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.
keiths,
I see Lydia Greene about on Twitter quite a lot. If ever there was an arena where this site’s tagline fit, this is it – both ways. It’s vital to be sure on vaccine safety, but if you’re going to publicly oppose them, that needs care too, when going against decades of scientific wisdom armed with memes and Rumble videos by disgraced or disgraceful oddballs.
The structure of RFK’s HHS is exactly as one might have predicted; nothing but noted contrarians. Sen. Bill Cassidy is rightly getting dragged for his deciding vote in approval.
Allan:
Yeah, as both a Senator and a physician, he’s doubly derelict for voting to confirm.
J-Mac,
(Cross posted from Sandbox)
It’s rather peculiar when a germ theory denier advances this argument – but unsurprising, since a weak grasp of the subject matter is a prerequisite. You don’t think any vaccine can act as advertised, since there is nothing to become ‘immune’ to. No germs: no immune system: no true vaccine of any kind. So why bang the drum for what (you imagine) they were ‘originally designed to do’, if you don’t think that was true either? “Why did this thing I don’t believe in change to something else I don’t believe in?”.
Such change in meaning as took place actually did so over 100 years ago. I’ll flesh out the history of the term “vaccine” in the next post, for interested readers.
It’s Allan. Why oh why do so many people see the double-l and feel obliged to change a to e?
I presume this is an attempt at a gotcha. But you will find that all universities, reputable and disreputable, teach immunology, virology and vaccinology in much the same way. Germ theory denial is not on the curriculum.
Oxford, incidentally, developed what became known as the ‘AstraZeneca’ vaccine. It uses a viral vector (adenovirus) to deliver DNA to the nucleus for transcription and translation to protein. If viruses aren’t real, how does that even work?
This is a familiar J-Mac tic. I suspect that, in reality, his kids take about as much interest in his Internet activity as my kids do in mine. Which is to say: none.
Allen (heh):
Apply a rock to your head with sufficient force (or in RFK Jr’s case, get yourself a brain worm), and you too can be a germ theory denier.
J-mac has latched onto the familiar refrain- “they changed the definition of vaccine”. Its usage has evolved, but there has not been a sudden recent change to accommodate RNA vaccines; it has long meant a product that elicits an adaptive immune response protective against a pathogen.
A brief historical review:
– Prior to Jenner, many ancient societies practiced variolation, or inoculation. This involved scratching a preparation from smallpox pustules into the skin of another. This conferred immunity to smallpox, but was risky, often causing the full-blown disease (a fact for which germ theory deniers have no explanation).
– In 1768 (100 years before germ theory, 30 years before Jenner) John Fewster realised that cowpox conferred immunity to smallpox, but more safely, being a milder illness.
– In 1796, Jenner (who gets all the credit) experimentally inoculated a child with cowpox pus. He coined the term “vaccination”, from vacca, Latin for cow. So if one is a linguistic pedant, one should reject the term ‘vaccine’ for all non-bovine formulations…
– Nearly 100 years later, Pasteur called his rabies preventative “vaccin”, in honour of Jenner. Note that this is post-infection prophylaxis. It does not make people ‘immune’ to the rabies virus; they typically already have it, but it protects the central nervous system by, metaphorically, heading the virus off at the pass. This work indeed precedes the discovery of the causative agents. Vaccination was empirically justified: it worked, without initially any knowledge of mechanism.
– Since then, numerous vaccines have been developed: live, killed, subunit. Some of them confer ‘immunity’, understood as lasting disease resistance, but many do not – just as many infections confer immunity, but many do not. The flu vaccine must be repeated annually, with only about 50% efficacy, yet flu infection does not perform any better. Toxoid vaccines, meanwhile – tetanus, diphtheria – do not prevent infection at all. They act against proteins produced by the pathogen, not the pathogen itself. It is these proteins that cause sickness, and the vaccine stimulates antibodies that neutralise them.
– And so, with the integration of empirical vaccine study with subsequent germ theory, virology and immunology, the term ‘vaccine’ came to be applied to any formulation stimulating an adaptive immune response to a pathogen. It exapnded from cows (the vacc- prefix) to rabies to incorporating an entire class of agents with that common feature.
– Thus, when, in the 1990s, it was proposed that such a response could be induced by antigen produced from mRNA or DNA alone, it was perfectly natural and reasonable to call them “vaccines”. What the fuck else were we going to call them?
keiths,
I often say that if one is dumb enough to be a germ theory denier, one is too dumb to be talked out of it. I’m prepared to be proved wrong, but it’s been a useful maxim.
The CDC announced their new Covid vaccine guidelines today, and now people can’t get their shots unless they consult a health professional first. It’s ridiculous.
They’re framing it as “individual-based decision-making”:
That’s positively Orwellian. It’s “individual-based decision-making” that isn’t actually individual-based. They’re preventing you from making the decision on your own. They even contradict themselves within that single sentence. How can it be “individual-based” if it’s based on “shared clinical decision-making”?
