RFK Jr is one of the greatest perpetrators of a firehose of falsehoods that we’ve ever covered. The stakes were raised when he was installed as head of America’s public health system. A new longform article in The Atlantic offers an inside look at the history and current thinking of this man, as insightful for what it offers as telling for what it omits. We discuss the role of journalism in an age defined by propaganda.
Show Notes
Scoop: The new #2 at CDC is a top ivermectin prescriber who ended Louisiana’s vaccine-promotion media campaigns
Doctor Critical of Vaccines Quietly Appointed as C.D.C.’s Second in Command
CDC Quietly Turned Off Its Vaccine Search Tool. It’s Not Clear When It’s Coming Back.
The Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr. Affair Is Messier Than We Ever Could Have Imagined
RFK Jr. and the Inexplicable Appeal of Repulsive Men
RFK Jr. is overhauling the program that helps preserve Americans' access to vaccines
Why Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So Convinced He’s Right?
Nature: Pertussis, A Tale of Two Vaccines
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Conspirituality 286, RFK Jr.'s Great Crusade.
RFK Jr. is one of the greatest perpetrators of a fire hose of falsehoods that we've ever covered.
The stakes were raised when he was installed as head of America's public health system.
A new long-form article in The Atlantic offers an inside look at the history and current thinking of this man, as insightful for what it offers as telling for what it omits.
We discuss the role of journalism in an age defined by propaganda.
First, Derek runs down just the past week in Kennedy news, and it's a lot.
Yeah, so as you said, Julian, it is a lot.
It's always a lot with Kennedy.
So before we dive into this Atlantic cover story, let's run down a couple of recent events.
First off, the hiring department.
You might recall that CDC Director Susan Monarez was ousted by Kennedy in August.
And there was a stunning moment in front of Congress when Kennedy was asked specifically about this.
And he stated that he asked Monarez if she was trustworthy and she said no.
So that's why he fired her.
A week later, Monarez was testifying in front of Congress herself and she refuted this tale.
But ever since, the department has been led by acting director of the CDC, Jim O'Neill, who is a biotech investor who previously served as managing director for Peter Thiel's hedge fund, Clarium Capital.
Oh boy.
He's also co-founder of the Teal Fellowship, which pays 24 students every year $100,000 to drop out of college and become entrepreneurs.
Very Silicon Valley way of thinking.
The CDC now has a second in command who is basically filling Monarez's shoes.
It is veterinarian and physician Dr. Ralph Abraham.
He previously served as Louisiana Surgeon General, where he ended the state's mass vaccination program and ordered the state's public health agency to stop recommending seasonal vaccines.
During the height of the COVID pandemic, he said that masking, lockdowns, and vaccine requirements were practically ineffective, despite tons of proof to the contrary.
In 2021, he was the seventh highest prescriber of ivermectin in the state of Louisiana, despite tons of proof that it doesn't help treat COVID-19.
He was also in the top 0.2% of opioid prescribers to Medicare patients back in 2013 during the height of the opioid crisis.
So this guy loves his prescription pad.
Abraham also believes that Obamacare should be repealed.
He opposes the expansion of Medicaid.
So yeah, he's the perfect guy to be second in command at CDC.
Interestingly, no one even announced Abraham's appointment.
Jeremy Faust, who runs the Substack Inside Medicine, noticed that the agency quietly updated its site to include Abraham's name.
And then all of a sudden the press caught on.
So not suspicious at all.
I wonder why they even bother to update the site.
Like why put them there at all?
Like presumably the point of updating the site is to, you know, you know, aid in government transparency and stuff like that.
But is there some requirement that sort of forces them to announce who the public servants are?
Or like, why don't they just do away with that too?
Well, that you might have just given an idea.
I mean, remember, Kennedy has said it's the most transparent HHS in history.
Yeah, that's awesome.
That is, you know what he does.
He's like, oh, I did this thing once and now I can point to that.
So updating the site is their way of being like, see, we're transparent.
Although you need a guy in Substack who does this as a side gig because he's an actual doctor to go and figure it out.
I know you're going to get into vaccine injuries in a bit, Julian, but I'll also flag that Politico is reporting that Kennedy is apparently planning major changes to the vaccine injury reimbursement program.
And this includes letting people with severe autism be compensated.
And they're also considering redefining brain dysfunctions, which will then open up any sort of brain dysfunction to compensation as well to the quote unquote vaccine injured.
Now, this means effectively that vaccine manufacturers are more likely to leave the U.S. market out of fears of an overwhelming amount of litigation, which is basically how anti-vaxxers work, right?
They remove vaccines from circulation under guise of science through legislation like this.
I didn't realize the implication of this also would be that anybody who has a disabled child who has been sucked into anti-vax propaganda also stands to be rewarded for aiding in this particular scheme.
That's kind of incredible.
Right.
On Monday's bonus, I kind of went through the history of Andrew Wakefield because he's being resurrected again in the wake of everything happening with CDC right now.
And people who like the timelines of Andrew Wakefield's Lancet study in 1998, like children were already showing signs of autism before they got vaccines, but he fudged the data to make it seem like it was after.
And I just, the fact that Kennedy is championing, he's friends with Wakefield, right?
Wakefield is the savior figure.
He is the martyr in this story.
So the idea that people will be able to now sue the government, this compensation program, when they could have been showing signs of brain dysfunction or, you know, severe autism before being vaccinated, that is all going to get manipulated and fudged as well, which is going to drive pharmaceutical companies out of the market, predominantly smaller companies who are making vaccines, but bigger companies might also leave the market as well.
Now, speaking of the CDC sneaking around, which I did a moment ago with their update, the site Notice, NOTUS, they do great work.
They noticed something odd.
The agency, the CDC, quietly turned off one of its key tools on vaccine.gov.
Now, this site was launched in 2021 during the Biden administration as a collaboration between the CDC and researchers at Boston Children's Hospital.
And citizens used to be able to plug in their zip code and search for pharmacies and clinics that offer vaccinations near them.
