The implications of awarding Robert F Kennedy, Jr with a position he’s completely unqualified for are becoming clearer by the day. While he’s made numerous egregious and dangerous moves as Secretary of HHS, canceling nearly $500 million of mRNA research grants is one of the most startling and shortsighted to date. Today we look at both the microcosm and macrocosm of such a move.
Show Notes
Kennedy Cancels Nearly $500 Million in mRNA Vaccine Contracts
RFK Jr. slashed mRNA vaccine development funding. A Nobel Prize winner just responded
Kennedy to halt $500 million in vaccine projects
Exclusive: Medical journal rejects Kennedy's call for retraction of vaccine study
Do All Celebrities Have Lyme Disease Now?
CDC Lyme Disease Case Maps
How mRNA Vaccines Work
CDC Explaining How Vaccines Work
Clinical Advances for mRNA Vaccines and Cancer Immunotherapy
Katalin Kariko’s Brittanica page
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Conspirituality 270, Kennedy's Bloodbath.
The implications of awarding Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with a position he's completely unqualified for are becoming clearer by the day.
While he's made numerous egregious and dangerous moves as secretary of HHS, canceling nearly $500 million of mRNA research grants is one of the most startling and short-sighted to date.
Today, we look at both the microcosm and macrocosm of such a move.
But first, I'll lead us through the recent uptick, pun intended, thank you, Derek, of celebrity Lyme disease cases.
So Lyme disease has been back in the news lately.
On July 31st, Justin Timberlake revealed for the first time in a post to his Instagram supporters that the two-year world tour he just completed was made extra grueling by some health struggles, including having been diagnosed with Lyme disease.
News outlets were quick to cover the story, noting that Timberlake is joining a growing number of celebrities who've gone public about having Lyme.
This includes other singers like Justin Bieber, Shania Twain, and Avril Levine, as well as actor Riley Keogh, comedian Amy Schumer, and then supermodel Bella Hadid, along with her mother and her younger brother.
They all have Lyme disease, apparently.
Justin Bieber probably got it via that ridiculous photo shoot for his New album.
I shared it with Matthew when you called it depression porn, and that was just perfect.
But you forgot, Julian, to list yourself because you were way ahead of the curve on this celebrity Lyme thing.
Yeah, I mean, I'm still waiting to become an official celebrity, but I did get Lyme disease 21 years ago, so I'm qualified.
But to be clear here, this is it's kind of similar to some of the other things we talk about on this podcast with regard to epidemiology.
Lyme disease rates have been increasing due to climate change.
Because of warmer summers and milder winters, the ticks that carry the bacteria which causes the condition, they're more prolific, they're more plentiful, they have more time to do what they do.
So more people do get exposed.
There was also a change implemented in 2022 regarding how the CDC accounts for the number of yearly cases, and that did produce a big increase.
So people can point at that and say, oh, wow, Lyme disease is really on the increase, but this is a counting thing.
That change involved now actually including cases from high prevalence areas based on lab test results.
This is the important piece alone, rather on lab test plus needing clinical verification.
But what's going on with the spike in celebrity cases?
So to unpack this, let's talk about those high prevalence areas that I just mentioned.
95% of confirmed cases of Lyme disease in the U.S. occur in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest, which is where the increased rates of infections, according to the CDC, have been concentrated as well.
So that makes sense.
These are states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, especially upstate New York, Delaware, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Vermont, and Virginia.
These are the main places where we find Lyme disease.
Why do these 14 states have the highest prevalence?
Well, I was digging into the story and I found that friend of the pod, Dr. Andrea Love, had written a very helpful breakdown, which I'll summarize here.
Lyme disease can only be transmitted to humans by two very specific kinds of ticks.
They carry the bacteria and it gets passed back and forth between that sort of tick and a particular kind of mouse, as well as a particular kind of deer.
And the combination of these creatures within whom the bacteria is called Borrelia bergdorferi.
And I'll ask the patients of the bacteria if I just butchered its name.
It enjoys its life cycle within these creatures.
And so those animals have to be present in order for a human to then be infected by a tick bite.
And that combination of factors is more prevalent in the climate and landscape of the states that I just listed.
And the reason for this is that the ticks themselves can only live in environments with at least 80% humidity where the temperature rarely goes above 85 degrees.
Very specific range.
They also need dense brush and leaf litter and shady woods.
They need to feed on the blood of one of those mice or deer, preferably both.
And those are also found in similar climates.
So the only known way to contract Lyme disease caused by exposure to that borrelia bacteria is to be bitten by one of those two types of ticks in environments where those kinds of hosts live.
You typically have to be out in the countryside in one of those states for this to occur.
And even then, you have to get pretty unlucky.
So this is why when you look at a map of yearly Lyme cases, they're all clustered in the upper Midwest and then highly concentrated in the Northeast.
You forgot to mention that Lyme disease was originally a PSYOP in Connecticut, Julianne.
We did actually cover this a few months ago.
Julian and I did a brief that kind of explores the history of Lyme disease in that area and how it started and the conspiracy theories around it.
So I'll include a link to that in the show notes.
I also want to add that Dr. Andrea Love is also the executive director of the American Lyme Disease Foundation, which is at aldf.com.
If you want more info on what Lyme disease is, how to treat it, and how to watch out for the charlatans who are inevitably going to try to sell you alternative natural cures.
Yeah, she does fantastic work.