This administration is dishonest to its core.
keiths,
Here in the UK, under-75s aren’t eligible this year unless they have a relevant underlying condition, so it’s actually similar, or somewhat worse. We’re still being offered flu jabs. I find this odd; I still regard Covid as potentially worse than flu. I don’t know if it’s cost-cutting, but delivery of the combined jab doesn’t have twice the overheads – just material costs. Or maybe Pfizer didn’t offer a big enough bribe this year… 😎
Antivax:”kids receive too many jabs”
Also Antivax: “Let’s give ’em four more”.
This is the effect of separating MMR into 6 shots from 2. It means kids will be unprotected against 2 of the diseases while they wait, – possibly for good if they don’t complete the course, which is rendered more likely. Ironically, the individual jabs have less safety data than the combo. Because no-one does this; there is no reason for it.
There is frequently a strong overlap between antivax and conspiracism. I just had one such exchange. My interlocutor insisted that case numbers were artificially high in order to ‘scare people’ into getting the vaccine. Leave aside that in 2020, there was no vaccine, and it was not known which companies would bring one to market; this shady monolith “Big Pharma” somehow had pooled its collective resources to scare people such that one or more of them would profit.
First, it was supposed that PCR ‘cycles’ were artificially increased to give false positives. I go into PCR and Covid at much greater length here, but fundamentally, if PCR reports a positive at any threshold, the individual definitely recently had the virus. Therefore, in order to make Covid seem common by this means … Covid has to be common! A nice little paradox.
Daily mortality stats were produced based on any death within 28 days of a positive test, as a rough-and-ready estimate. People see this as sinister. It overcounts people who died falling off a ladder, or of gunshot – but also undercounts those dying of Covid more than 28 days later, or untested. When pointed out that death certification has even more cases, my interlocutor decided that many death certificates were falsified – irrespective of any test. Certification is a serious professional duty, involving not just the attending physician but a medical examiner and possibly a coroner. Fraudulent certification can attract jail time. A murder case would collapse if the certificate said ‘natural causes’. But somehow, by dangling a wad of cash, a large proportion of America’s 1 million physicians was persuaded to risk that jail time. In fact, the ‘wad of cash’ in the US was deemed to be the payments to the hospital made to prevent the entire pandemic burden falling on the insurance industry, not even the certifying individuals.
Imagine the conversation.
“We want you to say Covid when you know it wasn’t. Don’t tell even your close family about this; we’re trying to cause a panic”
“Ah. What’s in it for me?
“Well… possible jail time. But hey, we get a few thousand dollars per patient!”
“Oh well, in that case… fuck off”.
I can’t even envisage how such a scheme operates. You need the people with the suitcases of cash, enforcers, admin, auditors to keep dark payments off the books, the PCR lab technicians, scientists, journalists, statisticians… all to scare people into getting about 300 million future doses of vaccine (US alone), for one unspecified company or another. With money left over to suppress ivermectin.
The admin alone…!
My new friend did not find any of this remotely absurd.
“Why not just pay off the statisticians to make up the figures?”, I asked. Cheaper, and fewer people to blab.
“That wouldn’t be convincing enough. A good scam needs multiple prongs”.
Your brain on conspiracism.
A Washington Post opinion piece:
Six surgeons general: It’s our duty to warn the nation about RFK Jr.
keiths,
Response: “DEI hires” 🙄
RFK Jr: Children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism, and it’s highly likely because they’re given Tylenol.
Have we controlled for matzo and chopped liver?
Allan Miller,
Of course, if it doubles the overall rate of autism, we should see 4x the rate in boys, yes?
Allan:
Except that young girls are given Tylenol for anticipatory PMS, so it evens out. It’s Tylenol. Definitely Tylenol.
Keiths,
Are you Jewsh?
J-Mac:
Neither Jewsh or Jewish. Ex-Lutheran.
Are you asking because you saw Allan’s matzo and chopped liver joke and thought it was me?
I don’t know that he’s Jewish either, but a lot of us goyim know a thing or two about Jewish culture.
Nope, I’m not Jewish either. I do like Jewish humour, though, which is kind of where I was going with the joke.
Of course, in the US, circumcision has been a popular practice for boys of all faiths, for purported health reasons. Many Muslims practice circumcision. But facts aren’t funny.
Trump got a Covid booster at his recent checkup. So largely ignoring the strong antivax element within MAGA/MAHA. Fingers crossed he doesn’t die soon though, eh? Antivaxxers would self-ignite in an orgasm of high-profile confirmation bias. The more prominent the deceased, the more definitely it’s the vax.
Allan:
+50 points for that sentence. 😂
No metaphor left unmixed!
Allan:
That’s the spirit!