And now it's gone.
Sorry, it's now listed under construction, but there is no date listed for its revival.
Now, this part in Notices reporting is fun.
A spokesperson for vaccinefinder.org told Notice via email that their organization ran vaccines.gov until their funding contract ended in July.
We are not aware of who at CDC maintains the website now, the spokesperson said.
One former CDC official who requested anonymity to speak candidly said vaccines.gov was formerly under the jurisdiction of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
But currently, quote, decisions are being made by CDC leadership, HHS leadership.
If it's down, it would be because IRD was directed to take it down, the official said.
Former NCIRD director Dmitry Duskalaksis.
That was an interesting name.
Duskalakis.
Greek.
That's Greek.
I should have scanned for that one ahead of time.
Dimitri Duskalakis confirmed that vaccines.gov was a CDC asset that HHS took over.
So speaking of takeovers, the CDC also recently updated its vaccines and autism page to falsely claim that evidence does not show that vaccines do not cause autism.
The double negatives are astounding.
It also evidence also does not show that the world was not created in seven days.
That's true.
We should get on that.
That's something the CDC should launch some investigation into.
Now, I ran down the list of misinformation on Monday's bonus episode that I flagged a moment ago, but suffice to say that the official CDC page now reads like any anti-vax playbook over the last 30 years.
And just to clarify, because you have read most of those playbooks, that's not an exaggeration, right?
It's like you're picking up children's health defense and that's been just that you open up these government sites and you're getting children's health defense.
Right, exactly.
Now, I mentioned my Monday bonus episode was focused on Wakefield, but before I got into his study, I went through paragraph by paragraph, the new CDC page and just showed how ludicrous it is.
So, no, I'm not exaggerating at all.
It is, it's really a coup, isn't it?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's a coup.
It's like a complete, absolute replacement of one infrastructure with another.
Absolutely.
And, you know, we're going to get into this with the Atlantic piece, but it's an example of how some media organizations are still calling people like Kennedy a vaccine skeptic.
It's like weighing language in moments like this is really important.
And I understand that different outlets have different standards and different possible compromises they have to take into consideration.
But this is the anti-vax playbook.
It's easy to understand.
And when you look at the CDC page, it is the exact rhetoric that we've seen for a generation from this community.
Yeah.
Not only is it a coup and a subversion of the actual science, but per what you were saying earlier, Derek, it's also incentivizing a whole group of people now to say, oh, there's money on the table for jumping on board of this anti-vax grievance train.
There's money on the table.
It should be noted that Kennedy has made millions of dollars from suing vaccine manufacturers.
There's different ways that it's monetized.
As I pointed out with Wakefield, like he was paid something like $645,000 to do that study in the first place because he was working with people who wanted to get new vaccines on the market or a new test kit that he was behind.
Wakefield was behind personally that he thought would make $43 million a year.
So I really hope that people understand that it's not always straight line from A to B with how they monetize it.
But when it comes to the big players like Kennedy and Dell Big Tree, they have schemes in place.
And when it comes to other people who just may be looking for compensation, you know, I didn't know this until recently.
There's an entire industry of people who, you know, when you have to sign up for an Apple update and it's just dozens of pages of legalese?
Yeah.
And you check yes.
There are people who read those looking for one error in order to sue Apple.
So that actually exists as something people do.
And I think it's really important in times like this because anything that the CDC updates will be subject to that sort of litigation from people who do that as an actual profession.
Yeah.
And in terms of the incentivizing I was talking about a moment ago, you know, with these families who have who have kids who may have various kinds of diagnoses and disabilities, it also dovetails with something we talk about a lot, which is that they don't have adequate support in terms of medical services, in terms of social work and, you know, ways in which they really need to be helped by the society.
And so that it's like, well, here's a pathway for you to get a huge chunk of money if you just say X, Y, and Z based on this new legalese, right?
They can be vindicated by applying for money from a fund that was set up to address the possibility of vaccine injuries.
And as they access that money, instead of asking for social services for their kids, they're going to drive vaccine manufacturers out of business.
Exactly.
And if that sounds cynical, I want to point out again with Wakefield, some of the parents who included their children in the study were already doing that.
Like he handpicked the 12 kids that were in the study in 1998.
This isn't like, you know, it wasn't a randomized controlled study, you know, the gold standard science that Kennedy always talks about.
It wasn't that.
Parents were already involved in litigation and he chose them for that reason.
So, you know, this all sounds almost conspiratorial and very cynical, but it is reflected in reality by people who are already doing these things.
All right, one more because we can't escape the Olivia Nootsi story.
Now, with the publication of the former New York Magazine journalist's book, American Kanto, this week, we're recording on Tuesday, so it's actually today.
Details about her sexting affair with Kennedy are everywhere.
Perpetually failing upwards.
Nootsie is now the West Coast editor of Vanity Fair, which published an excerpt that's been making the rounds.
Now, you listener have probably read it by now.
I posted some of it on Instagram.
I just want to hear Matthew read it out loud.
This is a total minefield for sexism here.
So I'm not going to try to do her voice.
Let me try to do something else.
I loved his brain.
I hated the idea of an intruder therein.
Others thought he was a madman.
He was not quite mad the way they thought, but I loved the private ways that he was mad.
I loved that he was insatiable in all ways, as if he would swallow up the whole world just to know it better, if he could.
He made me laugh, but I winced when he joked about the worm.
Baby, don't worry, he said.
It's not a worm.
I was hoping you would do Jordan Peterson's voice.
Right.
Okay, I could do that.
Next, next take.
Brian Phillips at a site called The Ringer wrote a detailed piece going into this entire affair.
It is satire.
It is hilarious.
It's actually a good read if you're not aware of the circumstances around this story, but it's even better due to its biting style.
It's written in a sort of QA format, like a Socratic thing where he's interviewing himself.
So, you know, just reading it out loud would seem weird if one of you read continuously here.