So these climate details actually make it highly unlikely that all of these celebrity inhabitants of the hot, dry desert that is Los Angeles actually do have Lyme disease.
And ironically, given my angle today, I should mention this to be fair.
Justin Timberlake may be an exception because He did spend a lot of time in his youth in Shelby Forest in Tennessee, where Lyme infections are not super common, but they have been known to occur much more than in LA.
Justin Bieber has also said he believes he contracted Lyme in Nantucket, Massachusetts, which could have happened.
So who knows?
Some of the others may have also gotten very unlucky out in the woods in one of the states on the other side of the country at some point.
Or maybe the ticks just went to LA to try to make it as a star, Julianne.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And also, these are people who are traveling like all the time, right?
Especially if they're musicians.
They're going to be like, there's festivals, there's outdoor concerts.
There's all kinds of, it's hard to know what's happening.
It's hard to know what's happening.
They would have had to have been out in the woods in one of these places for an extended period.
And then they would have had to have been bitten by a tiny little tick that then stayed on their body for 24 to 36 hours in order to really transmit the bacteria to them by feeding on them for an extended period.
So it could have happened.
And they didn't have like my father-in-law around to do tick checks, which is what our kids get every time they come in from the woods.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, so there would have been, had to have been an extended period of, you know, not showering and, you know, all sorts of things that could have gotten in the way, including having a, having a nice, who'd you say it was?
Your grandmother?
It's my father-in-law.
Your father.
Yeah.
Now, listen, I myself contracted Lyme disease on a trip to Massachusetts and upstate New York in 2004.
And what I was doing is just to shake off the jet lag, kind of like a traveling rock star, but not really.
I ran around barefoot in the grassy backyard of my hosts.
And this is across from a small creek, across a small creek.
I could see this field and there were deer grazing in the field.
And thankfully, when I came back inside and said, oh, God, I'm trying to shake off the jet lag, they said, oh, you should have been wearing shoes because we have Lyme ticks here.
That's the first I'd ever heard of Lyme disease.
And I'm so grateful they said something.
And like at least half of the people who get it, I had no knowledge or memory of being bitten.
It's usually one of the neophyte ticks that's like the size of a poppy seed.
But once I was back in LA, I did develop the classic bullseye rash that shows up on the skin of between 60 and 70% of people infected.
And then I had the fairly typical sequence of symptoms like muscle aches and pains and stiffness, nerve pain, fatigue.
I had a very hard time getting diagnosed, though, because Lyme disease is almost unheard of in Southern California.
So doctors didn't know what they were looking at.
The ticks that transmit it can't survive here.
And we don't have those kinds of damp, cool woodlands.
But you know, we do have here in LA plenty of prestigious alternative doctors who thrive in big cities where they can feed on wealthy folks interested in what I like to call medicine plus.
You know, not that boring old science-based medicine, but something more holistic, more alternative, intuitive, out of the box, more spiritual.
It's also usually more pricey and most often not covered by any kind of insurance.
Here in La La Land, it seems like every few years, Lyme disease takes a turn as being the speculative diagnosis that's just thrown out in alternative medicine circles.
You know, for a while, it might replace parasites or adrenal fatigue or gluten intolerance as the condition everyone seems to have.
Hey, you should get checked for this.
It explained my low energy.
It explained my depression and whatever else I may be going through, my reaction to sugar.
You didn't mention mold toxicity.
Mold toxicity is a big one.
Is that one cycled out already?
That's a big one.
I haven't heard that in a while, but it does come and go.
So if climate change like increases the sort of like territory for the ticks and their environment, is there some like equal sort of, I don't know, mechanism that allows the alternative doctors to spread into further markets.
I wonder if that's our next research project, right?
That's an interesting question.
I mean, if climate change is increasing the prevalence of Lyme disease in areas where the ticks can live, then they'd be dealing with actual Lyme cases, right?
But yeah, maybe they then would be peddling whatever their alternative treatments are.
So I'm talking here specifically about, you know, the so-called functional medicine doctors.
And they're going to order boatloads of tests you don't actually need, but they won't order the actual Western block test that will tell you definitively if you have Lyme disease.
And they're going to do this In order to prescribe and sell you all kinds of off-label drugs and often personally branded supplements.
Naturopaths do something similar.
They might recommend organ cleansing, heavy metal detox, and IV vitamins because you've got to do all these things to support your immune system against this problem that you have alongside whatever conventional prescriptions they'll get for you.
And then chiropractors as well are all too willing to give you their opinion on what kind of undiagnosed subclinical illness you probably really have.
These pseudoscience peddlers may use discredited diagnostic methods.
I don't know if you guys have come across this, like live blood cell analysis.
No.
Not me.
They'll take a drop of your blood and put it on a slide, and then they have a projector against the wall where they put it underneath a microscope that can project.
And they'll say, oh, look, there it is.
Oh, they show you.
Yeah.
They point to whatever they're pointing to in the image on the wall.
Say, there it is.
That's the evidence of your Lyme disease or whatever the thing is they're saying that you have.
They might use meridian electrode diagnosis, right?
Where you press an electrode to one of the acupressure points and then say, oh, look, your liver line is clearly being compromised by your Lyme disease.
And they might do something like palpation or muscle testing, applied kinesiology.
And none of these methods actually work medically, but they set the stage for then selling you a lot of the unnecessary, unproven, and expensive alternative treatments.
And believe me, guys, I've been there for 18 months.
