RFK Jr.: HHS moves to restore public trust in vaccines
208 ceejayoz 294 6/9/2025, 9:11:33 PM wsj.com ↗
See also:
Kennedy guts CDC's vaccine panel of independent experts https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/kennedy-guts-acip...
RFK Jr. ousts entire CDC vaccine advisory committee - https://apnews.com/article/kennedy-cdc-acip-vaccines-3790c89...
So, another lawsuit against illegal executive branch dismissal of federal workers, then?
No comments yet
Apparently ACIP is very much not new. I am curious to the specifics of the prevous mass appointment, however.
Essentially, an anticipatory filling of a committee that had a lot of unfilled spots in hoping of stopping something like what's just happened.
> Although it’s typically not viewed as a partisan board, the Biden administration had installed the entire committee.
After some degree of googling the history of ACIP I had not found any explanation and thought maybe someone here(who is actually American and maybe follows this kind of thing more closely?) would just know
Looks like there are actually some comments now that are more clarifying.
> Are you just asking questions to smokescreen for this executive power grab?
I’m just trying to understand the background. I get that this is a sensitive topic, but I’d ask that we keep things civil and give people the benefit of the doubt when they’re asking honest questions.
That trust was undermined by habitual liars in an effort to score political points at the expense of public health. None of the batshit-insane things they claimed were just around the corner have actually materialized.
Unfortunately, this isn't even the top five most egregious thing these people are doing this week.
But the basic work of ACIP had been done for 25+ years before the committee was created. The American Academy of Pediatrics made recommendations, etc.
I thought that something like a pandemic would have brought us all together around a base truth. However, politics + social media was stronger than R₀, this time.
That particular plague is in Il Promisi Sposi ( The Betrothed), the Italian national epic. Really, it's a bit picardesque. But the first hand descriptions of that plague are just so damn similar to what the COVID was like. I remember reading it years before the pandemic and thinking that I was glad we weren't so mideaval anymore. Now it read it again ( it's only a few chapters in the book) and I feel more like one veteran talking to another about their war.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45334
Chapter 31 is where the plague part starts, you needn't really read the rest, but it's a good summer book all the same
There should be public debate around most of any issue. Tell people something as simple that getting some sunlight is good for them and some will even argue against it claiming that no it's not, you'll just get skin cancer. And that's fine, even those sort of views deserve their place in the public discourse. But when that discourse is completely absent - presumably to try to give the appearance of complete consensus, it doesn't inspire confidence, but destroys it.
[1] - https://x.com/ITGuy1959/status/1581034815700488192
Im glad at least its happening sooner when Im still fairly young and have the flexibility to peace out if I need to.
On my part, I didn’t need anyone to tell me how various masks do or do not work. They all have certifications one can read on their own.
But, that mask messaging was bad. I suppose the alternative was, yes masks work, but we don’t have for you. Apparently we are not adult enough to hear that type of thing. And, I mean we’re not.
> When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent ... Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, "I can nudge this up a bit," so I went to 80, 85. We need to have some humility here .... We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I'm not going to say 90 percent.
The intention doesn't really matter; you can't admit to lying for policy purposes, then wonder why people stopped trusting the government.
So lets not pretend that you care about government trust, that sentiment doesn't fly anymore. It all comes down to my group vs other group, and by definition, my group is good and other group is bad.
Three of my direct coworkers died from covid. One guy didn't get his sense of taste back for a year.
People just gasping to death in their bedrooms waiting for things to improve and only going to the overloaded ER when it's too late.
I'm an asthmatic, I've been close to that feeling where sub 90% oxygen saturation made me feel like death. Anything like 80% your lungs start to fail. You're dead in a hurry.
And the raw milk (might or might not contain a bit of cow poop)
Maybe he did have a real parasite in his brain, but according to him the parasite left no permanent damage after it got cleaned up after the divorce ended in his favour.
I don't see why raw milk necessarily contains cow poop unless the udders aren't cleaned before milking (though I suppose you can't trust the diary industry to take care of that reliably) but I doubt he's consuming any of it beyond the public appearances set up for the raw milk grifters.
Why attribute to insanity that which could just as easily be attributed to corruption and lies.
