I am currently away at the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress in Chicago and had been debating whether to skip this week, given travel and the general business of being at a conference. It would have been nice, but a nagging bit of misinformation kept nagging at me, so that, even though this was posted almost a week ago I just couldn’t resist. There are a couple of reasons. First, never before have I seen a Secretary of Health and Human Services post such an old and obvious bit of straight up antivax disinformation on official channels before. Well, not exactly. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been doing just that since February. However, this one stood out because it’s a good example of a hoary old antivax trope that can deceive even fairly knowledgeable people if they are unaware of it, and, quite frankly, I was amazed that I could predict the studies studies that he cherry picked to support this trope once I realized that this was where he was going and before he could even cite the studies. Why? Because I’ve dealt with this trope before. I even gave it a name 15 years ago: The “vaccines didn’t save us” trope. Even more amazing, I was correct about all three studies that he cited. Even more amazing, I’ve written about them before because an antivaxxer used the same three studies in one of his posts in 2018.
First, the video, after which I will discuss:
contribute that much to 20th century improvements in global health and are therefore not really
necessary.
First, note the amusing thing. RFK Jr. is really peeved by having been dragged by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) with a chart that showed the enormous impact of vaccination on the burden of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases globally, so much so that he has to brag that he is going to “shred” that chart. Spoiler alert: He doesn’t so much “shred” it as twist it into a straw man he can attack.) For your edification, here is the chart:
Let’s take a look at how RFK Jr. demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt in this video that he is, in fact, antivaccine. I will repeat what I’ve been saying for months now: RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines; he’s coming for all vaccines, in fact. It’s just that he’s strategic enough to know that he can’t do it all at once, which is why he purged the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replace the fired members with antivaxxers and the antivax-adjacent, only one of whom has any significant experience in public health or vaccine policy. Personally, I’ve been saying that the only thing that’s saved us (thus far) is the inexperience and incompetence of RFK Jr.’s ACIP. In the meantime, President Trump has embraced Andrew Wakefield’s old grift about separating the components of the MMR vaccine as somehow being “safer,” even as he talks about adding autism to the list of table injuries for the Vaccine Injury Compensation System, a move that would certainly bankrupt and destroy it.
Yes, things are grim out there.
Through it all, RFK Jr. has been maintaining his old lie (or self-delusion—you be the judge) that he’s “not antivax” and is only interested in making vaccines “safer.” (Never mind that his standard of safety is basically unattainable and vaccines, as a medical intervention, are already incredibly safe and effective. If that were the case, though, you might assume that RFK Jr. would concentrate on the harms of vaccines, both the tiny but real risk of injuries from certain vaccines, and all the other harms that antivaxxers erroneously and/or deceptively attribute to vaccines (e.g., autism). He has certainly done that, but a hallmark of an antivaxxer is that, not only does he fear monger about the harms vaccines cause, both real and imagined, but he also feels compelled to argue that vaccines don’t work, are ineffective, or at the very least are not nearly as effective as we know they are. The reason, of course, is to produce messaging that shifts the risk-benefit ratio against vaccines as much as possible, even though vaccine scientists, infectious disease doctors, and public health officials know that the risk-benefit ratio is very much in favor of vaccines.
Thus, RFK Jr. has to resurrect the hoary “vaccines didn’t save us” argument that uses straw men arguments and conflates infectious disease incidence with infectious disease mortality to falsely argue that, in the grand scheme of things, vaccines didn’t do that much in the 20th century.
I wish vaccines could save us from the disingenuous “vaccines didn’t save us” trope
RFK Jr. is clearly pissed. True, he starts off cocky, almost ebullient, with a cringeworthy, “Hi, I’m Robert F. Kennedy Jr., your HHS Secretary,” as though he’s your buddy. He’s not. Then he complains about Sen. Cantwell’s chart, immediately going for the conspiracy mongering and “pharma shill” gambit:
The vaccine industry has long used this kind of chart as proof of the common claim that vaccines had saved hundreds of millions of American lives.