So I'm going to ask the question that Phillips asks himself, and then Julian, you'll reply.
Okay, but in general, it seems like we're talking a lot about Nootsi and not much about the older and vastly more powerful married politician in the relationship.
Why is this a scandal for her, but not for him?
I wonder about this too.
Nationally, RFK has faced very little blowback for his reported decision to get down on FaceTime with a woman less than half his age.
Why is that?
Garden variety sexism is surely part of it, but misogyny hasn't stopped sex scandals from bringing down male politicians in the past.
My guess is that the biggest reason is the ethics of journalism angle.
Nootsi is a reporter who broke one of the cardinal rules of reporting, and it's mostly other reporters who are talking about the story.
And Nozi was already a divisive figure among journalists, admired for her talent, criticized for her perceived narcissism and indifference to scruples.
In every friend group, there's one person whom the other friends keep a separate text channel to complain about.
Now, imagine if that friend had a video sex affair with the nation's leading vaccine denier.
Another possible factor?
Maybe everyone assumes that RFK is such an unprincipled egomaniac that it's pointless to try to hold him accountable in any normal human way.
Trump logic.
As a nice compliment to this article, Mother Jones published a solid piece.
It's called RFK Jr. and the Inexplicable Appeal of Repulsive Men that I'll include in the show notes.
I'm a bit surprised that Phillips brushed over the obvious because Olivia Nozie is a woman and women almost always take the fall for affairs in America.
I mean, sure, some male politicians have been brought down by sex scandals in the past, but those have usually involved women who weren't in the spotlight or who only became known due to the affair.
Nootsie was already a well-known gossip journalist by this point.
So I don't think Phillips is necessarily wrong with his other points here.
Trump logic certainly applies in this administration, but I personally think that misogyny is doing the heavy lifting.
And I'm not even going to try to defend Nootsi and her grade school prose, which sadly I think we're going to have to cover more in depth, maybe even next week if we all get to read the book this week, which I'm not looking forward to, but it is our job.
I think the affair with Nootsie is actually in Kennedy's favor if you look at Trump's cabinet.
Yeah, so by the time this is out, we'll have the memoir in hand, comes out today.
I'm going to be reading it not for her self-regard or for Kennedy transgressions that his followers will probably smirk at or maybe even approve of.
I think it's going to be valuable for whatever she discloses about Kennedy's day-to-day that might be distasteful or disgusting to the MAGA crowd, like things that make him look out of control.
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The original impetus for this episode was the November 23rd publication of an article in The Atlantic titled, Why is Robert F. Kennedy So Convinced He's Right?
It was penned by award-winning journalist Michael Shearer, who's written for Mother Jones, Time, Salon, Washington Post, and now The Atlantic.
And the article bore the subtitle, How an Outsider, Once Ignored by the Public Health Establishment, Became the Most Powerful Man in Science.
Now, it turned out when we first discussed this, guys, we were each aware of the piece, but we hadn't yet had a chance to read it.
And so, with some concerns, we agreed to each read it and then reconvene to discuss how to talk about it.
Given how we've tracked conspiracism, pseudoscience, Christian nationalism, and authoritarian extremism over the last six years, and then watched in dismay, along probably with all of our listeners, as they took over the government in this country, I think we were bracing for the possibility that the Atlantic had normalized Kennedy.
Perhaps we'd find that Michael Shearer argued Bobby has some good points about chronic disease, pesticides, seed oils versus beef tallow, or maybe we would find he'd enacted some both sides journalistic contortions around vaccine science.
Thankfully, the article didn't do that.
Yeah, I agree.
There weren't any both sides around the scientific issues or the vaccine science.
I do think if it didn't normalize some issues, it did gloss over some things.
I'll get to that in the end.
And I think, yeah, anyway, I'll get to it.
So the piece starts with Shira being beside Bobby on a plane upon hearing of Charlie Kirk's death.
And he describes Kirk as Kennedy's friend and the aide who whispered the news into his ear, eyes filled with tears.
Now, I think anyone who saw the video of that shooting was upset by it.
But the reality that this son of Democrat royalty considered an openly racist, misogynist, homophobic, Christian nationalist political activist a friend establishes an important tone.
Shira then weaves in the infamous assassinations of Bobby's father and uncle, as well as the August shooting alongside that at the CDC's Atlanta campus by a man who believed he'd been poisoned by the COVID vaccine and unleashed hundreds of bullets at that building, shattering all sorts of windows and I think killing one police officer.
I think that opening anecdote does set a tone, and I think the tone could go either way.
So I'm going to talk about the possible effects of Shearer's subtlety.
And this is one of those moments for me because he drops that Kennedy and Kirk are friends, but there's no comment on who Kirk was or what he did.
And then pinging the specter of recurrent political violence makes sense as a trigger point for the Kennedy family narrative.
But there's this implicit relationship made between Kirk and Robert Kennedy and JFK without a line about just how different these figures are or the contexts of their deaths.
If they were all political targets, which I think is why Kennedy is being appealed to by the MAGA crowd as kind of a whisperer for these kinds of events.
But this gives the article a sense of ambivalence from the top because I read that opening and I go, ew, right?
Like you probably do too, right?
They're friends.
But then one of the MSNBC hosts interviewing Shir said, well, that's a really poignant moment that you opened with.
So that's a news anchor opening with a reflection on Kennedy's emotions and humanity.
And I think maybe he was also influenced.
We have to say that the cover photo for this article is Kennedy presenting himself to the camera as a Catholic saint, gazing upwards, hands clasped around a wooden rosary.
And also I'm just looking at it now, and the lighting has been sort of adjusted or the tints, the filters or whatever, so that he doesn't actually look like a lobster.
He looks like a graceful sort of sage on the mountain or in a monastery or something like that.
So yeah, there's some artfulness going on here.
And I have some questions about that.
Yeah, it's interesting, Matthew.
I see that image and it just, it looks like total caricature to me.
Like I see it as skewering him.
I don't see it as deifying him.
