It looks like US will not be at the fore front of vaccine development and production.
I hope at least this US admin will not ban importing vaccines developed by other countries… they may tariff them, but not ban.
jfengel · 8h ago
Of course. But it will likely be years before it really reaches its full effect.
There is herd immunity for a lot of vaccines. It might be decades before we have to break out an iron lung. Once we do we'll have to get a whole bunch because polio is extremely transmissible, but until then it will be easily deniable.
Similarly, without tracking a lot of diseases, it'll just be anecdotal. We already hear about E. coli and salmonella outbreaks. Will anyone really notice the difference if there are twice as many? (Especially if it's only reported in the much-reviled "mainstream media".)
The danger is obvious to anyone who knows anything at all about how disease processes work. But as Kennedy said, "We, you know, people, we need to stop trusting the experts." Anybody who knows anything is ipso facto untrustworthy, and you should believe the opposite of what they say. So it will be quite a long time before people have sufficiently "done their own research" (by dying).
nostrademons · 5h ago
Also many vaccines are given in childhood, the vaccine schedule is frontloaded to the first 18 months of life, and many parents are trying to push to get the rest of their kids' vaccines early if possible for fear of losing access to them. So kids up through roughly 2024 births will have largely gotten their vaccines before the CDC can substantively change anything. We're looking at decades before the health effects become apparent, enough time for kids to be born after the unavailability of vaccines and yet grow old enough to get into school settings where diseases can easily spread.
Also likely to be extremely socioeconomically divided, as wealthy parents will likely be able to secure vaccines for their kids through vaccine tourism or the black market, while diseases run rampant through the lower classes.
aredox · 6h ago
>So it will be quite a long time before people have sufficiently "done their own research" (by dying).
And even then, it may not be enough. Antivaccine is as old as vaccines, with the same arguments forever, and I would argue that the mass adoption of vaccination in the 20th century has as much to do with social and cultural forces such as post-war optimism, fascination with science and trust in modernity, as with hard data like "efficacy" and having your kids escape illness.
lazyeye · 4h ago
60% of the US population has at least one chronic disease. 60 PERCENT!
40% has 2 or more.
In any other sector would this be an acceptable outcome?
The old establishment health bureacracy should not be taken seriously. By any measure they are corrupt and incompetent fools.
toomuchtodo · 4h ago
You’re blaming the medical establishment for Western disease? Maybe blame a car centric, carbohydrate rich ultra processed food incentivized system? Read the risk factors on the page you cited. It’s smoking, alcohol consumption, poor diet, and lack of exercise. Everyone gets cancer when we live longer and improve detection.
Prescribe and subsidize exercise and GLP-1s, ban cigarettes, and you solve a lot of this. The medical establishment did not make the system humans exist in the US in, they simply try to treat it.
You can't really do that, but life expectancy in the US is a fair bit lower than comparably wealthy countries. I'm not sure you can blame the CDC but something is not ideal.
I think it's 84 years in Italy, 79.3 in the US. I'm sure a lot of that is due to healthier diets and less obesity, but isn't that the sort of thing RFK is trying to encourage?
With demagoguery you start with there needing to be a party that's "corrupt and incompetent fools" and then apply that to the party you don't like. What are you doing, earnestly trying to understand the problem or something?
lazyeye · 4h ago
Yes this would be their primary challenge at which they have comprehensively failed.
shadowgovt · 1h ago
What task have they failed in? And, more importantly, what is the better approach?
You've asserted 60% of Americans having at least one chronic condition is a failure and begged the question that it is a failure (instead of a reasonable expectation of the health of mortals, especially mortals in a population that starts to skew older as our birth rates fall relative to the baby boom... Or the consequence of accurate tracking and reporting on an ever-widening set of understood or recognized conditions). Start by convincing the room there is a problem to solve before asserting leadership has failed at it.
And even if there is a problem to solve: entropy being what it is, there are infinitely more worse ways to do things than there are better. Even if the CDC's approach has room for improvement, from whence comes the confidence that putting a debunked conspiracy believer (https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/11/15/rfk-jrs-con...) and anti-vaccination activist at its helm leads to improvement?
owenversteeg · 1h ago
I completely agree. On any other issue this would be considered a catastrophic failure beyond failure. This is an op-ed from a series of old army generals who lost the war because they were in bed with the enemy every step of the way. The CDC, FDA, and other regulators have a revolving door open to the same industries that profit from the demise of public health.
Take, for example, myopia in children (which has grown from zero to nearly half of children today) or vitamin D deficiency (34.5% of Americans _sufficient_!) The cost is colossal - both myopia and vitamin D deficiency have huge knock-on effects. The intervention in this case is easy and free. And yet, because there is no profit to be made, approximately nothing was done. This is a completely insane state of affairs.
triceratops · 4h ago
To paraphrase Dwight Schrute, did the CDC force people to not exercise and eat butter and sugar for 30 years?
What about the role of companies that develop and manufacture and market all this delicious, poisonous food?
gigatree · 3h ago
The fact that you mentioned butter and not synthetic dyes, glyphosate, seed oils, or literally anything else is part of the problem (ie corporate capture).
Nihilartikel · 2h ago
Dyes, glyphosate, seed oils... Yeah. I like olive oil, and don't want to eat glyphosate, but you're fixating on the tenuous unfalsifiable presumed linkage of their toxicity to population level health problems.
I would still put my money on a person eating a commodity, non-organic, seed oil rich diet that is sanely balanced and appropriate for their activity level being healthier on average than an overeating gluten free organic-everything only touched by hemp fiber vegan who never exercises.
triceratops · 3h ago
"Butter" is in the quote I was referencing.
