As I dealt with the odd decision American voters have made to entrust the American experiment to Donald Trump once again, I found myself with some unlikely companions. First, there is Karl, the most serious of the Marx Brothers. I doubt Marxist historians will appreciate my selective and unenlightened theft of just a few words from his “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” but I found these especially relevant as we prepare to survive the second coming of President Donald Trump.
Marx writes: “Hegel says somewhere that great historic facts and personages recur twice. He forgot to add: ‘Once as tragedy, and again as farce.’” Then, of France and the tumultuous political changes that accompanied their populist uprisings, he wrote: “There remains to be explained how a nation of thirty-six millions can be surprised by three swindlers, and taken to prison without resistance.”
We have far more people today than the France of 1848, and we won’t really know how many swindlers we will be dealing with until Donald finishes picking his cabinet. Which brought me to Stephen Sondheim, his “A Little Night Music,” and this verse in particular from “Send in the Clowns”:
Don’t you love farce?
My fault, I fear
I thought that you’d want what I want
Sorry, my dear
But where are the clowns?
Quick, send in the clowns
Don’t bothеr, they’re herе.
And, of course, I have always loved Judy Collins’ heartbreaking version of “Send in the Clowns.”
The dilemma for someone like me, used to research and critical analysis, is the stark reality that we have entered the newly energized senseless world of Trump 2.0. He no longer has any desire—let alone need—to pretend. Last time he picked the former head of Exxon who had experience running a complicated business, and added distinguished men of the military, generals who actually fought our wars. This time around you can forget the old and traditional way of picking those with experience to staff the government. Men and women who could actually make a decent impression with those in the Senate who fervently held dear to the notion that they were in charge of the “advise and consent” function and wielded that power and privilege with pride.
Trump, in a short decade, a blink of the eye in our history, has cowed and owned the two other branches of government. His MAGA court has accelerated the demise of what the ultra-right dismissively refers to as the Deep or Administrative State—what some of us still regard as the very branches of government intended to serve us. And members of Congress seemed determined to fight amongst themselves to see who would most thoroughly prostrate themselves in the new MAGA limbo, asses pressed to the sand. All the while dispensing with any remaining shred of dignity to serve their President Without Ethics. My bet is on Lindsay Graham in the Senate and Mike Johnson in the House.
How many at The New York Times and The Washington Post would love to rage and scream and proclaim: Trump and his sycophants are all bat shit crazy, the narcissists and serial adulterers, the posers and grifters pretending they have even the slightest idea about efficient governing? But these journalists continue to soldier on—I imagine with the help of valium or extra sessions with their therapists. Here is “Under the Chandelier at Mar-a-Lago, Trump Makes Picks at Breakneck Speed,” by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman:
President-elect Donald J. Trump chose his attorney general almost on a whim, in the sky between Washington and Palm Beach, Fla. He scoffed at a candidate for the Department of Homeland Security, then abruptly changed his mind. His defense secretary pick was a snap judgment during a slide presentation at Mar-a-Lago. Emboldened, confident in his instincts and more contemptuous than ever of Washington expertise, Mr. Trump is staffing the most important roles in his government at breakneck speed. Advisers have been stunned at how fast he is ticking through his choices, filling the government’s most important positions roughly a month sooner than he did in 2016. Much of the action has taken place under the chandelier in the tearoom at Mar-a-Lago, where Mr. Trump surveys his potential Cabinet nominees on giant video screens.
Since Karl Marx reminded us about the farcical nature of our politics, I guess it is my task to do the best I can to fully explore what awaits us. Unfortunately, there are too many clowns and not enough space, so it is later for Matt Gaetz. It is clown by clown. Onto a man who will probably endanger the public health and safety of millions of us.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Susanne Craig of The New York Times offer “Kennedy’s Views Mix Mistrust of Business With Unfounded Health Claims”:
Seven years after Americans celebrated the licensing of Jonas Salk’s Cape Cod Times vaccine, President John F. Kennedy called on Congress to finance a nationwide vaccination program to stamp out what he called the ‘ancient enemies of our children’: infectious disease. Now Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is the nation’s chief critic of vaccines — a public health intervention that has saved millions of lives — and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to become the next secretary of health and human services. Mr. Kennedy calls himself a vaccine safety activist. The press calls him a vaccine skeptic. His detractors call him an anti-vaxxer and a conspiracy theorist.
