And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host, and I'm doing this one solo today.
It's a little bit different than any of the previous episodes, and I don't think I'll do this kind of thing very often, but today I'm going to be doing a critique of another podcaster's messaging, both style and content.
The podcaster in question is Brianna Joy Gray.
Don't fret if you haven't heard of her, but she has definitely been around.
She has a law degree and has worked as a lawyer, but most notably and pertinent to today's conversation, she was the national press secretary for Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential election campaign.
And she now hosts a podcast called Bad Faith, in which she mostly discusses topics from about the furthest left perspective I've ever found in the U.S. She's well informed about U.S. national politics and how to shape messaging on that level.
We're going to take a close look at a particular area of her messaging today.
I have listened to a few episodes of her podcast.
First, I found the title interesting, Bad Faith.
I think this is meant to be a comment on other media, but that title is going to come back around in this conversation, so put a pin in it for now.
Her political stances on many issues are very familiar to me, and none of them are going to be particularly highlighted today.
Her substance is not really at issue, at least not at the moment.
After listening to several episodes of the Bad Faith podcast, in which several important issues were raised and discussed at length, I was shocked when the last 24 minutes of one of her episodes dovetailed into a discussion about who would make a better Democratic candidate for president, Mary Ann Williamson or RFK Jr.
It turns out that the Democratic Party in the U.S. doesn't want to host debates with a full field of candidates.
And of course, anyone and everyone is like to have an opinion on that, whether they approve of the decision or not.
But Mary Ann Williamson and RFK Jr. are, for now, the only two people who are publicly posturing for the position to challenge Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination.
RFK Jr. just announced the launch of his campaign about a week ago.
So why is this important?
Why would I get uptight about this?
First, Marianne Williamson.
She is a reality denier who has promoted a lot of bad ideas in the anti-vax space.
Her particular flavor of anti-vax rhetoric includes the dangerous set of ideas that are centered around bad thoughts.
As in, if you're sick, it's because you have thought the wrong things and you've let the demons inside by not believing correctly.
I'm not kidding.
She has a long and storied history of telling gay men who have AIDS that they need to change their thinking in order to avoid their suffering.
This approach to disease control is not based on reality, and in no way should Marianne Williamson be allowed anywhere near the most influential position of power and authority.
So what about RFK Jr.?
Clearly he's a Kennedy and they are either all good or all bad, depending on who you talk to.
There are two sets of conversations that are had about RFK Jr.
The first of those focuses almost exclusively on his history working for environmental causes.
He has worked as an environmental lawyer for a very long time and he has legitimately worked on some very important cases about dumping of toxic chemicals into water supplies.
In the past year or so, most of those conversations have included things he said about war and guns and a few other topics.
To me, this has clearly been about a run for president.
The only reason anyone has ever asked RFK Jr. about his thoughts on any political topic is because of his family name.
He has worked closely with many other environmental lawyers, and no one was asking those other guys about guns, crime, race, drugs, or war.
Just RFK Jr.
So, what's the big deal?
Why would I be upset about him attempting to be president?
This has to do with the second set of conversations about RFK Jr.
He's an anti-vaxxer.
He's not just an anti-vaxxer.
He's one of the anti-vaxxers.
And by that, I mean that there are several hundred anti-vax influencers, and RFK Jr. is among the very top of that list.
So much so that the Center for Countering Digital Hate has named him among the disinformation dozen.
That is one of 12 anti-vaccine influencers who have made the largest impact on the anti-vaccine movement.
According to the center, these 12 people account for 65% of all anti-vax messaging.
Just in case anyone's wondering, Mary Ann Williamson doesn't even make it onto that list.
RFK Jr. runs a not-for-profit campaign agency known as the Children's Defense Fund.
If you've heard of this, it's because it's been mentioned a lot more in the past year or so as Bobby Kennedy has begun his electoral ramp up.
The Children's Defense Fund uses the idea that children are being harmed by vaccines to advocate for a reduction in their use.