Because his “insanity” is more than just a claimed brain worm:
The trauma from the men in his life being assassinated when he was an impressionable little boy. He now blames the CIA for both.
The heroin addiction.
The whale on the car incident.
The bear cub corpse in NYC.
The swimming in raw sewage.
There is no spy or health conspiracy too large for this guy. Everyone is corrupt/corruptable in his mind except him.
These are not the actions of a stable person. His solution to autism is to dictate that there is no significant genetic component, then give scientists 6 months to “find the cause” (after hijacking all of the medical data the US government can coerce).
Sure, there is corruption in that he is making referral money from some of his companies. I’m not sure he’s lying though — that requires Mens Rea. He might just have crazy ideas about reality. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t believe in _germ theory_ after his statements about HIV /AIDS.
Indeed
Once it turned out not to be true public trust was seriously eroded.
(1) https://abc3340.com/news/local/those-fully-vaccinated-very-u...
Weird link you got there.
> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti‑intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’
- “A Cult of Ignorance” by Isaac Asimov, published on January 21, 1980 in Newsweek
Looks at the lies the government told during COVID - masks don’t work, then they work, vaccines stop transmission, then they don’t.
And you blame people for being cautious about government promises? Sounds pretty smart to me.
(Use your context tool, an agentic LLM could do better! Click on profile and then comments before you judge someone so quickly!)
I don't believe you're engaging in good faith either.
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if you want to make changes, you should make a convincing argument to do so
1. That Wifi causes cancer.
2. That there is no vaccine which is "safe and effective".
3. It's unknown if the Polio vaccine prevented more deaths than it caused.
This quote from him seems to summarize his view on vaccines: "I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, 'Better not get him vaccinated.'"
So with that in mind, we can now say he's a complete and utter buffoonish idiot whose opinion is not worth a fart.
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Nowhere in there does it matter that anyone is "right". Democracy doesn't care.
See, the problem with everyone in these comments is that you're focusing on the wrong problem. RFK, Trump, they're all just symptoms of that larger problem. Getting mad at this news is like watching a tornado tear your house off the foundations then yelling in anger at the storm.
Better to state what you argue or what you believe an opponent is arguing, so that a reasonable discussion can then ensue. IOW I agree with you that each of RFK's contentions could be discussed dispassionately here; however, in contrast mrtksn 55 minutes ago wrote:
+I like the suggestion, but this is not a debate really, this is action."
which, to me, sounds like some sort of (insurrectionist/Marxist/something I'm unfamiliar with) "call to action" rather than a consideration of further discussion. If so, then my imagined discussion would be likely impossible. Instead I see two possible alternatives depending on what your state laws are:
I. You live in a state where firearms are heavily regulated and there is no "stand-your-ground" law or "castle doctrine". Result: possible burnings, lootings and days of general lawlessness, or
II. You live in a state like Texas where one can possess firearms and use them to "stand your ground". Result: a few possible deaths, some wounded burners, looters and rioters after 15 minutes of clarification.
(1) "The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health"
https://www.amazon.com/Real-Anthony-Fauci-Pharma-Democracy/d...
I’m okay with federal officeholders selling ideas in newspapers like Obama did with Obamacare. He didn’t receive special treatment - just another voice in the marketplace of ideas. It’s just the announcement exclusives that feel wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=tegyXGiQjsc
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAWGpASZexI
Before the pandemic, I heard some weird things from older Slovaks, such as EU has decided that kids must name their parents "parent1" and "parent2", and if they don't they will take your kids away. Absolutely bonkers.
Then during the pandemic, all the typical anti-vax rhetoric really took hold there, like crazy.
Then after the pandemic, all those anti-vaxers all of a sudden got pro-Russia. Which makes no sense when you think about that, because both have nothing to do with each other. At that point, I realised Russia was doing their campaigns way before covid already, but it got an extra boost thanks to it.
And now Slovaks prime minister Fico attended the Russian military parade.
The ironic part is that these anti-vaxers like to call the rest of us "sheep", but in the end they are the sheep that are lead straight to the slaughter house.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK561254/table/T4/
Are you being anti-humanity and anti-science if you didn’t want to take one of those?