I did IV mega doses of vitamin C. I did IV hydrogen peroxide.
Yeah.
So wait a minute.
Sorry.
They shot that right into your veins.
Oh, yeah.
What the fuck?
What are you talking about?
Creating a hyperoxygenated environment in which anaerobic bacteria cannot survive.
Okay.
I get it.
All right.
I mean, I seem to have survived relatively unscathed.
You might disagree, but I bought an infrared sauna.
I took fistfuls of supplements.
I did tons of organ cleanses.
I even bathed in water infused with Epsom salts and baking soda and hydrogen peroxide.
And I actually did have Lyme disease.
It was objectively confirmed by the ELISA and then the Western blot test, which is the best practice within medical science.
I also took antibiotics along with all of my crack treatments, but I took them for way too long because I really wanted to get better.
And the internet convinced me that the conventional medical wisdom of only doing a two-week course was biased by conspiratorial pressure of insurance companies.
Oh, right.
Because antibiotics are such a money maker, which is why no pharmaceutical companies are investing in them anymore.
So thankfully, I did recover.
And I don't think I had too many lasting ill effects of my alternative medicine adventures or the not recommended year and a half of antibiotics.
But during my harrowing journey, this is what I'll end this segment with.
I'll never forget a friend of a friend who reached out to me when I was really struggling.
I was in a bad way.
I was scared.
I was like 34 years old and I thought, this is it.
I've peaked and I'm now going to completely just be on a downhill slide.
And they said, hey, I hear you have Lyme.
Listen, I had it too.
And my doctor was able to clear it up fully with a combination of special supplements they use.
And I said, well, did you do the Western blot test?
And she said, no.
But my doctor did confirm that the Lyme is now out of my system.
Would you like their phone number?
And then you said, thank you, Gwyneth.
I would.
Okay, I have some questions about, because we started with celebrities.
And so I'm wondering if there's a kind of politics that is emerging around this particular condition.
I mean, first of all, are the celebrities spotlighting that this is like a climate change event?
And then the other question I have is, how does this illness intersect with the Maha movement, if at all, beyond the supplement scams?
Because it seems to be the type of thing that one shouldn't be afraid of.
It's like organic.
You can track it by traipsing through the tall grasses.
It seems like it's in that category of disease as God intended you to have it that should make your immune system stronger.
So what's going on with all that?
Yeah, I mean, if you die from it, clearly you weren't meant to survive.
I think that it would be more of a vector of that kind of Maha stuff if there was some kind of, like, let's say there was a vaccine against Lyme disease.
Right.
It's like, no, you don't need the vaccine.
You need to build natural immunity by getting exposed.
You should send your kids out into the woods naked and then not check them for text afterwards because that's what's going to make them stronger.
In terms of the selling of supplements, yeah, I mean, it's, I think they would say if you get on these supplements, they're going to boost your immunity.
So, if you do get exposed to Lyme, you'll be fine because people get exposed to Lyme all the time and a lot of them just do fine.
And this is one of the ways that we can make your immune system stronger.
In terms of climate change, I haven't seen a single one who's talking about it that way.
It's much more about my journey with fatigue and the vulnerability of realizing that even though I'm rich and famous, I can go through something like this.
And now I have more empathy for people with autoimmune conditions, that kind of thing.
I think that the fatigue part makes the thing very sort of, I think, attractive with regard to, you know, celebrities making themselves identifiable to their clientele, right?
Because, like, who doesn't suffer from fatigue?
I think there's something, there's an empathetic catch here that I think is probably pretty strong.
And there's an explanatory power there.
And this is always the thing with these kinds of questionable diagnoses.
There's an explanatory power that helps to make sense of, I haven't been feeling like myself.
I've been exhausted lately.
I have, you know, I have this malaise, right?
I'm actually unsatisfied with the pursuit of the things that I thought would make me ecstatically happy and feel powerful and invulnerable.
I also don't see a lot of people flying around on private planes everywhere talking too much about climate change.
Yeah, good point.
That's right.
And in terms of the Maha influencers, I just feel I don't see a lot of it and I'm looking at them regularly.
And I think that's because, as Julian flagged, it is a very regional disease.
Parasite cleanses, I mean, parasites are everywhere.
EMFs are everywhere.
But when you're talking about regional specificity, I think if the influencer, I've seen influencers who've had it selling it, but I just don't think it has that sort of pervasive power that would appeal to their downline.
This is another, this is an element I think we can add to our toolbox because it's the same thing with COVID.
Like COVID, had it been regional, had it been, you know, impacting cities only or cities on the East Coast only or whatever, there's no way it would have been this vector for the kinds of broad-based misinformation that we saw.
Yeah, I mean, like, that's why all of the previous pandemics, like Ebola, never rose to the level of, you know, that's true.
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Amateur Traveler, subscribe today on August 5th, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the cancellation of nearly $500 million in federal funding for mRNA vaccine development projects under the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority called BARTA.
This includes an ill-informed war that he's waged on this technology for years.
The slashing of funds includes the termination of contracts with Emory University and Tiba Biotech, the rejection or cancellation of proposals from Pfizer, Sanofi Pastor, and others, and restructuring of collaborations with companies like AstraZeneca and Moderna.
The HHS also announced no new mRNA contracts will be initiated.
Here's Kennedy explaining why HHS is doing this.
Most of these shots are for flu or COVID, but as the pandemic showed us, mRNA vaccines don't perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract.