You are an absolutely unapologetic atheist who would look at that picture and say, yeah, what a goofball.
But I tell you from the bottom of my Catholic heart, there's like a lot of people who will go, ah, yeah, there's something going on there.
And I have to admit, like that part of that drove my own interest in this guy for far too long, right?
Like I spent a long time almost doing that photograph in my mind.
Like, how did he get so fucked up?
How come he is so confused?
What is real about this person?
And I think it was a big waste of time, actually, because now he's a fascist.
Yeah.
And I'll just say, you know, the comparison or the putting together under the same umbrella of the two Kennedys and then Kirk in terms of having been killed by shooters, political assassinations, if you like, if we keep that term fairly open.
I don't know that most people who read The Atlantic are going to be confused about which one of those is a really bad guy.
I mean, I don't think anyone thinks, well, maybe Charlie Kirk is on the level of like, you know, Bobby Kennedy Sr.
But we just went through pretty much close to a month of people tiptoeing around this very issue, even on mainstream and liberal platforms about how we're going to speak about and regard Charlie Kirk and did he have good points and what was he really on about?
And then Kennedy himself tweets out on the day of his death, once again, a bullet has silenced the most eloquent truth teller of an era.
My dear friend Charlie Kirk was our country's relentless and courageous crusade.
But the thing is, is that that's Kennedy, but you could hear that in mainstream outlets as well, that he was just not that flowery, but the sentiment that, well, he was really just trying to sort of participate in the political project, right?
And so I think this article leaves the door open for that ambivalent sort of audience, which may actually take this friendship seriously or kind of recognize that, well, as politicians together, they share a common suffering, right?
Yeah, maybe.
I mean, I think some of the discourse around this was a little overblown.
On any outlet that wasn't sort of Fox News adjacent, I saw people trying to be sort of tasteful or thoughtful about the fact that someone had been murdered in a really brutal way.
But I also saw plenty of panel discussions in which people were saying, come on now, let's not whitewash this guy.
Here are all the terrible things he said.
Here are clips of him being a blatant racist and misogynist and transphobe and troll who was really willing to be incredibly hateful and step over the line again and again and again.
So yeah, I don't think anyone to the left of Fox News is in any way confused about who Charlie Kirk was, though there was a whole storm in a teacup about how his assassination was treated.
So anyway, I think that the way that we get into this is good storytelling through the article.
It correctly situates Kennedy as the central figure behind the unfolding carnage of American public health that Derek was just giving us updates on and the spiraling confusion that's inevitably ensuing now within our society about medical science.
Some pages later, we will also hear about death threats against scientist Paul Offitt from anti-vaccine extremists who buy into Kennedy's style of paranoia.
So I feel like there's a little bit of this back and forth around like, okay, who are the people who are being targeted?
And, you know, what's the theme here about threats of being shot in public?
Shira goes on to spend around 10,000 words making the kind of case we've made here over the course of probably close to 20 episodes, many of them driven by you, Matthew, very well, as well as a book chapter on RFK Jr.
He started off doing good work for the environment as a lawyer and then went off the rails via the bad analogy between actual polluted rivers and supposedly poisoned bloodstreams, doubling down deeper into conspiracism when the evidence just didn't support his heroic, we could say quicksotic quest.
Now, through pandemic chaos, social media misinformation, and switching political loyalties, that quest finds him in charge of the daily functioning and massive budget, it must be said, of the HHS.
I always feel it's important to mention that Kennedy's environmental cred has also been questioned.
He's created a nice little mythology around the idea.
And I'm not going to dispute that some of those lawsuits weren't positive because they did lead to good results.
But he also tried to start his own bottled water company when he was suing companies for water pollution.
So the impetus to monetize based on his lawsuits has been there for some time.
And to me, it really set the tone for Maha's monetization schemes today.
Yeah, it's almost like he was taking a note from Wakefield's book early on, right?
That water's also the Asprey kind of grift, right?
That water, that coffee, those vaccines are dangerous.
But hey, I've got one to sell you over here.
He was friends with Wakefield before that happened.
So it is that influence is possible.
Yeah.
So what I appreciated about the piece is how much ground it covers and how Shira was able to get inside Kennedy's point of view without ever failing to point out again and again how wrong he is and why, and drawing to do so on comments from experts like Paul Offit and Joshua Gordon for the scientific details.
He identifies and unpacks some of the recurrent arguments and mischaracterized studies that show up again and again in Bobby's rhetoric, while also gleaning what he can through spending time around him and having lots of conversations about how Kennedy's biography and psychology may dovetail with his tirelessly destructive public agenda.
On this podcast, we've cataloged and analyzed almost every twist and turn on RFK Jr.'s life and work.
For anyone who doesn't know, our publishers were actually able to get an excerpt from our chapter about him published as an op-ed in Time magazine the week our book was published.
I'm still quite proud of that.
But for many civilians out there, I'm comfortable saying that this article stands as a very good summary of who Bobby is and especially why he is so dangerous in his current position of power.
Now, one thing that struck me and got me thinking back to some work we've done here as I read the article is that Kennedy's background as a lawyer is actually a really, really terrible fit if you're looking for someone who wants to truly understand what the science on vaccines, pesticides, food dyes, or seed oils shows about their effects on humans.
He's not looking at the data or engaging with the scientific consensus or communicating with researchers the way a careful and well-informed yet appropriately humble civil servant would do.
No, he's much more like a shiny suit-wearing, fast-talking lawyer trying to find an angle that will win himself a big contingency fee regardless of the truth.
But in this case, his percentage of the victorious settlement is perhaps paid out in self-aggrandizing ego points.
He's already decided what the awful truth is and will righteously force whatever scientific papers through that he can to support his foregone conclusions.
Anyone who disagrees is in a closed-minded cult or captured by big pharma corruption.
