In discussing Trump, the subject of his HHS appointee, Robert Kennedy Jr, came up. Kennedy is widely regarded as ‘antivax’ – a term regarded as pejorative by Bill Cole, although I argue that it is not inherently so. I use it to describe a person or organisation that campaigns against some or all vaccines. It’s descriptive, not pejorative. Of course, since many people have rather a low opinion of such campaigners, it becomes a pejorative. In similar fashion, “flat-earther” is both descriptive and pejorative. I would be happy to be advised of a non-pejorative synonym.
So, does RFK oppose some or all vaccines? Quite clearly, yes. So by my definition, he’s antivax. My usage here does not apply to someone who makes a personal choice not to get a particular or any vaccine. I am in favour of free choice, and someone choosing to reject a vaccine for themselves or their children is not (necessarily) opposing vaccination. The key point lies in the persuasion of others. I also would exclude people who oppose mandates. In the UK, no vaccines are mandated; it is different in the US, and there is considerable variation globally. So it is possible (though rare) for people to campaign against mandates without necessarily being ‘antivax’ as defined. The recent push by Florida Surgeon-General Joseph A. Ladapo to remove mandates is an interesting case study. It would essentially just make Florida equivalent to the UK, hardly something I should find inherently objectionable – and yet, because of Ladapo’s clear opposition to vaccination, earning a rebuke from the CDC and FDA, he isn’t the exception to the rule that mandate opponents are usually antivax. For my part, though I’m inclined to oppose mandates, I live in a country that does not have them, so it’s not a fight I can be bothered pursuing!
Supporters of RFK argue that “he’s not antivax, he just wants better studies” (as if there are those who want worse ones!). This is somewhat deceptive. Does RFK want
a) More people to be vaccinated
b) The same number to be vaccinated
c) fewer to be vaccinated.
?
Clearly, the answer is c. Kennedy’s campaigning deliberately sows mistrust of vaccines, and the guise of ‘pro-choice’ clearly contains the cryptic desire that the choice will be made in the negative. It goes beyond mere concern about specific additives: campaigning does not stop when formulations change; there’s always something else. He founded Children’s Health Defense, nominally a ‘nonprofit’ (from which Grok reports he has pocketed over $2 million). In the shop one can buy these nice baby onesies. Nothing says “not antivax” quite like parading “Unvaxxed. Unafraid” on your kid’s chest, eh? In a weirdly meta move, the same page lists adult t-shirts expressing support for the onesie – it even terms it ‘onesiegate’, as if there has been some furore.
He says his initial inspiration was from so-called ‘mercury moms’, convinced that their children’s autism was linked to mercury in vaccines. This keyed into his environmental activism; a less controversial topic. The autism-vaccine story dates back to Andrew Wakefield. Despite subsequent retraction and the striking-off of Wakefield from the medical register, this link has lodged firmly and unshakeably in the minds of activists. This hits close to home: influenced by some vegan friends (nothing wrong with veganism, but it seems to provide some correlation with ‘holistic’ approaches) my wife refused to have our 3rd child vaccinated by MMR, causing some argument. She relented, and in any case as a nurse my daughter was obliged to be up to date on all vaccines.
Extensive study has failed to find a link. But still it won’t lie. Kennedy announced that he would have an answer ‘by September’, appointing David Geier, a non-medic with no apparent grounding in evaluation of scientific studies who has long believed in the vaccine-autism link, to investigate autism. “Gosh, I wonder what he’ll find?”, the cynic in me mused. Well, apparently it’s Tylenol (Paracetamol in the UK) use in pregnancy. I haven’t seen the data, but this seems bizarre. Can we now expect a statement from CHD that they were wrong all along? I doubt it. Thimerosal (or thiomersal) stopped being used in most cases in 1999. Did autism cease or decline? It did not.
Kennedy has long campaigned against Gardasil. This is a vaccine against Human Papilloma Virus, a significant cause of cancers in girls and young women, Gardasil is nearly 100% effective in eliminating these cancers. Yet it would appear that Kennedy does not want girls to get it. The reason being the possibility of side effects. This is classically antivax, where relatively minor side effects are amplified over the devastation of the disease itself. Personally, I’d rather my girls avoided cancer. That’s just me.