Here's the problem: mRNA only codes for a small part of the viral proteins, usually a single antigen.
One mutation, and the vaccine becomes ineffective.
This dynamic drives a phenomenon called antigenic shift, meaning that the vaccine, paradoxically, encourages new mutations and can actually prolong pandemics as the virus constantly mutates to escape the protective effects of the vaccine.
Millions of people, maybe even you or someone you know, got the Omicron variant despite being vaccinated.
That's because a single mutation can make mRNA vaccines ineffective.
The same risk applies to flu.
After reviewing the science and consulting top experts at NIH and FDA, HHS has determined that mRNA technology poses more risk and benefits for these respiratory viruses.
As you can probably already guess, nearly everything Kennedy said there is bullshit.
The funny thing is, though, when we were playing the clip, you guys laughed at the one thing that he said that was actually true, which is that antigenic shift could prolong pandemics.
That is absolutely true.
But this is often what happens.
He has to touch upon true things, but his reasoning for it, which I'm going to get to now, is utter bullshit around it.
So we get it backwards because we're hearing nothing but bullshit.
Yeah.
And also the fact that, I mean, my God, like we're not supposed to, okay, we are really, we're not supposed to laugh about his voice or the appearance or all this stuff.
Like, like, I mean, if you, if you tried to imagine a character in a Martin Scorsese film babbling away in prison, right?
Or like a Federico Fellini uncle, like who's at the dinner party that nobody's listening to and he's just going on and on and on, like this would be high comedy, right?
Like you couldn't, you couldn't, you couldn't cast anybody for something like this.
Such a character.
Yeah, incredible.
I think we did a really good job on the podcast.
And I'll also speak personally for a few years before he was installed as secretary of being like, no, he has spasmodic dysphonia.
Let's just focus on that.
And you know what?
Since he's been installed and been doing the shit he's doing and I see people taking rips on it online, I don't comment, but I also don't push back anymore because fuck him overall is what he said to me.
Yeah, I do, I do laugh hardest, I think, at the comparisons to like, you know, gas station hot dogs and like, oh, the skin stuff.
Yeah, the jerky stuff.
And he does look pretty red.
And he's just going to set tanning salons.
Like he opens himself up for that.
The voice, he can't do anything about himself about it himself.
But the fucking tanning.
Okay, let's go over why this is all bullshit.
So first of all, the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines all perform extremely well.
We have Data from millions of people globally on this.
mRNA vaccines don't only code for a single antigen.
Early COVID-19 vaccines did because they were trying to identify the exact source of the problem.
But as the mutation started, newer vaccines code for multiple antigens.
Can we just can just for me, maybe, but can we define antigen just very quickly?
Yeah, it's just anything that provokes an immune response.
It's usually a protein, but anything that gets in your body that makes your immune system start to fight it is an antigen.
Okay.
You know, I was about to say something and I see that you're going there next, Derek.
It's not just one mutation, right?
It's like that the vaccine gradually loses its effectiveness as mutations increase.
Yes.
Yes.
You just read ahead.
Thank you.
Okay.
No, but let's go in order of what he said because it's really like it's such a fire hose of bullshit and Gish Gallup that he's doing in this very seemingly calm and authoritative presentation that he does on Twitter with HHS videos, which this is from.
So the vaccines don't become ineffective after one mutation.
Their efficacy is weakened, but they provide protection against all the things we want, severe illness, hospitalization, and death.
Okay, now getting back to what he does get right, like antigenic shift is a real phenomenon.
But here's the thing.
Early in the video, even before what I clipped, Kennedy lumps the flu and COVID vaccines together.
And that's his tell, right?
Right there.
That is how he reveals that this is a fucking game.
Totally.
COVID lacks the genome characteristics that would allow for an antigenic shift.
They are susceptible to something called antigenic drift, which is an accumulation of changes over time, not a sudden change, which is antigenic shift.
The flu in the past has undergone antigenic shifts, but Kennedy lumping them together here is a convenient way for him to stop funding mRNA research, which appears to be the real goal.
It's rather rich that he's suddenly so concerned about protecting against antigenic shift as well, because everything he's doing right now is making it more likely to occur.
Break that down briefly.
One important factor in preventing antigenic shift is global surveillance, but the U.S. announced it's pulling out of the WHO in January 2026, which means the CDC and NIH will no longer share surveillance data with all other countries.
Another one, rapid vaccine production is key for stopping antigenic shift.
Now, near the end of the video, Kennedy says that the HHS is going to focus on live virus vaccines.
Also a fucking joke because he spent years railing against live virus vaccines and they take years to develop compared to mRNA, which can be rapidly developed, tested, and deployed with more efficacy and stability than the live virus vaccines, which he suddenly loves and has hated for decades.
Annual vaccination is key.
We know that less people, especially less children, are getting vaccinated now.
And masking is a key component for stopping antigenic shift.
Good luck ever implementing that again in our lifetime in America.
Yeah.
So I have a question here about the sophistication and complexity with which he's going about this, because I mean, essentially, he could stand up at that podium and say, vaccines, poo, poo, pee, pee, they're all gone and just like everything and just cancel everything without an explanation.
Do you think there's a method to the madness in the sense that like he's giving you this piece around antigenic shift?
He's not going to disambiguate from the drift because he might not know the difference.
But is he throwing enough at the wall to make it sound like he is sort of doing something strategically positive?
But actually the master strategy is putting all of these pieces together to create this plausibly deniable destruction of everything, which is the ultimate goal.