Dr Oz echoing Trump’s abuse of terms. Does he know he’s being dumb and wants to save the President’s blushes by pretending to be equally dumb?
A 650% reduction means that a £100 item would result in you being given the item plus £550. I’ll take some of that action. I have no need for pharmaceuticals, but if you’re gonna pay me to collect ’em…
Allan:
He’s pretending. He may be a quack, but he graduated from a top medical school (Penn) and went on to become a professor of surgery at Columbia. I daresay you can’t make it that far if you don’t understand percentages. The current lying fits well with his history of deliberate quackery, though.
As for Trump, this is my favorite quote in which he reveals his utter mathematical confusion:
I see. You’re going to reduce prices by an impossible 1000%, which will result in the price going from $10 to $20 for us. Makes perfect sense.
RFK Jr demonstrates his expert knowledge of female anatomy:
Well, if she has an almost full-term baby in her placenta, something is seriously wrong. Maybe she needs to gobble Tylenol.
Here’s a hint, Bobby: She’s saying “F Trump” because she’s angry that he put a dipshit like you in charge of HHS.
“What you’re saying is absurd. No one’s injecting massive fluids into a baby. The average childhood vaccination is 0.5 mL. That’s about 1/8 of a teaspoon—equivalent to 10 drops.”
President Trump: “I’ve seen doctors use 55-gallon drums of vaccine. It has to be brought in on a forklift. You give 82 vaccines in a shot to a little baby that hasn’t even formed yet. And then they say, “Oh, it’s safe.” It’s not safe. Look at the autism rates—they’re through the roof. The Amish don’t do it, and they don’t have autism. Something’s wrong here.”
55 gallon drums. He’s seen, with his own eyes, 55 gallon drums of vaccine being moved by doctors on forklifts…
Allan,
Here’s another one:
Hey, Bill — can you explain how the country benefits from having a President who is that stupid? Uninformed, bereft of the ability to distinguish fact from fiction, clueless about how to obtain reliable information, and basically unable to reason his way out of a paper bag? Are we safer with your Dear Leader in charge?
You need to look at the big picture, I guess. On a big-picture view, he’s a genius.
Amish have equivalent autism rates to other groups, incidentally. But it is in any case very dodgy to observe a differential between two groups and decide it is due to a chosen cause. There are massive confounders between the Amish and other populations due to their lifestyle and their relatively high degree of inbreeding. Autism is generally genetic. Inbreeding could cause concentration of a genetic factor if it is present in the founding population. The opposite would be true if it was absent.
But in this instance, there does not appear to be a differential to explain.
keiths:
Allan:
Yes, and we need to give it time. Let’s wait and see. Maybe having a stupid President who thinks that babies are given jarfuls of vaccine at a time, that autism is nonexistent among the Amish, and that 55-gallon drums of vaccine are being distributed by forklift — maybe that will turn out to be the best thing that’s ever happened to medicine in America. Historians will talk about the Golden Age of Medical Knowledge under Trump, hospitals will be named after him, and everyone will toss germ theory and mRNA vaccines into the garbage bin alongside frontal lobotomies and bloodletting.
You’d think.
Dr Oz: “You’ll notice, President Trump, these are discounted from 242 to 10. I don’t know what the math is on that. We can’t even calculate it. It’s too high to calculate.”
US Measles hits a 30-year high. Must be a decline in sanitation standards, hey antivaxxers? Or immigration, amirite?
Meantime the President, based on gut feeling, urges separation of MMR, which will create unnecessary delay iin achieving full protection vs the combined shots.
Seriously, it’s a clown show.
Cross-posted from “Is AI intelligent?”
Sadly so. MAGAs are particularly susceptible to antivax nonsense, often leading to full-on germ theory denial. Some even go so far as to deny the reality of DNA… virus denial took off post Covid. The line of thought, if one can call it that, appears to be ‘my rights were infringed so I’m gonna deny the entire basis’.
Allan:
Wow. What is their explanation of heredity?
No idea! It’s the logical extension of virus denial, since the DNA/RNA evidence for viruses is overwhelming. But I’m not sure how they explain anything – vast sums are spent on sequencing machines, PCR kits, etc in all manner of arenas: medicine, forensics, phylogenetics, general research, blood screening, genetics, genealogy etc. The whole world is buying and operating this kit that doesn’t even work in order to maintain a ‘scamdemic’. It’s biological flat-earth. They’re like children, all the naivety without the cuteness. They don’t know what they don’t know.
Because they couldn’t go to a bar, it all has to go.
One of the darlings of anti-virus is no-longer-a-Dr Tom Cowan. He’s decided there’s no such thing as the ribosome. Even x-ray crystallography of DNA is wrong (so…er… what did they crystallise?). I haven’t listened to this, as it would be bad for my blood pressure, but just reading the précis I know it’s bullshit.
The page has no end of supplements for sale. You can buy more shit on his website. He has made himself a rich man by talking utter shite.