RFK Jr posted a seven-minute video earlier this week that assures us that vaccines aren't all that great, actually. Derek reads the studies Kennedy references as proof. You might be surprised to learn the HHS Secretary has very selective reading.
Show Notes
Annual Summary of Vital Statistics: Trends in the Health of Americans During the 20th Century
The Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in the United States in the Twentieth Century
Infectious Diseases and Social Change
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30 agents ready to go with shotguns and rifles and you name it.
Five, six white people pushing me in the car, I'm going, what the hell?
Basically, your stay-at-home moms were picking up these large amounts of heroin.
All you gotta do is receive the package.
Don't have to open it, just accept it.
She was very upset, crying.
Once I saw the gun, I tried to take his hand and I saw the flash of light.
Listen to The Chinatown Sting wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., your HHS Secretary.
Fuck, we're doing this again.
On Monday evening, RFK Jr. posted a seven-minute video to his government social media accounts that I knew was coming.
The old vaccines aren't that great after all, trope.
He used the exact line of reasoning that I've heard for years from anti-vaxxers.
It's really about sanitation and diet and other non-pharmaceutical interventions, which is why we overcame a whole host of infectious diseases, which I'll have more to say about.
As usual with Kennedy and his Maha stands, they start with a grain of truth and then go off the rails to push an agenda.
Today, I want to look at Kennedy's techniques, which he uses over and over again to indoctrinate followers into the idea that vaccines aren't at all necessary, and eventually he'll get to the idea that they're doing more harm than good.
I'm Derek Barris, and you're listening to a conspirituality brief.
He's coming for all vaccines.
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The video that Kennedy created was to push back on a chart shared by junior senator from Washington State, Maria Cantwell.
And that chart showed decreasing infection rates from measles, pertussis, mumps, rubella, smallpox, dipteria, and polio in the 20th century.
It's important to note that the chart is showing morbidity rates, not mortality rates.
At my recent finance committee hearing, Senator Cantwell showed us this chart to illustrate the decline in infectious disease during the 20th century.
The vaccine industry has long used this kind of chart as proof of the common claim that vaccines had saved hundreds of millions of American lives.
The momentous 70% decline in mortalities in the United States and Western Europe from contagious diseases since 1900 marks one of the most monumental public health advances in all of human history.
Was this really an achievement of mass vaccination programs, as many people, including Senator He's so fucking petty.
Kennedy got absolutely cooked during the hearing, and what does he do?
He rushes to his crowd to complain and deflect.
But did you notice the immediate bait and switch there?
He talks about Cantwell's chart, which again shows morbidity or the rate of disease infections in a population, then immediately switches the conversation to mortality, which in this case is how many people die from a disease.
Kennedy is masterful at making straw man arguments, and throughout this video, he continually switches from morbidity to mortality and back, and he sets up his argument by conflating the two.
The real truther on X, who regularly pushes back on Kennedy on that platform, he sums it up quite well with what I'm about to read.
And just to note, I went on his Twitter spaces a few months ago to talk about Maha, and he covers the scene really well.
He writes, RFK Jr. is presenting the classic anti-vaccine argument where mortality in developed countries is emphasized over morbidity.
Death is not the only consequence of preventable disease.
Vaccines dramatically lower disease incidence, which translates into fewer hospitalizations, less disability, and reduced complications that extend beyond mortality statistics.
For example, vaccines prevent serious morbidity like brain inflammation and blindness caused by measles, paralysis from polio, permanent lung damage and pneumonia from whooping cough or pertussis, and cancers caused by hepatitis B or HPV infections.
These severe complications can cause lifelong disability and profound health burdens, even if patients survive the initial infection.
And of course, infectious diseases can lead to chronic diseases, which is what Kennedy's always blathering on about, the thing he wants to solve, but he never seems to make that connection.
In the video, Kennedy goes on to mention three studies or reports or papers.
He often conflates studies with articles and that's also part of his shtick.
I want to briefly look at all three, which I found in red for this episode, because that's where his real propaganda shines.
By considering only part of what each paper says, while decontextualizing each one of them to support his own argument and not honor the actual argument or the science being presented.
The most comprehensive evidence-based study that rigorously examines this issue is a CDC-funded study that was published in 2000, performed by a team of researchers from CDC and Johns Hopkins University and led by Dr. Bernard Geyer.
