IF HE sticks to his word, Robert F Kennedy Jr will be a bull in a china shop, causing havoc and shattering egos and ethically dubious contracts in the lucrative governmental-pharmaceutical complex. During his pre-confirmation grilling by senators, RFK seemed to backtrack on many of his stances, but perhaps this was playing the game to ensure his approval. He is now Secretary of the Department of Health & Human Services, so let’s hope for some real changes.
Certainly his opponents fear that he will disrupt established relationships between federal agencies, universities, hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry. Not having online access, I sometimes buy the New York Times to observe how the progressive elite maintains its version of truth in the face of a ‘populist’ onslaught. Monday’s edition was startling. While controversies rage over Ukraine, the Middle East, the Mexican border, tariffs and a blaze of presidential executive orders, the biggest villain for New York Times columnists is not Trump but RFK.
The opprobrium is intense: the three leading opinion pieces were all directed at the former Democrat’s threat to the status quo in medicine and public health. Given the substantial funding of mainstream media, directly by Bill Gates and indirectly by Big Pharma, it would not be too far-fetched to suspect that the NYT is appeasing its paymasters.
‘Sorry, Mr Kennedy, most Americans want their shots’ was the preposterous headline of one of the columns. According to Caitlin Rivers, epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, while there are many things that divide American public opinion, everyone agrees that ‘vaccines are good’. That’s all vaccines, whatever their stage of development and testing, and whatever their safety and effectiveness.
‘Vaccines remain enormously popular’, Rivers boasts, as if she’s writing about a brand of soft drink rather than biochemical injections. The majority of Americans don’t take the flu shot, so people don’t necessarily agree with her. The Amish don’t take any vaccines at all, and they’re the healthiest folk. And at least a fifth (probably more) refused the ‘Fauci Ouchy’ despite the punitive covid mandates. Rivers is concerned that hundreds of Americans are dying every week from covid, although she doesn’t note whether they’ve had the supposedly life-saving vaccine.
Rivers bemoans a research finding that college students who read a ‘falsely balanced’ report on vaccine safety were led to believe that the evidence was not as settled as the medical establishment claims. Rivers shows herself as a vaccine cultist who will not hear any contrary argument. Vaccines must remain routine, and referring to RFK she concludes that ‘leaders who undermine this basic tool may find themselves on the wrong side of both science and voters’. I thought that the vaccines were meant to be lauded as a ‘miracle of science’ rather than a ‘basic tool’, and as for voting, RFK was appointed on a manifesto of Trump’s electoral landslide.
Another column issues a deadly warning about RFK. According to Gregg Gonsalves, another epidemiologist (Yale School of Public Health), ‘just asking questions’ is a silly notion of vaccine and virus sceptics. In South Africa, he asserts, more than 300,000 people died as a consequence of an ignorant political leader denying science. RFK doubts the official narrative that HIV causes Aids, attributing this to a conspiracy by the former head of infectious diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Gonsalves regards RFK’s carefully researched book The Real Anthony Fauci as a work of fiction. Like the health minister of Thabo Mbeki’s government in Pretoria, who denied the HIV-Aids link and promoted a diet, RFK is dealing in ‘debunked canards’ and ‘science denialism’.
For Gonsalves, RFK is more dangerous than Mbeki, and he looks forward to when ‘our own Manto Tshabalala-Msimang leaves in disgrace’. He notes that once Mbeki and his health minister were gone, South Africa developed the largest antiretroviral drug programme in the world. But he has nothing to say about the iatrogenic hazard of these drugs, which are suspected of killing singer Freddie Mercury among many others.
The leading column was written by former NIH director Harold Varmus, who believes that the Trump administration and the appointment of RFK ‘endangers public health’. Varmus moans that ‘never before have I seen my profession so politicised as it is now’, arguing that ‘the executive branch is waging war on American scientific enterprise’. Scientists working for federal departments cannot focus on research grant applications because they are worried about their jobs.
Varmus is scathing on RFK: ‘One of the country’s most notorious vaccine critics is now the health secretary, despite his history of spreading misinformation, his disparagement of the Department of Health and Human Services staff, and his bizarre and immature behaviour.’
RFK and other cranks are still linking vaccines to autism, Varmus claims, long after this was fact-checked. But the suspected causal connection has never been disproved, and there is a clear temporal relationship between autism diagnoses and the steady increase in childhood vaccinations. How many injections would Varmus, Rivers and Gonsalves want before they too start asking questions?
Varmus also railed against covid sceptic and likely NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, for his ‘outlandish proposal’ to deprive institutions that suppress academic freedom of NIH funding. Vaccines must be protected at all costs.
The three columnists all believe that after Trump and RFK depart, everything will go back to normal. But more and more people have become aware that Big Pharma and its money-spinning vaccines are not primarily for their benefit. Shots are now being fired at the fraudulent ‘experts’ and profiteers, who may never get back on their undeserved pedestal. Nevertheless, there is much to be done to make America healthy again.