Kennedy has ceased funding for mRNA vaccine technology, based upon what appears to be simply an opinion that traditional vaccines (eg inactivated whole-virus) have a better safety and efficacy profile. Yet during the evaluation of multiple platforms dusing 2020, mRNA and DNA vaccines consistently outperformed inactivated candidates. mRNA may have been over-hyped in some quarters. Many respiratory viruses tend to evolve faster than (say) measles, whose formulation has remained unchanged for years. This means that they can evade the immunity provided against the variant they were developed against. Antibodies can also wane with time. Note that this immune evasion and waning apply to infection-acquired immunity as much as vaccination: the same epitopes are involved. This is why we get colds most years, and flu.
The effectiveness of the vaccines has also declined due to a rise in the population of infection immunity. A vaccine 95% effective compared to an immune-naive population will seem much less effective when measured against a population that has had widespread infection, even if there is no viral evolution or waning of antibodies in the vaccinated. People are misinterpreting these findings to assert that mRNA vaccines are ‘useless’. They are not. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, as the saying goes.
Additional fuel is given by lurid amplification of the safety profile. mRNA vaccines are supposed to be responsible for a mechanistically implausible array of conditions – cancers, heart disease, fertility, neural issues. Yet there is virtually no mechanism of harm that can be exploited by mRNA that does not also apply to infection. Plus, there are many avenues of harm that only infection can account for. No-one ever needed a lung transplant after vaccination, but they sure did after infection. Likewise a friend of mine had his pancreas destroyed by Covid, and became diabetic almost overnight. Amateur analyses of VAERS and Yellow Card abound. People imagine that, if something has been reported to VAERS, vaccine is definitely causal. It really isn’t that simple. You need to know background rates in the unvaccinated to make any kind of comparison. VAERS is highly reported because the vaccine is widespread, and VAERS widely publicised. We want VAERS reports. But we can do without ill-informed amateur analysis. Imagine there were an equivalent CAERS system that was as well-used to report Covid adverse effects. People are inclined to discount Covid when looking for cause, but hyper-primed to blame vaccine.
In reality, the safety profile of mRNA vaccines appears to be excellent. In the UK, we started with the AstraZeneca vaccine, a viral vector DNA vaccine (like Johnson&Johmson). The vector sends the DNA into the nucleus where it is transcribed to RNA to be translated to Spike protein in the cytoplasm. This contrasts with mRNA which is brought directly into the cytoplasm by the lipid nanoparticle (LNP). Sadly, some 50 deaths have been registered as due to this vaccine, and it has been associated with clotting issues, particularly in women. So we switched to mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna; very few deaths have since been reported. This is not to say there are no issues with mRNA. Stimulating the immune system (by vaccine or by infection) can have adverse consequences. A friend of mine suffered a debilitating fever for months. But this is not the norm. People often try and blame the LNP or the pseudouridine that is used in the RNA, but since these are absent in DNA vaccines with worse safety, it seems unlikely that these are involved.
The main issue with mRNA appears to be myo-and pericarditis in young men. From the vaccine, this occurs at a rate of about 1 in 10,000 – but from infection, the rate is about 20 times higher. Additionally, vaccine myocarditis tends more to be milder and self-resolving. Critics say the vaccine was ‘rushed’ – if we’d taken more time, we’d have found these issues. But we wouldn’t. A trial of 45,000 people (a very large trial) is insufficient to find an event less frequent than about 1 in 7,500 with 95% confidence, however long you look. This is the ”rule of 3″ with 22,500 in the treatment arm. Additionally, the longer a trial goes on, the less of a control the control group becomes. If a vaccine has any effectiveness at all, you get more infection in the control group, introducing a growing confounder.
The big advantage of mRNA is in fact its speed. You can design an antigen in a few hours, once you have the genetic sequence (again, takes a couple of hours). You can scale up to produce that RNA very quickly. Even Robert Malone, whose bitterness appears to cloud his judgement, was once an advocate of the rapid scaling of nucleic acid technology. By contrast, it takes about a year to develop an updated flu vaccine, not because people spend hours stroking their beards waiting for people in trials to die, but because it takes about 6 months to inject the new variant into chicken eggs and scale up production.
