President-Elect Trump has nominated Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) as Health and Human Services Secretary. Should we cheer or groan? Appalled media dub RFK “the anti-vaxxer RFK”. Like David Irving, he is not to be named without pejorative adjectives.
RFK is a man of strained voice, complex past and heretical views – on vaccines, fluoride, raw milk, food additives, the Covid response and Wi-Fi-radiation. And on HIV not being the cause of AIDS. Some notions are away with the fairies. The evidence that HIV causes AIDS is overwhelming, for example. But sometimes, just sometimes, he’s on the money. And, as a lawyer, he has a talent for seeing where Science (with the capital ‘S’) is burying inconveniences in the cellar, like Fred West.
RFK is the son of Robert Kennedy, assassinated in ‘68, and nephew of President Kennedy. Once considered for Environment Secretary by Obama, RFK began this election cycle seeking the Democrats’ nomination. They ostracised him, favouring Biden. So, he ran as an independent and the Dems did their legal utmost to keep him off the ballot. Finally, after the first attempt on Trump’s life, RFK allied with the Orange Man. His price was adding “Make America Healthy Again” to Trump’s “Make America Great Again”. It’s an odd marriage: photos show RFK looking aghast at his Team Trump’s lunchbox, supplied by McDonalds.
Whatever the adjectives and RFK’s sometimes crazy ideas, he has done more good than most men ever will. He successfully represented the Hudson River Fishermen (now ‘Riverkeepers’) against multiple industrial polluters. Infamously contaminated in the 1960s, the river is now clean, carefully patrolled and has seen the return of numerous fish species. This success prompted the establishment of Waterkeeper groups on other rivers, whilst Kennedy successfully litigated elsewhere against DuPont and Monsanto, with settlements exceeding $100 million. Surely you support clean rivers?
And so, to vaccines…
As RFK tells it, whenever he lectured, he found the front seats occupied by mothers whose children had developmental problems. They stalked him. Their infants, they said, were developing normally. But then, after vaccinations at 15-18 months, their language and coordination skills regressed.
The women asserted causality. RFK became convinced. I’m not. Regressive autism with an onset around 15-18 months has been known for over 100 years, and 15-18 months is when children receive several vaccine shots (figure below). If you’re going to develop regressive autism, you do so at around the time as you get these shots. Association isn’t causation. Wakefield’s infamous publication can be dismissed too. He misreported and misrepresented his data, likely with a financial motive, and had a sample of just 12 children and no controls.
But this should not detract from legitimate concerns that RJK highlights. The U.S.-CDC childhood schedule (above) includes COVID-19 and hepatitis B. In the case of Covid, why vaccinate healthy infants, at no risk of severe infection with a briefly-active product tailored to a strain already likely superseded? Original antigenic sin then may distort the infant’s immune response for when he or she does catch SARS-CoV-2, as he or she indubitably will. What’s more, you are giving a novel product with uncertain long-term risks. Europe has retreated from this recklessness. Why does America persist?
Next, hepatitis B. As RFK says: “It’s a [largely] blood-borne disease of drug addicts and rougher prostitutes.” So long as you screen expectant mothers (whose infants should be vaccinated pronto in the case of a positive test) there’s no sense vaccinating all infants. Only the manufacturer benefits. Hepatitis B vaccine is better reserved, as in the U.K., for risk groups – drug users and those regularly exposed to blood.
Chickenpox vaccination, though recently also advocated by the U.K.’s JCVI, is arguable too. Childhood infection is mild. Adult infection is more painful, as I can vouch. Sometimes the virus then becomes dormant, reawakening to cause shingles in old age. The vital question therefore is: “How long does vaccine-induced protection last?” Being protected in childhood but becoming vulnerable later would be undesirable. Such aspects need long trials.
RFK also, and reasonably, highlights a disturbing analysis by highly-regarded Danish vaccinologists, finding that, despite better nutritional status and being protected against three infections, African children given the Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis (DTP) vaccine had higher all-cause mortality than their unvaccinated peers. The authors postulate that subunit vaccines like DTP may suppress non-specific immunity against infection in general whereas live vaccines (like BCG against tuberculosis) stimulate it. This would be important in developing countries where children are daily exposed to multiple pathogens. Science should research such hypotheses, not hide them away. If some vaccines suppress non-specific immunity and others promote it there are implications for the order and timing of vaccinations.
Next, although I’ve not heard RFK highlight it, there’s Steve Kirsch’s analysis of patient-level Czech Republic data during the pandemic. This shows that recipients of Moderna’s Covid vaccine – and particularly younger vaccinees at little risk from Covid – were more likely to be dead within a year than those receiving Pfizer’s product (which isn’t to say the latter is entirely safe). The analysis is devastatingly simple and hard to refute. I’ve found a deep unwillingness to discuss it at scientific meetings.
