If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had been born with a different name, he’d probably be peddling miracle mushroom cancer cures on YouTube right now.
Instead, our french fry-slinging presidential hopeful Donald Trump has, according to RFK, “promised” to give him “control” of all Washington public health agencies, “which is, you know, key to making America healthy.”
RFK has wiggled his way into the hearts of MAGA by (rightly) opposing the public health establishment’s abuses during COVID — and, of course, by endorsing Trump.
And there’s nothing inherently wrong with RFK’s stated goal of encouraging Americans to be healthy “again.” Though, if he had his way, we’d all end up eating tofurkeys with spelt stuffing while praying for the sun to shine so our solar panels will kick in.
The bigger problem is that he’s a proven scaremongering authoritarian and dangerous Luddite whose ideas would make life considerably worse for everyone.
The other day, Trump-Vance transition team co-chair Howard Lutnick explained that RFK didn’t want the Health and Human Services job; he merely wanted access to federal data — allegedly hidden from the public — to prove vaccines were dangerous so we can take them “right off, off of the market.”
Granted, I’m not a scientist, but I suspect assuming what data will tell you isn’t how it’s supposed to be done. But RFK doesn’t want Americans to have vaccine choices. He wants to deny them the right to use them.
And after spending an entire “2 1/2 hours” with the man, Lutnick had embraced all his anti-vaxx nuttery, spreading the pernicious claim that vaccinations are linked to autism, for which there is zero scientific evidence. As proof, Lutnick made the preposterous claim that we “know so many more people” with autism these days as compared to when he was young.
Now, I’m a bit younger than Lutnick, but we grew up in the same area. Surely, he can recall kids being called “slow” or “weird” or “off,” or far uglier things, but never “autistic” or “neurodivergent.” It is highly probable that the spike in autism cases is an epidemic of discovery. There is increased public awareness of how autism presents itself and what it is.
Teachers, parents, caretakers and friends all look out for it. Doctors have better ways of diagnosing it. Millions of people who might never have even known they were autistic have been identified as being on the spectrum.
Basing policy on the childhood recollections of a billionaire doesn’t seem very sciency, either.
Then again, even if there were more cases of autism, there’s still no evidence vaccines are the cause. Lutnick has embraced a false cause fallacy. We do a lot of things we do today that we didn’t do in the 1960s. Why not blame autism on cellphone use?
Of course, even if RFK were correct, banning vaccines to curb autism would entail a disastrous tradeoff. The year Lutnick was born, the child mortality rate was 31 per thousand in the U.S., and now it’s seven. A few years before Lutnick was born, the U.S. saw 21,000 cases of paralytic polio. There is none now. Children have been spared all sorts of horrifying diseases like measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis and so
on. The upside of vaccinations has been a massive boon for humankind.
And make no mistake, RFK isn’t just a skeptic of the COVID vax. In 2023, he said there is “no vaccine that is safe and effective.” He claimed that vaccines had sparked an “autism epidemic,” which he abhorrently compared to a “holocaust.”
The man who wants get fluoride out of water (suggesting it makes kids gay) and put a stop to the crime of “chem trails” once said that COVID had been genetically engineered as an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon that spared Ashkenazi Jews.
“I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated,'” RFK explained in a 2021 podcast interview. Any rational person would ignore the raving of some rando on the hiking trail going on about the evils of vaccines.
Not, apparently, the Trump campaign.
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