First off, no one has claimed that. For one thing, the entire population of the US right now is only around 340 million, and that’s as high as our population has ever been, and, even if you ask how many Americans have ever lived, the number is less than double that, due to population growth over the last 250 years. So, right off the bat, RFK Jr. is constructing a straw man so massive, that, were it to be set on fire, it would be visible from the International Space Station. Second, no one uses that chart—or a chart like it—to estimate how many lives have been saved by vaccines. That chart cannot tell us, because it only describes how much infectious diseases have declined since vaccines. Worse, it’s almost certain that RFK Jr. knows that this chart can’t tell us this, because he correctly identifies it as a chart showing the effect of vaccines on the incidence of infectious disease, before pivoting to attacking pharmaceuticals for supposedly deceptively using such charts to prove something that no one is claiming. Not that that stops RFK Jr. After all, was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
Of course, not. RFK Jr. plunges ahead:
The momentous 70% decline in mortalities in the United States and Western Europe from contagious diseases since 1900 marks one of the most monumental public health advances in all of human history. But was this really an achievement of mass vaccination programs, as many people, including Senator Cantwell, claim?
You can see where this is going. Indeed, I even correctly predicted which cherry picked study he’d pull out here, because it’s the same damned study that nearly all antivaxxers pushing the “vaccines didn’t save us” trope cite, a 2000 paper entitled Annual summary of vital statistics: trends in the health of Americans during the 20th century by Bernard Guyer, MD; Mary Anne Freedman, MA; Donna M. Strobino, PhD; and Edward J. Sondik, PhD. When last I wrote about the misuse and abuse of this paper by antivaxxers, it was the co-founder of the antivax group Generation Rescue, J.B. Handley, doing the misusing and abusing. Because he wants to make you think that this study is the definitive word on what he’s trying to convince you of, RFK Jr. effusively praises Dr. Bernard Guyer, the lead author of the study, as having “meticulously” examined “100 years of government infectious disease mortality data” (the study was funded by the CDC and carried out by Johns Hopkins University researchers, before stating the study’s conclusions that most of the decline (90%) in mortality from infectious diseases had occurred before the vaccines. From this, RFK Jr. makes the antivax conclusion:
…nearly all of the mortality reductions occurred before the introduction of vaccines and that vaccinations therefore could claim little of the credit.
When J.B. Handley did it, he quoted this part of the paper:
Thus vaccination does not account for the impressive declines in mortality seen in the first half of the century…nearly 90% of the decline in infectious disease mortality among US children occurred before 1940, when few antibiotics or vaccine were available.
Sounds pretty damning, right? Not so fast. What antivaxxers always leave out is this part of the paper:
The major declines in child mortality that occurred in the first third of the 20th century have been attributed to a combination of improved socioeconomic conditions in this country and the public health strategies to protect the health of Americans. These public health measures included the establishment of local health departments in nearly all of the states. State and local health departments implemented these public health measures, including water treatment, food safety, organized solid waste disposal, and public education about hygienic practices. These improvements in water and food safety and purity are linked to the major decline in diarrheal diseases seen in the early years of the century. Similarly, improvements in housing and decreased crowding in US cities are linked to the reductions in mortality from tuberculosis and other diseases attributable to person-to-person airborne transmission.
The paper also notes:
Thus, vaccination does not account for the impressive declines in mortality seen in the first half of the century. The reductions in vaccine-preventable diseases, however, are impressive. In the early 1920s, diphtheria accounted for 175,000 cases annually and pertussis for nearly 150,000 cases; measles accounted for about half a million annual cases before the introduction of vaccine in the 1960s. Deaths from these diseases have been virtually eliminated, as have deaths from Haemophilus influenzae, tetanus, and poliomyelitis.
In other words, socioeconomic changes decreased mortality from vaccine-preventable diseases before the actual vaccines were developed, but the vaccines were important and remain important in preventing infectious disease and the morbidity and mortality due to vaccine-preventable infectious diseases. One notes that Haemophilus influenzae (Hib) remained a scary deadly disease among even well-fed, healthy children up until the 1990s, when the vaccine was introduced, leading to its virtual elimination. Moreover, note how antivaxxers harp on death from infectious disease as the be-all and end-all criterion for judging the success of vaccines, completely ignoring preventing illness and, in particular, the suffering and longterm complications from those diseases. As I like to say with measles, for instance, antivaxxers like RFK Jr. apparently don’t think that preventing the 400-500 deaths from measles that occurred every year before the first measles vaccine was introduced in the early 1960s, instead harping on how over 13,000 children a year were dying of measles a half century earlier.
Speaking of measles, RFK Jr, immediately pivots to some very familiar charts:
were still 400+ children a year dying of measles.