Yes, I think that he is a more sort of focused Trump in this sense, because someone will write Trump's talking points, and then we know that Trump will just go off on a fucking tangent.
That will make the contradictions evident.
Right.
Kennedy is more disciplined in that sense.
So someone wrote for him this thing about antigenic shift.
if they were researching it at HHS, they probably know it's bullshit, but they're also thinking, okay, how can we make it as science-y as possible?
So he's done this twice.
I've done social media posts about this.
He's done this twice in the last couple of months around measles, where he says, A study conducted says this, and then I go and read the study, and it's, you know, it's on under impoverished African children in the 1980s, which doesn't represent the population he's actually talking about.
So he takes some science-sounding information and then applies it in ways that aren't applicable, knowing that his crowd is going to be, oh, yeah, he's done the research.
So I'm just going to, I'm going to believe this without actually going further.
Yeah.
And he's a perfect example of a pseudoscience peddler.
He reasons backwards.
Kennedy decided a long, long time ago that vaccines were just incredibly, incredibly dangerous and bad.
And because of his ability to take in a lot of information and then spit it out in a kind of gish gallopy way that sounds like he's scientifically informed, he's able to provide all kinds of justifications for his already pre-established conclusion, which is that vaccines are actually really, really bad.
Well, and it's more than that, because I think you're describing what a pseudoscientist has to do internally.
But I detect a kind of strategic chess playing here too, where he seems to be attacking one sort of, I don't know, like panel on vaccine safety, and then he's switching the subject to this, and then he's withdrawing funding over here.
But there seems to be this pattern whereby like he's, it's, it would seem to his followers like he is actually designing a strategy for improving things when actually the opposite is true.
It's not just bullshit.
There's, there seems to be some strategy that I can't quite see, but I hear it.
Well, they jumped on that with the Coke and sugar thing.
I mean, they've been all over that, which is ridiculous because Kennedy just posted the other day that sugar is one of the most toxic ingredients in our food system.
And yet you have all the Maha acolytes out there saying, oh, yay, Coke is going to have real sugar now.
Like that sort of dissonance, they never address that, which is mind-boggling to me.
I also want to add, I've talked about this before, but I've been reading Arthur Allen's exhaustive history on the history of vaccines.
It's 464 pages.
I finished it this weekend.
The last chapter, it really hones in on the anti-vax movement.
And I just realized, because this was published in 2006, seven, Kennedy's only mentioned once because he just started with the Rolling Stone article talking about it.
And I never realized that basically every single thing you hear Kennedy spouting today about vaccines, someone else has laid that groundwork for generations before that.
And Eilen lays that out really well.
I just add here before you keep going, Derek, is that he is having lots of conversations with lots of people and getting a lot of information, right?
And mostly it's bad sources.
Some of them are going to be more legitimately scientific than others.
And so here, what you see now is this is his new angle, which is that mRNA vaccines are really the problem.
And all of a sudden, as you pointed out, live vaccines are much better, right?
Even though he was opposed to them in the past.
So like it evolves.
And I think you're right, Matthew, that there are strategic reasons why he might change his mind in terms of how he's contradicting himself at different times.
I think that's exactly it.
If you can say, if you can say, well, the live vaccines are actually more wholesome and that's what I'm going to focus on here.
He might not have any intention of doing that, but it's just enough to get, you know, whoever, the Republicans who need to support him still in the various committees, it gets them on board.
It keeps his certain followers on board.
But he's able to switch back and forth from one focus to the other to make it look like he's got some coherent plan when actually it's really just a jackhammer.
No, he doesn't because it's mid-August and people at HHS have been up in arms because there's been no flu recommendation vaccine recommendations yet.
There have been no COVID updates.
And now it seems that they are going to remove all the COVID-19 boosters for children five and under now.
So he is dismantling the system as we are watching it happen.
And there will be a point in a couple of weeks, maybe it's today, Matthew, that he's going to come out against live virus vaccines because he just needed to do that for this video.
Now that that's done, he'll move on.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's That's but a moment ago, Julian, you said mRNA vaccines, but it's really the technology itself, which is ironic because it's one of the most important scientific discoveries in recent decades.
In fact, Catalin Caraco and Drew Weissman were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023, thanks to their work on the development of mRNA vaccines.
Without this technology, we might still actually not have COVID-19 vaccines, to be very clear right now.
Most likely we would have at this point, but definitely not within a year.
Carrico was talking to CNN, and here's how she framed Kennedy's decision.
Yes, so obviously, you know, when you are sick, you wouldn't ask advice from a lawyer like Kennedy.
You know, you ask experts, your physician, for advice, and obviously he's misinformed and do not understand that, you know, science is knowledge which was, you know, around the world.
And we collected those with observation, experimentation, measurements, and all of this scientific evidence.
And, you know, when you just reject and rely on misinformation, then you make a decision like he made, which is false based on false information.
Let's step back and look at what mRNA is and why it matters.
Then I want to look at what's going to be lost due to this propaganda.
And then in the last segment, we'll consider how this continues Kennedy's eugenics agenda.
Yeah, I mean, before we do that, Derek, let's just backtrack a tiny bit.
Some listeners might appreciate this to say that many of the vaccines that we had relied on pre-COVID were made by taking the actual live pathogen, which causes the illness, and then either attenuating it, which means making it weaker, or inactivating/slash/killing it entirely, and then using fragments of it to provide your immune system with an exposure that would then make it create antibodies, right?