Whatever one calls him, Mr. Kennedy is a polarizing choice whose views on certain public health matters beyond vaccination are far outside the mainstream. He opposes fluoride in water. He favors raw milk, which the Food and Drug Administration deems risky. And he has promoted unproven therapies like hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19. His own relatives called his presidential bid ‘dangerous for our country.’
Let’s hear it for “his own relatives” who, without an editor or publisher to answer to, put it this way:
Perilous indeed. I have previously written about Donald Trump’s pick to head Health and Human Services in “THE OTHER SIDE: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. v. Peter Hotez,” about his penchant for misstating scientific facts and attacking those in and out of our government who try to protect us against disease, especially infectious diseases like SARS and COVID. More recently, The Washington Post published “10 RFK Jr. conspiracy theories and false claims.” Here are a few of them:
Kennedy, who founded a prominent anti-vaccine group, has repeatedly linked the childhood vaccine schedule to autism — a claim that has been debunked by scientists. Kennedy has falsely blamed autism on thimerosal, a compound safely used as a preservative in vaccines, and decried the number of shots on the childhood vaccination schedule. ‘I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,’ he said last summer in an interview with Fox News host Jesse Watters …
A 2004 report by the Institute of Medicine concluded there is no link between autism and vaccination. Dozens of studies published in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals have also disproved the notion that the MMR vaccine causes autism. [Director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, Peter] Hotez and many other public health experts say they worry that Kennedy, as health secretary, will do irreparable harm to already declining confidence in vaccines. Hotez pointed to the fivefold rise in pertussis, or whooping cough, in the past year; the 16 measles outbreaks reported by the CDC so far this year, compared with four in 2023; and the detection of polio in New York in 2022. ‘So our baseline is a fragile vaccine ecosystem that could be on the brink of collapse,’ Hotez said. ‘I worry that now with this appointment, that could actually happen.’
The Post continues:
Kennedy falsely called the coronavirus vaccine the ‘deadliest vaccine ever made’ – At a 2021 state House hearing on a Louisiana Department of Health proposal to require schoolchildren to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, Kennedy proclaimed the vaccine to be the ‘deadliest vaccine ever made.’ Health officials say the coronavirus vaccines are safe and effective, saving millions of lives. At the time, Louisiana State Health Officer Joseph Kanter condemned Kennedy’s remarks as ‘the intentional spread of health disinformation.’ …
Kennedy argues government employees have an interest in ‘mass poisoning’ the American public – ‘The agency, the USDA, the FDA have been captured by the industries they’re supposed to regulate, and they all have an interest in subsidies and mass poisoning the American public,’ Kennedy told Fox News in August.
[Emphasis added.]
There are already many Americans who take great comfort in the anecdotal tales of magical cures and have no patience for the very complicated, sometimes oh-so-long process of trial and error, the scientific method. I had a dear friend with cancer who sadly turned to several alternative healers without rigorous medical training and suffered unnecessarily because of it. The problem is that folks like Robert F. Kennedy, convinced from the get-go that they are the smartest ones in the room, so often cut corners, prefer stories of success to sometimes painful failure. But it is the scientists, the epidemiologists, the men and women in their labs who have laboriously spent years to find solutions to the deadly diseases that crippled us in the past. And RFK Jr., so taken with himself, is chomping on the bit to punish those who have actually saved lives, not cost them like he has:
It is in no way a rhetorical statement to suggest that these men and women of science have saved millions of lives with vaccines. And it is reprehensible that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in a past life helped to clean America’s polluted waterways, now so easily slanders those who work so hard to eradicate diseases that end the lives of children everywhere. Here are graphs from Our World in Data that illustrate this reality. Let me start with polio, a disease that haunted my childhood, which, thanks to Dr. Jonas Salk, was pretty much eradicated in my lifetime:
And here are the cases of measles before and after the development of the vaccine:
Our World in Data has also prepared a graph showing the cases of smallpox throughout the world:
The one and only time I truly appreciated the clowns was at Madison Square Garden when the Ringling Brothers clown car pulled up. I worried too much about the high-wire acts and saw the grief and anguish in the eyes of the elephants, but I was delighted by extraordinary numbers of clowns who had magically managed to cram themselves into that little car.