SMALLPOX SMALLPOX ERADICATED
Yeah, the smallpox vaccine was pulled from the market because it actually worked and eradicated smallpox.
We almost got the same for Polio, but unfortunately some anti-vax nuts prevented that.
Presumably to be replaced with political appointees / friends?
I can't wait to travel to Mexico or Canada to get a vaccine!
In any event, Mexico and Canada are special in that they share a terrestrial border with most of the United States.
FWIW TB was the leading infectious disease killer in 2023 (surpassing COVID-19)
https://www.who.int/news/item/29-10-2024-tuberculosis-resurg...
and remained so in 2024.
Because America has been the paragon of health over the past few decades...because America spends the most per capita on Health Care. What a super effective system. Obviously everything was working out so great before this JFK guy came.
I work in healthcare - most problems we see in the hospital are related to chronic illness caused by poverty and the gutting of social services. Many other countries spend more on social services than healthcare, but in the US it's flipped.
Where I come from, whenever 2 old women meet, I noticed they always ask how many children they had. And the response is always a variation of: 6 children, 4 alive, 2 dead.
Child mortality is still present in their minds. This is inconceivable to me but my generation still listens to the stories. The future generations are not gonna listen to these stories, the US is probably already in such a future.
So is your suggestion that medical policy based on balancing humours is actually effective altruism?
Everyone: “we can tell you’re an entitled dbag.”
VC: “well now I’m going to act like an entitled dbag and it’s your fault.”
- Me paraphrasing his actual interview. You know who I’m talking about.
No, we don't, because not all of us watch the same media or follow the same threads.
Sorry, don't know, plz tell us!
All of them?
It's pretty easy to come across this site if you're just generally interested in tech stuff (I think everybody I talk to knows exactly what I refer to if I say "the orange site"), and if you're someone who's interested in tech but not particularly plugged into things like the mechanics of startups or business, well, there's a lot on here that's not related to that.
Also, I didn't really see the connection to the US election and vaccines.
In this case though I guess it's just hard for me to recognise how much the focus of this site has shifted and that people can come here that seemingly have no interest in startups/tech/vc.
If not, the end state looks not great. How have you dealt with this reality for your own personal/family planning? Asking for me.
The Citizens United decision allowed capital to have a much larger influence on the programming of our political media.
Obama, many faults and all, has a great quote on this topic: ~"If I watched Fox News, I wouldn't vote for me either!"
That is why Trump was right about him shooting someone on 5th Avenue and getting away with it. He was smart enough to tap into this undercurrent that I was unaware of, perhaps due to my youth.
Yes, we grow into that as we turn into toddlers, then hopefully we grow out of it. One of our simple core algo's is categorization, but it's just a base algo which came out of base survival techniques from the days of yore.
> They were okay with the idea of equality of opportunity, but once their relative social ranking started to drop, they reverted to their base instinct of pulling others down to make up for their own failings.
This is true to some extent, and very sad. However, it does not apply to everyone in my experience. It only applies to those who see the world as a zero-sum game. If I understand the last few hundred years correctly, thanks to technology, we do not live in a zero-sum world, so it's an obsolete concept. Once you learn that, it overrides those old base algo's, if you are in a social circle that allows this. However, those base categorizations do appeal to our base instincts, so it's an effective political campaigning technique for those politicians who have no shame.
I ain't young no more, and the biggest change in US politics that I have seen is that being shameless has become normalized, again.
There are many examples of when super racist/sexist/political people get to talk with those who they once hated, they drop all those previous trainings, and just see them as fellow humans, and even friends. This is why those who use the obsolete categorization ideology as their entire identity don't want you to go to university, or travel, where you might learn all that.
And ample access to 1000x more lies than truth. For the people who are media illiterate, facts don’t matter and truth is replaced by confirmation of priors.
Hence the schadenfreude.
It's one thing to be wrong with everyone. It's another to be wrong after a ton of people said "This is a dumb idea."
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/08/is...
Oh and to be clear my attitude towards antivaxxers is burn by /slow/ fire, but still.
But hey, what do I know, maybe you're 80yo and working on a short time horizon.
And this is coming from someone who abhors that business model and everyone in it.