The pandemic response was a triumph; the mRNA vaccine has saved many lives – but Kennedy, with as straight a face as he can muster, told Congress that “no-one knows” if it saved any lives. This is at odds with the facts. Additionally, his vaccine-skeptic appointees Makary and Prasad have indicated that they want placebo-controlled trials before any updated formulation is marketed. This is in contrast to flu, and indeed placebo trials are considered unethical when a safe and effective treatment is already available. Who is even going to volunteer for such a trial? A vaccine skeptic wouln’t touch it with a bargepole; a pro-vaccine individual would just get the current candidate (if they can) rather than risk placebo. There are not 45,000 public-spirited individuals available any more, nor the money to pay them, nor a sufficiently widespread disease to reach endpoints quickly.
The whole Covid minimisation/vaccine skepticism movement seems to skew quite far to the Right. Trump is actually a notable exception, though God knows what he was thinking when he appointed Kennedy. But it seems as if there is a straight line from libertarian resentment of Covid measures to regarding the whole thing – including that which helped end those measures – as a bit overblown, or even a massive hoax. Many have decided that the ‘Covid hoax’ is part of a bigger hoax to persuade us that viruses are real! Beyond that, some even deny molecular biology – DNA is a hoax, and as for ribosomes…. Well, my daughter was on the front line, a doctor on Respiratory when the pandemic hit. She watched people die, “drowning in their own body fluids”. She lost a colleague to Covid, a respected and loved consultant, who caught it working on the wards. She is in no doubt that the vaccines were an absolute game-changer in keeping people out of hospital.
How can we improve the safety profile, or the efficacy, if we don’t research? How can we prepare for the next pandemic? Certainly, we cannot look to the US for leadership right now.
Next pandemic – inevitably, there will be one – we can be assured that a bunch of people will try and blind themselves to the reality; will picket hospitals, even call for people like my daughter to be hanged as part of a fantasised “Nuremberg 2.0” as being directly responsible for the deaths. That’s the arse-end of antivax, of course. It’s a spectrum. I don’t mean to tar every antivaxxer with the same brush when I use the term. But the reasoning is the same, the confirmation bias, the authority arguments, the teeth-grinding ineptness with statistics, the conspiracism, the talking points, the misunderstandings… it all gets depressingly samey after a while.
Good grief. I didn’t realise he went this far. Germ theory denial is biological flat earth. Definitely antivax.
This is a bs response after the proven failure of so-called vaccinations, to prevent transmission and spread, especially the mRNA ones, and if you don’t know it, then what is the point of discussing it? I’m not claiming here all respiratory illnesses or their symptoms are contagious. Later about this…
WHO-World Hoax Organization was forced to change the definition of what vaccination means because “fat fish” in the ‘vaccine’ business would lose billions and not more… if they didn’t. Even some dictionaries were forced to change the definition during convid-19 hoax.
So, if vaccines are not inherently effective at preventing infection and spread of “respiratory diseases” what is the point of injecting billions of people if the best they can do is according to Alan: “induces an adaptive immune response protective against a pathogen.”
Keep in mind that this is an assumption after the clear failure of what had been claimed before convid-19 of infection prevention and spread.
I’m not saying Alan is right or wrong but the business model of so-called vaccines had not guaranteed increased profits. The the model had to be changed to make sure that as many people as often as possible get “vaccinated” because the “new emerging pathogens developed an immunity against one time vaccinations…
This is a bs response after the proven failure of so-called vaccinations, to prevent transmission and spread, especially the mRNA ones, and if you don’t know it, then what is the point of discussing it? I’m not claiming here all respiratory illnesses or their symptoms are contagious. Later about this…
WHO-World Hoax Organization was forced to change the definition of what vaccination means because “fat fish” in the ‘vaccine’ business would lose billions and not more… if they didn’t. Even some dictionaries were forced to change the definition during convid-19 hoax.
