RFK Jr.: HHS moves to restore public trust in vaccines (wsj.com)

You can flag my comment if you want, but Im past the point of caring about optics when it comes to conservatives as they are functionally destroying my country.

Conservatives on the other hand feel like its ok to have a private militia in the form of ICE exacting their will.

For all we know, RFK and his kids got sick but just didn't tell anybody.

The phrases used by @refurb are commonly repeated phrases, but they are missing nuance.

Masks absolutely work, just ask any nurse who didn't catch COVID while working 12-hour shifts for weeks in a COVID ward. The issue like you said is the right type of mask, and wearing it properly.

Half the time people were wearing masks with their nose poking out, or under their chin. Even wearing it fully covering - if it isn't airtight, and you haven't pinched the wired nose connection removing the small gap, it still won't work.

Similar with vaccines, science isn't exact, so a statement made at the start of the pandemic is not going to be the same 12-18 months later. There were dozens of variants of COVID each with different levels of risk. A vaccine doesn't guarantee you won't catch the virus, but can minimise or reduce symptoms, reduce spread, prime your body with some antibodies for your body to start combating it sooner.

So it's easy to say someone "lied". But data changes. Also, you have to make statements for the general population (lowest common denominator), not people with an educated / scientific / medical background.

Vaccines, masks, social distancing are all part of the Swiss Cheese Model which will reduce risk, but not eliminate it.

> 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.

It's Republicans that think it's alright. Not "Congress". The Republicans just happen to control what happens in Congress - the Democrats are not complicit at all.

Trump can live as long as medically possible, which could be 10 or 20 more years, nobody really knows. Then Trump Jr. is going to take his place as the figurehead, and he'll probably win the next election if there is one. If Trump doesn't make it to the end of his term, we'll have President Vance and VP Miller, or maybe VP Trump Jr. It's not looking good no matter what happens.

To your other question: I perceive DEI, and most other "inclusion" efforts I've seen so far, mostly as a strawman. We basically failed with digital accessibility and more inclusion in the workplace for people with disabilities. If I am not mistaken, the US and EU still stand somewhere around 80% unemployment for people with disabilities. To me, DEI is an attempt to hide that failure by including a lot more marginalized groups, which at the end of the day do not need so much adaptation as people with disabilities do. So IMO, DEI is trying to hide the fact that inclusion of people with disabilities has already failed. And its mixing up too many groups with different needs. I have absolutely nothing in common with a LGBTQ-person when it comes to my needs as a blind guy. There is no overlap, and I dont feel represented when they have their pride month. But they are so loud that the needs of my community have been silenced by now. Which confirms my intuition with DEI. Meanwhile, teachers are telling me they are working with their classes to find a new word for "disability". If that is the outcome of DEI, people endlessly engaging in wordgames, instead of working on the actual hard problems, I don't need anything from it. Its useless waste of time and dumbing down of the actual problems at hand.

In comparison, it seems like we're almost at a point where all WW2 vets (the last time "white men" had to confront fascist behavior) have passed away. When's the last time America as a general unit has had to properly protest authority? The Boomers didn't seem to take the right lessons about Vietnam into account when they started taking the reigns.

That said, what people call DEI today is just a reformation of Maoism based in Marxism, and its goals follow hopes, and patterns that seek to engender social collectivist indoctrination in those subjected to it; following principles of thought reform/torture unironically also coming out of mainland China during Mao (1950s).

Its particularly effective against the habitually complacent.

The big trick of communism is to induce hope in people to narrow their focus to a circular but undefined viewpoint which can be falsely claimed as truth later, but which in reality lacks a property of what's called metaphysical objectivity in philosophy; an identity you need to prove anything through logic/critical thinking. This is how double-speak and double-think work.

It also takes advantage of a lot of psychological blindspots we all have (by purposeful design), just like any other cult programming.

Its important to note: Equity isn't equality, and its not properly defined.

If you want to learn more about blindspots, I'd suggest starting with Robert Cialdini (Influence). Robert Lifton covers case studies of actual torture mechanics which can be derived (elements, structuring, clustering), which use these blindspots (albeit this material came before Cialdini published back in the 1950s).

New Discourses covers the progression of DEI in damning detail albeit he sometimes becomes too wordy.

With any regime change playbook you inherently have two roles being played simultaneously by a single cohort. You have a subgroup of antagonists, who perform and carry out acts to inflame which then are used by the other role to create a unifying narrative/platform for influence and insurgency.