Most specifically, the old claim about vaccines causing autism is trotted out repeatedly.
This claim has been debunked many, many times after it first got pushed into our atmosphere.
Vaccines don't cause autism, but the claim that they might has caused a lot of fear among new parents who just want the best kind of life for their children.
Ordinary people who are exposed to bad information and thus are convinced to make bad decisions to put their children at greater risk of harm.
That's the legacy of the so-called Children's Defense Fund.
I personally think that anyone who uses children as a political prop should incur appropriate social penalties, but everyone can feel free to make their own decisions on that point.
Feel free to send me an email about your feelings on that to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
But I started talking about Brianna Joy Gray and her messaging style.
Here's a clip from episode 271 of the Bad Faith podcast, which aired on May 1st.
In this clip, we hear Brianna Joy Gray on her podcast talking to Margaret Kimberly of the Black Agenda Report.
Also featured in this clip is a clip that aired on Brianna's podcast of Tucker Carlson engaging in an anti-vax rant.
Here it is.
You know, it's interesting that this media critique piece, just we could stay here for a second, because RFK Jr. made a statement and Lee Fong also on Twitter echoed this argument that what might have put Tucker over the line for Fox management was that this is quoting Lee Fong.
Tucker Carlson last week ripped big pharma, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on TV ads and news outlets routinely parroting drug industry talking points.
Is there a single example of a CNN, MSNBC, or other Fox news host ever discussing TV advertising corruption?
And Robert F. Kennedy also tweeted that Tucker Carlson five days after he crosses the line by acknowledging that the TV networks pushed a deadly and ineffective vaccine to please their pharma advertisers.
Tuck Carlson's breathtakingly courageous April 19th monologue broke TV's two biggest rules.
You know, what do you make of this argument that maybe this is all smoke and mirrors for the fact that Tucker Carlson was too truthful, that Tucker Carlson went too far in actually threatening the business by talking about advertisers?
I don't think so.
You know, I think that's more about Kennedy and his emphasis on his opposition to the COVID jabs.
I think it's more about what he emphasizes as a person.
I think this is about the lawsuit.
It's about Dominion more than anything else.
They would allow him to talk about big, I mean, that's red beat for their viewers, right?
Big pharmas forcing us to get this jab.
Yeah, but the advertiser piece, the idea that the network is complicit because they are happy to accept these advertising dollars and complicit in conforming their news, their news content so that it doesn't undermine the advertisers' best wishes.
Right.
I don't know.
It doesn't strike me.
I mean, it could be possible, but it doesn't strike me as the thing that would get, I mean, his show is the highest rated show.
Right.
It doesn't strike me as the sort of thing that would cause him to lose his job altogether.
Yeah.
It just doesn't.
I'm not feeling it.
Yeah, there have been these other moments too, right?
Where he's lost advertisers.
He's covered topics that have caused advertisers to flee Fox.
And what we saw were there were like a small number of ideologically aligned advertisers, like the My Pizza Guy, the Papa John's guy, I think, who are willing to step up and cover the spread for Fox News until the advertisers returned.
So they were basically willing to front the money for Tucker Carlson to say what he wanted to say.
And even after those scandals, Tucker Carlson remained afloat.
So I think that is more evidence, at least, that it's unlikely that the kind of the pharmaceut of April 19th was the one that did it.
Well, here's one measure of their badness.
You can try this at home.
Ask yourself, is any news organization you know of so corrupt that it's willing to hurt you on behalf of its biggest advertisers?
Anyone who do that is obviously Pablo Escobar level corrupt and should not be trusted.
What would that look like?
That level of corruption.
Well, imagine that the Trump administration had made it mandatory for American citizens to buy My Pillow.
That's one of Fox News' biggest advertisers.
Imagine the administration declared that if you didn't rush out and buy at least one My Pillow, and then at least another booster pillow, you would not be allowed to eat out.
You couldn't re-enter your own country.
You couldn't have a paying job.
My Pillow, they told you with a straight face, was the very linchpin of our country's public health system.
