable information. Last year, RFK Jr. hired David Geier, the son half of the old father-son duo of antivax “researchers” to look at VSD data, even though the Geiers had been slapped down when they had had access to VSD data in 2003 because they had done some hijinks that could have compromised patient privacy, as documented in the Kaiser Permanente letter revoking their access. Thus far, RFK Jr. appears to have been unable to gain access to any post-2001 data from the database.
Given that failure thus far and patient privacy guardrails holding (so far), what RFK Jr. appears to be doing is trying to reconstitute his own VSD by fiat covering every healthcare system in the country, as described in the press release:
Federal health information technology standards overseen by the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology will now require electronic health records to capture vaccine-related adverse events so that this information can follow patients across the health care system.
The requirement will give health care professionals a more complete picture of a patient’s medical history and reduce the need for patients to repeatedly recount the same information when receiving care from different providers.
Again, this is an idea that, in principle, I wouldn’t have opposed under a normal administration. It would be, in concept at least, a good thing to expand the reach of VSD by being able to examine the patient data of many. ore healthcare systems, as VSD is sometimes too small a dataset to detect rare adverse events. Unfortunately, this is not a normal administration, and I do not trust RFK Jr. or his lackey Dr. Mehmet Oz to do this correctly in a way that doesn’t artificially inflate apparent vaccine harms.
Finally, I haven’t addressed the clinic itself:
On October 5, NIH opened a new clinic dedicated to studying and caring for patients experiencing health problems following vaccination. HHS and NIH leaders marked the opening with a ribbon-cutting ceremony at NIH’s Bethesda campus.
The clinic brings specialized patient care and scientific investigation together, allowing NIH clinicians and researchers to evaluate patients, study their experiences, investigate potential causes, and identify better approaches to care. By connecting patients directly with clinicians and researchers, NIH will expand access to evaluation and care while advancing scientific understanding of health problems reported following vaccination.
This clinic seems like something that is not really necessary. Again, it will depend upon who runs this clinic, and, surprisingly, no director of the clinic was announced at the groundbreaking. Failure to publicly announce the leadership of a clinic like this at the event announcing its opening is practically unheard-of. (At least, I can’t remember ever having encountered an instance like this.) Usually, the director is part of the announcement and is touted as being the right person to make sure that the initiative being announced will succeed. Just for yucks, I asked Claude, Google Gemini, and ChatGPT if they could find any announcement of a director, and they failed too. Indeed, search as I might, I can’t find any important administrative details about the new clinic, such as the clinic’s budget, enrollment guidelines, internal oversight structure, or the names of people appointed to direct and lead it. Perusing news reports about the ribbon-cutting, I found that HHS has not answered requests for information on the clinic leadership, budget, structure, etc., which are all very important things. The lack of such an announcement leads me to think that there’s something being hidden, particularly given the three day delay between the ceremony and the HHS press release and social media posts.
Antivaxxers react
Unsurprisingly, antivaxxers are overjoyed at this announcement. For example, at The Defender, the house organ of the antivax organization Children’s Health Defense, which was run by RFK Jr. until he decided to run for President in 2023 but still has close ties to him, Michael Nevradakis quoted antivax leaders happy at the announcement:
Polly Tommey, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) senior director of digital media who also attended Monday’s event, called the initiative “a massive step forward in acknowledging vaccine injury.”
Tommey, whose son was injured by the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and who has interviewed thousands of parents of vaccine-injured kids on CHD’s Vax-Unvax Bus, said it was “surreal” that all of the leaders of federal health agencies “were joined together on the issue of vaccine injury.”
“Never, ever before have we, the parents, been in a position like this,” Tommey said. She called the initiative a “small but cautious step forward.”
I do love how Nevradakis claims that the initiative is getting “thumbs up from scientists”:
Pediatrician Dr. Elizabeth Mumper, a member of the HHS Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, told The Defender she is “delighted” to see “such concrete action being taken” on behalf of the vaccine-injured.
And several mainstream scientists and physicians said the clinic and other initiatives are a positive step.
Yale University cardiologist Dr. Harlan Krumholz told Science that the vaccine-injured have long been ignored. “The path forward has to be to avoid the politics and simply pursue the science,” he said.
Daniel Salmon, Ph.D., director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told The New York Times that “more research in vaccine safety would be very helpful.”
Elizabeth Mumper is an antivax quack who’s been featured on this blog a couple of times. Dr. Krumholz is a cardiologist whom I first encountered because he apparently believes that chelation therapy can treat cardiovascular disease but who now runs the LISTEN Trial, looking at long COVID symptoms, but also attributing them to COVID vaccines. Basically, the list goes from antivax quack (Mumper) to an apparently reputable but with some questionable views (Krumholz, given that to me he seems to go beyond what the evidence will support in terms of COVID vaccines causing symptoms) to a legitimate public health scientist (Salmon), making them all seem equivalent, as though Dr. Mumper is equivalent to Dr. Salmon. (She’s not.) Also tellingly left out of the quote above is what Dr. Salmon said after saying that a vaccine injury research program could be “very helpful,” namely, “It needs to be rigorous science.” You’ll excuse me yet again if I highly doubt that the science will be anything approaching rigorous.
Undoubtedly the children and parents in attendance have suffered horrible things, and I actually believe the parents when they say that their children (and they) have suffered horribly. We are not, however, obligated to accept without question these parents’ interpretation of events or their inference that vaccines caused their children’s suffering. It is possible to be empathetic without automatically accepting that vaccines caused their child’s death or suffering, insisting on rigorous scientific investigation to ask the question of whether or not vaccines had anything to do with the health problems their children suffer from. If rigorous science implicates a vaccine, so be it. I’ll accept that conclusion. Unfortunately, I know that if rigorous science does not implicate a vaccine, RFK Jr. will most definitely not accept the conclusion. I also know, amusingly enough, that many antivaxxers think that this clinic is basically a distraction to cover up MAHA being owned by the mRNA cartel. (I kid you not.) It’s also hilarious that antivaxxers are noticing that there was no information given on how to refer a patient to the new NIH clinic:
You’d think that RFK Jr. would have wanted to publicize this information, so that all the antivax quacks that he knows, many of whom idolize him, could start referring their patients forthwith.
In the end, as much as most antivaxxers seem to realize (correctly) that this new initiative is designed to produce “evidence” that will allow RFK Jr. to come after more vaccines and either restrict them or remove them from the CDC schedule, RFK Jr. must know that it will never be enough to satisfy many of his supporters. They share his goal of eliminating all vaccines because, just like him, they truly do believe that vaccines are ineffective and deadly. In the meantime, look for who is appointed to run this clinic, and also realize that this is not intended to be a research program that asks if vaccines cause all the horrible things attributed to them, but rather to go looking for evidence that can be presented in favor of the conclusion that they do cause all these horrible things.
Make no mistake, RFK Jr. is (still) definitely coming for your vaccines. This vaccine injury clinic and research program are just the latest tools that he plans to use to eliminate as many vaccines as he can.