The fact that violence and rioting are occurring fairly often is sufficient evidence that DEI and its other forms have had some success as a memetic contagion.

The harm always comes at you sideways without any visibility or attribution being possible. Are you better off today than you were a decade ago? Could you imagine a decade ago police firing teargas and rubber bullets indiscriminately into a peaceful assembly, or people firebombing cars with molotov cocktails? Which came first?, none of the news is saying and all the public narratives lean towards omitted lies in one form or another.

No objective signals can be discernible or come out of channels jammed to the Shannon Limit.

People go absolutely insane when they cannot maintain an internal consistent narrative/mental state and this happens without them realizing it (subliminally), and its been known for quite a long time going all the way back to the 1800s with Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd.

"I support safe vaccines, it just so happens that I don't believe that any vaccine is safe and I am not willing to trust the medical system to evaluate vaccines for safety and will continue to insist that all vaccines are unsafe" has the net effect of not supporting vaccination at all.

Vaccines provide acquired immunity. And that happens only with a weakened or killed antigen. With everyone being different that means there is no 100% effective vaccine. It is only people like RFK who spread this disinformation.

Then there is the history of US vaccine legislation. He often misinforms people about it too. The legislation was put in place in the 1980s because the DPT vaccine was suggested to cause brain injury. When lawsuits piled up some vaccine makers stopped producing vaccines altogether to avoid being liable. Without insurance prices skyrocketed and no one could get the and hence the law was put in place under Ronald Reagan.

Even with this law there are alternatives to getting compensated. So, the whole point is one big disinformation.

The common point of confusion between people who spread this disinformation about RFK's position is that they are either arguing in bad faith or misinformed at best.

If the standards are "raised", then novel vaccines are going to be impossible in US because we are back at square one. Manufacturers cannot get liability insurance for the new vaccines and hence need to be very wary about producing these vaccines, lest they get sued.

It is often said that people should learn from history. But people in RFK's orbit seem to want to test history for themselves.

And for the sake of clarity Samoa tried RFK's approach and here's what happened: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

But then RFK being the politician he is, distanced himself from the situation. I am sure he is going to do the same once things don't work out. So, everyone should put their health in hands of someone who has never taken responsibility for his actions and words but demands higher standards from others.

So is your suggestion that medical policy based on balancing humours is actually effective altruism?

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?

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.

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!"

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.

If not, the end state looks not great. How have you dealt with this reality for your own personal/family planning? Asking for me.

They can't, and often neither can the doctors. That is one of the major practical reasons why vaccinations should be voluntary - it is quite hard to assess the evidence of what exactly medicine does. Some things take a while for the evidence to really form a meaningful pattern.

It was like them declaring the vaccine safe and effective after a few months of trials - that isn't a crazy standard but if the vaccine literally caused people to drop dead after 12 months for some weird reason they just couldn't have detected it because not enough time had passed.

https://gladstone.org/news/hiv-particles-do-not-cause-aids-o...

Second, please review the author’s articles - https://apnews.com/author/michelle-r-smith - she’s obsessed with RFK. There’s zero positive writing about anything. RFK wants the healthcare industry to be more transparent. He insists on more rigorous testing. These are common sense policy positions that deserve fair analysis. The lack of balanced reporting does a disservice to readers who deserve comprehensive coverage of important health policy debates.

What happened is that our country is extremely polarized and one side picked vaccines, masks, and lockdowns, so the other side took the opposite stance.

Then the vaccine, mask, and lockdown side reacted by leaning farther in (probably a bit too far near the end of things).

On the one side you had people yelling about masks causing them to asphyxiate and on the other you had people wearing masks alone in the car.

We don't even seem to be learning in retrospect. I've yet to see one article from health officials to the public about how they could have done better and what mistakes were made.

How’s that working out so far?

Now you are suggesting it was all some form of performative behavior modification theater? It’s no wonder our public trust in our health authorities has decreased.

RFK made a career out of being anti-vax, while according to his congressional testimony, his own children were indeed vaccinated.

These people are political grifters, with no limits, even when it comes to other people's health.

(This comment exchange probably sucks, sorry)

Second, vaccination did reduce both severity of disease in case of infection, and also rate of infection, and thus transmission. Even imperfect reduction of transmissibility (the famous R_0) can mean the difference between a pandemic and fizzling out.