RFK Jr.’s video lovingly focuses on this graph, zooming in so that the audience sees what he wants them to see, after which he crows, “Therefore, nearly all the measles mortality had disappeared before the vaccine. So the measles vaccine can’t claim credit for saving all those lives.” Of course, no one is saying that it did. It did, however, dramatically decrease the incidence of measles and led to deaths from measles becoming so rare that, until the West Texas measles outbreak this year, we could go decades without a child dying of measles. Here’s the thing. Even the CDC webpage on the history of measles (and I’m shocked that RFK Jr.’s antivax goons haven’t gotten around to purging this page yet) notes that among the measles cases every year in the US:
- 400 to 500 people died
- 48,000 were hospitalized
- 1,000 suffered encephalitis (swelling of the brain)
I’d say that’s a burden of disease that rates a vaccination program. Apparently, RFK Jr. does not. The numbers would be a lot higher now because the US population is much higher now than it was in the early 1960s. Unsurprisingly, RFK Jr. goes through a list of similar graphs of mortality vs. year for other vaccine-preventable diseases, such as pertussis, for which the graph is less convincing because, even though the mortality had declined markedly, there was still an impressive decline in pertussis mortality associated with the introduction of the vaccine in the late 1940s. The graph for influenza is really deceptive, as it starts in 1919, which, as you might remember, was the height of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Of course there would be a dramatic decline in mortality from influenza as the pandemic waned! To these, RFK Jr. shows declines in tuberculosis mortality, noting that the US has never mass vaccinated against tuberculosis and scarlet fever, as if this is some sort of “gotcha” moment, although the wag in me can’t help but note that the first effective antibiotic against tuberculosis, streptomycin, was discovered in 1943, but the decline in mortality before 1943 was impressive. There was a head-scratcher there too, specifically a graph showing declines in mortality from scurvy, which has been known to be treatable with vitamin C (ascorbic acid), since the 18th century.
Yes, I know. The point is that a lot of this mortality resulted from better nutrition and sanitation. No public health scientist would deny that. However, public health is multifactorial, and vaccination against infectious disease is important too. RFK Jr. is presenting, as antivaxxers are wont to do, a deceptive argument insinuating that, if much of the decline in mortality from infectious disease during the first half of the 20th century was due more to better nutrition and sanitation than to vaccines, vaccines are unnecessary and unimportant, which is the argument that he pivots to next, citing the second paper that antivaxxers love to cite whenever they employ this trope.
The “questionable” contribution of medical interventions to the decline in mortality
It turns out that J.B. Handley had also cited the next paper to which RFK pivoted after the Guyer et al paper, a paper by John B. McKinlay and Sonia M. McKinlay from 1977, The Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in the United States in the Twentieth Century. Once again, RFK Jr. lays it on thick about how great the McKinlays were, calling it a “landmark” paper and claiming that it was “required reading” in medical schools in the late 1970s through the 1980s. (It wasn’t. I went to medical school in the 1980s.) In any case, to hear RFK Jr. tell it, according to McKinlay and McKinlay, the declines in mortality were almost entirely due to engineering innovations (e.g., refrigeration, better transportation, and “superior sanitation”) that led to better nutrition in the US population, with very little of the decline being due to medical interventions. As an aside, I will note that it’s amusing that RFK Jr. mentions water chlorination as one of those innovations, given his emphasis on “purity” and his fear mongering about fluoridation.
In any event, this is a strange paper that overstates its case massively and is written in quite the hyperbolic fashion. Certainly, whenever I see a paper start with a subsection title of “Introducing a Medical Heresy”, my skeptical antennae start twitching a bit. I also couldn’t help but think “Grandiose, much?” when I read the first paragraph:
The modern “heresy” that medical care (as it is traditionally conceived) is generally unrelated to improvements in the health of populations (as distinct from individuals) is still dismissed as thinkable in much the same way as the so-called heresies of former times. And this is despite a long history of support in popular and scientific writings as well as from able minds in a variety of disciplines. History is replete with examples of how, understandably enough, self-interested individuals and groups denounced customs and beliefs which appeared to threaten their own domains of practice, thereby rendering them heresies (for example physicians’ denunciation of midwives as witches, during the Middle Ages). We also know that vast institutional resources have often been deployed to neutralize challenges to the assumptions upon which everyday organizational activities were founded and legitimated (for example, the Spanish Inquisition).
