Here we go again. after writing part 9 of this series last week, I hadn’t planned on moving directly to part 10 this week, especially since part 9 was more optimistic than my usual post in this series, which I like to call RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines. I realize that this will make it three posts out of five this month that added to this series, but sometimes events don’t let me ignore them, and a blogger’s gotta do what a blogger’s gotta do. Our antivax Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. doesn’t let up in his quest to eliminate all vaccines, and so I can’t afford to let up in my writing about it, particularly in light of “Podcast Jay” Bhattacharya‘s pledge last week to restore faith in the CDC and his bragging about having done one of the absolute minimal things a CDC Director, either acting (as he is) or permanent, should do while measles outbreaks are raging across the country: Taping a video urging parents to vaccinate their children against measles.
What does Podcast Jay want? A cookie? I didn’t miss how you buried the lede and didn’t get to recommending that parents vaccinate their children until halfway through the video, after having obfuscated it with references to other resources and interventions, all while emphasizing “informed choice.” True, this is one of the most pro-vaccine messages that I’ve seen coming out of HHS since President Trump took over, but that isn’t saying much.
But back to the reason for the season, so to speak, the news story that made me decide that I had to add another part to my ongoing series on how, since he became HHS Secretary, RFK Jr. has been working feverishly to take away your vaccines, Podcast Jay’s little video notwithstanding. Part of the reason that I felt the need to write this is because, even though last week a legal ruling laid down a major bump in the road that will slow down RFK Jr.’s efforts to remake the CDC Advisory Council on Immunization Practices (ACIP) into an antivax rubber-stamp on whatever policy that RFK Jr. wants to spew out to whittle away at the US federal vaccination program, I wanted to point out that RFK Jr. is not giving up in light of this setback. Instead, he’s enlisting his antivax lawyer buddy and collaborator Aaron Siri to give him a pretext to do what I’ve long predicted that he would do: Add more conditions to the Vaccine Injury Table. Let me explain after briefly quoting a news story:
An anti-vaccine group aligned with U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is petitioning him to vastly broaden a federal list to include more than 300 injuries it says are linked to immunizations, and has threatened to sue if he does not.
The petition, dated March 20, calls for amendments to the Vaccine Injury Table, which currently lists 47 potential vaccine-related injuries. It enables expedited compensation for claimants without proving a vaccine actually caused their health issue if their symptoms match those on the list.
ICAN’s lawyer Aaron Siri, who has worked with Kennedy on vaccine litigation in the past and served as his presidential campaign’s lawyer, was asked whether he discussed the petition with the health secretary prior to filing it.
“This petition and notice was submitted without any coordination with anyone inside the federal government and we hope that HHS does the right thing in response to it,” Siri told Reuters.
ICAN, of course, stands for Informed Consent Action Network, an antivax group founded by longtime antivax activist and Andrew Wakefield crony Del Bigtree. It’s an antivax propaganda and legal organization that has long spewed antivaccine disinformation and uses its legal apparatus to oppose vaccine mandates of any kind and to distort the meaning of “informed consent” to disguise what antivaxxers really mean when they invoke the term: Misinformed refusal of vaccines.
Why is this significant? Let’s first revisit the tactics that I first predicted over a year ago that RFK Jr. would use as HHS Secretary to eliminate vaccines in the US.
Where does Aaron Siri’s petition fit into RFK Jr.’s plan to eliminate vaccines?
Long ago, as RFK Jr. was going through the nomination and confirmation process to become HHS Secretary, I predicted that he would use seven key tactics to undermine, chip away at, and ultimately destroy US federal vaccination programs, his endgame being a United States with no more vaccines. (Oh, you think I’m exaggerating here? I’ve been writing about RFK Jr. for nearly 21 years, and let me assure you that I am not.) In any case, these are the tactics that, although I had been discussing them for months, I first put into a formal “listicle” in this post:
- Co-opt the CDC to change its evidence-based policy-making apparatus to policy-based evidence-making designed to fuel antivax messaging. Over the last year, I’ve provided multiple examples, and it’s only getting worse.
- Co-opt the NIH to direct research funds away from vaccines and towards studying “vaccine injury” and other antivax narratives (to support the policy-based evidence-making). Examples include defunding NIH grants to study mRNA vaccines, COVID-19, and the like. Similarly, putting antivaxxer David Geier in charge of a study to “find the causes of autism” is another example. (Spoiler alert: He’ll find that it’s the vaccines.)