Sadly, it is not enough to point out the significant bias that RFK Jr. has displayed with disastrous consequences about vaccines and alternative treatments like ivermectin. So let me remind you of several instances that suggest his apparent lack of judgment makes him less than ideal for the task. When it comes to farce, we might as well start with the story he told Roseanne Barr:
It shows him sitting at a kitchen table, telling an incredulous-looking Roseanne Barr (yes, the canceled comedian) about how the dead bear ended up in his van upstate and, ultimately, on top of a bicycle beneath a bush in New York City’s largest urban park.
Kennedy, an animal lover and former environmental lawyer, says he was driving upstate early one morning to take a group of people falconing in the Hudson Valley when a driver in front of him fatally hit a bear cub. ‘So I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van, because I was gonna skin the bear,’ he explains matter-of-factly. ‘It was in very good condition and I was gonna put the meat in my refrigerator.’ Kennedy added that it is legal in New York State to get a bear tag to take home a roadkill bear. Such a tag must be written up by a law enforcement officer. The bear never made it back to his Westchester home, however.
Kennedy says he got waylaid by a busy day of falconry, and then had to rush back to New York City for a dinner at Peter Luger Steak House, which ran late. ‘I had to go to the airport, and the bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in the car because that would have been bad,’ Kennedy continues. Then, as he put it, ‘the little bit of the redneck in me’ had an idea. Kennedy just happened to have an old bike in his car, which he said someone had asked him to get rid of. He recalled that the city ‘had just put in the bike lanes’ after a number of serious accidents, and decided to stage the bear in Central Park as if it had been hit by a bike. ‘I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea,’ Kennedy said. ‘So we went and did that and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it, or something.’
The six-month-old, 44-pound cub made national news after a dog walker stumbled upon it that fateful October morning, in a wide-open part of the park right near the path where thousands of people run and bike each day. Weirdly enough, one of the New York Times reporters who covered the mystery was Caroline Kennedy’s daughter Tatiana Schlossberg, RJK Jr.’s first cousin once removed. She told the paper this weekend that ‘like law enforcement, I had no idea who was responsible for this when I wrote the story.’
Onto The New York Times’ combined account of RFK Jr.’s brain worm and often questionable pursuit of wealth. Susanne Craig reports:
The presidential candidate has faced previously undisclosed health issues, including a parasite that he said ate part of his brain. In 2010, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was experiencing memory loss and mental fogginess so severe that a friend grew concerned he might have a brain tumor. Mr. Kennedy said he consulted several of the country’s top neurologists, many of whom had either treated or spoken to his uncle, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, before his death the previous year of brain cancer.
Several doctors noticed a dark spot on the younger Mr. Kennedy’s brain scans and concluded that he had a tumor, he said in a 2012 deposition reviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Kennedy was immediately scheduled for a procedure at Duke University Medical Center by the same surgeon who had operated on his uncle, he said. While packing for the trip, he said, he received a call from a doctor at New York-Presbyterian Hospital who had a different opinion: Mr. Kennedy, he believed, had a dead parasite in his head. The doctor believed that the abnormality seen on his scans ‘was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,’ Mr. Kennedy said in the deposition …
He has gone to lengths to appear hale, skiing with a professional snowboarder and with an Olympic gold medalist who called him a ‘ripper’ as they raced down the mountain. A camera crew was at his side while he lifted weights, shirtless, at an outdoor gym in Venice Beach.
Still, over the years, he has faced serious health issues, some previously undisclosed, including the apparent parasite.
For decades, Mr. Kennedy suffered from atrial fibrillation, a common heartbeat abnormality that increases the risk of stroke or heart failure. He has been hospitalized at least four times for episodes, although in an interview with The Times this winter, he said he had not had an incident in more than a decade and believed the condition had disappeared. About the same time he learned of the parasite, he said, he was also diagnosed with mercury poisoning, most likely from ingesting too much fish containing the dangerous heavy metal, which can cause serious neurological issues.