The scientists meticulously examined 100 years of government infectious disease mortality data, and they concluded that nearly all the mortality reductions occurred before the introduction of vaccines, and that vaccinations could therefore claim a little of the credit.
The paper he's referencing is called Annual Summary of Vital Statistics Trends in the Health of Americans during the 20th century.
And the lead author, as he said, is Bernard Geyer, who is now retired and a professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The paper tracks with Kennedy's overall thesis.
Vaccination does not explain the significant declines in child mortality and infectious disease mortality seen before 1940.
About 90% of the decline in infectious disease deaths among U.S. children occurred before widespread vaccine availability.
This isn't a hidden secret.
Anyone with a working knowledge of vaccine history and public health knows this.
I realize the majority of people aren't necessarily interested in those topics.
What I'm saying is that people within those fields already know what he's saying.
They're not hiding it from everyone.
But that's the conspiracy Kennedy keeps reiterating throughout this seven-minute propaganda film.
Here's what really gets me though.
As is Kennedy's habit, he's very selective in his reading.
He points out the first two sentences in what I'm about to read from that paper, but somehow he neglects the rest of the fucking paragraph.
Quote, vaccines against tipteria, tetanus, and pertussis became available during the late 1920s, but only widely used in routine pediatric practice after World War II.
Thus, vaccination does not account for the impressive declines in mortality seen in the first half of the century.
The reductions in vaccine preventable diseases, however, are impressive.
In the early 1920s, diphtheria accounted for about 175,000 cases annually, and pertussis for nearly 150,000 cases.
Measles accounted for half a million annual cases before the introduction of vaccines in the 1960s.
Deaths from these diseases have been virtually eliminated, as have deaths from hemophilious influenza, tetanus, and poliomyelitis.
In the fucking paper, he's saying that vaccines are very important Because they've kept people from dying since their introduction.
Somehow, Kennedy fucking missed that.
For example, you can see from this graph that in 1900, some 13,000 Americans a year were dying of measles.
By 1960, however, this number had dropped to a few hundred.
But the measles vaccine was not introduced until three years later.
Therefore, almost all the measles mortality had disappeared before the vaccine.
So the measles vaccine can't really claim the credit for saving all those lives.
Okay, here's the thing.
No one says that the measles vaccine is taking the credit for those lives.
First off, not sure how a vaccine is claiming credit, but what he's getting at is the public response to vaccination.
Kennedy is just creating another straw man here.
He's setting up a binary in which there's a whole group of supposedly pro-pharma people who give all the credit to vaccines, when in reality, doctors and public health officials know that vaccines are one tool in the public health toolkit, but he needs that straw man in order to set up his anti-vax argument.
So, what actually did cause the decline in infectious disease mortality?
A landmark 1977 study by McKinley and McKinley was required reading in most American medical schools during the 1970s and early 1980s.
That study attributed the decline not to medical advances or innovations, but almost exclusively to agricultural and engineering innovations that improve nutrition.
Ah, there it is.
Food dyes and seed oils, big maha energy going on here.
McKinley is credited less than 3.5% of the mortality declines to all medical measures put together, including antibiotics, surgeries, and vaccines.
Okay, let's unpack this paper because again, he starts with something true.
It's called The Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in the United States in the 20th century, and it was written by John McKinley, a medical sociologist and epidemiologist, and his wife Sonia, a mathematical statistician.
First off, the title is an anti-vaxxer's dream, which I'll get to because they definitely tried to capitalize on it.
And the synopsis is correct.
The McKinleys were concerned, correctly, I think, about the growing influence of the pharmaceutical industry in the medical profession and society writ large.
This is something I've been concerned about for a very long time.
You know, one of the pillars Kennedy ran on during his presidential bid and when he was campaigning to be secretary of HHS was getting the pharmaceutical lobby out of DC.
I speculated that he would never do such a thing because, as the largest lobbying arm, the administration is just not going to have it.
And that cuts across partisan lines.
The percentages by which the Republicans have been more favored by the pharmaceutical industry, the Democrats is not that large.
So I don't think any of the politicians want to give that up.
And true to form, Kennedy has been pretty silent on actually doing anything about that since he was installed in his position.
Back to the McKinley's report, I want to note a few things.