I think this epistemological thing that you're bringing up, Julian, is so important because even with somebody who is not as melted and potentially traumatized as RFK Jr. is, the notion that you could move out of a legalistic framework into the realm of, well, let's actually do science that is not in pursuit of a foregone conclusion,
that would be extremely difficult.
The types of being in the world are just totally different.
You know, you're looking at, you're representing a client who needs a particular goal met versus you're sitting on a bench, not knowing what your slides are going to tell you until they tell you what they say.
And it's just totally different, totally different.
It's totally different.
And the transitive quality of charisma that comes with him in that move from the legalistic world to the scientific world means that he is then not actually able to do what a responsible, qualified adult would do who was making that transition, which is say, I need a group of advisors around me who can keep me straight on the fact of what the actual science is versus my tendency to want to argue for a particular position.
Yeah.
And the transitive nature of that charisma means that we have spent many, many years trying to platform, you know, qualified researchers and physicians who don't have that necessarily because that's not how they won.
They weren't in their professions to win.
They were in their professions to know.
And that doesn't require standing up in front of judges and being as flashy or as dominant as possible.
It requires carefully making your case and just very, very different sort of forms of warriorship going on and a complete mismatch that I think we've been trying to sort through for years.
I can only imagine that when finding a winning litigation strategy where his heroic intuitions actually did line up with the truth about environmental pollution, this dogged style helped him do a lot of good things.
But in our melted national discourse about obesity and chronic disease, diet, exercise, supposedly toxic food and pesticides, and this fallacious vaccine-autism link, that style only puts the madness on steroids.
So I imagine in another life, perhaps one without that famous last name, this unknown guy whose dad and uncle had been tragically killed, who survived heroin addiction and then did good work cleaning up river pollution, might have ended up becoming obsessed with vaccine misinformation in the same way.
And he might have become a member of that special class of cursed lawyers who take on the cases that come up before the vaccine court, more properly called the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, or NVIC.
Founded in 1986 via legislation that sought to free up vaccine manufacturers from lawsuits that were costing them large sums of money.
High legal fees, large jury settlements, and a litigious climate had caused a swarm at that time around the claim that the DPT vaccine was causing permanent brain damage in children.
Subsequent research only confirmed that there was no connection and that the brain damage was actually caused by an unrelated genetic condition called infant epilepsy.
But as with the MMR vaccine and autism, rumors, myths, and opportunistic lies proved hard to overcome.
All but one manufacturer had walked away from producing the DPT vaccine, which was a crucial line of defense against diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus, which had in the past killed thousands of kids every year.
In the 1920s, for example, diphtheria killed as many as 15,000 per year with a staggering 50% death rate pre-vaccine.
And pertussis killed around 9,000 a year.
Serious side effects for the DPT vaccine did exist, but were rare at about three cases per million vaccine doses administered.
But it could, in an even smaller number of cases, include seizures, which made this confusing overlap with epilepsy and brain damage seem convincing to juries.
The NVICP established a 75 cent excise tax on every vaccine sold to build a fund that would pay out vaccine injury claims as well as legal fees via a special kind of court that awards cases based on the preponderance of evidence standard,
which essentially gives away money based on it seeming more likely, like 51% that the injury was caused by vaccination and not something else.
This compromise was arrived at specifically to maintain herd immunity from those deadly conditions with high death rates by persuading manufacturers to keep producing vaccines.
And as far as I can tell, bending over backwards to help anyone who believed that they'd been a victim of vaccine side effects.
Now, it's important to note here, too, that the overall trend for its 40-year existence is that awards are given despite the scientific consensus being at odds with the rulings.
And in cases like the proposed links between the DPT vaccine and brain damage or the MMR vaccine and autism, later evidence after millions had been given away has shown that it was unwarranted.
Approximately 60% of all compensation has come via a negotiated settlement in which during saner times, the HHS had not determined that vaccines were causally at fault.
And it's important to point out that a common anti-vax talking point is you can't sue vaccine manufacturers.
It makes it seem like there's a collusion with the government.
The United States is really the only nation where citizens regularly sue everyone at all times.
And it's exactly why I flagged a moment ago, like the anti-vaxxer are trying to drive out vaccine manufacturers.
They were doing the same shit in the 80s.
They were just suing at every possible chance.
And the government had to step in and be like, this is very important for public health.
We need some sort of system where we can test this.
And just they don't have to get caught up in vaccine lawsuits all of the time.
That's why it exists in the first place.
So in Kennedy and Callie means and they say, you can't sue pharmacists.
See, it's an evil deep state.
No, it's because fuckers like you have been doing this forever.
And you force the government from a public health perspective to step in and try to create some guardrails around it in the first place.
Well, the guardrails are kind of like an insurance slush fund against misinformed claims that carry tragic stories with them, but don't end up being verified.
So it's like the CDC decided that, okay, the cost of doing business against the anti-vax lobby is to actually create this buffer fund that allows people to apply for reparations.
Yep.
Even though we can't really verify that there's a causal link.
Yeah, no good deed goes unpunished.
It's a very good faith setup.
And it also has to be said that at various times in its history, there were conditions where they were like, you know, we're not completely sure.
The science has not been fully decided on this.
And so if there's any chance that this may have happened, we want to help you.
We want to give you this money.
And so, yeah, then you get this, they both sides the whole thing.
Vaccine manufacturers has been indemnified because it's an evil conspiracy against us.
And then they'll go to the other talking point, which is how come the vaccine court has given away $4 billion.
And vaccines are roughly 4% of pharmaceutical profits.
Anytime I'm in these discussions, I'm like, I'm not defending pharmaceutical companies because the C-suites are predominantly evil and they will do fucked up shit all the time.
When it comes to this one domain of vaccines, the incentives are barely there to be manufactured.
And without sort of public input and governmental support, there's even no reason for them because they'll make a shit ton more money selling Viagra and cosmetic surgeries than they ever would from vaccines.
So all the incentives are skewed in the first place.
Yeah.
And then you also have the irony that this is a heavily, heavily regulated sector of the marketplace.
