This week, the state of Pennsylvania reported its fourth measles death this year — the highest number in decades. So far, the victims have included two infants too young to receive the vaccine, an unvaccinated 40-year-old woman, and an unvaccinated 18-year-old woman. Just today there was a reported exposure at the NICU at the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania. That’s bad!
This year, there have been 731 cases of measles in the state, which is far more cases than were reported in the whole of the United States each year from 1996 to 2018 (and from 2020 to 2023). There have been 3,294 cases in the United States so far this year, the most since 1992.
So naturally, this week was just a really good time for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to give a speech to his old pals at Children’s Health Defense all about the good work he is doing at the White House to combat the scourge of … vaccines.
The Department of Health and Human Services secretary’s speech followed one from MAHA Institute President Mark Gorton, who has claimed that the success of the polio vaccine was a “massive medical fraud and a masterful PR deception.”
“Upon the release of the vaccine, they narrowed the criteria for categorizing paralysis with polio and stopped paying doctors for categorizing cases as polio,” he said in a speech earlier this year. “Instead of calling paralysis ‘polio,’ doctors started calling it acute flaccid myelitis. These policy changes virtually guaranteed that the authorities could report reductions in polio even if the vaccines had no effect.”
Is that a lie? It is.
Polio had been considered a cause of acute flaccid myelitis, just not the only cause. To boot, during the height of the polio epidemic in 1952, there were nearly 58,000 people infected, with 21,000 cases of paralysis. The highest number of diagnosed AFM cases in the US was in 2020, when there were 201 cases. Even if these were the same disease, which they are not, that would certainly be a reduction drastic enough to validate the vaccine.
Also speaking before RFK Jr. was Andrew Wakefield, the author of the widely discredited study that very much did not prove a causal link between autism and vaccines. Feel like it’s worth noting here that I recently found out that Wakefield was peddling his own vaccine just a year before he came out with that stupid study. What a strange coincidence!
RFK Jr. began his speech by thanking all the moms of the “vaccine injured” who “have given so much of their lives to go to the state capitals, to study the science, to become experts in what happened to their child and not only care for their children, but also care for all of our children by doing what they could to make sure that those injuries could not happen to other kids.”
Or, as some of us might put it, “put all of our health in danger by being fucking idiots who didn’t know what they were talking about.”
He then thanked the scientists who were “demonized, marginalized” for publishing widely discredited studies on the dangers of vaccines.
He later assured them all that they have a “friend” in the White House, meaning Donald Trump, who has called the MMR vaccine “lethal” despite there not being an ounce of evidence to back that up.
Kennedy explained that his interest in all of this was due to the fact that he had a very large family with many brothers and sisters and cousins and they were all healthy with no asthma and no allergies, and then when he had kids in the 1980s, he noticed that they had asthma and allergies and other issues. Gee, could that possibly be attributable to lifestyle changes, pollution, and other issues? Could it be that his family’s wealth attributed to their overall healthfulness? Or the fact that in the 1950s, when Kennedy was growing up, asthma was considered to be a nervous condition — which is partly why they always showed anxious nerds with their inhalers. It was one of what they called the “holy seven” of psychosomatic illnesses, which also included peptic ulcers, rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, essential hypertension, neurodermatitis, and thyrotoxicosis.
He complained of other “injuries” they had that no one in his family had, like “ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, ticks, Tourette’s syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, autism,” despite the fact that none of those things are “injuries.” There’s a reason he keeps referring to them as that, though. Injuries have a direct cause. Something you can point to and say “that’s how this happened.” When I broke my foot as a teenager, it was because I fell off a curb while trying to talk to a boy I had a crush on (it did not go well!). But my ADHD wasn’t “caused” by anything other than perhaps genetics, as its heritability is estimated at 77–88 percent.
He also took some time to conflate Type 1 juvenile diabetes, which is an autoimmune condition, with younger people developing regular Type 2 diabetes, which is typically triggered by lifestyle choices.
He spent no small amount of time harping, once again, about how autism didn’t exist when he was young (it absolutely did) and how it suddenly started being diagnosed more in 1989, which he ties to “something” that happened in 1989, likely an “environmental toxin” we are meant to assume is vaccine-related.
Well, I can’t think of anything that happened in 1989, but I can think of something that happened in 1988 — the movie Rain Man was released. While the film’s portrayal led to no small amount of misconceptions about autism, like that everyone with autism is also a savant of some kind, it vastly increased cultural awareness of the condition, resulting in people being more likely to seek diagnoses. Compare that to 1963’s A Child is Waiting, in which Judy Garland and Burt Lancaster star as child therapists at a center for children with Down Syndrome dealing with a child whose symptoms today would clearly be diagnosed as autism, but are instead treated as something that could be fixed if his parents would stop avoiding him. Indeed, in those days people thought that autism was caused by “refrigerator mothers” who were “emotionally cold.” This theory was not disproven until the 1970s, when scientists came to understand autism as a neurological and biological issue.
Call me crazy, but I think parents might be less likely to seek out treatment for something believed to be caused by being shitty parents.
Kennedy then moved on to talking about food and nutrition (blaming ADHD on food) for a minute before switching back to how he only got three vaccines, whereas kids today get 18 — because apparently we were just supposed to stop trying to develop vaccines for serious diseases and illnesses once that got to a number that RFK Jr. thinks sounds crazy. He listed off a number of conditions he believes could be caused by vaccines, going by things reported in the VAERS system — which, as you know, is where anyone, doctor or not, can report any issue had post-vaccine, whether or not it was actually related to the vaccine. That would be why you see things in there like car accidents and people turning into the Incredible Hulk.
“If you look at all of those 18 vaccines, there are 454 adverse events listed in total and they include almost all of the injuries like diabetes, death, sudden infant death syndrome, uh anorexia, allergic reactions, allergies, asthma, autoimmune diseases,” he said. “I have, you know, I have this list here and I’m just randomly reading things off. Encephelopasty, Kawasaki’s disease, Guillain-Barré, um, all kinds of gastrointestinal illnesses.”
Yeah, um. I don’t think vaccines cause anorexia. That seems like a bit of a stretch.
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Throughout the whole speech it was clear that he feels very strongly about continuing his anti-vaccine nonsense and that he lied about this when he testified during his confirmation hearings.
We’re already seeing the deleterious effects of his bullshit, from measles cases all over the nation to the fact that the state of Florida is about to eliminate all vaccine requirements, with state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo claiming that “every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.”
It’s not going to end well, and not just because of the people who are going to get sick. Validating the kind of “logic” that leads RFK Jr. and others to these very stupid conclusions can be just as contagious and just as dangerous as any virus.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
My daughter got out of the NICU two months ago yesterday. I cannot say what I would do to this fucker.
Mengele-without-a-medical degree knows the motto of Maladministration 2.0.
Go Lysenkoist or Go Home!
And this is one of many reasons this vile eugenicist crank was hired by Republicans to shiv Joe Biden. It's also why the resultant Harris campaign told this vile eugenicist crank to get fucked when he tried to shake them down for a position in their campaign. Because he's a vile eugenicist crank.
The Department of Pestilence is definitely punching way above its weight in Maladministration 2.0!