Here It Is, The RFK Jr./Dr. Phil Interview Recap You Never Asked For!
Not afraid to be the opposite of servicey.
I made it about seven minutes into Dr. Phil’s interview with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. before I broke. I made it through the not-so-good doctor’s extremely vague introduction, casting Kennedy as a rebel, heroically standing up to “the man,” without mentioning any of his actual beliefs, but it wasn’t until seven minutes in, when the two of them expressed their shared awe that the HHS was so much bigger and cost so much more than the Pentagon and what we spend on defense, that I needed to scream into a throw pillow.
Because obviously we should be spending more money on killing people than on trying to cure cancer, right?
The interview aired on Monday night, and so far, understandably, the part that’s getting the most attention is the part where RFK Jr. encourages parents to “do their own research” on vaccines and suggested that the measles vaccine was unsafe. But because I am apparently a masochist, I’m going to watch the whole 120 minute thing … and I’m taking you all on that journey with me.
It got worse after that. Because after that, Dr. Phil — who we can assume, as a big Trump supporter, does not support Medicare for All or any form of socialized medicine — had the gall to note that “We have the highest healthcare cost and the poorest healthcare delivery of the other 37 developed nations that it’s compared to.”
Yes. Because those nations have universal healthcare and the United States is the only nation in the developed world without it. That is why they have better outcomes. How are we going to have a better outcome than those countries when everyone can’t get healthcare? How are we going to have better outcomes when people are afraid to take ambulances? How are we going to have better outcomes when people don’t have access to preventative care and don’t get things taken care of before they become serious, because everything is so expensive? We can do all of the cancer research in the world, and that’s great (and we should!), but that doesn’t help the people who cannot afford healthcare.
I’ve seen several Republicans touting this line lately and I can’t believe it, especially after the many years they’ve spent claiming that we have the best healthcare in the world and all of the other countries are jealous of us.
Kennedy then starts going on about how the CDC is “responsible” for the fact that Americans are so sick and have so many chronic diseases, which they’re not. Seems worth noting here that one of the most common chronic diseases in the United States is tooth decay, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to get fluoride out of the tap water.
And then RFK Jr. starts in on the fertility of teenagers and his oft-cited statistic that 77 percent of teenagers are not eligible to serve in the military for health reasons, calling it a matter of national security. While, yes, the number one reason is obesity (though, please to recall, conservatives are the ones who think “walkable cities,” a thing that would certainly help with that, are a communist plot to take their cars and freedom away), the second is drug use or a criminal record and the third is inadequate education. That third one, coincidentally, is the number one reason people think Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes any kind of sense.
Then! Then! He starts going on and on about how there was no chronic disease when his uncle (JFK, you may have heard) was president and no money was spent on chronic diseases at all. Just to be clear, the most common chronic diseases are heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy and, again, tooth decay.
Point of fact, deaths due to heart disease hit a high in the 1960s, when his uncle was president, and have steadily declined ever since. From 1965 to 1980, they decreased by 26 percent. From 1980 to 2008, they decreased 64 percent.
While heart disease deaths were lower in the early 20th century, they were still the fourth most common cause of death, behind pneumonia and tuberculosis, the latter of which is no longer an issue (for now) because vaccines.
After this, Dr. Phil pulled up a list of the things RFK Jr., who is not a doctor nor a scientist, suspects are the “root causes” of childhood chronic illness, which included things like medical treatments (ie: vaccines), electromagnetic radiation, and absorption of toxic material. As for that last one, let us just note that the CDC, under RFK Jr., has refused to help Milwaukee address its problem of unsafe lead levels in public schools.
Following this, RFK Jr. and Dr. Phil had a relatively bland conversation about tobacco companies and food dyes and additives and how kids should eat better. Dr. Phil then followed that up by asking, “Now, the things that we’re talking about, these are not things that are challenging to follow, right? This makes common sense. So why do you think people are so threatened by what you’re doing? It can’t be just the confusion about vaccination, because you don’t have to go very far to find legacy media that either won’t talk to you, or labels you some kind of conspiracy, crazy nutball. Why do you think people are so threatened by the message that you are delivering?”
So here’s what he’s doing. He’s taking the absolute most innocuous thing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believes or wants to do with the HHS and making that the reason people are calling him a “conspiracy, crazy nutball.” That’s like suggesting that people’s primary opposition to Hitler was that he was a vegetarian.
RFK Jr.’s reasoning, of course, was that it’s the industries that make these things that are convincing everyone that he’s nuts.
Somehow, this devolves into a conversation about RFK Jr.’s good friend, the very loyal and funny … Roger Ailes, who Dr. Phil agreed was a great guy. RFK Jr. explains that Ailes told Kennedy that he agreed with him on everything but couldn’t put him on any of the primetime shows to talk about it because of their pharmaceutical advertisers. Then, I assume, they compared sexual assault accusations.
I will note here that no one is mad about the idea of taking pharmaceutical ads off TV, either, and this is actually something the Left has been saying for years now.
About a half hour into the interview (yes, all of this nonsense occurs before then), we finally get to vaccines. RFK Jr. says the things he’s supposed to say about how people who get the MMR vaccine will almost definitely not get measles, but then claims that the real problem with the vaccine is the “mumps portion of the vaccine and the combination,” which he claims was “never safety tested.”
Do I need to say more than that? Because it’s just an outright lie. There have been many studies in many countries and the vaccine is definitely safe. RFK Jr. then claimed that the mumps portion of the vaccine “has never worked.”