‘I have cognitive problems, clearly,’ he said in the 2012 deposition. ‘I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.’ In the interview with The Times, he said he had recovered from the memory loss and fogginess and had no aftereffects from the parasite, which he said had not required treatment. Asked last week if any of Mr. Kennedy’s health issues could compromise his fitness for the presidency, Stefanie Spear, a spokeswoman for the Kennedy campaign, told The Times, ‘That is a hilarious suggestion, given the competition.’ The campaign declined to provide his medical records to The Times.
Yes, a hilarious suggestion. Except to those of us who have seen his interviews. The Times continues:
Mr. Kennedy has spoken publicly about one other major health condition — spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological disorder that causes his vocal cords to squeeze too close together and explains his hoarse, sometimes strained voice. He first noticed it when he was 42 years old, he said in the deposition. Mr. Kennedy for years made a significant amount of money giving speeches, and that business fell off as the condition worsened, he said. He told an interviewer last year that he had recently undergone a procedure available in Japan to implant titanium between his vocal cords to keep them from involuntarily constricting.
And so, we have got brain worms and a roadkill bear cup, but let’s not forget the whale head. Kennedy thought it a good idea to take a chain saw to a dead whale that came ashore on the Cape. As The New York Times recounts:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Sawed the Head Off a Whale and Drove It Home, Daughter Says – Three decades later, an environmental organization is calling for an investigation. It is a violation of longstanding federal law to collect parts from the carcass of a protected marine animal if there are still ‘soft tissues’ attached.
It becomes political intrigue if the collector was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the severed head of a possibly protected marine mammal streamed ‘whale juice’ down the side of the family minivan three decades ago. On Monday, the political arm of the Center for Biological Diversity, a progressive environmental organization, called on federal authorities to investigate an episode, recounted by Mr. Kennedy’s daughter in a 2012 magazine article, in which she said Mr. Kennedy chain-sawed the head off a dead whale on a beach in Hyannis Port, Mass., bungee-corded it to their vehicle’s roof, and drove it five hours to the family home in Mount Kisco, N.Y.
‘It was the rankest thing on the planet,’ Kick Kennedy, then 24, told Town & Country in the article, which described Mr. Kennedy as someone who likes to study animal skulls and skeletons … Without confirming or denying he took the severed whale head, Kennedy said the deadline to bring charges passed long ago. He implied without evidence that the investigation was tied to his endorsement of Trump. Kennedy repeatedly declined to elaborate on the investigation when questioned by reporters after his appearance, saying the media only wants to talk to him about ‘gossipy nonsense. I’m not interested in feeding that feature of the mainstream media,’ Kennedy said.
But have no fear. As the Cape Cod Times reported on October 26, 2024:
A federal investigation into claims that former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. removed the head of a whale that had washed ashore at Hyannisport’s Squaw Island 30 years ago and transported it to his Mount Kisco, New York home has been dropped, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration …
NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement ‘takes all reports of alleged violations seriously,’ Silverstein said in an email, noting that the agency received the letter on Aug. 26 ‘reporting a possible violation of a federal marine resource law regarding Robert F. Kennedy’s reported collection of a whale skull. Following standard procedure, the office initiated an investigation into the matter. The office determined the allegation to be unfounded and closed its investigation on Wednesday, Oct. 16,’ she said.
Many Americans have agreed with Kennedy’s criticism of the pharmaceutical industry. And yes, the industry’s greed is almost unrivaled in the corporate world. And Kennedy has rightfully and repeatedly questioned whether scientists who often rely on grants and awards can retain their independence.
Here is what I wrote previously about the issue:
So not surprisingly in this very complicated story, questions were raised in 2008 by CBS News:
‘They’re some of the most trusted voices in the defense of vaccine safety: the American Academy of Pediatrics, Every Child By Two, and pediatrician Dr. Paul Offit … CBS News has found these three have something more in common – strong financial ties to the industry whose products they promote and defend. The vaccine industry gives millions to the Academy of Pediatrics for conferences, grants, medical education classes and even helped build their headquarters. The totals are kept secret, but public documents reveal bits and pieces.