This gives us an immune response without having to go through the full-blown illness.
It allows us to then recognize that specific pathogen and fight it when we're exposed to it in the wild.
Many respiratory viruses, including COVID, use something called messenger RNA to replicate their genetic material once they found their way into our bodies.
So that's mRNA, messenger RNA.
And as you said, scientists have been working on how to engineer that specific mRNA to use in new types of medical technology, including vaccines, for decades.
It can now be made relatively quickly in comparison to the much longer process required to grow and then reconfigure the pathogen itself for use in a live vaccine or an attenuated vaccine.
mRNA vaccines don't actually expose us to the live virus itself or to the bacteria in some cases, but to the messenger RNA molecules specific to that pathogen.
And the massive irony here is, as you mentioned here with Catalan Carico, Derek, with regard to how conspiracy theorists treat this topic is that she is a real example of someone who is suppressed, harassed, and ridiculed for her work on the growing edge of science with regard to these specific mRNA applications, starting in the late 80s.
And then she would eventually go on to be vindicated and win the Nobel Prize, as you said, in 2023.
So she's like actually the test case of someone who was a renegade and turned out to be right.
The exact opposite of Judy Mikovitz, but you get the idea.
Lucky for us, lucky for all of us, that research process was reaching fruition in time for the COVID crisis.
And it would have been much deadlier were it not for the unprecedented accomplishment of such rapid development and distribution of vaccines.
This was possible because the genetic structure of COVID-19, including the genes that make the spike protein, were sequenced within weeks of the outbreak being identified and published online by Chinese scientists, which then allowed scientists all over the world to begin the process of creating and testing these highly effective vaccines, all within less than a year.
And this is how it worked.
The messenger RNA vaccine teaches your immune system how to make the COVID-19 spike protein, which is Then recognized as an invader and destroyed.
And voila, we have a learned new immune response.
And not only is this quicker and turned out to be safe and effective, it also massively reduces the risk of lab leaks or dangers to immunocompromised people because you're not actually putting the virus into the body or the small incidence of actual infections that could happen, especially in communities with poor sanitation, for example, where the lack of medical infrastructure has made live attenuated vaccines the logistical option.
Now, a common piece of anti-vax misinformation was that the mRNA could actually alter your DNA at the time that you are given the vaccine or in the future, but that's completely false.
mRNA cannot enter the nucleus of the cell where the DNA exists.
And actually, the instructions that it provides that teach your body how to have the immune response are broken down within around 72 hours and then completely ejected from your body.
The only remnant left is the ability to fight the infection.
But beyond viral pandemics, and this is to me, like the really crucial issue, mRNA technology also turned out to have very promising applications to cancer treatment by using cancer markers to train an immune system response.
And that research, which I would argue is essentially the holy grail of all medical science, is now threatened by this catastrophic move by Kennedy.
It's not the only thing that's threatened.
The decimation of funding is going to have numerous damaging long-term effects.
I want to go through some of them.
Innovation in mRNA vaccines is going to end, at least in America.
For all the talk from this administration about not letting countries like China get ahead of us, we're basically guaranteeing that they will.
And universities and research organizations in other countries are already poaching American researchers.
And if I was them, I'd probably get the fuck out too.
Speaking of, these researchers are completely deflated.
Their morale is crushed.
I mean, imagine spending your entire life devoted to science and then an anti-vax Nepo baby ends your career on a whim.
Dr. Andrea Love, who we mentioned before, she commented this as well on one of our Instagram posts: quote: So many of my friends just got fired in the last 24 hours because of this, and humanity will not be able to recover from this.
mRNA and genetic tools are the future of biotherapeutic development and not just for respiratory viruses.
She is a trained immunologist, so I think she knows what she's talking about here.
Pandemic readiness for future outbreaks are going to be gone.
Older technologies will devolve.
As I mentioned, he's putting the money towards older technologies, which are not as effective or stable and ironically come at a higher risk of adverse events.
There's national security risks.
I'm no fan of for-profit healthcare, but this is a major blow to American biotech and as well as their partnerships with government, which is a lot of how a lot of our drugs are developed.
It's going to be a bloodbath for America, but it's going to be even worse internationally.
You flagged this before.
Countries with worse public health infrastructure systems that don't have access to vaccinations and other therapeutics are going to get nothing at this point.
And there's just going to be more distrust and skepticism in the system, even though it's Kennedy running right now.
But I do want to close this segment with a touch of good news.
A recent study that was funded by the Danish government, and it was published in the highly respected journal Annals of Eternal Medicine, they published something in July where they analyzed data from 1.2 million children over more than two decades.
That's a big study.
Yeah, it's a big, it is the gold standard research that Kennedy is always pining for, right?
Yeah.
The researchers discovered that aluminum exposure in vaccines do not create an increased risk of autoimmune, allergic, or neurodevelopment disorders like autism.
This is considered the most wide-ranging example of this topic to date.
So of course, Kennedy said it should be retracted.
Along with his propaganda arm, Children's Health Defense, they called the study controversial.
And Kennedy himself called it, quote, a deceitful propaganda stunt by the pharmaceutical industry, which is fascinating because, like I said, it was funded by the government, not by pharma.
Kennedy published his opinion on this on Trial Site News, which is an interesting choice for the leader of America's public health agencies.
The site was founded in 2018 and has served as an arm of the anti-vax propaganda wing ever since then.