So, if vaccines are not inherently effective at preventing infection and spread of “respiratory diseases” what is the point of injecting billions of people if the best they can do is according to Alan: “induces an adaptive immune response protective against a pathogen.”
Keep in mind that this is an assumption after the clear failure of what had been claimed before convid-19 of infection prevention and spread.
I’m not saying Alan is right or wrong but the business model of so-called vaccines had not guaranteed increased profits. The the model had to be changed to make sure that as many people as often as possible get “vaccinated” because the “new emerging pathogens developed an immunity against one time vaccinations…
J-Mac,
You asked me to define vaccine and antivax, which I did. It is not ‘bs’; this is just basic usage. I am by no means simply talking about mRNA here; vaccines are products that produce an adaptive immune response protective against a pathogen. It is not necessary that they provide 100% protection against either acquisition or transmission. Many ‘true’ vaccines provide no protection against either, but protect against secreted toxins (toxoid vaccines: tetanus, diphtheria).
I respect your response …would you like to learn more about this issue?
I respect your response …would you like to learn more about this issue?
I am already well-versed in this issue, having studied biochemistry and immunology at university, maintained a keen interest since – particular during Covid. I can pretty much guarantee you’ll have nothing I haven’t seen before!
Big announcement on Tylenol and autism. Yet there is no evidence of a link. A study of 2.5 million kids found no link. But suddenly, MAGA is convinced. Trump says it, it must be true. It is maddening, horrifying almost, to see this scientific ineptitude.
I remember when Tylenol was the yardstick by which ivermectin was measured. “Safer than Tylenol” went rhe cry. Which is a low bar, since Tylenol is a popular drug for suicide (horribly – people often regret their choice, but the damage is done). Taken as directed, though, it is safe enough. Now, people will switch to less safe alternatives. For absolutely no reason.
Trump has also come out against hepatitis B vaccination. It is normally given to newborns within 24 hours of birth to prevent catching it from the mother. “Just blood test the mother”, they say. “It’s sexually transmitted, no need for it in kids”. But the blood test has about 20% false negatives, and there are numerous routes besides sexual transmission. Protection lasts between 20 years and a lifetime, taking kids into their sexually active phase. Everyone benefits, because there’s less of it around to catch. But no. People are misled by the fact that it is rare in infancy. This is due to vaccination, not a reason to abandon it.
Allan Miller,
Europe knows Tylenol as Paracetamol. Definitely not a good choice for shuffling off this mortal coil.
Alan Fox,
My wife’s 3rd Year project (we both did biochemistry) involved developing assays for paracetamol in the local hospital. Heard some sad stories of intentional overdoses that were regretted, too late – it takes days to succumb.
(Just asked her: she has no recollection of this!).
Absolute bullshit medical advice from Trump:
There is no scientific basis for a single word of this. It’s just his narcissism again – he believes he’s a medical expert. Subjecting kids to multiple jabs when one will do is cruel. Not administering an antipyretic to a feverish pregnant woman or a child can have serious consequences.
Allan Miller,
Wasn’t that trope about breaking up the MMR vaccine into three separate ones, Wakefield’s original grift? I seem to remember he had a patent for one of those vaccines that he hoped would pocket him lots of money. Follow the money, antivax conspiratards say. Yeah, right.
Crackpots love to rehash their own crap. Their followers are so dumb they don’t even need to come up with new stuff.
I need evidence vs your supposed credentials. Get it?
1. Why and how would SARS CoV-2 eliminate the seasonal flu? I want evidence not your speculations. I have evidence
2. How and why vaccines have gone from supposed infection prevention of symptoms, hospitalization prevention at best?
3. What is the latest business model of pharmaceutical companies regarding vaccines? Prevention of infection vs limiting hospital visits and symptoms and why?
4.
5.
6.
7. 8.
9.
10.
To come
How do you know this?
J-Mac,
I’m still interested in hearing the story behind this:
What do you want? How much money I lost or friendships?
Those who are not in the business of pathogenicity should probably know that contagion has never been proven. Unless Allan Miller has his own hidden studies, PUBMED won’t support.