> a network of prospective cohorts among frontline workers, showed that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were approximately 90% effective in preventing symptomatic and asymptomatic infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in real-world conditions (1,2)

Are they lying? Is 90% the damning number of ineffectiveness? Also I'm confused, why wouldn't you vaccinate everyone including healthy children? It's like the first thing I would do as a parent. The yearly flu vaccine is more of a gamble than the COVID vaccine and I still get it every year. Why do you want less protection?

Horseshit, and you know it. Because even you acknowledged elsewhere they said "unlikely".

Then you run around this conversation saying "they said it won't happen", and using weasel words like "basically" to justify your mischaracterization of what they said as absolute claims.

Has a plot of cases over time, where you can clearly see the number of cases dropping after the vaccine is developed.

Long story short: if you are anti-vax, you for sure are anti-science. We know a lot about vaccinations and the risks of taking them and not taking them.

Indeed

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.

The only country that had a very good societal response was Japan, as a result they had one of the lowest death rates in the world, even with their aging population, while having the law in place that pretty much only restrict government power to closing certain places, without being able to enforce quarantine. The initial decision of the government was even against imposing emergency powers, but eventually all parties agreed that emergency powers were necessary.

>Asking people to inject themselves with something that was rushed out the door, most using novel technology, and whose results did not come remotely close to the early rhetoric (which included claims that you would not get infected or spread COVID if vaccinated) is not something that people would ever organically rush to adopt.

And yet, those same people eat food that contains who knows what, was processed with random chemicals that may or may not cause cancer, buy meat from animals injected with chemicals that they don't know the contents of, smoke, drink alchol, vape.

But suddenly, when it comes to taking a vaccine with technology that not only has been around for a while, but also adequately tested, the "government can't be trusted".

The negative response to vaccine was never about government distrust, it was pretty much a very easy ideological line to draw in the sand. This is why every single anti vaxxer person on their way to the grave breathing through a ventilator was changing their mind and telling people to take the vaccine, because when shit actually gets real, ideology matters less.

And equivalently now, maybe (and hopefully), when US is embroiled in civil unrest with martial law in place, and people can't feed their families, they will realize that having a black woman president would have been probably a much better outcome than voting for a convicted felon who sold them lies of individual liberty.

Problem is, in America, that group is large enough to make significant impact on government.

People still act like it's some common cold. My partner has nearly no taste left, years later. That's an entire sense, a fundamental perception, gone.

Even if it was a common cold, I don't want to be forced to have it.

The youngest to die were Hamilton who died in a duel, and John Hancock who died of gout of an undocumented cause - it can be caused by excessive alcohol consumption. All the others lived into their 60s and 70s. So their overall life expectancy was pretty much the same as we have today. And this was long before vaccines or even us knowing that surgeons washing their hands before surgery was a good thing to do. It's the same as you go back further into history. A study [1] of all men of renown in Ancient Greece was 71.3, and that was from thousands of years ago!

The most primitive medical technology, antibiotics in particular, could have likely expanded these lives well beyond current day. So the idea here is not to just add more regulations to medicine or have people go to the hospital even more for preventative care but to start living healthier lives in general. Less crap food, more time outdoors, more exercise, less obesity, and so on. And these are things that the government should have been pushing all along.

[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18359748/

Look at "The Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in the United States in the Twentieth Century", by Mckinlay and McKinley (1977). I know it's an old paper, but it has some fascinating and, to me, very persuasive time series. Those plots show mortality from various infectious diseases over the 20th century.

Example: death rates (per 1000) from scarlet fever dropped from 0.1 in 1900 to effectively 0 in 1940. There is NO VACCINE for scarlet fever.

Example: death rates from measles (lately very much in the news) dropped from 0.12 in 1900 to 0 in 1960 (a vaccine for measles was introduced in 1960).

A similar trend exists for many other infectious diseases: huge drops in mortality PRECEDE the introduction of vaccines or antibiotics for the disease. Surely we can't credit vaccines with such a drop in death rates. I don't see how anybody could come to such a conclusion.

And nobody really knows why this is, though there are plentiful hypotheses. And exercise is just one aspect of living healthy, though a very important one. You find similar strong associations between 'clean' eating and all other sorts of aspects of a living a healthy life.

Not only does it have effects but rather dramatic ones. I'd think most people would probably see this in their daily lives as healthfulness has dramatic effects on both physical and psychological wellbeing.

[1] - https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/o...

[2] - https://www.bbc.com/news/health-11664660