We have discussed his messaging discipline.
This seems to be a mistake on his part because he's called a lot of attention to this study with his ridiculous demand that it be retracted.
Like I think your actual posts on it on social media are taking off like wildfire, Derek.
So lots of people are actually, you know, sort of putting these things together and saying, look at this, look at this crank.
And so, yeah, I think he's falling down here, which makes me think that like he's actually really disturbed by what the study says.
Yes, absolutely.
It is my most shared post on Blue Sky ever.
I just wrote a sarcastic comment, as I often do, and put up the Reuters article, which broke the story, but people really engaged with it, which I was happy about.
And like I said, there is good news because the team at the journal told Kennedy to fuck off.
The lead author of the study remarked, quote, I am used to controversy around vaccine safety studies, especially those that relate to autism, but I have not been targeted by a political figurehead in this way before.
I have confidence in our work and in our ability to reply to the critiques of our study.
And this is really good because he is overseas, so he does not have to kowtow to Kennedy and worry about losing his money.
And this all tracks because he was actually doing science, not whatever the fuck Maha is doing right now.
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Music by Ben Thede Okay, so I was really happy to get that refresher on the tech side of things, guys, because I honestly, I find the details hard to retain.
And I think this accounts for some of Bobby's success.
Like he doesn't, I would never buy him because there are too many indicators of like, you know, charismatic insanity that come along with his package, but I can understand why he's convincing.
And, you know, I understand the kind of medical imagination that's like, for me, it's like this Looney Tunes animation of food and liquid zigzagging through hollow bodies on conveyor belts in rabbits or cats or whatever.
Like I just don't have, I don't think that way.
So I'm glad for the refresher.
But I've brought a philosophy and history refresher that I think hopes shed light, shed light on why vaccination persists as this perennial target of anxiety.
You know, listeners, you might remember some of this, but I also think it's worth a concise pass over again.
I've also detected a few twists that stretch my thinking on what Bobby and Maha are actually forging here.
And I think the most useful overall framework that I have for understanding the moral panicry around vaccines, it derives from the idea of biopolitics.
Now, this is, you know, an idea that's made famous in Birth of the Clinic, where Foucault describes the practices of social and political control that regulate human bodies towards being functional and productive in an empire.
And people who take up this theme, they talk about how a lot of modern healthcare, hygiene, hospitals, asylums, you know, come as part of the price of the benefits on offer by, you know, imposing these rigid schemes of pathologization and rules for the bodily existence of acceptable citizens.
And, you know, I think when we're talking about the vaccine schedule, we're talking about something that is extremely regulated and homogenizing, or at least it has been in practice.
But this idea of biopolitics goes farther than that because the clinic where the person is poked and prodded and tested for fitness is one of the places in which, you know, you become a modern subject in relation to the state.
It's where you're measured and recorded, and it's how you know that you're functional.
And in that process, the big sort of transition towards modernity is that the doctor displaces the priest as the confessor.
And while the priest would report back to God, I guess, now the government can report, or sorry, sorry, now the doctor can report you to the government.
And in this framework, I think it's very easy to understand how charged the politics of protecting the HIPAA regulations are, for example.
Like your bodily health is this intimate record of your self, of your sins, your virtues, and so on.
Now, romantics and nature fallacyists and conspiratualists have always hated this modern technocratic health management.
And so they have always advocated for biomorality.
And this is the sort of health of the spiritually aligned body.
So the scholar I'm influenced by most here is the anthropologist Joseph Alter, who shows how the modern yoga renaissance that began in India in the 1920s was inextricably bound up with early Hindu nationalism.
And so it wanted to be modern, but it was also obsessed with medieval ideas about the spiritual nature of bodily tissues and fluids.
And so illness, they said, was a spiritual misalignment.
And so to intervene with science deprived the body of its self-healing mysteries, and it might even prolong the reach and influence of colonialism from their point of view.
And so it usurped the function of the spirit.
And their attitude was that no doctor had the right to dispute what the sages have seen and decided.
And I think that sounds perfect for Maha.
And I think that's true in all of the philosophical ways.
But here's where I'm starting to see something a little bit differently from the way I saw it maybe two years ago.
RFK Jr. inherits a huge biopolitics system as he rises.
And is he going to give up all of that power?
No, he's not.
And he's also come of age in a highly routinized and standardized wellness economy with its own regimes of pathologization and recovery.
It's kind of a parallel world to the cold and clinical world that the Maha Mamas hate, but it's no less abstract.
And it doesn't look like he wants to give up all of that infrastructure and power because it holds power.
And it gave him power in fighting it for decades.
Like he's the David before Goliath as the lawyer.
Like who would he be without this enormous structure?
And so he's tearing it down to build something else.
But this produces contradictions.
Like he wants to end data collection on the population level, but at the same time, he wants everybody to wear wearables, presumably to market supplements to individuals.
So the wearable becomes the talisman of like a personal spiritual journey towards health while keeping the wearer tethered to an even more capitalistic system than the for-profit model.
Yeah, So not only is it data collection for whatever purpose, but pretending not to be, it's also a way of enrolling people into a certain kind of self-responsibility, right?
The wearable is going to tell you, and it's going to tell us that you are doing all of the right things in order to be a good citizen who is staying healthy in the right ways.
Yeah, with the affiliate marketing plan, right?
Because part of doing the right thing for yourself and taking care of yourself is going to be buying my friends' supplements.