So, Allan Miller, let’s begin here if you don’t mind:
1. Why can’t contagion be proven by the scientific method over the last 100 plus years.
You have 3 shots at it and a week. After that I will tell you why you are a moron…
J-Mac:
As much as you’re willing to reveal. It sounds like an interesting story.
As per ‘good faith’ site rules, you’ll just have to take my word for it. University of North Wales Biochemistry. 1975-1978. 2 years postgraduate research.
As predicted, you have nothing I haven’t seen before. There is a whole cottage industry prowling the Internet and sealioning as if they have discovered some incontrovertible fact that will blow the gaff sky high. And they all have that same in-yer-face style.
But I will indulge you, briefly, and pretend I haven’t seen your nonsense a thousand times.
It didn’t. Flu was slightly down in the UK, but of the order of previous years. It runs at about 50-1000 deaths a year, so if you’re looking there for an explanation of Covid numbers (45,000 at that point) you need to look elsewhere.
If you’re saying it was a pandemic of flu, it was still a pandemic.
They didn’t. Vaccines have always been about inducing an adaptive immune response protective against a pathogen.
See above. There is not a single type of vaccine or target of action. Measles vaccines protect against infection, toxoid vaccines (qv) do not.
Seem ’em all, mate. Sealioning Gish Gallop incoming.
How do we know Tylenol is Paracetamol? Or how do we know it’s not good for suicide?
The former is simply a fact, the second because it causes liver damage which may not prove immediately fatal, but does kill, tragically, after the consumer has changed their mind.
J-Mac,
,
Ah, you’re a virus denier. Seriously, do you have a single original thought? It’s all there, including pretentious use of “the scientific method”. Hilarious, because Terrain Theorists have not demonstrated a single damn thing using what they understand of the Scientific Method.
Describe an experiment proving “contagion by the scientific method”, according to your understanding of the terms, and I’ll tell you if it’s been done. For bonus points, show me a Terrain Theory experiment to the same standard. Or to any standard.
Bingo card for those playing along at home: ‘allopathic’, ‘isolation’, ‘contagion’, ‘Enders 1954’, ‘Rosenau’, ‘scientific method’, ‘exosome’, ‘cell debris’, ‘Big Pharma’. ‘PCR’, ‘Dr Kerry (sic) Mullins’ (sic), ‘Fauci’, ‘hoax’, ‘Koch’s Postulates’, ’empty hospitals’, ‘DDT’, ‘Tiktok’, ‘Midazolam’, Remdesivir’, ‘ventilators’, ‘gene therapy’, ‘Nuremberg’, ‘Dr Stefan Lanka’, ‘convid’, ‘follow the money’.
That’s the one. Wakefield has become a millionaire from being struck off, monetising incompetence or outright fraud. In fact all of the leading lights seem pretty well off. There is a vast amount of money in this, but the gullible see only Pharma profits.
Please, correct me if I’m wrong, or if I’m not using proper terminology, but weren’t the Covid vaccines initially very effective at preventing secondary transmission? I remember we had a discussion about that here, and DNA_Jock answered my questions about this stuff, but I can’t remember the details. What I remember is a tweet with a list of papers published shortly after the vaccine rollout showing vaccines were something like 75-90% effective at preventing transmission, was it because they lowered the viral charge so effectively that even if they couldn’t prevent infection, in practice infected people were much less likely to pass it on to others? If I’m not wrong, that changed with subsequent variants: Delta and specially Omicron, but the vaccines remained (and still are) very effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths.
I’ll see if I can find those posts.
EDIT: Found it, in the Sandbox
I have read that vaccines are not very effective at preventing transmission of upper respiratory infections, because the viruses reproduce and spread in the nasal passages before encountering the bloodstream.
I’m pretty sure there are ongoing efforts to develop a nasally administered vaccine.
This may be wrong or oversimplified, but it was out there for a while.
It seems to be true that nothing has really stopped transmission.
dazz,
Yes, broadly correct. If a vaccine reduces incidence, it necessarily reduces ‘transmission’, broadly understood as the amount of infection in the population. Of course numerous factors have reduced that efficacy:
– The virus has evolved, and is selectively favoured to evolve away from antibody binding
– Immunity wanes after a few months, once the immune system ‘imagines’ the danger is past.
