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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These popular modern movements seem to attract people with small brains who are completely blind to the consequences of their actions.
Nail…on…head…
Bravo..!
When reality bites…That is one hell of a rude awakening, but thank the gods she survived and her kids are OK. I hope she’s now a lot wiser for this experience.
Wiser? Unlikely, she’ll be looking around for a white supremacist to blame.
“Now she’s fairly changed her tune”… but not enough to admit she was in error before.
No sympathy whatsoever for the trauma suffered by this woman. She and her kind pose a huge threat to civil society. .
Sorry, couldn’t help it!
And for the downtickers,
I bet this young lady wished the police had been there to kneel on her assailants necks no matter what colour those necks were!
she wouldn’t have give a toss so long as her and her kids where safe! Convince me otherwise instead of cowardly downticking!
I read a comment elsewhere which questioned the authenticity of the blood pattern on her face and which posited that the blood had been mixed with water to create a more extensive and gruesome flow. In any case, and bearing in mind her political allegiances and stated goals, as her fellow knee taking anti white racist traveller has said, it’s all part and parcel of living in a big city. Sorry, not sorry.
I would query the fact that her lippy and eye makeup are intact, neither of which would survive the experience of being roughed up and dragged around – hell, I’ve only got to sneeze to smudge my eye make-up.
Edited to add, why are her earrings still in place too?
All we need is a report of a noose and her masked attackers shouting “this is MAGA Country” for the picture to be complete. And didn’t George Floyd hold a pregnant woman up at gun point during a home invasion?
She may well of been cleaned up in hospital immediately after the attack then used a bit of fake blood to recreate an injury for her post but I don’t think there’s any doubt she was attacked. The big question is what colour were her attackers? There’s a good chance they were one of her black siblings she’s so desperate to be an ally with. If this is the case no doubt the attack was a result of slavery, systemic inequalities and white dominance. There’s no chance black attackers could of been people with free will who chose to do it.
Exactly – and no way is that red stuff blood. She’s up to something.
Fancy chain round her neck in the bigger picture in the daily email. Her top ;looks unruffled too.
Nevertheless, it was a terrible thing to happen to her. Hopefully she’ll change her mind about dismantling the police.
Looks like raspberry juice to me
The full picture shows the top she is wearing has quite a damp patch like it’s been poured on. Her hair looks untouched as does her face except for the splatters.
Are there any reports of what the neighbours did after the attackers left? I couldn’t find any except the neighbours “wanting to help” while the attack was in-progress. I would have thought it newsworthy to report how they came to assist once the attackers had gone.
Yes, I’ve just had a closer look at the picture – eye make-up perfect, no smudges so no obvious attempt to wipe her face, ditto lippy. Her appearance is fake. Was her make-up done specifically for a photo shoot and some blood applied, carefully mind, just before the shutter was pressed?
So if the piccie is fake what about the story? I suspect some minor argy-bargy which she has blown up out of all proportion.
Might have been better to show a picture of her supposedly broken leg.
Some speculation in the Telegraph article about the colour of the assailants, but if they had been white it would have been trumpeted loud and clear, as is normally the case in the media.
That’s what immediately sprung to my mind, HP. If I had been savagely beaten, so much so that blood ran down my face, I don’t think the first thing I would have done would be to take a selfie. I would have been worried for my children. There is no obvious bruising, no – as you say – smudging of make-up, no blood-shot eyes, no swelling or other cuts. It looks like raspberry juice and not blood which doesn’t dry like that. You tend to mop up blood that is running with a tissue or cloth which smears it. This looks like it was squirted on to be honest. Call me a sceptic and of course I may be wrong but something about this doesn’t add up.
Entirely agree Aethelred and:
“You tend to mop up blood that is running with a tissue or cloth which smears it.”
This is increasingly becoming a Democrat story.
(I am sure the euphemism is obvious.)
Seen a lot of bloody and beaten people and she looks faked. Glad I’m not the only one who has spotted it.
Yes, agreed. It does resemble a joke shop, Halloween effect type of effort. However, it’s a lot harder to fake a broken leg. Plus, call me soft as clarts, but I don’t care who you are or what you’ve done, I draw the line at somebody’s attempted murder/serious assault being witnessed by their own children. I’m just relieved everyone concerned is alive, being America and all..
While I agree about the children witnessing the ‘attack’ if the blood is being faked then how much else is being faked. There is no pallor, no ‘pain face’, no fear or anxiety, nothing. Having broken bones and been ‘duffed up’ (I won, but it did not feel like it, I had more boo-boos than my two assailants), and having also seen a lot ot ‘stuff’ in the Army, I can assure you that her body will react like any other persons body. You just cannot help it, adrenaline rush shows and I am not seeing anything.
I have net zero sympathy. In fact these thugs did all right-minded people a favour because unless others like this woman suffer that which they are happy to see visited on others the de-fund the police madness will not cease.
Suck it up lady.
The lovely Julie Birchill nailed it when she called them ‘luxury beliefs’….amazing how easily they crumple in the face of reality!!?
…not the same State I know, but oh the irony!!
https://themessenger.com/news/walmart-is-building-a-police-station-inside-its-new-atlanta-store-to-deter-shoplifting
Walmart announced plans to build a police station inside one of its stores in Georgia, local news outlet Rough Draft Atlanta reported.
The Vine City Walmart Supercenter closed last year after sustaining fire and water damage in a suspected arson case. Walmart executives and Atlanta officials announced on August 29 that it’s slated to reopen next May — with the addition of a police substation meant to deter shoplifters.
LOL!
Or this:
Instead of giving thumbs down why don’t those commentators have the b*lls to express their opinions so that we can see where they are coming from? Can they be BLM supporters?
The only ones with downticks seem to be the posts that are enjoying her misfortune. She may well be a left-wing Dem fk-wit but that doesn’t mean everyone appreciates kicking someone when they are down. And no, it wasn’t me that down ticked.
Not at all. See Mogwai.
Oh I can tell you exactly why, based on personal experience and my experimentation. Apparently there’s a correlation between being a tight-wad and a coward. All you have to do is mention a small, furry children’s pet and it’s even smaller appendage and you’ll trigger the feck out of them. But you still won’t get an actual reply though.
Minneapolis were all for defunded the police. How did that turn out.
Instant karma!
LMFAO
So there IS a God.
Trying hard not to laugh but it’s difficult
“Let’s hope other wokesters can change their views on the police without being assaulted.”
Hopefully but doubtful.