Because nobody expects…the Spanish Inquisition!
Sorry, I couldn’t resist. However, I must say that my skeptical antennae started twitching so mightily when I saw McKinlay and McKinlay invoke the Spanish Inquisition as an appropriate comparison to medical orthodoxy. Comparing medicine to religion, no wonder Handley liked this article so much:
The study clearly proved, with data, something that the McKinlay’s acknowledged might be viewed by some as medical “heresy.” Namely:
…that the introduction of specific medical measures and/or the expansion of medical services are generally not responsible for most of the modern decline in mortality.
By “medical measures,” the McKinlay’s really meant ANYTHING modern medicine had come up with, whether that was antibiotics, vaccines, new prescription drugs, whatever. The McKinlay’s 23-page study really should be read cover to cover, but in a nutshell the McKinlay’s sought to analyze how much of an impact medical interventions (antibiotics, surgery, vaccines) had on this massive decline in mortality rates between 1900 and 1970:
And here’s the graph:
So, yes, there was a remarkable decline in mortality from 1900-1973. Of course, once again, this is inflating the denominator, because this is all mortality, not just mortality from vaccine-preventable diseases or childhood mortality. In a later graph, he looks at what proportion of the total mortality reduction was represented by various infectious diseases, finding that only the declines in tuberculosis and pneumonia mortality were fairly large percentages of the overall decline 1973 (16.5% and 11.7%, respectively) and that the percent of the total decline in mortality from the other eight conditions examined (scarlet fever, diphtheria, influenza, whooping cough, measles, smallpox, polio, and typhoid) combined was less than 12%.
This leads McKinlay and McKinlay to conclude:
Even if it were assumed that this change was entirely due to the vaccines, then only about one percent of the decline following interventions for the diseases considered here could be attributed to medical measures. Rather more conservatively, if we attribute some of the subsequent fall in the death rates for pneumonia, influenza, whooping cough, and diphtheria to medical measures, then perhaps 3.5 percent of the fall in the overall death rate can be explained through medical intervention in the major infectious diseases considered here. Indeed, given that it is precisely for these diseases that medicine claims most success in lowering mortality, 3.5 percent probably represents a reasonable upper-limit estimate of the total contribution of medical measures to the decline in mortality in the United States since 1900.
I can’t help but point out right here that, even if this pessimistic estimate were accurate, that would still likely be millions of lives saved by modern medicine over that 73 year period. There’s also another problem, and McKinlay and McKinlay themselves note it. Mortality statistics over such a long time period are fraught with difficulties. For instance, there were changes in registration areas in the US in the early 20th century. Also, often no single disease, but a combination of conditions, is responsible for death. Moreover, studies show considerable inaccuracies in reporting the cause of death, and, just as relevant, there are changes over time in what is fashionable to diagnose. Add to that how some conditions cause immediate death, while others don’t. For example, consider scarlet fever. Untreated, it can result in rheumatic heart disease, but that usually doesn’t kill for decades. Indeed, my grandmother was an example. She had rheumatic heart disease after having had scarlet fever as a child. Eventually she needed a valve replacement. So if someone dies of rheumatic heart disease at age 60, is the cause of death heart disease or scarlet fever? Also, there are a lot of conditions that are debilitating but don’t cause immediate death. It’s true that over the last 50 years reporting has become a lot more standardized, but if you’re looking at statistics going back into the 19th century, you have to wonder how accurate they are.
Here’s another issue. Everybody dies. I like to say that life is a sexually transmitted terminal disease. If you don’t die of an infectious disease, you’ll die of something else eventually. That’s just the way it is. Heck, even McKinlay and McKinlay show that in this article with a graph showing the decreasing percentage of people dying of infectious disease being compensated for by the increasing percentage of people dying of chronic diseases and diseases of aging.
In fairness, as noted by Derek Beres at Conspirituality the other day the McKinlays had been becoming very concerned about growing pharmaceutical industry influence, which was not (and is not) an unreasonable thing to be concerned about, but the title of this article is basically an antivaxxers’ dream. The antivax movement wasn’t nearly as big in the 1970s as it is now, or even as it was in the early 2000s, but to my mind that was a deeply irresponsible title. Be that as it may, Beres made another good point about this study that I hadn’t considered back in 2018 when I wrote about J.B. Handley’s weaponization of it:
Basically, they didn’t take enough consideration of the social determinants of health. The statistical models that they used might have underestimated the cumulative effects of medicine over time. Then you have the timing of mortality declines, which may not account for later medical advances, like new drugs, like antibiotics and anti-hypertensives.