Their work is important.
I think I read the paper, they make some really important points.
There are a bunch of criticisms, however, on the report's methodology, their interpretation of historical data, and broad policy implications.
I want to briefly go through this in order.
The report predominantly assessed the mortality decline from infectious diseases, but they didn't fully consider the impact of interventions on chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease or cancer, because modern treatments have had substantial effects.
They isolated the effect of medical measures from broader socioeconomic, environmental, and public health factors, which is methodologically challenging.
Basically, they didn't take enough consideration of the social determinants of health.
The statistical models that they used might have underestimated the cumulative effects of medicine over time.
Then you have the timing of mortality declines, which may not account for later medical advances like new drugs like antibiotics And anti-hypertensives, you have improved emergency medicine, and you have more effective chronic disease management that all occurred after the initial decline in infectious disease deaths that they're citing.
Then you have the fact that chronic diseases have become the leading causes of death in America, and newer research shows that medical interventions have contributed meaningfully to the decline of death rates.
This is through improved disease management and control, which pretty much puts the report and its very limited focus into view.
Then you have the report's conclusion, which suggests that health spending priorities should shift away from medicine to social policies, and that kind of oversimplifies the issue.
Preventive care, vaccines, and newer medical technologies have had significant population impacts that weren't really understood at the time of the report.
None of this does Kennedy bring up.
The broader point they're making there, though, that more money should be focused on social policies.
I fully agree with that.
I don't think any public health professional or epidemiologist would deny that.
But we're in an administration that is no longer tracking food insecurity, for example.
You had Kennedy over the summer going on tour saying, yay, we got soda off a snap benefits.
I have not seen anything about how they are replacing it with nutritious food, besides him showing up at a farmer's market here or there claiming that they're doing it.
And then you have the whole soybean issue and other crop issues that are happening with American agriculture right now.
They keep doing this bait and switch.
We're taking this away, this very big thing.
Here's this here, these crumbs were feeding back in.
So be happy with the crumbs.
That's effectively what the public health policy has become under Kennedy.
Now, here's the thing about the McKinley's work and why Kennedy is again being disingenuous.
The McKinleys noted that this report has been misused by anti-vaxxers.
They explicitly stated that such use of their work is a quote, agregious misinterpretation.
They've clarified that vaccines have an important role in the ongoing containment of diseases, and they use measles as a modern example of how reduced vaccination rates can lead to a resurgence of previously controlled infectious diseases, which is the same fucking thing.
The last study stated, but does Kennedy bring that up?
No, of course not.
The McKinley's core argument was not against vaccines, but rather that population level mortality decreases in the early 20th century were primarily driven by improved living standards and public health measures.
But they came out and said that vaccines are very important for managing those gains afterwards.
So fucking like every time Kennedy posts something, I just, I just know this is gonna happen when you actually read the source material, his referencing, he has never let me down in that sense.
Let's move on to the final paper that he weaponizes.
In 1970, Harvard Medical School professor Edward Cast was arguably the world's preeminent infectious disease authority.
He was both the founder and longtime editor of the Journal of Infectious Diseases, and president and founding member of the infectious diseases Society of America in his address that year to a joint meeting of the Infectious Disease Society of America and the 10th Inner Science Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.
Dr. Cass issued a prescient public warning that actors within the medical industry would try to take credit for the momentous reduction in disease fatalities in order to advance their profits, their prestige, and their influence.
Dr. Cass challenged the emergent claim that vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives.
Julian brought up an important point on Thursday's episode about how propagandists and influencers operate.
They often use jargon to obscure science.
Kennedy could have just said Cass's 1971 address to a medical conference, but he goes into detail using medical jargon to make it seem like this was a momentous conference that changed the course of medical history.
The thing about Edward Cass is that he, like the last few authors, never argued that vaccines were unimportant or ineffective.
In the 1970 address that Kennedy is citing, and it's titled Infectious Diseases and Social Change, Cass urged his colleagues to recognize that the long-term decline in mortality from infectious diseases in the 20th century were largely due to broader socio and economic improvements rather than solely to medical advances like antibiotics and vaccines.
Fair game, nothing different than the other papers we've been discussing.
The thing is, Cass cautioned against embracing the half-truth that medical research and modern health systems were primarily responsible for limiting the major killers of the past because he was, like the McKinleys, concerned about industry capture.