If RFK can push these aspects of vaccinology up the agenda, he will do good.
What’s more, his bailiwick will include the CDC, NIH and FDA. All need reform following the pandemic. What work was sponsored at Wuhan by NIH (and the military) and why? To do it on the risky cheap; or to keep a surveillance eye inside a Chinese institute? Exactly why did state functionaries promote and orchestrate the infamous Proximal Origins paper promoting a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2 despite its authors privately having doubts? Who ordered suppression of dissenting voices and on what authority? How did masks come to be enforced – even for toddlers, who cannot handle them hygienically – when the supportive evidence is so scanty? Why was universal Covid vaccination sought, with mandates, once the vaccines’ failure to stop infection and transmission was abundantly clear? Did the incidence of cardiac problems rise among military personnel following Covid vaccination? Anonymised patient-level U.S. data on Covid vaccines should be released, as in Czechia. Most importantly: how can such a disproportionate response to a respiratory virus be prevented from ever again being inflicted upon a free people? As Matt Ridley points out in the Spectator, official Science’s Covid failures fuelled RFK’s rise. He now has his chance to flush the Augean Stable.
The NIH needs breaking up. In a 30-year reign over one division (NIAID) Anthony “I am the Science” Fauci became judge, jury and executioner. He advised the Government on Covid and determined which researchers received grants. Only the reckless, retired and nearly-retired dared to criticise, for fear of losing career-vital funding. Such power must never again rest with one man: the grant-giving and Government advisory parts of NIH need a thick wall between them. Having written an excoriating biography of Tony Fauci, RFK is the man to build it.
The FDA needs restructuring too. Whilst I don’t buy entirely RFK’s assertion that it is “captured” by industry, it is malfunctioning. The original mRNA vaccines, representing a completely novel type of medicine, were swiftly licensed for universal use, followed by updated formulations entirely lacking human efficacy trials. On the other hand, the trial requirements for new antibiotics – reserved for a few patients with uncommon superbugs – remain onerous, despite use being limited. This discourages companies from antibiotic development and drives bankruptcies among those foolish enough to enter the field.
RFK is surely right to say that America is unhealthy, with vastly higher autism, allergy, childhood type 2 diabetes and obesity rates than when he was a child. Medical expenditure is higher and lifespan shorter than in other developed countries. Diet must be the main factor in type 2 diabetes and obesity. Whether that’s down to amount or, as RFK thinks, to over-processing, is moot. Either way there is no good reason why the USA allows numerous food additives and colourants that are banned in the EU, U.K. and Canada.
The NIH should urgently look at autism, irrespective of any (doubtful) vaccine link. Are the rises real, a function of increased diagnosis, or due to a broadening definition? I note a literature claiming genetic factors, but this can hardly explain rising incidence, and I recall the wild goose chase for a ‘gay gene’. If rises reflect expansion of the diagnostic criteria, is this helping those diagnosed to live productive lives? Or were we better with that old world where we’d say, “Joe’s a funny kid”, but smile, shrug and help him find his metier without a medical label. As for the rise in ADHD diagnoses, how much is driven by the availability of treatments, such as Ritalin? Big questions must be asked about the rise in allergies too. Do they reflect diet? Too little early-life exposure to antigens? Or too much?
There’s one more thing. RFK promises to ban the direct-to-public adverts for prescription medicines that bespatter every TV programme in America. Hurrah! Nowhere else allows this, except New Zealand. Irrespective of whether the adverts encourage the public to seek inappropriate treatment, the income discourages the media from holding pharma to account. Perhaps that is the purpose: bribery, not advertising? RFK thinks so. Either way, the sooner it stops, the better. And legislation should extend to ‘charities’. Consider Gates’s Media Partnership Programme. Readers of the Daily Telegraph will recall how, through 2020-22, balance and the chance for comment gradually permeated the paper’s main coverage on Covid. But it never reached the vehemently pro-narrative pieces of the Gates-sponsored ‘Global Health Security’ section. Propaganda isn’t charity.
So – unlike many scientific colleagues – I welcome RFK’s nomination. I hope he survives Trump’s dubious diet and the Senate confirmation hearings. I think him wrong on many topics, sometimes wildly so. But I believe he will shake a scientific and regulatory apparat that is entrenched, arrogant and self-serving. And which, during the pandemic, inflicted far crueller insanities than he would dare contemplate. I hope too that he forces research funding back to big questions and encourages exploration of heterodox hypotheses. That is how science advances.
Dr. David Livermore is a retired Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of East Anglia.
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