Now, imagine as they told you that, that Fox, as a news organization, endorsed it, amplified the government's message.
Imagine if Fox News attacked anyone who refused to buy My Pillow as an ally of Russia, as an enemy of science.
And then imagine that Fox kept up those libelous attacks, even as evidence mounted that my pillow caused heart attacks, fertility problems, and death.
If Fox News did that, what would you think of Fox News?
Would you trust us?
Of course you wouldn't.
You would know that we were liars.
Thank heaven, Fox News never did anything like that, but the other channels did.
The other channels took hundreds of millions of dollars from big pharma companies, and then they shilled for their sketchy products on the air.
And as they did that, they maligned anyone who was skeptical of those products.
At the very least, this was a moral crime.
It was disgusting, but it was universal.
It happened across the American news media.
They all did it.
So at this point, the question isn't who in public life is corrupt, too many to count.
The question is, who is telling the truth?
So there's a whole lot there.
Let's start from the bottom of the pile and work our way up.
Tucker Carlson first.
All of the things that Tucker Carlson said in that clip are either wrong or skewed.
First, the metaphor is not a good comparison.
In logical terms, it would be a false equivalency.
He asks if a network might be so corrupt that it would hurt its viewers at its advertisers' behest.
And he uses a comparison between pillows and vaccines.
This would be a more apt comparison if pillows were a new and unknown technology.
Imagine a world where we slept on beds without pillows, and we were finding that some of us were experiencing neck and back pain and maybe some other problems.
Along come the pillows, and then somehow we're forced to use the pillows because the government says they're good for us.
But that still doesn't fix the metaphor.
It's still flawed in that, in Tucker's metaphor, we are forced to pay for the pillows.
To make it more accurate, the government should negotiate a price to buy the pillows in bulk and provide them to us for free, which is how it worked with the vaccines.
No one had to shell out personal dollars to purchase vaccines.
Further, in Tucker's metaphor, all the pillows are bought from one single supplier.
This isn't how vaccines worked either.
Several vaccine manufacturers had approved vaccines for COVID.
Pfizer and Moderna were the first on the market.
Johnson Johnson was initially approved, but that vaccine was pulled after a very small number of health issues developed.
Novavax is approved in the U.S. now, but I don't think it was initially.
AstraZeneca was never approved for use in the U.S., but it was in Canada and Britain.
There wasn't a government-mandated monopoly on anything, as Tucker's imagery implies.
Note that he doesn't state this outright.
It's an important piece to understand about the way he attempts to distort reality for his viewers.
And of course, Tucker Carlson Gish Gallops threw several falsehoods about COVID vaccines all very quickly.
Here they are in sequence, along with why I know they are wrong.
In the metaphor, he's referring to the purchase of the My Pillow, but he is really referring to the vaccine here.
So I'll speak solely about the vaccine and not about the confusing, flawed, and ultimately ham-fisted metaphor that Tucker uses.
If you weren't vaccinated, you couldn't eat out.
This may have been true in some regions for a few months.
Once the case count got below some predetermined threshold values, this restriction was removed region by region.
This condition was certainly long gone before Tucker ever said this.
If you weren't vaccinated, you couldn't re-enter your own country.
This was never true in the U.S. or Canada.
There was a time when you had to isolate after entering the country, and travel to other countries was restricted by the rules of those other countries.
Complaining about this only makes sense if you don't believe COVID is a real virus that has the potential to harm or end human lives.
Most of these travel restrictions were from the period of the pandemic before we had vaccines.
If you weren't vaccinated, you couldn't have a paying job.
There were some jobs that required vaccination, particularly jobs that required a person to work in proximity with other people.
Not all jobs required this.
There have been people during this pandemic that have given up finding a job that could be done without a vaccination and are usually much worse off for it.
In my experience, this is the sort of person that couldn't afford to not have a job for an extended period of time.
That requirement has largely gone away in most areas of work.
