Toxic celebrity
Instagram bars a vax denialist:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now blocked from Instagram after he repeatedly undercut trust in vaccines. Kennedy has also spread conspiracy theories about Bill Gates, accusing him of profiteering off vaccines and attempting to take control of the world’s food supply.
“We removed this account for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” a spokesperson for Facebook, which owns Instagram, told NPR on Thursday.
Kennedy has been a prominent voice in the anti-vaccine community for years, speaking out against childhood vaccines and promoting controversial and disproven claims that seek to link vaccines with autism.
In the past year, Kennedy’s beliefs about vaccines have intersected with the COVID-19 pandemic. He has told his followers not to trust “mainstream media, government health officials” and doctors who say the coronavirus vaccines are safe, recently highlighting a rare and tragic case in which a woman died hours after receiving the vaccine.
Someone should tell him about the much less rare cases in which people die of the coronavirus.
In early 2017, Kennedy met with then-President-elect Donald Trump, urging him to create a commission to study vaccines’ safety. It was an instance, as NPR reported at the time, of “Trump embracing the fringe when it comes to the science of autism and vaccinations.”
In response to that meeting, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement saying “vaccines protect children’s health and save lives.”
While Kennedy works hard to stop them.
Dear RFK Jr,
Worldwide about 35 million doses of COVID vaccine have been administered. About 350 deaths have been reported after administration of the vaccine. But those are deaths after the vaccine, not because of the vaccine. In some cases, the victim already had COVID, or contracted it before the full benefit of the vaccine kicked in; in other cases, the victim died of some other underlying cause. And that’s not surprising, given that the population receiving the vaccine skews elderly. (Source: https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-are-covid-19-vaccines-causing-deaths/a-56458746.)
In the meantime, the virus has killed almost 2.4 million people worldwide. (Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-toll/.)
One of the problems I had when I was in my Environmental Science program was how many of the students embraced shit like this. Anti-vaccination was strong among the younger, hipper set, many of whom believed science was a western construct (which leads one to wonder why they were studying it). RFK Jr. was a hero to most of them, and I will admit, some of his environmental work has been sound, but it isn’t enough to overcome the problems with being an anti-vaxxer.
No matter how good a science education we received, too many of the students were in the “chemicals bad, natural good” category. I wonder how they passed Chemistry if they didn’t understand that most of the chemicals in the world are natural, most of them are either neutral or good for us, and the issue at question in science is not ‘chemicals in the environment’ (since the environment is MADE OF chemicals), but toxic chemicals in the environment.
I’m glad they are banning anti-vaxxers. That’s a dangerous worldview. It is particularly pernicious in poorer communities and poorer countries. So who has the western imperialist mindset, those of us who are working to get good health care to people who need it, or those who are exporting toxic anti-science?
This should be simply debunked by showing that in matched cohorts rates of death do not increase in groups that receive the vaccine.
In theory, yes. But I doubt that people who are anti-vaccine to start with are going to believe any debunking. It would just be another part of the Conspiracy. Wakefield’s original paper linking MMR vaccines to autism ended up being shit-canned by the journal that published it, and he lost his licence. Normally, you’d think that revelations that this study was a) run by someone with a vested interest in coming up with the published answer and, b) too small to draw any conclusions from and, c) refuted by better studies, would have put an end to this particular movement, but no, it didn’t. With the COVID vaccines, it’s going to be even worse, because the virus has been so heavily politicized. Anti-maskers and lockdown skeptics are not likely to line up to get their very own Soros/Gates financed, Big Pharma/World Government Mind Control and Tracking Device injected into their flesh. In some jurisdictions, that number of resisters is probably going to be non-trivial enough to keep the virus going longer.
I didn’t realise that Bill Gates was taking control of the world’s food supply as well as putting chips in everyone. Where does he get the time? It takes me half the morning just to check my email and catch up with my feeds.
You’d think so. But for a while, the antivaxxers were claiming that the tiny amount of mercury in thiomersal (a preservative used in some vaccines) was having homeopathic-scale effects. Removing thiomersal had NO effect on the rates of the problems being blamed on it. Direct studies of its effect have actively proven the safety of thiomersal. The anti vax crowd doesn’t seem to have lost a single member.
They either keep repeating the old lie, or take a step sideways to the next on.
It turns out you can get a lot done if you stay off the golf course and don’t watch TV. Who knew?