He never dismissed the importance or value of vaccines.
He encouraged ongoing vaccination campaigns, but he wanted decision makers to stay open to social and environmental drivers of health rather than attributing public health games to medical intervention alone.
Kennedy conveniently leaves all of this out, however, because he needs to decontextualize everything in order to set up his strawmans.
His selective reading skills are truly astounding.
And yet it is a common trope promoted by the pharmaceutical industry and allied medical associations and there are highly paid politicians.
They evangelize us into believing that vaccines alone saved all of those lives.
Again, no credible professional or historian thinks or says this, but notice how Kennedy shifts to the politicians here because that sets up his next straw man.
Senator Cantwell has taken some 456,000 dollars from pharmaceutical companies.
Nope, not true.
Another checkable fact, thanks to the Center for Responsive Politics, more commonly known as open secrets.
Senator Cantwell has received approximately 74,750 from pharmaceutical manufacturers over the course of her career, which is not 456,000.
During the last few election cycles, her top sources of campaign contributions were not from pharmaceutical companies, and in fact, Cantwell is well known for her long-standing pledge to reject PAC money, which further limits her direct acceptance of large industry checks.
Why is he saying this?
Because Kennedy is doing the same thing he tried to do to Bernie Sanders a few months ago during a different hearing.
He's conflating individual donations from people who work in the pharmaceutical industry with pharmaceutical industry money.
Those are very different things.
Individuals who work in every industry, they're allowed to contribute however they like.
There's no connection between the industries they work for and their political views.
Kennedy doesn't give a shit about that, however.
Nearly half a million dollars sounds much shadier as if she's in cahoots with the industry, even if it's a blatant lie.
As we know with this administration overall, though, lying is a feature, not a bug.
The Mandric pronouncement that vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives is so embedded in conventional wisdom that it rarely receives the kind of skepticism and the rigorous scientific examination that public health agencies should apply to all dogmas.
Kennedy is such an amateur at this, at least when it comes to his claims that he's doing science.
He's banking on the fact that most people are not going to go and read the studies that he cites or look at open secrets or bother to check out whether or not vaccines have been properly tested.
And in that sense, sadly, he's right.
I've been seeing his propaganda from this video repeated verbatim on social media all week, as if suddenly the Maha stands are experts in vaccinology history.
And as I said on my Monday bonus about Kennedy and Tylenol, he always gives himself an out.
Vaccines are a critical part of public health.
They can prevent infections like nasals altogether, and the serious injuries that sometimes accompany measles, and they can prevent you from spreading measles to others.
That's the clip he'll use and share to say, look, I'm not actually an anti-vaxxer, embedded way at the end of the video.
You know there's a butt, however.
But blind faith in vaccination alone, as our only recourse against death by infection has inclined our medical system to discount the role of therapeutic drugs and vitamins and diet, exercise, and other lifestyle changes that might fortify human immune systems against all kinds of sicknesses.
Again, no serious professional discounts those things.
The entire video is like a field of scarecrows, and Kennedy has no shame in setting them up.
But I'll give this to Kennedy.
He knows the trigger words for his crowd.
During the Biden administration, the U.S. government's unbalanced response to the COVID pandemic exemplified this peril.
And of course, he knows how to tickle the fancy of Dear Leader.
Under President Trump's leadership, we are going to ensure that America has the best childhood vaccine schedule.
We're going to address vaccine injuries.
We're going to modernize American vaccines with transparent gold standard science.
We're going to eliminate and correct conflicts of interest and misaligned incentives.
And we're going to ensure scientific and medical freedom.
And that's the big reveal we all knew was coming.
He's coming for all childhood vaccines.
I've been personally fascinated with medical and science history, so I know that I'm speaking from a place of personal fascination here.
But honestly, reading the few studies and putting this episode together only took a few hours of my time.
I know that's more than a lot of people have, But if you're going to just repeat what this man says without the same level of skepticism that he's calling for, I don't really know what to say.
That's how propaganda works, though.
It relies on them taking him at his word.
Kennedy himself said no one should take medical advice from him just a few weeks ago, but that's not actually what he wants.
What he does desire is completely destroying our public health agencies to feed his conspiracy theory drenched ego and implement his pseudoscientific policies.