It might be noted, though, that the loosening of this restriction was always subject to the ability for society as a whole to deal with the pandemic, and the people who were able to go back to work unvaccinated can thank those who vaccinated for this societal condition.
Tucker tries to minimize the importance of vaccines by comparing them to pillows, saying that my pillow, they told you with a straight face, was the very linchpin of our public health system.
If anyone were trying to say that about pillows, they would indeed need to work on keeping a straight face.
Not so for vaccines.
They have eradicated smallpox and drastically reduced the incident rate of a host of other ailments that would be much more common without vaccines.
Life in the year 1800 was a special misery where 46% of children failed to reach their fifth birthday.
Now that's less than 3%.
Vaccines do most of the heavy lifting there.
Tucker tries to paint a scenario where supporting vaccines is itself an obscenity.
He claims that anyone who refuses to take the vaccine is accused of being an ally of Russia and being an enemy of science.
He's wrong about the former and mostly right about the latter.
The science of vaccines is clear and unequivocal.
Nothing in our world has been more scrutinized in the past three years than vaccines.
When someone is labeled an ally of Russia, it is for other reasons.
He is confusing two issues, and he's likely doing it deliberately.
Then Tucker starts with the real false vaccine claims.
The vaccines don't cause heart attacks.
This claim is an exaggeration and oversimplification of another anti-vaccine trope about myocarditis.
Myocarditis is a swelling of the heart.
It is true that myocarditis can occur at a slightly higher rate in a group of vaccinated people who don't have COVID than in a similarly sized, unvaccinated group that don't have COVID.
I say that part about them being groups that don't have COVID because getting COVID very greatly increases the risk of myocarditis, and the presentations of myocarditis that occur without COVID vaccination tend to be much more severe.
Tucker claims that COVID vaccines cause fertility problems.
He doesn't specify which fertility problems exactly, and he doesn't want to.
He's only saying this to cause fear.
Dr. Vicki Male is a British researcher and lecturer in reproductive immunology, and she has done a lot of work to undo the misinformation surrounding vaccines and pregnancy.
She is who I look for when I get confused about some data or study that seems to indicate a problem with vaccines and fertility.
She explains it very well.
I will link to one of her interviews in the notes for this episode.
Vaccines do not cause fertility problems or increase risks for pregnancies.
COVID, however, does increase health risks for both pregnancies and newborns, and pregnant women should get vaccinated against COVID.
Tucker claims that vaccines cause death.
This is controversial, but only if you expect no one to ever die.
As of January 11th of this year, there have been nine deaths associated with the COVID vaccine in the U.S. That's after 665 million doses had been administered.
For anyone keeping score at home, COVID has killed well over a million people in the U.S. as of January of this year.
Tucker Carlson claims that all of these very bad things, most of which are blatantly untrue, some of which are merely mostly untrue, were happily endorsed by all the other sources of information.
He's implying that he, and by extension, Fox News, is the only good and true source of information.
He implied it, but didn't state it outright.
But if he was really the only good source of information, he wouldn't even need to imply this.
It would be self-evident.
Him leading people to it is a cult-like information control behavior.
In cults, the leader of the cult is the only real source of information, and those cult leaders expect to be able to reinterpret the observations of the world for their followers.
Tucker lastly claims that all the other media sources shilled for big pharma, that they took hundreds of millions of dollars from big pharma companies.
I have to assume he means from ads, but he doesn't outright say that, which is also probably a deliberate attempt to make it look like this money is some sort of open bribe.
Then Tucker says that the other channels maligned anyone who was skeptical of those products.
All of this is a confused jumble of dog whistles to anti-vaxxers.
There were no advertisements for the COVID vaccines.
There was no need.
When they arrived, COVID and the vaccines were about the only thing anyone was talking about anywhere in the world.
And also, there was no need to advertise for them because individuals were not paying for them.
Most of us were not altogether picky about which ones we got.
Tucker Carlson goes on to call this a moral crime.
Everything from his flawed metaphor to his skewed grasp of reality makes this not so.
