New boss
Bad Kennedy fires key official to make room for his own lethal crankery:
The former top vaccine official at the Food and Drug Administration says he was forced out of his job for trying to protect vaccine data from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Dr. Peter Marks told The Associated Press Sunday he refused to hand over unrestricted access to a vaccine safety database to the Health and Human Services secretary and his team, fearing that the information might be misused, manipulated, or deleted altogether.
Initially, Marks said that he tried to be on good terms with his vaccine-skeptic new boss regarding vaccine safety, making plans to develop a “vaccine transparency action plan.” Marks also gave Kennedy and his team the ability to view reports from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, but drew the line at allowing them to edit the data.
“Why wouldn’t we? Because frankly we don’t trust [them],” Marks said, using an expletive. “They’d write over it or erase the whole database.”
Any guesses on what the expletive was? Mine is “the fuckers.”
But ever since Kennedy’s swearing in as secretary of Health and Human Services, his true colors have been on full display, as he has responded poorly to the initial deaths from the measles outbreak, expressed support for dubious measles treatments, ended support for vaccine initiatives, and even at one point claimed the measles vaccine was as bad as the disease itself.
Over the weekend in Texas, Kennedy attempted some damage control by saying, “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.” But, while on that visit, he also met with two doctors who claim to have treated children with measles using the steroid aerosolized budesonide and the antibiotic clarithromycin, calling them “extraordinary healers.”
What kind of metastatic ego does it take to think that One – who has no education in medicine or disease of any kind whatsoever – knows more about medical issues than the many thousands of people who do have such education? How conceited do you have to be to think you know more about vaccination than the people who actually do know more about it?
But there is also a bright side to this. At least he is not into voodoo. Yet.
And our food is going to be much safer, too…
https://www.food-safety.com/articles/10289-as-us-pieces-together-how-hhs-cuts-are-affecting-food-safety-stakeholders-speak-out
I feel healthier already!
“How conceited do you have to be to think you know more about vaccination than the people who actually do know more about it?”
I wonder how much of this distrust nowadays we can trace back to Andrew Wakefield and his “MMR vaccines give you autism” fraud. Vaccinations clearly work; we generally don’t see tuberculosis or rubella or rabies or polio killing people any more, but apparently people either forgot how we got here or literally do not know or care. Depressing.
#3, those of us over a certain age, who actually had friends with polio, suffered through measles and mumps, and knew people who died of those diseases, know how we got here. The younger generation sees that as ancient history, and may not even know it ever happened. To them, the diseases are not fearful, they are just a part of life that might be a bit inconvenient. Several deadly diseases had been contained before they were born, so they don’t know to be scared of them.
I suppose that explains why older people were more ready to get COVID vaccines…we understand what the world looked like pre-vaccine. And most of us who are Baby Boomers are immune to many of these diseases, having had them when we were young (obviously only the ones of us who lived through them, of course).
Isn’t it interesting that they don’t like vaccines (or a lot of the drugs that are actually used to treat ailments) but they’ll go for the off label use of some other drug with a scary sounding chemical name to treat random ailments? At least St. John’s Wort is all “herbal” and herbs are assumed to be healthy.
It didn’t start yesterday, it didn’t start with Trusk and Little Bobby, it began a long, long time ago in a faraway place we once called America. Chris Mooney wrote about it 20 years ago.
https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/0465046762?ref_=mr_referred_us_au_au
Yes, Rev, I encountered it frequently during my Ph.D. work in Environmental Science. Some of the younger students were more like activists than scientists, and would go all ape shit over Big Pharma and Big [X] (They had a million of ’em). I was criticized for taking medicine to treat my asthma; couldn’t I just take ginkgo biloba? Well, if it actually worked, that might be worth a try, but hey, I think I’ll keep on with the ‘chemicals’. One of the students, seeing me use my inhaler, went on a long tirade about ‘chemical pollutants’ and how I was destroying the water quality by adding ‘chemicals’ to it (like the water is made of anything but chemicals!)
The anti-vax was strong among the students, though most of us in the older generation just ignored them. They were being silly, they’d learn, they’d grow up. Only they didn’t. They didn’t learn; I don’t know whether they grew up or not.
Rev, yes, and then Chris Mooney went all “vocal atheists are scaring off all the voters in the middle so they have to shut up.” He was remarkably aggressive about it.