Peter Smith Quadrant Online 1st February 2025
In December last year more than 75 Nobel laureates signed a letter asking the U.S. Senate not to confirm Health and Human Services secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr, citing his opposition to vaccines among their concerns. I suppose only 65 Nobel laureates would not have been as convincing as 75. I wonder whether they could have got 85 to sign the letter?
My first question: Is RFK Jr. as flawed and dangerous as cousin Caroline Kennedy seems to think? He definitely would be dangerous if let loose on the environment and energy. He is an unreconstructed greenie. And, while he professes to be sceptical of a lot of scientific findings, this does not include man-made global warming. Trump is aware of that and has kept him well away from any energy portfolio.
My second question: Are his views on vaccines wacky or do they provide a beneficial counterbalance to voracious drug companies interested primarily in selling their products?
In trying to answer these questions do we trawl through his contested history on the subject of vaccines or do we cut through and simply take him at his recent word? I think the latter, which I heard first-hand. Namely, he is not opposed to vaccines per se but opposes them being forced on parents or their children. (Apparently, his children have been vaccinated.) In other words, the choice of having or not having a particular vaccine should be entirely voluntary. That sounds fine to the libertarian streak in me. And holding drug companies to account falls out as an unmitigated good.
Jack the Insider in Thursday’s Australian had a hit piece on RFK. (“Why RFK is an unhealthy choice for the world “) I often like his articles. This one not so much. This passage struck me:
…he still believes in the comprehensively debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism. When the deception is laid bare, he babbles about double blind placebo testing of vaccines, ignoring the ethical concerns of subjecting children in the placebo groups to suffering infection…
So many things have been “comprehensively debunked” before turning out to be true. ‘Comprehensively debunked’, why not just debunkedm by the way, is rather like settled science. It should make sceptical people uneasy. ‘Debunked by whom’ is always a handy question to ask.
And then he claims that wanting double-blind placebo testing is babbling. Really? How are you to know something really works, and without causing incidental harm, unless you have controlled experiments in which some get the vaccine and some don’t? I don’t necessarily see the ethical dilemma. Of course, if you knew the vaccine worked without deleterious side-effects you would offer it to everyone. But the point of the test is that you don’t know and want to find out because you intend offering it to, and perhaps forcing it upon, many millions of children.
Giving anybody, particularly children who can’t effectively consent, a placebo in a clinical trial can be unethical if they are denied treatment during testing which could be helpful. But it is not babbling to suggest that a new vaccine, if at all possible, should be tested in this rigorous way. It is common sense when there is no effective alternative treatment and the untested vaccine, if effective, will fill a gap.
I admit that my view of compulsory vaccines is coloured by the confected hype of the Covid episode. In the end result there is no compelling evidence that the vaccines worked at all. And any online search will throw up many claims that they caused harm. So far as I am aware there was no double-blind testing which gave the vaccine to half of a controlled group of fat old people with common comorbidities (the cohort at risk) and a placebo to the other half.
As it was, fat old people with comorbidities had a high risk of dying from contracting Covid whether vaccinated or not, whereas hardly anybody else died whether vaccinated or not. I am old enough, if not fat. I was never vaccinated and don’t even know whether I ever contracted Covid. If I did, it was a non-event.
There was never any reason to make the Covid vaccine compulsory. Yet, effectively, it was. Denying people their livelihood for refusing the jab is making it compulsory. So, I am on the side of being free to choose. However, there is an issue when it comes to the growing cocktail of vaccines now given to children.
The issue is whether unvaccinated children pose a risk to children in childcare or schools who for medical reasons cannot be given the vaccines. It is an issue which must to be considered and weighed. Should the freedom of the many to choose be sacrificed for the very few? Quite simply, I don’t know in this case. But certainly, the medical profession should approach childhood vaccines with a rigorous Popperian mindset; particularly when people are under legal or societal pressure to subject their children to them.
Every effort has to be made to reveal any short- and long-term damaging effects when used alone or in combination. We are talking here about injecting chemical substances into the bodies of young children, infants, and babies. And, to boot, where each jab increases drug company profits. In these circumstances, we desperately need the questioning scepticism of people like JFK, even if his views seem eccentric to some. Will the required number of Republican senators see it that way is the question?
Nelle's journey 