This is also a lie, and a fucking ridiculous one at that, because it’s pretty easy to see that vaccinated people are not going around getting mumps these days.
Dr. Phil then did his level best to sanewash what RFK Jr. was saying into something more normal, without pushing back on him at all.
RFK Jr. then claimed that none of the vaccines were “safety tested” against placebos, claiming that this means that “we have no idea what the risk profiles for these products are.”
Also a lie, and here is a list of those tests:
Rubella vaccine
Pneumococcal vaccine
Hib vaccines
HPV vaccine
The Salk Polio vaccine
Measles vaccine
Tdap vaccine
COVID vaccine
He then claimed that the CDC did a study on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) called “The Lazarus Study” that showed that 99 percent of vaccine injuries go unreported … and then used that to say, once again that “we have no idea about the safety profiles of these products.”
This is also, unsurprisingly, a straight up lie.
Dr. Phil then moved the conversation to autism, and, predictably, RFK Jr. repeated his usual lies, which we all know by heart by now.
Dr. Phil once again tried to help him make his ideas sound more normal.
“You’re spending money ($50 million) and making commitments to researchers to try and figure out causes and treatments of this, so why would someone — if we really want to help this population, and we really want to bring them, this population, diagnostic tools, treatment tools, coping strategies for the children and the families, why would someone want to sabotage those efforts?” he asked.
Because that’s not remotely what he’s doing. Because the head of the study is a widely discredited anti-vaxxer who has been in trouble with the law for practicing medicine without a license.
And, to his credit, RFK Jr. corrected Dr. Phil, saying it wasn’t really about treatment so much as “finding out what’s causing it,” and we know he believes it’s vaccines.
Kennedy Jr. then explains once again that he does not believe the cause of autism can be genetic, because it’s an “epidemic” and an “epidemic” can’t be caused by genes, and that they can only maybe cause a “predisposition” to autism. Dr. Phil then tried to clean that up as well.
“You’re saying, clearly, there is a powerful genetic predisposition, you’re wanting to know what the interaction is between the genetic predisposition and environmental toxins or behavioral interactions, you’re wanting to know what the interaction is between all of the factors. Let it be 90-10, 95-5, whatever. You want to know what the interaction is,” he said.
And RFK Jr. noped that right out of the park, saying, “Whatever’s causing the epidemic is not genetic,” later claiming, “We know it’s a toxin that became widespread around 1989.”
That was when Dr. Phil decided to let the audience ask the questions. The first question, of course, was about how vaccines cause autism, which led to RFK Jr. talking about how all of these parents took their kids in for their 16-month or two-year vaccinations and then the kids regressed and became autistic.
Autistic regression is a known phenomena that has jack shit to do with autism, and usually occurs around months 18-24. It is one of a few different and somewhat similar conditions in which that kind of regression occurs, including childhood disintegrative disorder, as well as “two biological conditions with known etiologies [that] also involve regression with some behaviors resembling autism behavioral phenotype. These are Rett syndrome (a genetic disorder) and Landau–Kleffner syndrome (which involves a seizure disorder).”
After a break, Dr. Phil took the reins back to ask Kennedy Jr. why people write about infectious diseases more than they write about chronic diseases, which is a lot like asking why police only send out Amber Alerts for children who have just gone missing in a specific area instead of all the missing children everywhere, or why the CDC (used to) alert people when it’s not safe to eat romaine lettuce because of e. coli, instead of alerting them to all the food that is unhealthy for them to eat. Because people need to know if there is an outbreak so that they can do what they need to in order to avoid it. Like, for instance, getting a vaccine.
But Kennedy Jr. was also puzzled by this, “because every new case of measles is a headline,” even though there are “100,000 new cases of autism a year” and 230 million Americans who are diabetic and prediabetic (which he once again claims “was unknown” when he was a kid, which I imagine would have come as a big surprise to my grandfather) and “every kid who gets a diabetes diagnosis, there should be a headline and every kid who gets an autism diagnosis, there should be a headline, but you never read about ‘em.”
Well, I guess if we did that, we wouldn’t have time to fact check all of Kennedy Jr.’s lies, which I imagine would be pretty nice for him.
Next up, we get to the part everyone’s been talking about, in which a woman asks him what his advice would be for new parents, with regards to vaccines. And yes, he said “do your own research” — which for people who share his views usually means “look at some memes on Facebook.”
A few audience members later, we get Emily, who tells us that her “biggest concern is the stratospheric aerosol injections that are continuously peppered on us every day. Bromium, aluminum, strontium, it’s sprayed in our skies all day long. […] How do we stop it?”
In case it’s not 100 percent clear … our dear Emily is talking about chemtrails, which are not real. I’m also going to need to point out that “bromium” is the homeopathic term for “bromine.” Strangely enough, people believe it cures respiratory problems, which it does not, because water doesn’t have a memory and homeopathy is bullshit.
“That is not happening in my agency,” Kennedy answered. “We don’t do that. It’s done — we think — by DARPA and a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel. Those materials are put in jet fuel. I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it. We’re bringing on somebody who’s gonna think only about that, find out who’s doing that and hold them accountable.”
No. Just no.
This is one promise he’ll end up breaking — because you can’t put a stop to something that doesn’t exist in the first place. No matter what he does, these people are still going to see contrails from planes in the sky and go “Oh no, chemtrails!”
He may as well promise them Bigfoot.
Come to think of it, he may as well promise them scientific proof that vaccines cause autism.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Thanks again, Oprah.
RFK Jr. was born on third base and thinks he scored a touchdown.