- Remake ACIP as an antivax committee, in order to remove recommended vaccines from the CDC recommended immunization schedule and refuse to approve new vaccines. It was inarguable that he’d already done this; that is, until the legal ruling earlier this month that put a stay on RFK Jr.’s efforts to remake ACIP and rewrite the CDC recommended vaccination schedule. Whether that ruling will stand after appeal remains to be seen.
- Take control of the vaccine safety monitoring systems, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and the Vaccine Safetylink Database (VSD), to cherry-pick evidence designed to portray vaccines as dangerous. Under any other administration, I probably wouldn’t have been too bothered by the plan to consolidate VAERS with other drug safety databases into something called the Adverse Event Monitoring System (AEMS). However, this HHS is run by RFK Jr., a longtime antivaxxer; therefore, color me…suspicious…particularly given that HHS wants it to have a heavy contribution of AI to identify “injuries.”
- Co-opt the FDA to make approval of new vaccines more difficult and issue black-box warnings based on antivax fear mongering for existing vaccines. With Drs. Marty Makary as FDA Commissioner, this has already begun. I doubt that anything will change once Vinay Prasad leaves his post as Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) at the end of April.
- Influence the Vaccine Court and the NVICP to compensate “vaccine injuries” that antivaxxers believe in but that are not supported by science. This is where Aaron Siri comes in. Through his petition and threat of legal action on behalf of ICAN, he is “prodding” RFK Jr. to do what I’ve long predicted that he would do. Not that it was a difficult prediction. Antivax lawyers have long telegraphed their deepest desires. Specifically, they have long wanted to eliminate the Vaccine Court and the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, the no-fault system funded by excise taxes on vaccines that requires complainants first to go through a special Vaccine Court. However, eliminating the NVICP and Vaccine Court would require an act of Congress to change the law (specifically, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986). As a secondary strategy, they’ve long wanted to undermine NVICP, in essence bankrupting it, by adding so many conditions to the “table” listing adverse events due to vaccines that are automatically compensated by the NVICP that the system collapses, thus putting pressure on Congress to “reform” (i.e. eliminate) the system to allow them to sue vaccine manufacturers directly without the extra step of the Vaccine Court, thus driving them out of the US market due to liability concerns.
Now, back to the story. If you want to see what this is all really about, conveniently Aaron Siri gave an hour-plus long speech at the Kennedy Center last week in which he out and out told the audience what it was all about. Here’s the video for those of you who can stand to watch the whole thing, which consists of an introduction by longtime crank Sen. Ron Johnson, followed by a presentation packed with antivaccine tropes, distortions, misinformation, pseudoscience, and disinformation, all used to attack vaccines, the NVICP, and to argue for “reform” that will in actuality destroy the system—by design.
False analogies, and the plan to force the vaccine industry to face a “crossroads”
Looking back at Siri’s whole presentation, one thing that struck me was how baldly antivaccine it was. RFK Jr. and his allies aren’t even pretending anymore to be provaccine. If you look at the chapter markers, they have titles like:
(17:02) Why Vaccine Companies Can Kill With Impunity
(25:34) Current Epidemic of Chronic Childhood Diseases
(30:59) FDA’s Abject Failure to Assure Safety Pre-Licensure
Yes, that first part is all about the NVICP. More on that later. That part about failing to assure safety pre-licensure is, of course, about how vaccines are supposedly not tested against saline placebo in randomized controlled clinical trials. I’ve explained many times why that is not true and why, when it is true, it’s an intentional distortion based on a willful What I found perhaps the most hilarious was:
(1:17:18) Depoliticizing Vaccines
(1:19:33) Mandates Are Illegal and Immoral
Ah, yes. Siri owes me a new irony meter, given that RFK Jr. and he have been doing nothing but politicizing vaccines for as long as I can remember, and his calling vaccine mandates “illegal” and “immoral” sure sounds to me like politicizing vaccines. I’d say that the hypocrisy is breathtaking, except that I know that they really don’t view their contradictions as hypocrisy. They really do believe it’s not “politicizing” vaccines when they do it, but heaven forbid that “we” should do it. Then it is most definitely (to them) “politicizing vaccines.”