You have improved emergency medicine, and you have more effective chronic disease management that all occurred after the initial decline in infectious disease deaths that they’re citing. Then you have the fact that chronic diseases have become the leading causes of death in America, and newer research shows that medical interventions have contributed meaningfully to the decline of death rates. This is through improved disease management and control, which pretty much puts the report and its very limited focus into view.
Indeed. I would add to that that it’s a false dichotomy to say that public health is all about vaccines versus nutrition and sanitation. In fact, it’s about all of that! Moreover, I doubt there’s anyone in public health who wouldn’t argue that more should be spent on addressing the social determinants of health and environmental causes of disease, but that isn’t what RFK Jr. is doing. Instead, aside from some performative actions to get rid of certain food dies and seed oils, what RFK Jr.’s “make America healthy again” (MAHA) movement is really doing is shifting from public health to private health, with health being entirely up to the individual and health being seen as virtue, along with the converse, which is that if you’re not healthy you are not sufficiently virtuous and your illness is your fault.
Also, as Beres also mentions, in the years since their study’s publication, the McKinlays have complained that it has been misused by antivaxxers, referring in an interview to such uses thusly in 2020:
It should be noted that some anti‐vaccine advocates have used the McKinlays’ paper as scientific support for their views. To this, the McKinlays reply that “we consider this an egregious misinterpretation of our research. Effective vaccines clearly have an important role in the ongoing containment of a disease after its prevalence has been reduced. Measles provides an excellent current example of the resurgence of a previously contained infectious disease following reduction in measles vaccination interventions.”
Same as it ever was.
One last misused study
The last study misused and abused by RFK Jr. was actually not really a study, but rather an address by Edward Kass, MD in 1970. RFK Jr. describes it thusly:
In 1970 Harvard Medical School Professor Edward Kass was arguably the world’s preeminent infectious disease authority. He was both the founder and long time editor of the Journal of Infectious Diseases and president and founding member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. In his address that year to a joint meeting of the Infectious Disease Society of America and the 10th Inner Science Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, Dr. Kass issued a prescient public warning that actors within the medical industry would try to take credit for the momentous reduction in disease fatalities in order to advance their profits, their prestige and their influence. Dr. Kass challenged the emerging claim that vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives. Dr. Kass observed that the decline in mass deaths from these dreaded killers occurred prior to the proliferation of vaccines.
So he did. He also speculated on the reasons for this, but his speculation led him to a different conclusion than the McKinlays. As you will see, he concluded that the decline in infectious disease mortality wasn’t primarily about nutrition. First, though, let’s look at the quote that RFK Jr. cherry picks:
The principal half truths were that medical research had stamped out the great killers of the past —tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, puerperal sepsis, etc. —and that medical research and our superior system of medical care were major factors extending life expectancy…
So far, this is not unreasonable, but RFK Jr. leaves out a lot, instead pivoting back to Dr. Cantwell’s chart, which he calls “deceptive” and “precisely the kind of scientifically baseless propaganda device against which Professor Kass warned us.” Here’s the thing. Contrary to RFK Jr.’s whole vibe that improved nutrition was a major factor contributing to the major declines in mortality from infectious diseases last century, Kass actually points out that it probably was not, explicitly noting that there was little evidence that nutritional improvements accounted for the decline in mortality from common infections:
Currently fashionable is the view that nutritional improvements account for the decline in mortality from common infections and that nutritional inadequacy is a major factor in explaining the present predilection of the poor for certain communicable disorders. In fact, there is little useful evidence to support this view. Experimentally, the nutritional deficiencies that are needed to substantially affect resistance to infection are generally extreme, and in the case of certain viral disorders such deficiencies may often increase resistance.
Clinically, there is not much evidence of manifest malnutrition in economically underprivileged populations in this or in other industrialized countries, if the available indices of malnutrition are used, even though it is evident that certain infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and rheumatic fever, are pretty much limited to the poor.
