RFK Jr. and vaccines: searching
I noticed a discussion in the comments about whether RFK Jr. was against vaccines more generally, or just the newer technologies (the latter of which I assume refers to mRNA vaccines like COVID). I’m highlighting my answer in this separate post because I want to point out something that some of you may not know about doing online searches.
If you’re researching a question like that – involving the past – in a regular search of course you’re going to get recent articles for the most part, and they will discuss the COVID shot. But you can do a custom search for earlier dates in order to filter the recent pieces out. In Google, this is done under “tools,” and in DuckDuckGo you’ll see an option that says “any time” and under that you’ll see you can do a custom search.
When I search between the year 2000 and January of 2019 for “RFK Jr. and vaccines,” plenty of articles pop up that seem relevant. Here’s one of them, for example. It’s from October of 2015, and it’s entitled, “Robert Kennedy Jr. warns of vaccine-linked ‘holocaust’.” An excerpt [emphasis mine]:
With lawmakers [in California] preparing to vote on a bill blocking parents from skipping vaccinations for their children, prominent vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. arrived at the Sacramento screening of a film linking autism to the vaccine preservative thimerosal and warned that public health officials cannot be trusted.
“They can put anything they want in that vaccine and they have no accountability for it,” said Kennedy, who walked onto and left a Crest Theater stage to standing ovations, of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Wednesday afternoon will see the first hearing for a bill eliminating the personal belief exemption parents can cite in order to avoid vaccinating their kids. Senate Bill 277 was prompted by soaring exemption rates in some schools districts and outbreaks of long-dormant diseases like measles and whooping cough.
Kennedy has credited the film Trace Amounts with helping to persuade lawmakers to halt a vaccination measure in Oregon. Advocates offered free Trace Amounts tickets to every California lawmaker, visiting offices in the State Capitol on Monday to drop them off. Three rows cordoned off for lawmakers sat empty on Wednesday evening, though some staff members attended.
The overwhelming scientific consensus supports vaccine use and dismisses any serious side effects. Multiple studies have rejected any link between the mercury-containing chemical thimerosal and autism. Nevertheless, vaccine manufacturers have removed thimerosal from nearly all childhood vaccines (some influenza vaccines are the exception) and a California bill further barred thimerosal content. In light of those facts, SB 277’s author called Kennedy’s continued activism disingenuous.
“I think it is dangerous that he is spreading misinformation about something that’s very important for public health,” Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, a pediatrician, said in an interview. “Autism rates have continued to rise even though we are not using thimerosal in vaccines for children,” he added. “We still haven’t figured out exactly what causes autism. We do know it’s not vaccines.”
The vaccine/autism connection is bogus. I have written several posts on the subject of autism; for example this one on the vaccine connection and this one on the rising number of diagnoses of autism and why this might be happening.
I think young people have become more isolated and prefer to immerse themselves in online interaction rather than engage in in-person intimacy and friendship. The definition of autism may have broadened to include kids behaving in this way, and that could account for the rising incidence.
Thanks for the research tip, Neo. I now see the options on DuckDuckGo.
Once again, Florida does it right. One case I know of is a mother in Florida who claims (falsely, I think) a religious exemption from vaccinating her son because she thinks he might become autistic. Extended family really worry about the boy, but there is little they can do. The risk is to him, not to vaccinated children around him. I have to support parental choice in a case like this, although I do not support “choice” when parents are choosing medical and surgical procedures of very questionable efficacy for sex changes. The first option, a vaccine exemption, declines a demonstrated safe and effective disease prevention method, whereas the second inflicts irreparable harm on the child.
My daughter, the PhD speech pathologist, points out that vaccines are often given at the same general age when problems like autism may emerge. Correlation is not causation.
“The risk is to him, not to vaccinated children around him.”
Not entirely. The vaccines don’t work on everyone. For example, I and all of my siblings had the MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) shot. But my sister later got measles anyway. The vaccine didn’t work in her case. But it works on a large enough percentage of the population that it effectively stops outbreaks, thus protecting people who can’t be successfully vaccinated.
Someone skipping out on the vaccines increases the risk for the “vaccine doesn’t work” people.
Couple of notes here:
Autism is terrifying. I used to spend a couple of hours a week minding a young man one of whose challenges was autism.
My sister has a friend with orthopedic issues from trying to control her autistic son.
An advocate named Escher has two. She wonders if the diagnoses are skewed by moving the bar of the spectrum. Anybody know? Now that we know what Asperger was up to in his spare time, is the Asperger diagnosis folded into the autism numbers? Does it have another name? Are the afflicted just…gone?
Anybody know?
Last summer at an interdenominational church service, I saw two families with two autistic kids each. And it wasn’t an autistic-specific service.