I covered corporate capture in the second half of my comment.
billy99k · 3h ago
These aren't mentioned because Kennedy is against all of them.
UncleMeat · 4h ago
When people live longer they develop more chronic conditions. And our view of health widens, so stuff that was previously just “Bob has bad knees” becomes a chronic condition.
I assure you that banning vaccines isn’t going to fix people’s back pain.
spondylosaurus · 3h ago
Many chronic conditions are also "chronic" now but just two or three generations ago were either a swift or slow and painful death sentence. We see more adults with <insert major health problem here> because now they actually survive into adulthood and can reasonably participate in society rather than being confined to their homes (or to a home).
It's mystery to me why people rush to defend such extreme levels of failure.
toomuchtodo · 4h ago
You can’t pick your parents. ~40% of pregnancies every year in the US are unintended [1], and a similar percentage of births are paid for by Medicaid [2] (~50% in rural communities). Lots of kids born into some combination of poverty and parents who aren’t providing the nutrition and exercise kids need to not be pre-diabetic (poverty rates are highest for rural children). The only solution to that is to help everyone who doesn’t want kids to not have them (robustly accessible contraceptives) if we’re not going to provide robust social support to parents who need it to raise healthy children (all evidence points to “we are not going to do this” for the foreseeable future). Are you expecting the government to do something different? Because they were providing food assistance (SNAP) and child healthcare (Medicaid) which is getting reduced or removed (depending on state or circumstance) by this administration.
Like “Who pays the tariffs?” in this context the question is, “Who do you think has the primary responsibility of raising healthy children? And why aren’t they able to?” [3] [4] [5] I think it’s highly unlikely changing vaccination requirements is going to improve the outcomes you’re stating are the problems in this thread.
I hope at least this US admin will not ban importing vaccines developed by other countries… they may tariff them, but not ban.
There is herd immunity for a lot of vaccines. It might be decades before we have to break out an iron lung. Once we do we'll have to get a whole bunch because polio is extremely transmissible, but until then it will be easily deniable.
Similarly, without tracking a lot of diseases, it'll just be anecdotal. We already hear about E. coli and salmonella outbreaks. Will anyone really notice the difference if there are twice as many? (Especially if it's only reported in the much-reviled "mainstream media".)
The danger is obvious to anyone who knows anything at all about how disease processes work. But as Kennedy said, "We, you know, people, we need to stop trusting the experts." Anybody who knows anything is ipso facto untrustworthy, and you should believe the opposite of what they say. So it will be quite a long time before people have sufficiently "done their own research" (by dying).
Also likely to be extremely socioeconomically divided, as wealthy parents will likely be able to secure vaccines for their kids through vaccine tourism or the black market, while diseases run rampant through the lower classes.
And even then, it may not be enough. Antivaccine is as old as vaccines, with the same arguments forever, and I would argue that the mass adoption of vaccination in the 20th century has as much to do with social and cultural forces such as post-war optimism, fascination with science and trust in modernity, as with hard data like "efficacy" and having your kids escape illness.
40% has 2 or more. In any other sector would this be an acceptable outcome?
https://www.cdc.gov/chronic-disease/about/index.html
The old establishment health bureacracy should not be taken seriously. By any measure they are corrupt and incompetent fools.
Prescribe and subsidize exercise and GLP-1s, ban cigarettes, and you solve a lot of this. The medical establishment did not make the system humans exist in the US in, they simply try to treat it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_affluence
I think it's 84 years in Italy, 79.3 in the US. I'm sure a lot of that is due to healthier diets and less obesity, but isn't that the sort of thing RFK is trying to encourage?
You've asserted 60% of Americans having at least one chronic condition is a failure and begged the question that it is a failure (instead of a reasonable expectation of the health of mortals, especially mortals in a population that starts to skew older as our birth rates fall relative to the baby boom... Or the consequence of accurate tracking and reporting on an ever-widening set of understood or recognized conditions). Start by convincing the room there is a problem to solve before asserting leadership has failed at it.
And even if there is a problem to solve: entropy being what it is, there are infinitely more worse ways to do things than there are better. Even if the CDC's approach has room for improvement, from whence comes the confidence that putting a debunked conspiracy believer (https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/11/15/rfk-jrs-con...) and anti-vaccination activist at its helm leads to improvement?
Take, for example, myopia in children (which has grown from zero to nearly half of children today) or vitamin D deficiency (34.5% of Americans _sufficient_!) The cost is colossal - both myopia and vitamin D deficiency have huge knock-on effects. The intervention in this case is easy and free. And yet, because there is no profit to be made, approximately nothing was done. This is a completely insane state of affairs.
What about the role of companies that develop and manufacture and market all this delicious, poisonous food?
I would still put my money on a person eating a commodity, non-organic, seed oil rich diet that is sanely balanced and appropriate for their activity level being healthier on average than an overeating gluten free organic-everything only touched by hemp fiber vegan who never exercises.
I covered corporate capture in the second half of my comment.
I assure you that banning vaccines isn’t going to fix people’s back pain.
https://diabetes.org/about-diabetes/prediabetes/adolescents-...
It's mystery to me why people rush to defend such extreme levels of failure.
Like “Who pays the tariffs?” in this context the question is, “Who do you think has the primary responsibility of raising healthy children? And why aren’t they able to?” [3] [4] [5] I think it’s highly unlikely changing vaccination requirements is going to improve the outcomes you’re stating are the problems in this thread.
[1] https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-u...
[2] https://www.aha.org/fact-sheets/2025-02-07-fact-sheet-medica...
[3] https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...
[4] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/12/poverty-rate-...
[5] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-...
And how will banning vaccines will help with any of the problems you pointed out?