– The very fact of positive efficacy means it must decline. If more people get infected in the unvaccinated population, that increases immunity in that population, and so when the two populations are compared, it will look as if efficacy declines when it may be just as effective measured against an immune-naive population as it ever was.
This last is one reason trials cannot last indefinitely. If there is any efficacy at all, the control group gradually ceases to be a control group, because of differential infection rates.
petrushka,
Too many people use “stop transmission” as a universal: 100% or it’s useless. This is unrealistic. No vaccine ‘stops’ transmission in that sense. Even 95% efficacy – 1 case in the vaccinated to 20 in the unvaccinated- can be seen as ‘not stopping transmission’ to the terminally obtuse.
Oh, yeah, you made this point here a few day ago if I’m not mistaken. Didn’t know that. Thanks, Allan, much appreciated.
A September 10 poll:
Just 1 in 4 Americans believe Trump administration vaccine shifts are based on science, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds
No polling data yet on how Americans view the Tylenol idiocy.
It was in the OP, I just noticed! Had a few sleeps since then; I’d forgotten.
Allan Miller,
Are you confident enough to replicate Lanka’s experiments? To prove him wrong?
I’m not talking about the core of his and other’s experiments some of which are going on as we speak…
If you do feel you can challenge them, I mean it, I may get involved in sponsoring this event if I know the details..
Does anybody remember that?
This is it
Error establishing a database connection
keiths,
The UK anticipated Trump’s idiocy. Dated July 15. Several points about separate vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella. Most significantly, the current separate vaccines are (ironically) not as well tested as the combo. That’s been the norm for a while, so we have lots of data. Also, kids would need 6 jabs instead of 2, leaving them unprotected for longer, subjecting them to unnecessary distress and increasing the likelihood the course will not be completed.
Vaccine advocacy was one of the few things I gave Trump credit for. The balance sheet is looking ever more blank on the plus side.
My wife is actually down with “flu like symptoms”. Is she experiencing long-convid?
How do I know is not flu?
How do I know it is not Shizer “vaccine”?
O
You can STILL prove your earlier claims, right?
Why do you people insist on baby-talk? “Convid” “Shizer”. It hardly makes you sound smart.
You’ll have to be more specific. I gave you detailed data on flu from the UK. Are you just going to pretend I didn’t?
Allan Miller, I think you are are major coward, and this is not because you lack knowledge…
What is science?
Meh. Wounded, I’m sure. What would a brave person do? Ignore my point on flu stats?
Meh, did you or did you not work in frontline when convicted-19 took over the flu?
J-Mac:
If you have to ask, you’re part of the problem.
It didn’t. You clearly haven’t even read my point on flu. You are not handling this well so far, with your baby-talk and failure to address responses to your own points.
Every antivaxxer sounds and acts exactly the same. Why is this? Do you all go to a seminary or something, where you are fed the same talking points and recommended style?
Here is a graph constructed from Table 3 in the dataset downloadable from
here
Sorry, can’t upload a picture directly.
Table 3 shows all deaths where flu or non-Covid pneumonia was a direct cause of death (columns B and C), or where the chain was initiated by Covid (column D). Essentially, where these terms were in Part 1 of a death certificate: direct causes. B is the 5-year average for that date, C the daily total in 2020.
It is crystal clear from this that Covid is not explained by misassigned flu or other pneumonia. Flu season was largely over when Covid started to take off, end of March 2020. Flu and non-Covid pneumonias continued to be diagnosed and certified, and the numbers were not vastly different from the 5-year average, day by day. Yet there is a massive spike of death due to ‘some other cause’ (ie Covid).
LOL, true, I completely forgot
Repeating myself is one of the hazards of old age!
Seconded. I already suspected something had gone awry in your personal situation, J-Mac. Your comments have grown more hostile and you have clearly been sucked into the antivax-bubble. I am more interested in what caused that than in your current non-discussion.
Ex-MAHA Moms Say They ‘Feel Guilty’ They Ever Backed RFK Jr.