It’s incredible when I read this sort of comment, and then I realise that the comment is so badly ill informed that I need to respond. But it does make me wonder what sources of information the other person is reading…
Perhaps you were thinking about compensation from the government, but the original poster was talking about actually holding Pfizer and Moderna liable.
VI claims are still paid (faster, with lower standard of evidence, and cheaper to everyone involved). Lawsuits that go through court involve law firms and the investigations become extremely expensive for everyone.
Manufacturers (and rhetorical supply+delivery chain) are monitored by medical orgs and the federal government to ensure the doses remain safe, after passing the initial trials. These review systems catch incidents like the Samoa measles vaccine incident (in which a few nurses were at fault for injecting from the wrong bottles, which RFKJr was on the wrong side of) and other incidents where some vials were contaminated. Unless a VI plaintiff can prove gross negligence, the outcome is better under the current system. If they can prove gross negligence, they can still take a manufacturer (or any other defendant involved in the supply chain) to court.
The government decided that vaccines are a public health net positive and designed to current system to spread the risk across manufacturers and the government to ensure the cost of litigation didn’t eliminate this very useful tool.
People still have an avenue to sue for harm -- they can sue the government.
The government took on that liability in exchange for preventing the spread of a highly pathogenic, novel pandemic with moderate mortality, thereby allowing return to normal life, with fewer deaths, faster.
Which part of that was a bad idea?
Packing the committee with a diverse group of cranks and cronies will surely restore confidence in the health care system.
I think terms in boards like this should be filled under a different periodicity from the presidential term, preferentially with a period coprime to it, just like cicadas do. This way it would be harder to pull the trick of letting both cycles sync.
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/11/scicheck-rfk-jr-incorrectl...
The left believes the aggressors are the Trump administration. The right believes its the left and the Biden admin. The real aggressor is the division itself; upstream from both these administrations. Those sad quirks of human nature, tribalism and division, which the algorithms picked up on, which feeds back into content creators biasing toward serving those algorithmic niches, which feeds the cycle further. Russia probably disinfo'd a bit in there, but honestly, they don't even need to; human nature does it itself.
Social media and AI-accelerated tribal bubble reinforcement is going to destroy the world. If you work in social media: Your work is destroying the world. You need to stop. The only way to save modern society is to turn off social media.
Meanwhile my son and I (both inoculated in our first months of life) had a very light cold, essentially unnoticeable on my part, and were ok in a couple days. Because we inoculate children against HIB no doctors sees serious cases like this in otherwise healthy adults and it took many rounds of seeing multiple doctors before they tried looking for HIB. The bacteria is very very common but only the immunocompromised are checked with any regularity.
Incidents like this will become more common if these antivax anti science schemes are in effect for long enough. HIB is not a big flashy name because we have solved this problem. You get a “cold”, are told to rest, and you never remember it happening as time passes. My wife is not going to forget the part of her vocal range that does not work. She has had to stop her singing classes, something she loves.
“You died of dysentery” is a meme in the US because the only people we collectively know who have had dysentery are the characters we played in the Oregon Trail as kids in school. As someone who has had Dysentery care of an outbreak in the Caribbean, I feel like we’re seeing the result of the tremendous success of our health programs allowing completely stupid thinking to gain power.
What really pains me through all this is that the absence of disease does not mean that vaccines do not work! One would think the latest pointless measles outbreak would have been proof to convince people that the antivax rhetoric is all bunk, yet here we are. I don’t understand how we have gotten here beyond people simply not seeing up close what has been prevented by decades of programs.
My parents are old enough to have grown up with people who were irreparably harmed by Polio. The only ones I know of are aging senators or when the odd documentary on iron lungs. The vaccine development for Polio is the example that people like RFK use against all other vaccines, as if they’re all made the same way and as if we had not learned from the experience. Regulations are often written in blood and it’s simply disgraceful that they are throwing away what has been codified so they can smugly sell onesies with “I didn’t get a vaccine” on it.
Meanwhile RFK’s kids are vaccinated.
Charlatan.
If someone thinks they’ve actually been harmed by a vaccine, there’s a part of the government that would like to talk to you. Better do that fast before that gets torn down too.