So picture me as a skeptical terrified parent:
I recall when we used to play around with mercury in the chem lab. Back in high school. Then, when I wasn’t looking, it became God’s worst curse. We were to run shrieking from the room at the mention of the stuff.
Some years ago, a Detroit high school bought new shoes for the student body because some mercury had been spilled on the floor of the science wing.
Used to be dire warnings of mercury in tuna fish.
And I’m supposed to shoot this stuff into my kid?
The pharma rep says it’s below toxic dose. He would.
I remember when peanuts didn’t run our lives. Now, they have such dangerous effects on a number of people that the rest of us have to pay attention. And it…just happened.
Sure, you may sneer at “peanut”, curling the nostril at the first syllable. But it kills people.
And it didn’t used to. Anybody know why?
So don’t tell a concerned parent that a Thing can’t possibly happen. Because there’s never been a Thing happen before. Right? But make sure to call the mom of your kid’s new playmate to check on such things.
And anybody who says, including doctors, that HCQ and ivermectin are useful therapeutics is a science denier. If they were, the EUA allowing the vaccines would be void. That would be too bad, right?
Now, instead of believing with certainty of a Galileo that the stuff doesn’t work, we have to do a one-eighty when the FDA says it does. But we must be certain of this, too, or be a science denier.
It was a good idea to be skeptical of SCIENCE when things didn’t look right. And that was before Covid caused SCIENCE to take a head first dive into the Port a Potty.
Irrespective of what I believe, I have sympathy for the skeptical, terrified parent.
I ask, why has the autism diagnosis exploded in frequency? It ain’t thimerosal, but there is a cause or causes.
fertcarden perhaps has it right (above).It may be a social media-induced illness.
CIcero. That would be on the mild end of the spectrum. A kid who’s kind of…spoiled when he pitches a fit when he doesn’t get what he wants. Might be one, might be the other.
It’s hard to say about kids these days. I have grand kids who are growing up the usual way; school, sports, social life, friends, part time job, church activities. Yes, some time on the phone but not a ton.
So I don’t know, am not in a position to know, how many kids are in the position described deeply enough to be induced to behave as on the mild end.
But one of the aspects is trusting, and trusting too much.
Back a few years in a civic activity, a parent said her third grade kid was ‘on the spectrum”. Kid thought I was her best friend forever. We could have gone off anywhere. If I had a spare avatar, it would be walking ten feet behind her with a big stick and I don’t think there’d be a lack of business.
Guy in our church has an autistic son, mature. Trusts anybody. To some bad results.
Is there something else going on? Homosexuality used to be called a mental illness. Now it’s not. Gender dysphoria is, if only socially, seen as some kind of cool thing with enormous financial benefits for those pushing it.
Does somebody stand to benefit from torquing the diagnostic standards one way or another? Never happen, right? Never happened before, right? Except when standards changed…see homosexuality.
Cicero; Richard Aubrey:
Did you see the link to the post I wrote about the rising autism statistics? If not, here is is again.
Well, you make the diagnostic criteria fuzzier, the number of cases you define as such increases.
As the Pitch Meeting Guy might say:
Being on the Spectrum is tight!
I had a San Francisco church friend whose kid was autistic. Friend wrote a book on Indigo Children — a New Age belief that the problem autistic kids have is that they are more highly evolved spiritually.
neo
That’s a good link on the stats in question. Problem is…do we really know which is which? Yes, there are more people looking for it and so they’ll find more of it. But…does that answer the entire change?
As I say, we have the lowly peanut looking over our shoulder. It is not a case of more people looking for anaphylactic shock after PB&J than there used to be. So…are we guaranteed that is the issue with autism?
And the only place mercury is okay is in our kids’ vaccinations….
Making a solid scientific case takes a lot of answers. Without answers you have questions. Unanswered questions. It would be odd if people were not skeptical of conclusions drawn from unanswered questions. Or questions with more than one answer.
And then there’s probability theory. Among other things, random doesn’t necessarily mean evenly spread out. You aren’t guaranteed five and five when flipping a coin ten times. You aren’t even guaranteed not getting ten and zero. So the probability of me seeing two families each with two afflicted kids one summer morning is pretty low. But it did happen and reflecting on chi square and confidence intervals does not reduce the impact.
I’m trying to make the case for the skeptical parent. Other than the pharma rep’s assurance that the mercury is below toxic dose levels, what certainty is there? When I’m supposed to be watching my tuna fish consumption. (I don’t think that’s a thing any longer but it was and, presumably for a good reason. Never be a scam or major medical and scientific screw up, right? Good reason? Right?)