And, you know, of course, supplements are not at all regulated.
These people are held much more to account.
And because of that, in the instances where you have things like Viox, for example, there are these very high-profile lawsuits and there are these very big penalties that are delivered.
And then even that gets used, right?
It's like we caught them, we punish them, but it's all part of a conspiracy that's being covered up.
So there's no winning in any of this.
So yeah, as I said, during saner times, the HHS had not determined that vaccines were causally at fault in about 60% of the negotiated settlements that happened through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
But that leads us now to the very strange situation we're in today, because RFK Jr. is precisely the kind of lawyer who cares more about arguing persuasively to win, regardless of the facts and evidence.
But as head of the HHS, he's also now the guy who gets to point to those reality-distorting victories as proving the truth of what are actually false claims.
Thanks for that rundown, Julian.
I've pulled a few specific quotes from the Atlantic piece I want to tug on for discussion.
And then Matthew, you can close with your big picture thoughts here.
But here's the first one: quote, the whole medical establishment has huge stakes and equities that I'm now threatening, he told me, Kennedy told Scherer.
And I'm shocked President Trump lets me do it.
And this is an interesting one to me because it is a little bit shocking because on one hand, you have a completely deregulatory administration who is all about the free market.
And what's happening over on the public health side or in Kennedy's side is there is actually some pushback.
Like just today, Tuesday, the New York Times is reporting that the city attorney for San Francisco is suing food manufacturers for actually making ultra-processed foods, right?
Which from a public health perspective, it's debatable about what kind of good that will do.
But from a free market perspective, that's antithetical to it.
You know, I also want to point out that the recent Maha Action Summit featured a number of biotech leaders speaking at it, which is also antithetical to Kennedy's crowd because he's all about reining in the pharmaceutical companies.
And yet here he is bringing in a number of pharmaceutical startups in order to pitch their products to the crowd.
So that particular piece really jumped out at me and the sort of competing incentives that are going on right now.
And Kennedy's crowd has been very upset that the FDA continues to approve drugs, which is what they're supposed to do.
But Trump cultivated all of these conspiracy theories within his base.
And so when you get to the Epstein files, they're going to choose the conspiracy over the figurehead.
And I feel like Kennedy is facing some of that right now because he has cultivated all these conspiracy theorists, but then they want no vaccines on the market.
They want the FDA to not approve any drugs at all.
And he's going to have to grapple with that.
So that particular moment jumped out at me from the article.
There's another one that he wrote about that jumped out.
Quote, in January 2025, after Trump announced that he would be nominating Kennedy as HHS secretary, his cousin Carolyn Kennedy, JFK's daughter, wrote a public letter opposing his confirmation in part because of what she'd witnessed during his years as a young drug user.
She blamed him for leading others in the family down the path of addiction.
She described young Bobby as a predator like the raptors he'd raised, saying he had grown addicted to attention and power.
Yeah, that moment in the article was so stark.
I mean, because that letter also included a description of him enjoying subjecting visitors to seeing him put baby chickens and mice into a blender to feed his birds.
And the fact then that his response to having those quotes from the letter read to him by Shearer was, I wouldn't contest it that much.
Addiction is kind of narcissistic, is what he said.
It just shows how out of touch he is with how those stories actually come across.
The question is, out of touch with who, right?
Like, I think that's what we're all dealing with, right?
Is he's able to go on record and say that.
And how's it going to land?
How's it going to land?
I mean, he's being transparent.
Is it going to fit into his whole shtick of, well, I go to meetings every day?
Or, you know what I mean?
Like, is it part of his recovery arc?
Is that part of what the sort of picture on the cover is about or referring to?
But he doesn't say, I wouldn't contest it that much.
Addiction is kind of narcissistic.
And I did some really awful, cruel things that I'm embarrassed to hear you read back to me right now.
He doesn't say that.
No, maybe the premise that he's in recovery is a foregone conclusion for him and his followers, right?
Last one.
Kennedy thinks more people should follow his lead by consuming science directly.
I don't know what the fuck that means.
Trusting the experts is not a feature of science, he likes to say.
It's not a feature of democracy.
It's a feature of totalitarianism and religion.
But having everyone do their own research, as Kennedy recommends, was untenable even before the advent of technologies like nanoscience and genomic editing.
When I suggested to Kennedy that he was now presuming to play the role of health expert himself, he rejected that.
Quote, I don't tell people to trust me.
I tell people don't trust me.
It's double speak.
It's all double speak.
Scientific consensus actually is a form of democratic epistemology, but evaluation of that process by completely unqualified readers who are quote doing their own research is not a bold rejection of authoritarianism.
It's more akin to the stupidity of a pigeon strutting around on a chessboard, taking a shit and then declaring victory.
Well, the entire argument is also a red herring because whether he likes it or not, Kennedy is the expert who is deciding on policy and funding, which is driving science.
But he continues to pretend that he's just the powerless contrarian who can't do anything about it.
Yeah, exactly.
And this is also the classic pseudoscience talking point.
It falsely frames the scientific consensus arrived at by qualified people following the skeptical critical thinking required to understand and evaluate data as being based on blind faith or authoritarian groupthink.
But the opposite is really true.
It's the contrarian pseudo-skeptics for whom Bobby is the patron saint who truly base their arguments on vibes and are susceptible to the grift of unregulated wellness products.
And now he's in this position of power where he's still kind of doing that routine.
Well, the entire mindset is wellness-based because these decades of wellness rhetoric has now risen to the level of mainstream politics.
the don't trust me, trust your own body, trust your intuition as a form of medicine, which has fucked up people for a long time.
It's also a continuation of the Reaganomics view of health, to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, your health is your own choice and it's your own responsibility, has nothing to do with society.
That's incompatible with public health.
And yet Kennedy is approaching public health from an individualistic health perspective.
I'm reading Betrayal of Trust by Lori Garrett right now.
It was written in 2000.
She is sort of the public health expert who really understands it.
And this quote really jumped out at me after reading Sharer's article.