If reality did match the picture he paints here, then yes, there would be a reason to call it a moral crime.
But this entirely depends on whether or not you think COVID is a real virus that has the potential to harm or end human lives.
That's the objective reality on which this hinges.
Because if COVID is both real and dangerous, then discouraging people from getting vaccinated is the misery booster in this story and is the real moral crime.
After this, he doubles back on the shameless self-promotion he's most famous for, attempting to sow seeds of distrust in the other channels, implying that they aren't going to tell his audience the truth his audience wants to hear.
It took Tucker Carlson less than two minutes to reel all that off, and it took me over 12 minutes to speak the words that refuted it, much longer than that to double check all the facts to be certain they were exactly correct before I did so.
This is always the burden of those countering disinformation.
If we never attempted to pluck weeds out of a garden by the root and instead only chopped them off six inches from the ground, would we ever win the fight against weeds?
Or worse, what if we were convinced that it was only fair and right to allow the weeds to grow as part of nature in our gardens?
And that we should make the vegetables compete directly with the weeds for resources while still demanding that the vegetables bear us fruit.
That would be lunacy, and it's a big part of why I do this podcast.
But that was just the Tucker Carlson section of this rogues gallery.
Moving one step up, we get to RFK Jr.
Brianna Joy Gray pivoted to the Tucker Carlson bit by way of RFK Jr.
RFK Jr. said that Tucker Carlson was fired because Tucker spoke up against the vaccines.
RFK Jr. knows that Tucker Carlson was removed from Fox News because of complications with the Dominion lawsuit ruling.
He knows it wasn't because of an anti-vax creed that Tucker aired five nights before.
Margaret Kimberly, the guest on the Bad Faith podcast, who was asked about RFK Jr.'s conspiracist proposal, moves straight to that answer when asked, as we heard in the clip.
But why would RFK Jr. ask this question?
Kennedy saw an opportunity when Tucker Carlson was fired.
Specifically, he saw the proximity of the latest anti-vax rambling from Tucker and decided that it might be possible to amplify the idea that there is a cabal of powerful people who control the media and want to silence a particular set of messages, and that this was the real reason Tucker Carlson was fired.
This wasn't the first time that Tucker Carlson ranted against vaccines, and it wouldn't have been the last if he hadn't been fired.
Fox News had had no problem with this activity for years.
It makes no sense for them to suddenly have an issue with it now.
So that's RFK Jr.
He wants people to believe there is an Illuminati type group of powerful people who are attempting to exert undue influence or control over the world.
In turn, he wants his audience to heed his warnings and leadership to fight back against this imagined group of elites by listening to his messages and buy his products and do all the things he says should be done.
This is cult leader 101.
He says, I'm the only source of information you can rely on, and all other sources are either confused about reality or actively working against your interests.
Again, as with Tucker Carlson, RFK Jr. wants to be the only trusted source of information.
Cult-like information control behavior.
So let's get to Brianna Joy Gray.
Most of my problem with Brianna is her messaging technique.
She posted Tucker Carlson's anti-vaccine rant without any hint or even implication that any part of it might be erroneous.
She left it run for nearly two minutes without critique, as though it were a perfectly reasonable thing to say about COVID vaccines.
This is the way that bad ideas make it to new audiences.
The way that new people get exposed to conspiracy thinking.
It's like reality deniers are on one level, and those engaging honestly with actual reality are on another.
And there is a steep cliff between our two positions.
But then people like Brianna Joy Gray come along and start building a ramp to smoothly move from one level to the other.
If they are very good at crafting those messages, the ramp will be very smooth and only very slightly tilted, such that you might not even notice as you walk along it that you are changing elevations.
Brianna Joy Gray is attempting in other conversations to be reasonable and to attract an audience of reasonable thinkers.
She then peppers that reasonability with conspiracy beliefs and misinformation.
She exposes new audience to this tainted information and attempts to make those bad ideas sound like reasonable conclusions to come to about the world at large.