There’s a difference between “isn’t shown to….” and “is shown not to…”
Generally statistically, vaccines for the childhood diseases work well, yield a valuable group benefit and don’t cause harm.
But in my former legislator capacity, I dealt with the local Kennedy people, and the Pharma people, and parents are not making it up that they had a seemingly normal child for a year or two or five or eight whose behavior radically changed after a vaccination.
where I came down is this.
In tail ends of statistical distributions, you will have outliers, and absent statistically studying the outliers, you can’t rule out the possibility that these kids were harmed by something associated with a vaccination process. Precisely because it doesn’t show up in some statistical models as anything but randomness, you can’t rule out the possibility that there was some kind of perfect storm happening within an individual, likely due to some corresponding random immunocompromised event (eg an unknown infection at the time of vaccination, a person with a sensitive immune system which goes out of whack when the vaccine booster material-not necessarily thimerosal-sends the immune system haywire). That is my thought on peanut allergies as well. There is some weird thing where the kid gets an exposure at the wrong time and immune system goes haywire – and maybe it isn’t the peanut itself but some protein in it resulting from a gmo modification, or a pesticide residue, or who knows? So we don’t ban peanuts but then maybe cover the cost of that kids epipens. Ditto on bees, some people get stung and no big deal, others go into anaphylactic shock. Do we really know how to differentiate the two?
Random side effects can and do happen in a small percent of the population, for just about any drug. One example is a family member of mine who was given a common blood thinner that led to the side effect of a massive dumping of blood in the urine, which isn’t a known side effect, but when the drug stopped, in 24 hours the bleeding stopped. Does that individual to him side effect show up in the label? No. But it was a real adverse event (and proven when a stupid resident added it back in to therapy and same side effect started again). Ditto on statins and liver damage, etc. which only has started to be noticed after decades of use.
So we can’t assume these random things happen for every other drug, but not vaccines. Even so, that also doesn’t change that these numbers are still a small percent of the population. On the whole childhood vaccines prevent far more harm vs what they potentially may cause on an individual outlier basis. As a general rule yes parents vaccinate your kids against polio, measles etc.
But then you have for example the HPV vaccine. Merck unsurprisingly wanted legislation to mandate it as a condition of attending school, because if that became state law, Merck gets lots of money. Planned parenthood was also on board because they want as many different things as possible that they can do to add to their stats of clinical services provided to reduce their overall abortion stats percentages. And get Medicaid funding.
One of the problems with the HPV vaccine is that , like COVID, for most people the body can naturally clear the infection without a vaccine and without experiencing cervical cancer. So they have booster ingredients to juice up the immune response to make the vaccine look like it is actually doing something at a general population statistical level. Okay. But Pharma has never done a head to head double blinded trial between HPV vaccine and booster-ingredients as placebo. The placebo has taken those materials out.
That creates a single-variable problem. Some of the allegations re HPV vax triggering infertility have been due to the mechanism of operation of the booster ingredients themselves. Has that study been done to rule that possibly out? Nope. If what the boosters in the vaccine do is happen to also trigger a haywire response of the immune system based on something else existing in the body, will a clinical trial really pick that outlier up? Not likely.
So for a non-contagious disease can we justify using brute force govt mandates to require this as a condition of attending school? Nope. Well, nope for me, anyone who got big dollars from Planned parenthood or Pharma was usually on board with it, as were the believe all experts savior types.
Every medical decision is ultimately personal. We still don’t know a lot about how things work. A bit more humility from the medical profession (and don’t get me started on mandated treatment guidelines that force a crude box on individuals) would be nice. Because the outliers can and do exist, and are really hard to study.
Former legislator:
Thanks for that well-considered comment.
I could use a bit more “humility from the medical community” myself.
I have both personal experience and research on autism. I first heard about Aspergers Syndrome when I was 55, and it was like the lights coming on for many things in my life, both growing up and as an adult. Now, nearly 20 years later, my 10 grandchildren are all diagnosed with autism or something related to it. Why do we have so many? From what we have been able to find out, it seems we have been marrying people on the spectrum for at least 3 generations. It might go back even farther, but we don’t know enough about the behavior of the earlier family members. (For instance, my great-grandparents died before I was born.)
Unlike the situation 50 years ago, it is now known that autism is primarily genetic–you get it from your parents. Some years ago, the CDC concluded it was 70-80% genetic. I have heard of, but never found, an Italian study that came up at 95% genetic.
The autism “epidemic” is mostly an improvement in identifying it in children. And that has happened mainly in the last 20 years. Nobody was even trying to find us when I was growing up. How many are there of us? Nobody really knows; the CDC’s current estimate is that we are 2-3% of the US population; the wild-and-woolly guess is that we are 15% of the population. My own hunch is between, but closer to the upper level than the lower.
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