So we know that Bobby is not interested in social health, but he can't shake this interest that, you know, Foucault describes with regard to the clinical visit where the patient is confessing to the doctor, right?
He wants to know how many ultra-processed foods every man, woman, and child is eating.
Like he really wants to know that.
So how does a fetish for biomorality, this is the idea that health just can't come from homogenous clinical practices, but from some higher intelligence?
How does that influence attitudes towards vaccination?
Well, you know, as we've said before, it goes way back.
In 1917, we have a lecture from Rudolf Steiner as the Spanish flu begins to rip through Europe, and he writes the following.
I have told you that the spirits of darkness are going to inspire their human hosts in whom they will be dwelling to find a vaccine that will drive all inclination towards spirituality out of people's souls when they are still very young.
And this will happen in a roundabout way through the living body.
Today, bodies are vaccinated against one thing and another.
In future, children will be vaccinated with a substance which will certainly mistake there, sorry, a substance which it will certainly be possible to produce.
And this will make them immune so that they do not develop foolish inclinations connected with spiritual life.
I love the sentence construction there, right?
Well, because it was confusing and you stumbled over it, which is that they'll be vaccinated with a substance which it will be certainly possible to produce.
Like, come on.
It will certainly be possible to produce.
What the fuck?
Like, just edit that out.
Get an editor.
Anyway, so does this sound familiar?
It's not just that the state or the medical industry is unethical or profit-driven or more interested in managing the masses than caring for people.
It's that vaccinators have the ultimate goal of severing the relationship between humans and their spiritual source.
Now, where did his certainty come from?
He channeled it.
He claimed that he could read the Akashic Records.
This is a fantastical library floating in the Great Beyond that records all past and future history.
This gave him miraculous and fascist insights into Atlantis and Lemuria, into the hierarchy of races, and the educational theory that became the backbone of Waldorf education.
And Waldorf schools, as we know, currently have chronically low vaccination rates.
And about channeling, I have to say, we know a lot about Bobby's Gishgallop Logaria, his like this endless capacity for just pulling bullshit out of thin air.
I think he hooked a substantial chunk of Maha people through that spellmaking.
Like I think he's basically channeling the Akashic records of pseudoscience, right?
Now, Waldorf's views were not original.
As the American writer Eula Biss recounts in her gorgeous book on immunity and inoculation, metaphysical nausea in response to vaccines is as old as the premise of vaccination itself.
And BIS begins right from the fundamentals.
We source our understanding of the world from our own bodies.
It seems inevitable that vaccination would become emblematic.
A needle breaks the skin, a sight so profound that it causes some people to faint.
And a foreign substance is injected directly into the flesh.
The metaphors we find in this gesture are overwhelmingly fearful and almost always suggest violation, corruption, and pollution.
And then BIS tracks that fear of pollution forward.
Throughout the 19th century, vaccination left a wound that would scar the mark of the beast, some feared.
In an Anglican archbishop's 1882 sermon, vaccination was akin to an injection of sin and an abominable mixture of corruption, the lees of human vice and dregs of venial appetites that in afterlife may foam upon the spirit and develop hell within it and overwhelm the soul.
It's so great.
It's just so gothic.
It was the poison of adders, the blood entrails and excretions of rats, bats, toads, and sucking whelps that was imagined into vaccines of the 19th century.
This was the kind of organic matter, the filth believed responsible for most disease of that time.
It was also a plausible recipe for a witch's brew.
You're right.
It's beautiful writing.
It's gothic.
That Anglican archbishop is really hitting it.
And you can kind of imagine, this is the paradox, RFK Jr. listening to that passage and getting a little bit hard, actually, because he's swimming with his grandchildren in sewage.
This guy chainsaws whale heads.
He collects roadkill.
I'm willing to bet he's one of those washing your hands after a BM is woke guys as well.
And so I think he should be totally into the injected witch's brew.
And so maybe this is visible as he keeps pivoting back to praise live vaccines or something like that.
I mean, the injection part is interesting too, right?
In terms of the contrast with his previous addiction.
Right.
Interesting.
I mean, it's a stack of contradictions.
He advocates for bodily choice, but he cancels research and epidemiological tracking, which would actually provide people with choices.
And now he's reducing food choices.
He hates the regimentation of contemporary medicine, but he fetishizes the discipline of self-help.
He's a systems thinker guy, but he doesn't want population-level health data.
He wants privacy and autonomy, but he also wants your HHS Fitbit to tell him all about your sugar intake so that you can atone for it.
Well, that's something that the state really does need to know.
Right.
Yeah.
So I guess a few years ago, I clocked him as an OG crunchy pseudoscientist.
But I think it's more complicated than that.
Like he's actually creating something that we haven't quite seen before.
He's re-engineering the biopolitics of control that creep a lot of people out unless they're making money from it.
But maybe to balance it somehow, he's injected that biopolitics with the content of biomorality.
Like he wants a disciplined for-profit health system run by the corporations of his choosing in unregulated and maybe even dirty clinics.
And it just occurred to me as I was finishing this up that, you know, maybe this is why severance was so compelling to so many of us, because we can see in our time a 19th century religious cult exercising its power through the enthusiastic use of hyper-modern surveillance technology and also emotional indoctrination.
So I can totally imagine the white halls of HHS empty, long, winding, endless, and just walking through them these days, turning a corner and seeing RFK Jr. in the goat field with mud on his loafers,