But let’s get to what he says about the NVICP. Just to recap, for those who might not have read this blog before and/or might not be familiar with the NVICP, the NCVIA of 1986 set up a no-fault system to compensate people and families for adverse events or injury that can, from a scientific standpoint, be reasonably attributed to CDC-recommended vaccines. To do this, the NVICP requires that complainants first go through a special court system, which came to be known as the Vaccine Court, staffed by judges (called Special Masters). The system is funded by an excise tax on every dose of vaccine administered, and compensation is determined by Special Masters after legal hearings. Although the system doesn’t allow astronomical payouts of the sort that jury trials in civil litigation can result in, with lawyers Hoovering up one-third of (or more) of the award as big fat contingency fees, the system is quite generous in that it pays complainants’ legal expenses, win or lose, although those expenses are limited to the hourly rates that attorneys charge, plus other expenses (e.g., expert witnesses). This, I’ve long suspected, is why antivax attorneys despise the NVICP so much. Even though they can make a good living on hourly fees bringing cases before the Vaccine Court, they can’t ever expect to score millions—or occasionally even tens or hundreds of millions—of dollars in contingency fees from a single case. Never mind that it’s a good deal for the complainants in that, even if they lose their cases, they won’t be on the hook for large legal bills.
The other way that the NVICP is a good deal for complainants is the standard of evidence used, which is the “50% and a feather” rule in which the “preponderance of evidence” supports the claim. In fact, the standards of evidence used by the Vaccine Court are arguably less stringent than what are used in conventional federal courts. For example, Daubert rules for scientific evidence do not apply. Indeed, all that is necessary is a scientifically plausible-sounding mechanism by which a plaintiff might have been injured by vaccines, and compensation can be awarded. In essence, lowering the Daubert standard and allowing “science” that has not yet been peer reviewed makes meeting the standard of evidence showing a 51% or greater chance that the plaintiff was injured by the vaccine in question easier than it would be in regular civil court. I go even further and argue that the Vaccine Court seems to bend over backwards to make compensation easier, sometimes even awarding questionable claims. One prominent example was the time before the pandemic when it awarded compensation for a case of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), even though the overwhelming preponderance of scientific evidence indicates that not only are vaccines not associated with an increased risk of SIDS but they might even decrease the risk of SIDS. True, the ruling was eventually reversed, but the initial ruling did award compensation.
Another example was the Autism Omnibus proceeding back in the late 2000s. Given the large number of cases coming before the courts in which parents sought compensation for their children’s autism, which they blamed on vaccines, the Vaccine Court came up with a system to evaluate these claims. The CliffsNotes version is that the Vaccine Court had this group of parents bring their best cases, cases that the lawyers representing the parents thought to be the most convincing cases of “vaccine-induced autism,” as test cases. If the parents who brought what ultimately turned out to be six test cases did not prevail, that would be that, and the rest of the cases could not proceed. If the parents prevailed, then all the other cases blaming autism on vaccines could proceed. Obviously, this outcome could have bankrupted the system, just as RFK Jr. appears to want to do. Fortunately, all six test cases—which, remember, were the most convincing cases that attorneys representing parents claiming vaccine injuries to their children could come up with out of the 5,000 or so total cases—failed.
Of course, antivaxxers don’t see it that way, which is why Siri characterized the circumstances that led to the passage of the NCVIA of 1986 and the creation of the NVICP thusly:
Leading up to 1986, there were only three routine vaccines: MMR, DTP, and OPV. That’s it. Three routine childhood vaccines. That’s the whole schedule in 1986 right there up on your screen.
Actually, that’s a 1983 schedule. There wasn’t another one created until 1989.
The amount of harm and injury caused by those three products was so great that every single company making those vaccines went out of business or stopped making them.
Now, lots of industries face this crossroads. Lots of industries. Remember when there was asbestos in building materials and in popcorn ceilings? What did they do?
Did they leave the asbestos in and just give them immunity and say, “Hey, you keep selling that stuff. Buildings are really important. You can keep selling”?
No. They forced them to make a better, safer product.
How about when gas tanks were exploding? Did they give them immunity? Say, “Oh, cars are really important. We can’t get people to the hospital. We’re just going to give you immunity”?
No. Make a better gas tank.
Go industry by industry. Find me an industry, and I’ll find you a crossroads they faced at some point in history.
Even baby powder, right? The thing you all thought was so safe.
The point is that Congress, in its wisdom, did something different with vaccines. It did not do with any other product. It said to the companies, “You know what we’re going to do?”
Instead of making you create a better, safer product, we’re just going to make it so nobody can sue you.
No matter how many kids you kill or injure, even if you could have made the product safer, vaccines are the only product that has that permanent liability.