‘A $342,000 payment from Wyeth, maker of the pneumococcal vaccine – which makes $2 billion a year in sales. A $433,000 contribution from Merck, the same year the academy endorsed Merck’s HPV vaccine – which made $1.5 billion a year in sales. Another top donor: Sanofi Aventis, maker of 17 vaccines and a new five-in-one combo shot just added to the childhood vaccine schedule last month.
‘Every Child By Two, a group that promotes early immunization for all children, admits the group takes money from the vaccine industry, too – but wouldn’t tell us how much. A spokesman told CBS News: ‘There are simply no conflicts to be unearthed.’ But guess who’s listed as the group’s treasurers? Officials from Wyeth and a paid advisor to big pharmaceutical clients.
‘Then there’s Paul Offit, perhaps the most widely-quoted defender of vaccine safety … Offit was not willing to be interviewed on this subject but like others in this CBS News investigation, he has strong industry ties. In fact, he’s a vaccine industry insider. Offit holds a $1.5 million dollar research chair at Children’s Hospital, funded by Merck. He holds the patent on an anti-diarrhea vaccine he developed with Merck, Rotateq, which has prevented thousands of hospitalizations. And future royalties for the vaccine were just sold for $182 million cash. Dr. Offit’s share of vaccine profits? Unknown.’
Then I wrote:
[Y]ou’ll have to decide for yourself whether making a profit, even what you regard as an obscene profit cancels out any potential good of creating a vaccine in America. A lifelong fan of basketball I’ve somehow gotten used to NBA players making $40 million dollars a year to dribble, pass and dunk. And having been poor my entire life, I find it slightly galling that in this case, it’s multimillionaires Joe Rogan and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. throwing their stones of those who are paid to work in government or academia or medical centers to help and cure the sick. Kennedy Jr. makes a small fortune fighting vaccines.
The New York Times writes that RFK Jr. “reported an income of $7.8 million in the year.” Kennedy Jr. pays himself more than half a million dollars a year—though he is taking a break as he runs for president—as the chairman of the board and chief legal counsel of the Children’s Health Defense, also known as the World Mercury Project, an organization he created. And he makes a fortune as an attorney and, as the Times puts it, “consulting work for a personal injury law firm known for litigation against pharmaceutical companies.” This year, according to his candidate finance form, he made over $5 million from just one of several firms he is involved with, Kennedy & Madonna, L.L.P.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and spoke extensively about vaccines and their ties to childhood disease. In the process, he was very critical of vaccine developers like Dr. Offit, who has vigorously disputed Kennedy’s account of their interactions. For the record, here is some of what Offit said during a January 7, 2011, interview by National Public Radio:
Soon after our conversation, on July 14, 2005, RFK Jr. published an article in Rolling Stone … titled ‘Deadly Immunity.’ Kennedy had sandbagged me. According to the article, I was part of a group of government agents and industry insiders that had ‘colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public.’ The article was full of misstatements. RFK Jr. claimed that the amount of ethylmercury in vaccines was 187 times greater than the recommended limit, when it was only 1.4 times greater. He claimed that thimerosal in vaccines had caused autism, when several studies had shown that it hadn’t. Kennedy wrote that I had defended mercury in vaccines because the rotavirus vaccine on which I was a co-inventor was ‘laced with thimerosal.’ But the rotavirus vaccine, which was licensed one year later, never contained a preservative …
RFK Jr.’s most recent rant against me was delivered in a 3-hour episode on The Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular podcast in the world. Kennedy recounted his conversation with me. He told Rogan that to help him interpret studies evaluating the safety of mercury in vaccines, he had first called senior officials at the National Institutes of Health and the National Academy of Sciences. ‘And they kept saying to me I can’t answer that detailed question,’ said Kennedy. ‘You need to talk to Paul Offit. Paul Offit made a $186 million deal with Merck. Odd to me that government regulators said that you should talk to someone in the industry.’
First, I have never worked for a pharmaceutical company. At the time of the interview, our rotavirus vaccine wasn’t a licensed product. Second, although Fred Clark, Stanley Plotkin, and I are co-inventors and co-patent holders of the rotavirus vaccine, we are the intellectual property of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Wistar Institute. For all practical purposes, those institutions owned the patent, which they later sold to asset acquisition companies. I didn’t make a deal with anybody. And companies don’t pay $186 million for a product that isn’t a product yet. RFK Jr.’s statement about my $186 million dollar deal with Merck was a complete and utter lie. And it’s resulted in hate mail, physical altercations with anti-vaccine activists, and three death threats. One caller threatened my children. By falsely labelling me as someone willing to line my pockets at the expense of children’s health, RFK Jr. put both me and my family at risk.