Is it possible that she doesn't know what she's doing here?
Is it possible that she has done this by accident somehow and doesn't realize that what she's doing is dangerous?
Brianna Joy Gray worked as the national press secretary for Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential bid.
She's a professional communicator in the political sphere.
I'm fairly certain she knows not only how to craft a single message, but also how to go about crafting a sustained strategic messaging strategy.
She should also know how to recognize it when it's happening.
So is this a solitary example of her acting in this way?
Is this the only time she's mentioned RFK Jr. in reasonable terms or dog whistled to conspiracists?
Later in this same episode, we hear this.
Rather than meeting the needs of the people, I think someone who really spoke about these foreign policy issues in the way I'm describing would get a hearing with the public.
I think that's true.
It's interesting.
I do think a lot of folks see RFK Jr. as that candidate.
And this isn't me talking.
This is just me observing.
He is no way, you know, my candidate, but I think I would be foolish to ignore the energy that's rising up around him in a kind of bipartisan, I don't even say bipartisan, because a lot of independents are seemingly very interested in his campaign as well.
Brianna Joy Gray seems to regularly mention that RFK Jr. isn't really her candidate.
To me, this is all very slippery.
She gets to push and work to normalize anti-vaccine messaging by playing Tucker Carlson's rant uncritically.
If called on it, she would likely say that she wasn't saying those things Tucker Carlson was.
This is also one step further removed because she only mentioned the Tucker Carlson bit because it was something RFK Jr. mentioned.
She will regularly say that RFK Jr. Isn't her candidate, even though she will regularly say very complimentary things about him and will never mention his anti-vaccine stance.
Also, I think it's disingenuous for Breonna Joy Gray to say that RFK Jr. isn't her candidate.
I don't think her preferred candidate is actually running for president.
Therefore, saying that Kennedy isn't her candidate implies that she wouldn't vote for him.
Despite that, she has openly said that she would support his candidacy for president.
These clips were taken from episode 270 of her Bad Faith podcast, which aired on April 24th.
In this episode, Brianna is talking to Shama Savant from the Socialist Alternative Party.
This conversation began as a discussion of a series of political operations to increase the minimum wage in Seattle, but moved eventually straight into a discussion about who would make a better presidential candidate for the Democratic Party to challenge Joe Biden.
And as I mentioned previously, only the two names came up: Marianne Williamson and RFK Jr.
Here are a few tidbits.
You know, are you thinking at all about the possibility of bringing that question to someone like RFK Jr. or Marianne, whoever else might enter into the raise?
And if they were to do that and did have some energy behind them, is there something about those candidates that you think makes them fundamentally not someone you would want to kind of partner with in that way?
Or do you see that as like a real possibility?
Okay.
Spoiler alert: despite lining up with this question, the anti-vaccine activism of RFK Jr. and Marianne Williamson is never mentioned during this entire discussion, which lasts 24 minutes.
More here.
And so I guess that is my issue.
I completely concede in no planet do I think that either Marianne Williamson or RFK Jr. are as good candidates as Bernie for myriad reasons.
But I do, especially between behind RFK right now, and it's early days, of course, but behind RFK Jr. right now, there does seem to be a familiar sense of energy.
And two, given when you look at their platforms, and if you say, well, it's about saying to America that, you know, we still can have Medicare for all.
We still can't have a $15 or $25 minimum wage.
We still can't, we still should be fighting for student debt cancellation.
RFK has been tweeting, I know, tweeting, but has been tweeting about his desire to use executive orders and Biden's failures to do so.
Both candidates have had a very adversarial, aggressive message when it comes to the swamp and corruption in Washington, D.C.
And it seems to me that all of that from a messenger's perspective and from a policy perspective is potentially beneficial.
But what I'm hearing from you, Shama, it feels like you sense that there might be some downside, some damage that is done either to the left or to socialist alternative or to working people by even kind of rhetorically supporting the value of these people running or of these campaigns or of their being a candidate against Biden.
Is that right?