And Congress didn’t just give them immunity for OPV, DTP, and MMR. It gave it for any other routine childhood vaccine developed thereafter.
Of course, one can’t help but predict what was coming next. Antivaxxers often point to past CDC-recommended schedules that included fewer vaccines against fewer diseases as though those schedules were somehow inherently superior to the more extensive vaccine schedule that we have now, rather than as a manifestation of the simple fact that there weren’t as many safe and effective vaccines back then, with vaccines against varicella, rotavirus, and HPV (for example) not yet developed. The other unspoken subtext is that they view more vaccines as a bad thing—always!—rather than its being a good thing to be able to safely protect more children against more infectious diseases than we could in the past.
Now here’s the false analogy. First, the evidence that asbestos caused harm to health had become indisputable by the time the government finally banned asbestos from building materials. So had evidence that the gas tanks of Ford Pintos were prone to exploding after even relatively minor impacts. at the time the government acted. These products were causing provable death and harm. In contrast, the evidence that vaccines were safe and effective was overwhelming—and remains overwhelming. The litigation that was threatening the vaccine industry was based on anecdotes, bad science, pseudoscience, and, yes, antivax lawyers who preceded Siri 40 years ago, not to mention some sensationalistic news stories blaming DTP for neurological injuries in infants. (Dr. Paul Offit described the situation well in his book Autism’s False Prophets.) Second, asbestos was not essential to building anything. It could be removed. Similarly, there were many autos on the market with gas tanks that were not prone to fires and explosions after low speed impacts; substitutions were not difficult. In contrast, there were no substitutes for vaccines, and removing vaccines would leave children open to infectious diseases that had long been controlled by vaccines. This is a harm that we used to consider unacceptable in the 1980s. Unfortunately, in the 2020s, it appears that this is no longer the case.
Moreover, unsurprisingly the petition is deceptive:
Scientific and legal experts said the petition stretched legal definitions and would hamper future government research into vaccine injuries.
Noel Brewer, a public health professor at the University of North Carolina and a former member of a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent panel of outside vaccine experts, dismissed the reasoning as flawed.
“The lawyer is making the argument that the government considering if something could be harmful made it a harm that should be memorialized as such, and that doesn’t make any sense,” he said. Brewer was among 17 panel members fired by Kennedy last year.
Dorit Reiss, a vaccine law expert at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, also criticized the petition.
“The petition argues that simply analyzing potential harms establishes an association, even if the government found no evidence of one. That interpretation stretches the legal definitions,” she said.
Same as it ever was, at least with respect to antivax “law.”
I could go on, but I’d rather simply point out that this is a statement of intent. Vaccine manufacturers already faced just this crossroads in the mid-1980s. Siri even said so! The flood of pseudoscience- and sensationalism-fueled litigation was about to drive them out of the US market, and Congress was justifiably alarmed, sufficiently so that it passed the NCVIA of 1986 and President Reagan, no liberal he, signed the bill into law. What Siri clearly wants to do is to force vaccine manufacturers into a similar new “crossroads” four decades later. The difference in our situation now as opposed to forty years ago is that there is currently an HHS administration in place for whom no evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that vaccines are safe and effective. If we come to this “crossroads,” as Siri clearly wants us to, there will be no possible way that vaccine manufacturers could ever “make safer products” sufficiently “safe” to satisfy RFK Jr., Aaron Siri, and the collection of cranks, quacks, and antivaxxers running HHS now. Their standards for “safety” and efficacy are unachievable. (As I like to say, if a vaccine is not 100% effective at preventing disease and transmission and 100% safe, with zero side effects—conditions that apply to exactly zero vaccines—to antivaxxers it’s a crappy, dangerous, and ineffective vaccine.) The end result would likely be the outcome that we narrowly avoided in 1986: Vaccine manufacturers abandoning the US market because the risk of losses or outright bankruptcy due to litigation is just too high. That’s the plan.
To support the plan, Siri went through his usual Gish gallop repeating his false argument that no childhood vaccines have been approved based on a placebo-controlled randomized controlled clinical trial. I’m not going to dwell on this lie before, because I’ve discussed it in depth multiple times (most recently here and here). Suffice to say that Siri once again ignores the history that the original versions of vaccines were all tested in placebo-controlled RCTs before licensure. He also ignores basic clinical trial ethical principles, one of which is that no subject in an RCT can ethically be randomized to less than the existing standard of care. Therefore, if you’re studying a second or third (or fourth) generation vaccine against an illness for which a safe and effective vaccine has already been licensed and accepted as the standard of care, it is unethical to test that vaccine against an inert placebo. The only ethical RCT design in such a case is to test the new vaccine against a disease against the existing vaccine in a non-inferiority design to assure that the new vaccine is at least not inferior to the existing vaccine or, ideally, that it is superior. It’s the same reason you can’t ethically test a new chemotherapy drug for a cancer against a placebo if effective chemotherapy for that cancer exists. You either have to add the new drug to the existing standard of care and test the combination against that standard of care or test the new drug against an acceptable standard of care.