[Emphasis added.]
Offit writes:
RFK Jr. wasn’t finished: ‘It was weird to me that the top regulators in the country were telling me to go talk to an industry insider because we don’t understand the science. I talked to him, and I caught him in a lie. And both of us knew that he was lying.’ ‘What was the lie?’ asked Rogan. ‘I asked him why is it that the CDC and every state regulator recommends that pregnant women do not eat tuna fish to avoid the mercury but that the CDC is recommending mercury containing flu shots with huge boluses of mercury … And he said, ‘Well, Bobby, there are two kinds of mercury. There’s the good mercury and the bad mercury.’ [But] there is no such thing as the good mercury. I know a lot about mercury… Mercury was really an adjuvant that stimulates the immune system. Worse, mercury doesn’t kill bacteria like streptococcus or staph.
Again, RFK Jr. was wrong. First, thimerosal isn’t an adjuvant, it’s a preservative. Second, thimerosal is bacteriostatic not bactericidal. It doesn’t kill bacteria; it prevents bacteria from growing. Finally, mercury is part of the earth’s crust, where it exists harmlessly in an inorganic state. However, due to rock erosion and volcanos, mercury is released onto the earth’s surface where it is picked up by bacteria and converted to an organic form: methylmercury. Unlike inorganic mercury, methylmercury can cross cell membranes and do harm. Indeed, methylmercury poisonings caused by industrial accidents in Japan and Iraq caused neurological damage in both adults and unborn children. But because mercury is in the earth’s crust, everyone has mercury in their bodies at levels well below those that are harmful. In the words of Paracelsus, a 16th century physician, ‘The dose makes the poison.’
Ethylmercury (thimerosal), however, is not methylmercury. While methylmercury has a half-life in the bloodstream of about 70 days, ethylmercury has a half-life of seven days. So, it’s much less likely to accumulate and do harm. During the Rogan interview, RFK Jr. explained how he first came to believe that thimerosal was harmful. ‘In 2003, a CDC researcher named Pichichero did a study where he gave tuna sandwiches that were mercury-contaminated to children and then measured their blood …Then he injected the children with mercury from a vaccine and the mercury disappeared in a week. But where did it go?’ Kennedy then referred to a study by Thomas Burbacher, who found that after injecting infant monkeys with thimerosal, mercury was detected in the brain where, according to RFK Jr. it ‘caused severe inflammation.’ ‘And I told Offit about that study, and he was quiet and said there was a mosaic of other studies. I asked him to send them to me. But he never did and that’s the last I heard from him.’
[Emphasis added.]
Offit continues:
Once again, RFK Jr. had misrepresented the facts … RFK Jr. has said that he has taped our conversation. Great. Release the tape. Let’s hear what really happened. Second, Michael Pichichero studied infants as young as two months of age; he never fed them tuna fish sandwiches. Third, Pichichero concluded, ‘Administration of vaccines containing thimerosal does not seem to raise blood concentrations of mercury above safe values in infants.’ Finally, it was not surprising that Thomas Burbacher found trace quantities of ethylmercury in the brain of infant monkeys injected with thimerosal, which can cross cell membranes. But RFK Jr. lied when he said that the mercury had caused ‘severe inflammation.’ Burbacher didn’t report any evidence of inflammation, writing, ‘no serious medical complications were observed in any of the monkeys.’
[Emphasis added.]
Since I had heard this story from both Kennedy then from Paul Offit, I went and checked out the studies. While quickly confronting my limited understanding of biology, chemistry, medicine, and toxicology, I did make it through, and you can read for yourself what Pichichero and his team actually wrote in their November 2002 Lancet study, “Mercury concentrations and metabolism in infants receiving vaccines containing thimerosal: a descriptive study.”
And you can find the Burbacher study, “Comparison of Blood and Brain Mercury Levels in Infant Monkeys Exposed to Methylmercury or Vaccines Containing Thimerosal,” here.