So public health is a negative.
When it is at its best, nothing happens.
There are no epidemics.
Food and water are safe to consume.
The citizens are well informed regarding personal habits that affect their health.
Children are immunized.
The air is breathable.
Factories obey worker safety standards.
There is little class-based disparity in disease or life expectancy.
And few members of the citizenry go untreated when they develop addictions to alcoholic or narcotic substances.
Yeah, perfectly said.
The absence of so many awful public health outcomes, most notably deadly and debilitating childhood diseases, has lulled a privileged public over the decades into misunderstanding how extraordinarily successful the existing interventions, especially vaccines, have been at preventing all of that horrific suffering.
But it doesn't make good memes on social media.
And so therefore people don't even think it's real.
I want to talk about some of the really subtle strengths of Shira's piece.
I thought this piece was strong on all of the science that you guys have covered and on the question of its headline, like, why does Kennedy think he's right?
I do think that question is a little bit late in the game in the current climate, but I'll get to that.
But on his self-confidence, Shara covers all of the great bases and all of the conspiratuality mainstays, a lot of which we've covered.
His quote about being on a great crusade, which emerges out of his family dynasty, the hero's journey rhetoric that comes out of his addiction and his claimed recovery arc.
He mentions that Kennedy has said that this acceptance into Trump's cabinet was providential.
And Sher records the comparisons to Galileo that float around the conference rooms at HHS.
He also gets a former friend of Kennedy's, Mark Green, on the record attributing Kennedy's persistence in the face of family and political opposition to his, quote, messianic self-regard.
Now, you add to all of this the zero-sum winner-takes-all skills of the litigator that you were talking about, Julian, and his constant referral to populist validation.
And this is why he thinks he's right.
I think that Shira really answered that question.
Now, in answering that question, he is throughout diplomatic and fair.
It's a great piece of old school journalism.
And in it, he renders Kennedy with this kind of page-turning complexity of a fictional anti-hero, but not like the absurdist type.
Like he could be a pyncheon-level paranoid character.
But in Shara's piece, he's rich enough to be really in Chekhov, I think.
And Shara pulls this off with some tastefully subtle hints.
So I'm just going to mention two.
I use the phrase Bobby's claimed recovery arc above because Scherer has this line, quote, although Kennedy says he has not taken heroin since he got clean, he still considers his brain to be a sort of formulation pharmacy able to transform anything, rock climbing, falconry, sex, into a drug.
Okay, so the entire article impugns his credibility on science and public health.
So Scherer starting any sentence with, although Kennedy says, is kind of like flagging the reader to doubt what comes next.
And I think the law of threes in that last clause feels like it could point to a bunch of other possibilities beyond rock climbing, falconry, and sex.
And sure enough, the nutsy memoir Buzz has him copying to smoking DMT and doing psychedelics.
I wonder with who maybe in the Austin area.
You know, the psychedelics question is interesting because they have been shown to be non-addictive, like neurologically as compared to the other drugs.
So the question of addiction comes into play.
Now, that said, as someone who's consumed a lot of them in my past, there is an addictive quality to wanting to do them and have that experience.
So it makes it very tricky to talk about like, what is a drug in the first place?
Like if he drinks caffeine, he's taking one of the most addictive substances we know of.
But does it have a negative health impact as compared to heroin?
Like, no, it does not.
So that's always tricky territory.
What we do know about the psychedelic culture in this crowd in particular is that it tends to increase everybody's confidence with regard to their divine mission, right?
That's the through line.
That's the through line.
Okay, here's my other subtle sure moment, maybe my favorite one.
Listen to this.
Kennedy now compares his relationship to the president to when you're dating somebody that you keep liking more and more.
It's just the image is actually gross.
Yeah, I'll get to that.
They began meeting after the failed assassination attempt on Trump in July 2024.
Kennedy came to believe that his previous impressions of Trump, that he was a bombastic narcissist, that's in quotes, who lacked curiosity and didn't read books had been wrong.
Quote, one day he sat on the plane with me.
We were talking about Syria and he drew a map of the Mideast for me.
And it was a perfect map, Kennedy told me.
Then he drew in the troop strength of each country and also the troop strength on various borders.
Trump would recite sports trivia to Kennedy and recount the net worth of major Wall Street financiers.
And as with everything else Kennedy talks about, he fact-checked all of this very carefully, right?
This is my point.
Like, first of all, the dating thing, he says, when you're dating somebody that you keep liking more and more, it's pretty funny given Kennedy's relationship rap sheet.
Like long-term dating, I think is an ultimate confession of love and respect.
But to your point, Julian, Kennedy wants Scherer and the rest of us to believe that he's able to fact-check Trump's doodle on the Middle East and troop levels.
Maybe he left out the pubic hair squiggles.
But Scher gives me the image in this little vignette of one bullshitter winning over another.
But also, and I think this is much more ominous, it's the image of two Zionists who are hobnobbing on Air Force One over a napkin drawing of the region where a genocide they have respectively co-signed in Trump's corner and rationalized in Kennedy's corner is still unfolding.
But it is subtle.
And this is what I want to talk about next is I wonder how many other readers will read it that way.
Because I think there is a conundrum in covering Kennedy at this point, especially.
And I think the scene on the plane illuminates the paradox in Trump world because his inner circle members survive having gone on record slamming him.
So JD Vance called him a moral disaster and that he was cultural heroine, which is interesting, you know, if Kennedy is also in the cabinet.
And he wondered whether Trump, this is Vance, wondered whether Trump could be America's Hitler.
Kennedy, for his part, publicly described Trump as appealing to some of the darkest impulses in the national psyche.
And then in a leaked text, Kennedy himself called Trump a terrible human being, the worst president ever and barely human.
He is probably a sociopath.
Okay, how does Trump tolerate this and then actually hire and admire these guys?
I've been wondering about this, but I think something about Mamdani's Oval Office visit clarified things for me because there, Trump shruggingly accepts the mayor-elect saying that he's a fascist, and then he doesn't bat an eye over the notion that he's funded a genocide.