I mean, that's kind of what I'm sensing because it seems from my perspective, it's like, hey, live and let live.
They're running.
I'm not running them.
I'm not paying for it.
But if they want to run and do this, and I obviously have some residual value for it, why not be supportive?
Why not vote for them?
Why not attend their rallies?
Why not retweet their stuff?
It's hard for me to see the downside.
Really walking the can't see any downside line.
And then there's this little diddy.
But I think those criticisms are completely fair.
JFK Jr., one, does seem to have genuine energy forming behind him.
Two, has been taking very strong anti-war positions throughout his entire life and up until now in this Ukraine war.
Very strong statements about it on his website, made many strong statements about it in his opening speeches and interviews on Tucker Carlson and all of that.
RFK Jr. Sounds like a reasonable candidate if your only source of information about this is the bad faith podcast.
But he's not.
Note that sometimes Brianna slips and mentions that he's JFK Jr., but of course, JFK Jr. is gone.
RFK Jr. needs to not become president of the United States.
It's possible that his anti-vax activism is only a grift and that he does it for monetary gain.
In which case, first, we would have to question the moral integrity of this person.
But secondly, we would have to wonder if he would continue this grift as president or if he would drop it because it wouldn't be worth the effort.
But those are several ifs all in a row, and I don't think anyone should count on them.
It might also be that he's a legitimate lunatic who has built in his mind a full anti-reality world in which vaccines are harming people.
We need to ask: what would such a man do as president of the United States?
Would he cancel federal funding for the childhood vaccination program?
Would he tell other countries to do so?
Would he withhold international aid to countries that vaccinated their children?
Would he threaten existing alliances with other nations that vaccinated their children?
All of these options would be saving money for the U.S. rather than costing it money, and it would have at least some support within the U.S. populace.
This is a non-exhaustive list of truly miserable diseases that childhood vaccination reduces the risk of.
In 2018, two babies in Samoa were vaccinated with improper preparations of a vaccine and sadly died.
In such a small place, this, along with a strong dose of anti-vaccine messaging, caused a sharp drop in vaccination of newborns in Samoa.
In the summer of 2019, just the next year, a passenger carrying measles arrived in Samoa and a new outbreak occurred there.
Over the next four months, 79 people died of the measles in Samoa, and most of those were children aged four and under.
We need childhood vaccination in order to continue enjoying the society we have built.
Electing a U.S. president who holds an anti-reality position on such an important health-related topic would be disastrous, and not just for the United States, for everyone the United States deals with, for every place to which citizens of the United States travel, to the world economy.
Whenever the U.S. comes up with a bad idea, they export it.
And the first port of call for that bad idea boat is their biggest trading partner, Canada.
As a Canadian, I implore the good people of the United States, please do not support an RFK Jr. presidency.
For all of his flaws, and there were many, Donald Trump launched Operation Warp Speed, the purpose of which was to accelerate the development and approval of vaccines for COVID-19.
In his public comments during 2020 about the pandemic, Trump often minimized the reality of the dangers of the virus and sometimes openly mocked efforts to contain the spread.
Yet at the same time, he was working to speed up the development of a vaccine.
And as the election got closer, he was openly promising a vaccine, quote, very soon.
It's possible that his plan was to have a world-saving vaccine roll out as an October surprise that would give him the bump he needed to remain president.
This, of course, did not happen.
But Operation Warp Speed did make many parts of the vaccine development happen sooner.
If our mishandling of the current pandemic allows for a vaccine-escaping variant to develop, something that is still a strong possibility given everything we know about the variation rate of COVID-19 and the number of infected, we might need a new vaccine solution someday.
If the president of the wealthiest nation decides that something like Operation Warp Speed will only speed up vaccine harm, where will the world be?
As for Brianna Joy Gray, I'm not yet certain about her motives regarding her glowing words of praise and complete lack of critical appraisal of RFK Jr. I suspect the name of her podcast was meant to be ironic.
I suggest she change course before it becomes an open joke.