Offit makes an important point about the differences between the forms of mercury and the important issue of dose. Burbacher and his team used macaques monkeys who were exposed to the different forms of mercury, methyl mercury introduced via feeding tubes, or ethyl mercury via injection in a vaccine containing thimerosal. Burbacher explains:
Public perception of the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccines has a direct impact on immunization rates (Biroscak et al. 2003; Thomas et al. 2004). The current debate linking the use of thimerosal in vaccines to autism and other developmental disorders [Institute of Medicine (IOM) 2001, 2004] has led many families to question whether the potential risks associated with early childhood immunizations may outweigh the benefits (Blaxill et al.2004; SafeMinds 2005).
Thimerosal is an effective preservative that has been used in the manufacturing of vaccines since the 1930s. Thimerosal consists of 49.6% mercury by weight and breaks down in the body to ethyl-mercury and thiosalicylate (Tan and Parkin 2000). Recent reports have indicated that some infants can receive ethylmercury (in the form of thimerosal) at or above the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) guidelines for methylmercury exposure (U.S. EPA 2005), depending on the exact vaccinations …
Recent publications have proposed a direct link between the use of thimerosal-containing vaccines and the significant rise in the number of children being diagnosed with autism, a serious and prevalent developmental disorder (for review, see IOM 2001). Results from an initial IOM review of the safety of vaccines found that there was not sufficient evidence to render an opinion on the relationship between ethylmercury exposure and developmental disorders in children (IOM 2001). The IOM review did, however, note the possibility of such a relationship and recommended further studies be conducted …
[Emphasis added.]
Contrary to Kennedy’s claim that Burbacher found “it’s gone to the brain,” Burbacher actually “found no serious medical complications were observed in any of the monkeys.” And because ethyl mercury levels found in the environment don’t adequately or accurately translate to levels of thimerosal delivered methyl mercury, Burbacher responsibly acknowledged more research was needed because this “information is critical if we are to respond to public concerns regarding the safety of childhood immunizations.”
I have included this technical information because Kennedy and others have relentlessly made the case against vaccination. It does a grave disservice to concerned parents and the community at large to misstate often complex scientific studies.
From his earliest days, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a troubled relationship with the truth. There are serious consequences when lies replace truth. On October 18, 2023, AP reporters Michelle R. Smith and Ali Swenson wrote “RFK Jr. spent years stoking fear and mistrust of vaccines. These people were hurt by his work”:
When 12-year-old Braden Fahey collapsed during football practice and died, it was just the beginning of his parents’ nightmare.
Deep in their grief a few months later, Gina and Padrig Fahey received news that shocked them to their core: A favorite photo of their beloved son was plastered on the cover of a book that falsely argues COVID-19 vaccines caused a spike of sudden deaths among healthy young people.
The book, called ‘Cause Unknown,’ was co-published by an anti-vaccine group led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President John F. Kennedy’s nephew, who is now running for president. Kennedy wrote the foreword and promoted the book, tweeting that it details data showing ‘COVID shots are a crime against humanity.’ The Faheys couldn’t understand how Braden’s face appeared on the book’s cover, or why his name appeared inside it.
Smith and Swenson continue:
Braden never received the vaccine. His death in August 2022 was due to a malformed blood vessel in his brain. No one ever contacted them to ask about their son’s death, or for permission to use the photo. No one asked to confirm the date of his death — which the book misdated by a year. When the Faheys and residents of their town in California tried to contact the publisher and author to get Braden and his picture taken out of the book, no one responded.
Joe Hagan of Vanity Fair writes:
Long before he entered the 2024 race with a wagon train of conspiracy theories, the wider Kennedy family was intimately familiar with RFK Jr.’s problematic personality — the outsize confidence masquerading as expertise, the ‘savior complex’ (as one family member called it) that drives him to take up quixotic causes and cast himself as a lone hero against established powers, and, above all, as one old friend calls it, his ‘pathological need for attention.’ …
The portrait family members paint of Bobby is of a man of exceptional charm, wit, brains, and generosity who has championed important environmental causes, but whose worst traits — an unnerving ease with blending fact and fiction; a powerful ability to deny the collateral damage of his own destructive actions — have engulfed his better angels. The source of these pathologies, they observe, are found in his long and troubling biography, a life story marked by personal trauma and addiction to drugs, sex, and, perhaps most perniciously of all, public adulation.