And so things start to get a little bit clearer.
Like Trump can absorb the worst verbal criticism so long as it creates news, so long as it comes from figures whose charisma or popularity in the public sphere, he can turn to his own purposes.
Or in Mamdani's case, he thinks he can.
So shit talking is just part of the business for him.
And this is where, you know, we can remember the pro-wrestling K-Fabe and neo-K-Fabe analysis of Friend of the Pod Josie Reisman.
You know, Trump is the babyface or Trump is the heel, depending upon what sells in the moment.
Yeah, and he believes that about everyone else too.
He thinks I say a lot of crazy stuff about people that is incredibly insulting and condemnatory.
They say it about me, but if we can make a deal, we can make a deal.
Yeah, and they're probably playing the same game that I am.
And I think that's why Kennedy is also like Teflon in this incident that Cher records around Carolyn Kennedy dubbing him a predator with regard to the Raptors.
So like, it's an incredible moment where she's describing, I was with him when he was a teenager and in college, and I went to his rooms and where he was living, and he would just freak everybody out by grinding up small animals and blenders.
And of course, there's drug trading going on as well.
And he shrugs it off.
And so what do you have?
You can call Trump a fascist to his face.
And you can call Kennedy a predator to his face.
So what is left in the critical arsenal?
It's really hard, right?
So playing it straight, as Sher did, sticking to the factual disputes, I think for a lot of people seems like the best option.
But here's my take, which is I think that if journalism on Kennedy stays in the realm of discussing the science and the hero's arc as a health maverick, that will fulfill certain norms of fairness.
But I think it might also be a win for Kennedy and maybe even for Trump.
And this is not to take anything away from the article.
I think it's just a really incredibly difficult rhetorical space.
And I think that one reason that Kennedy might have talked to Schur for a year, despite whining about it in the article, was because he might have been able to sense that the conversation was staying in that pocket of scientific and pseudoscience back and forth, he said, she said, kind of mystification.
And dominating that very space is why Kennedy is in power, because he's the one, according to his followers, who bravely challenged the status quo, didn't back down, and asserted his narcissistic certainty as boldly as any boomer Facebook uncle.
So I don't think there are facts, studies, or in the future, statistics of excess deaths under his HHS tenure that will uproot that narrative.
Kennedy is now a pillar in a fascist regime, and his shitty data and his twisted justifications, I'm afraid, have already won.
So I have some reservations about the utility of letting him continue to make his case while posing him as a radiant saint on the cover during the Christmas season.
Like he's going to be there on the displays at Whole Foods, you know, with his rosary beads.
This is not Schur's choice.
It's not his fault.
That's not his decision.
I think, you know, the cynical view might be that it keeps the Atlantic more in the ballgame with regard to access to the administration than if that cover subtitle read the most dangerous man in public health, because what they put as a subtitle is, you know, he's the most powerful man in science.
And I think that actually rubs Kennedy the right way, even if on balance to a normal reader, to somebody who's actually reading it, it makes him look very bad.
I don't think it makes him look bad in his field or where it really hurts him.
So how would I personally spend the financial and institutional resources the Atlantic committed to this in a more activist mode, which is what my choice would be.
And by activist, I mean like, what type of critique do I believe is most likely to erode his support and his fandom?
And I think my aim would be to add to and bolster the public record on what a disgusting out-of-control person he is, but not just in the eyes of Democratic voters, but in the eyes of erstwhile supporters, especially whatever part of the Maha Mama crowd identifies as feminist.
And that might mean getting Carolyn Kennedy back on record following up on how he dismissed her comments.
I think it also means not letting prior reporting on sexual assault or sexual compulsions kind of lie in the background.
About two-thirds, three-quarters of the way down, Cher shorthands a well-reported and personally significant episode in Kennedy's life involving the marriage that produced for the children.
Quote, in 2010, after 16 years of marriage, he filed for divorce from Richardson.
She accused him of extensive infidelity, and he described her as abusive.
Before the acrimonious proceedings concluded, Richardson committed suicide.
Okay, so what we know, and I know that, you know, he's got 10,000 words to work with.
There are space considerations.
There's all kinds of choices to be made.
And maybe he didn't, you know, make the final cut.
But what we have is something that leaves out what we actually know.
And what we know is that the infidelity was not an accusation.
It was self-recorded in Kennedy's handwritten journal of dozens affairs, dozens of affairs leaked by Richardson's family after her death by suicide, not committed.
He described her as abusive in a still-sealed court document that I've been trying to get at for ages that was aimed at winning custody.
But then her family described him constantly mocking and demeaning her struggles with jealousy and substance use despite his own history.
Cher also kind of glosses over, or this article does, the admitted sexual assault on the former Kennedy family babysitter Eliza Cooney, who he didn't name, even though she gave multiple on-record interviews about why she came forward.
So I think pieces like this definitely have their audience.
They are super helpful.
But ultimately, I think that a wave of direct statements from women about his personal conduct and the downstream blood on hands effects of his policies might be more effective in draining support from his base and ultimately his favor from Trump, who doesn't want losers around him.
So Caroline Kennedy, Mary Richardson, Eliza Cooney, all real people to whom real things happen.
And I think if they're really spotlighted and more, I believe Kennedy looks smaller.
And it's not just them.
Like, who's going to interview the families of the dead children in Samoa who, you know, came from, who died because of the massive infectious outbreak?
I'd also go out and find the hundreds of MAGA moms with children who have cancer who realize what the research and the staffing cuts at HHS mean to them right now.
So alongside a piece like Shara's, I would flood the zone with the kinds of personal stories of abuse and suffering and death that Kennedy assumes are all on his side because his conspiratorial bullshit has projected them outwards for years.
Like I would force him to answer in public to the verified testimonies of the women and the mothers he says he listens to.
And I wouldn't let him fight in the octagon where he's already won.
