Scientists And Doctors Don't Give A Damn What RFK Jr. Thinks About The COVID Vaccine

Vaxx your kids! Vaxx your wife!

Earlier this month, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. published an impassioned op-ed on Trial Site News in which he implored the scientific journal Annals of Internal Medicine to retract a July study that found there was no connection between aluminum salts in vaccines and 50 autoimmune diseases, allergies, and neurodevelopmental disorders. Why? Because, despite the many decades of evidence that the aluminum in vaccines is perfectly safe when used in appropriate doses, he believes it just can’t be true.

Kennedy Jr. insisted that the study of approximately 1.2 million Danish children born over two decades was methodologically flawed because it did not include children who had died before the age of two (because they were studying long-term effects) or children with certain pre-existing conditions (including congenital rubella syndrome, respiratory conditions, primary immune deficiency, and heart or liver failure), those who somehow received an “implausible” number of vaccines, or children whose mothers had not lived in Denmark for more than two years prior to giving birth.

This was obviously meant to ensure that the study was uniform, that congenital conditions would not be mistaken for conditions directly related to the vaccine. For instance, one of the major areas of interest was asthma. Well, how are you going to determine that a vaccine caused a child to develop asthma if you are counting kids who started out with respiratory issues? If you want to know if it exasperates such conditions, that would need to be another study entirely. Duh.

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However, the gang over at the Annals of Internal Medicine thought it over real hard, and they decided that they are standing by the study and will not be retracting it, no matter how hard RFK Jr. stamps his feet and cries that it must cause autism and also every other condition known to humankind. Editor-in-chief Christine Laine helpfully explained that “retraction is warranted only when serious errors invalidate findings or there is documented scientific misconduct, neither of which occurred here.”

“If there was a mechanism of action where a particular vaccine caused autism, we’d see it in 80, 90, 100% of people receiving the vaccine, and we don’t,” independent virologist Gary Grohmann explained to Nature, adding that the association likely has more to do with timing than anything else. “In other words, vaccines might be given at the age of two, and autism genetically might also kick in at the age of two.”

The journal isn’t the only entity that has told RFK Jr. to kick rocks lately. Last week the American Academy of Pediatrics announced they would be issuing their own damn guidance for the COVID vaccine and that they would be recommending that infants between six months and 23 months receive the vaccine.

As you may recall, Kennedy Jr. announced in May that the COVID vaccine would no longer be recommended by the CDC for “healthy children and pregnant women” — a move the CDC itself undermined a week later by keeping the vaccine on the schedule for children ages 6 months to 18 years.

On Friday, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists also announced that they would continue to recommend that pregnant women get the COVID vaccine, in spite of Kennedy’s preference.

“While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently removed its recommendation that pregnant and lactating individuals receive updated COVID-19 vaccines, ACOG’s recommendations have not changed,” the group advised. “The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists continues to recommend the use of updated COVID-19 vaccines in individuals contemplating pregnancy and in pregnant, recently pregnant, and lactating individuals.”

ACOG has decided to ignore Kennedy Jr.’s personal wants and desires, as they conflict with the organization’s mission to provide accurate health information to pregnant women.

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The updated advisory explains:

• Pregnant women have historically been at an increased risk of severe disease, adverse pregnancy outcomes, and maternal death from COVID-19 infections. All currently available COVID-19 vaccines keep up with new coronavirus strains and remain effective at reducing rates of medically attended COVID-19 illness encounters resulting in emergency room and urgent care visits, hospitalizations, and critical illness for adults 18 years or older, with protection lasting for that season (Link-Gelles 2025). Updated COVID-19 vaccines are particularly effective at reducing morbidity from COVID-19 complications in pregnant patients and their infants (measured by emergency department/urgent care encounters) (Ciesla 2024).

• Infants aged less than 6 months are at increased risk for severe COVID-19 disease but are not yet eligible for COVID-19 vaccination, and they depend on transplacental transfer of maternal antibodies for protection. They continue to be hospitalized for COVID-19 at higher rates than all age groups except adults 75 years and older (Havers 2024). COVID-19 vaccination in pregnancy reduces the rate of symptomatic and severe COVID-19 resulting in hospitalization in the infant in the first 6 months of life (Halasa 2022 MMWR; Cardemil 2024). During the 2023–2024 respiratory virus season, mothers of less than 5% of infants hospitalized for COVID-19 were vaccinated during pregnancy (Havers 2024).

• COVID-19 vaccine safety during pregnancy has been well established. There is no evidence of increased risk of negative maternal, pregnancy, or infant outcomes associated with vaccination (Ciapponi 2024).

BOOM.

This administration — RFK Jr. in particular — has been going overboard when it comes to defying norms. And it’s not going to be possible to fight them without defying some norms in response. Of course, the more groups, people and and entities do that, the more of a “norm” it will be.