Which brings us to this part of Siri’s talk:
Okay, so here are the reforms that I have suggested for the CDC. Again, absent public contrition, remove anyone in CDC involved in vaccine safety, misleading reports, or promotion of vaccines. Remove from the schedule all improperly licensed vaccines. Make remaining vaccines shared clinical decision-making.
To be clear, before you report that I want to eliminate vaccines, I said remove them from the schedule. I did not say not license them. Okay? Anybody should be able to still get a vaccine. It’s America. That’s freedom. You should be able to take risks you want. But the government shouldn’t be promoting them like a pom-pom cheerleader without proper evidence.
Note that what Siri means by “improperly licensed vaccines” are vaccines that were not tested against a saline placebo, even though testing against a different comparator was entirely justified from both an ethical and scientific viewpoint. He knows that his audience is ignorant of ethics and the science of what constitutes an appropriate comparator to be used for the control group in an RCT. (Yes, it is indeed my considered opinion that he is deliberately misleading the audience here. If he isn’t, then he’s stupid and ignorant, and, as much as I detest Siri, I don’t think he’s stupid or ignorant.) As for the part about removing these vaccines from the schedule, Siri knows that his unscientific and unethical requirement would remove most childhood vaccines from the schedule. That is the point. As a longtime antivax attorney, he must also know that vaccines not included in the CDC-recommended schedule do not fall under the NVICP. Any vaccines removed from the CDC schedule would become fair game for Siri and his antivax attorney buddies to directly sue manufacturers over “injuries” attributed to them. Again, that’s the plan.
This would, of course, bring us back to the situation that we were facing in 1986, except that this time most, if not all, vaccine manufacturers would likely flee the US market. Even if Siri fails to remove vaccines from the schedule this way, the second prong of his two-pronged plan would add all sorts of “injuries” to the Vaccine Injury Table for which the evidence of vaccine causation is at best shaky and at worst nonexistent. This would result in the bankrupting of the NVICP, unless Congress were to step in to increase its funding sufficiently to handle the flood of claims expected. While Congress might do that, in the current political climate, it’s more likely that Congress would simply scrap the VICP altogether and allow parents to directly sue vaccine manufacturers, which is, of course, exactly what Siri wants because (1) he is antivax and (2) he and his law firm would profit mightily afterward.
Is Aaron Siri colluding with RFK Jr. to add “injuries” to the table?
It’s no secret that RFK Jr. has said that he would like to add “vaccine injuries” to the table. Indeed, it’s the sort of thing he’s advocated dating back to long before even the possibility of his becoming HHS Secretary was even a fever dream (or nightmare to science-based advocates like us). Even his old antivax org Children’s Health Defense gave away the game in one of its articles about Siri’s petition by citing something he said on The Charlie Kirk Show last year:
In a July 2025 interview on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” Kennedy vowed to reform the VICP, calling it a “very heartless system.”
“The VICP is broken, and I intend to fix it,” Kennedy said. “I will not allow the VICP to continue to ignore its mandate and fail its mission of quickly and fairly compensating vaccine-injured individuals.”
In September 2025, Kennedy suggested he could expand the Vaccine Injury Table to include symptoms commonly associated with autism.
My suspicion has long been that RFK Jr.’s reconstituted ACIP had been working in that direction, to recommend adding autism and other bogus “vaccine injuries” to the Vaccine Injury Table, using “evidence” manufactured by the likes of David Geier, who from my perspective was hired a year ago to do just that. When that plan was stymied (or at least greatly slowed down), enter Plan B, in which Siri files his “petition” to RFK Jr. demanding the HHS do what RFK Jr. has always wanted to do and add a whole laundry list of antivax-favored “vaccine injuries” to the Vaccine Injury Table. Then there’s the threat to sue if he doesn’t do it in 60 days, which is a clever addition to the petition. Given the increasing political unpopularity of RFK Jr.’s antivax crusade, to the point where the White House has been reported to be telling him to cool it on vaccines (at least until after the midterm elections), such a lawsuit might give him cover to start up the process of adding all of Siri’s “injuries” to the table, something he’s clearly wanted to do ever since becoming HHS Secretary.
