What RFK Jr. Gets Right and What He Gets Wrong | The Free Press
When it comes to vaccines, I often feel Kennedy sees only harms and never sees benefits. This is dangerous. Vaccines are one of the great medical innovations in human history, one that has saved countless lives. This is not to say all vaccines are the same as far as safety and risk are concerned. But far too often, Kennedy paints with a broad brush, and broadly disparages all vaccines. More than that, he makes unfounded leaps of logic to blame vaccines for a variety of ills.
I vehemently disagree with Kennedy s belief that early childhood immunizations with the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and the Diptheria-Tetanus-Pertussis (DTaP) vaccine causes autism. These vaccines have been thoroughly investigated, and there is no proof of any connection to autism. Over the decades, these vaccines have also prevented many cases of disability and death. Their net impact is overwhelmingly positive.
Polls show that faith in standard childhood vaccines is declining, which I think is an unmitigated public health disaster. Covid-19 vaccination policies, especially the many mandated shots for children and young people at little risk from the virus, have certainly been a part of this. But Kennedy, too, has used his prominence to unnecessarily scare parents about the safety of vaccinations.
Kennedy s case for this frightening assertion is that since 1989, two things occurred together: there has been a rise in neurologic and autoimmune diseases; and, we give children more vaccines. In the interviews I have listened to, he doesn t take the argument much further than this, and I find it to be entirely lacking. It is low-quality causal reasoning, and is unpersuasive. First, I am not clear that 1989 is the magic year that things changed. Second and crucially a lot of things changed around that time. There is also real evidence that other factors, such as parental age, have an impact on autism. Here I believe Kennedy is undermining both himself and the public health benefit.
But I do think that all the concerns that have been raised about vaccines, and the crumbling public support for them, need a response from officials. The two major Covid-19 vaccine concerns one that the Johnson & Johnson shot caused a small number of life-threatening blood clotting disorders, the other that the mRNA shots caused myocarditis were both initially discovered and reported outside of the U.S. This suggests to me that our system of vaccine safety surveillance is suboptimal. Rather than enter into decades of debate with Kennedy s growing supporter base, I think public health officials ought to design and implement a new vaccine surveillance system for the twenty-first century.
via www.thefp.com
I object to the “I’m an expert and this is what I think about RFK, Jr.; feel free to take notes” tone of this piece, but experts — what are you gonna do? I listened to RFK Jr. for 3+ hours on Joe Rogan yesterday while I cleaned up the garage. (I’m a slow cleaner.) I was somewhat shaken by the interview. I knew the FDA and CDC were pretty well captured by Big Pharma, but evidently I didn’t know the extent of it. But Dr. LWJ dismissed RFK Jr.’s views on vaccines as “complete garbage.” My personal physician also advises me to get the Covid vaccine, which I think I’m going to forget to get around to doing. I’m a conservative about these things. I’d rather be laid low by a joint Big State-Big Pharma-CCP Frankenvirus against my will than by a corrupt profit-maximizing crony-capitalist biomedical experiment which I’m not even getting paid for. Tough call, I know.