Funny how RFK Jr. decided not to quote that passage. So what did account for the differences? Kass speculated:
What other explanations are there for the effects of being poor? One explanation was developed in England more than 40 years ago (figure 6). It was shown that rates of rheumatic heart disease were almost linearly related to crowding at home. This is understandable since spread by droplet infection is greatest in a narrow radius around an infected source and the home is, particularly for children the place in which most prolonged contact will occur.
Kass also cited data from World War I that showed that when beds in barracks were placed too close together rates of meningococcal infection among troops rose abruptly and a study from Baltimore that showed in African-American children that attack rates for rheumatic behavior were not related to low income or lower educational attainment, but were directly related to the number of people per bedroom. In other words, decreased crowding associated with lower socioeconomic status could account for a significant part of the decline.
Kass even concluded his address considering this possibility:
Can it be that most diseases that preferentially attack the poor are infectious in origin? Can we be sure that common chronic diseases are not due to infectious agents? Can we convince our increasingly skeptical public of the desirability of our continuing to ask and to explore such questions? I believe we can, but believe we must convince the public not by slick advertising tricks of which they are inherently suspicious, however gullible they may be, but by acting promptly and critically, by showing that we will set social objectives and that we will not allow gaps to appear between discovery and application-that we will deal with the full social problem and not with the more convenient but often less useful small portions that happen to command our individual attentions.
Ouch. That bit about dealing with the full social problem at the heart of infectious disease mortality and not the “more convenient but less useful small portions that happen to command our individual attentions” describes RFK Jr.’s MAHA movement and its fascination with banning food dyes and seed oils rather aptly, don’t you think?
Moreover,, we now know that she chronic diseases are due to infectious disease. Preventing infection with certain strains of human papilloma virus, for instance, prevents cervical and other cancers. In any case, agree with Kass or disagree with him, view his 55 year old observations as out of date or not, it’s clear that Kass, too, was arguing for a more activist public health science that addresses more than just medical treatment but embraces, again, the social determinants of health. Naturally, RFK Jr. only cherry picks a couple of sentences that allow him to claim that Kass didn’t think vaccines were important, ignoring huge swaths of text that go against his MAHA beliefs that nutrition and lifestyle are far more important than vaccines when it comes to infectious disease.
RFK Jr. is antivaccine
RFK Jr. having abused and misused these three publications, then goes on to attack Sen. Cantwell as a pharma shill and portray the claim that vaccines have saved millions of lives as nothing more than big pharmaceutical propaganda. This, of course, led me to ask: If you really aren’t antivaccine, why, then, are you doing your best to portray the idea that vaccines have saved lots of lives as scientifically wrong and nothing more than the product of pharmaceutical industry propaganda, captured medical societies, and politicians feeding at the pharma trough? That sure sounds pretty antivaccine to me. Sure, RFK Jr. states in a perfunctory manner that vaccines are a “critical part of public health” and even says that the measles vaccine can prevent infection, the serious complications of measles, and transmission, which is actually true, but I don’t think he believes it. He’s saying it just to—if you’ll excuse the term—inoculate himself against charges that he’s antivaccine, just as he always does.
How do I know RFK Jr. is being insincere? Easy. As soon as he makes his perfunctory statement that the measles vaccine works, he immediately pivots to attacking a straw man about “blind faith in vaccines alone as our only recourse against death by infection” and complaining that it’s “inclined our medical profession to discount the role of therapeutic drugs and vitamins and diet, exercise and other lifestyle changes that might fortify the human immune systems against all kinds of sickness,” referring dismissively to the “idea that health comes from a syringe,” which no one in pubic claims, as something that can distort public health and lead to misallocation of resources. After a brief interval to attack President Joe Biden’s pandemic responseand encouraging of mass vaccination against COVID-19 and to praise President Trump (who, he conveniently forgets, was President during most of the first year of the pandemic), RFK Jr. risibly concludes that he and President Trump will make sure that America has “the best childhood vaccination schedule.” (I kid you not. He said that.) Of course he blathers about “addressing vaccine injuries” and using “gold standard science” (which is a meaningless buzzword).
Seeing this video, I’m more convinced than ever that RFK Jr. is not just coming for your vaccines, he is coming for all vaccines. After all, to his message that vaccines are dangerous, he’s just added the antivax trope that they don’t work very well and are unnecessary if you are sufficiently healthy, well-nourished, and doing the “right” things, and, of course, there’s quack treatments to save you in case that fails.