Of course, Siri denies that he colluded with RFK Jr. over this petition:
ICAN’s lawyer Aaron Siri, who has worked with Kennedy on vaccine litigation in the past and served as his presidential campaign’s lawyer, was asked whether he discussed the petition with the health secretary prior to filing it.
“This petition and notice was submitted without any coordination with anyone inside the federal government and we hope that HHS does the right thing in response to it,” Siri told Reuters.
Sure, Aaron. Whatever you say.
Meanwhile, Podcast Jay Bhattacharya is no longer holds the title of “acting director” of CDC because the position of CDC Director has been vacant for over 210 days:
Under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, once the 210-day clock expires without a formal Senate nomination, the office becomes legally “vacant,” triggering an administrative bifurcation. The law distinguishes between delegable, day-to-day management duties and “non-delegable” functions—the exclusive statutory powers that must be performed only by the CDC director.
While routine operational management can continue to be delegated to Bhattacharya, he has been legally stripped of the “acting director” title. Attempting to downplay the downgrade at a recent CDC all-staff meeting, Bhattacharya told employees, “Instead of acting director, I would be acting in the capacity as director.” However, the distinction is far more than semantic. Any attempt by an unconfirmed official to execute the non-delegable powers of the office after the 210-day limit renders those actions legally void. Those exclusive statutory powers revert upward to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. By permitting this deadline to expire, the Trump administration has accepted a structurally downgraded CDC directorship at the precise moment of nationwide conflict over vaccine policy, concentrating authority over the nation’s premier public health institution directly in Kennedy’s hands.
And:
This operational paralysis has facilitated CDC’s rapid centralization under the direct control of HHS. According to former chief medical officer and deputy director for program and science at CDC, Dr. Deb Houry, a cadre of approximately 20 political appointees aligned with Kennedy now micromanages agency budgets, external communications and individual employee travel requests. Ultimately, this systematic dismantling strips CDC of its independent scientific status, refashioning it into a subordinate political arm of the Trump-Kennedy administration.
Exactly as OMB Director Russell Vought and HHS Secretary RFK Jr. intend.
In other words, without a real director, confirmed by the Senate, the CDC is effectively being run by the HHS Secretary, which means that RFK Jr. is really the acting director of CDC now, with his useful idiot lackey there just to do the administrative gruntwork of the position without having having the powers associated with it that really matter. On the surface, it might look as though Trump and RFK Jr. are in a bind because any candidate for CDC Director aligned with RFK Jr.’s antivax crusade would be unlikely to be confirmed by the Senate, which is once bitten, twice shy (particularly in an election year) and any candidate whose nomination would pass the Senate would have to be a more conventional public health scientist, someone who would very likely resist RFK Jr.’s antivax crusade and gutting of the CDC as an effective force for public health. However, this uncertainty and lack of a clear leader serves RFK Jr. well, because all non-delegable powers of CDC Director remain his as long as there is no permanent director confirmed by the Senate. Bhattacharya might think he’s running things, but in reality he’s just doing RFK Jr.’s scutwork managing, but not leading, the CDC, just like the good little toady, sycophant, and lackey that he is.
In conclusion, having watched Siri and Kennedy in action over the last couple of decades, I conclude that there’s no way anyone can convince me to change my opinion that they are colluding, and it is my judgment that Siri was almost certainly lying when he denied any coordination between him and RFK Jr. They’ve known each other and worked with each other for far too long for me to believe such a fantasy story, a story believable to only the very gullible, the very ignorant, or some parts of the mainstream press. Be that as it may, again, make no mistake: RFK Jr.’s endgame is the elimination of vaccines, while Siri’s goal appears to be primarily profit.
Whatever the motivation of this not-so-dynamic duo, RFK Jr is coming for your vaccines, and he won’t rest until there are no more vaccines in the US. Undermining or destroying the VICP in a manner that doesn’t require the passage of any new laws might be the most efficient and effective tactic to achieve this end, particularly when the CDC is in such a chaotic state without a permanent director. In the meantime Siri, who has financial conflicts of interest more massive than even the most fantastical “pharma shill” that antivaxxers demonize, can glom onto the effort and boost the profits of his antivax law firm.