‘You can’t reason with addiction,’ says Stephen Kennedy Smith, a cousin of Kennedy’s whose father ran the elder Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. ‘And what we know about addiction is it leads to bad judgment—extremely bad judgment.’
I suspect there is another connection that binds Trump and Kennedy together. There is their mutual prolonged history of cheating on their spouses, an almost pathological need to seduce or, worse, to assault a variety of women. As the next pandemic rages, they can join Matt Gaetz while sharing their deluded notions of seduction. Many regard Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s serial sexual encounters as a cause for his second wife, Mary Richardson’s deepening depression and eventual suicide.
Hagan writes:
After her death a ‘sex diary’ from 2001 that Kennedy kept leaked to the New York Post. According to reporter Isabel Vincent, the back page listed the names of two dozen women Kennedy had been involved with, including a scorecard of how far he got with each woman. Kennedy reportedly described himself as plagued by ‘my lust demons’ …
Theories about Kennedy’s reckless behaviors abound. Long before it was reported, members of the family knew about the brain worm, which in court testimonies Kennedy conjectured he’d picked up from food he ate in South Asia. He said the tapeworm consumed a portion of his brain and led to protracted ‘brain fog.’ But more often his family points to Kennedy’s 14 years as a heroin user, which began when Kennedy was 15 and didn’t end until he was 29 … At Harvard, in the mid-1970s, Kennedy was regularly injecting speedballs, a mixture of heroin and cocaine … Addiction shadowed RFK Jr. …
I want to end with Hagan’s account of Kennedy’s involvement in Samoa and his great distrust of the extraordinarily successful MMR vaccine, the vaccine that combined the measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella (chickenpox) antigens:
In 2018 Kennedy involved himself in a largely forgotten vaccine controversy in Samoa. That year, two children died after receiving the MMR vaccine, sparking a furor in the island nation. Though it was later revealed that two nurses made a critical error administering the vaccines, accidentally introducing expired muscle relaxants into the formula, Kennedy’s nonprofit took to social media to hype the deaths as evidence of vaccine dangers.
Under public pressure, the Samoan prime minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi halted MMR vaccines nationwide. In June of 2019, Kennedy and Hines flew to Samoa, lending celebrity wattage to local anti-vaccine advocates, giving press interviews, and taking a private meeting with the PM.
Over the ensuing months, Samoa was hit by the largest measles outbreak in its history, infecting 5,707 citizens and killing 83 people, most of them children. The outbreak was so lethal, the prime minister declared a state of emergency and ordered mandatory vaccinations, eventually curtailing the spread. Later one of Kennedy’s biggest critics, a pediatrician and member of the FDA’s advisory committee on vaccines, Paul Offit, told PBS that ‘Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had everything to do with that. And that shows you how disinformation can kill.’
The year after the Samoa episode, the COVID pandemic began, ultimately killing millions of people — but it was a stroke of political and financial fortune for Kennedy, who found a ripe audience for his anti-vaccine claims, tapping into a newly fertile online world of misinformation, conspiracy, and distrust of pharmaceutical companies on podcasts and social media. During the next three years, Kennedy would publish a half dozen books on the dangers of vaccines, costar in a documentary with Andrew Wakefield (Vaxxed II: The People’s Truth), and launch a full-scale assault on Anthony Fauci, disseminating misinformation to an anti-vaccine movement that politicized health measures meant to protect the public from COVID, which led to untold numbers of unvaccinated people dying unnecessarily.
Consequently, money poured into the tax-exempt Children’s Health Defense, doubling revenue in 2020 to $6.8 million, and increasing Kennedy’s annual salary to $510,515 in 2022 from $40,200 in 2016. Kennedy’s Twitter feed, and that of Children’s Health Defense, grew to hundreds of thousands of followers.
Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have each shown their willingness to turn their backs on established science and medicine. Donald Trump, by nominating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head Health and Human Services, seems determined to continue the disastrous decision-making that caused far too many unnecessary deaths from COVID.
Sadly, he appears committed to sending in this clown.
