For a guy who insists he is totally not a conspiracy-minded anti-vaxxer, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. somehow can’t stop himself from doing conspiracy-minded anti-vaxxer stuff. This time around, it’s his surprise announcement that the United States will be pulling funds from Gavi, an organization that provides vaccines to children in lower-income countries. Wouldn’t want to save poor children from easily preventable diseases now, would we?
Kennedy kept it real classy and announced this major policy change via a prerecorded video to be played for health officials attending Gavi’s pledging summit, where the organization is seeking to raise $9 billion from countries and organizations to fund its efforts to reach 500 million children between 2026 and 2030. Definitely a cool and great time to pop off and say that America is not going to honor the $1.58 billion the Biden administration pledged for Gavi.
Why is Kennedy pulling money from an organization that has helped vaccinate over 1.1 billion children in 78 low-income countries, preventing over 18 million future deaths? Because Gavi has “ignored the science,” of course. What science? Kennedy never really says. But here’s his very scientific and astute statement about what Gavi has to do.
“I’ll tell you how to start taking vaccine safety seriously: Consider the best science available, even when the science contradicts established paradigms,” he blabbered.
This is nothing but code for a demand that organizations entertain Kennedy’s beliefs that somehow the “real science” about vaccines has been suppressed, particularly his belief that childhood vaccines cause autism. He has insisted that he would approve of a vaccine “if the data is there” and “if you show me the data.”
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The data has long been available, and it shows that vaccines are rigorously tested and safe to administer. But Kennedy refuses to believe that, so he has to jeopardize efforts to protect children from dying due to easily preventable diseases.
When Kennedy isn’t busy pulling funding from international vaccine efforts, he’s busy overseeing a flood of misinformation domestically. He fired every member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, replacing actual scientists with a raft of anti-vaxxers. On Tuesday, a report called “Thimerosal as a Vaccine Preservative” appeared on the CDC website in advance of a Thursday presentation to ACIP by Lyn Redwood. Redwood is a former colleague of Kennedy’s at Children’s Health Defense, a rabidly anti-vax group. Thimerosal, a preservative, is a fixation for anti-vaxxers despite having been removed from all childhood vaccines since 2001, and evidence shows there is no harm from the low doses of thimerosal used in vaccines.
Redwood’s presentation cites a study titled “Low-level neonatal thimerosal exposure: Long-term consequences in the brain” by Robert Berman, published in 2008 in the journal Neurotoxicology. Except that Robert Berman himself says that it is not a study he published. He did co-author a piece with a similar name that appeared in a different journal, but that one doesn’t support Redwood’s conclusions either, with Berman saying, “I do not endorse this misrepresentation of the research.”
Perhaps Redwood felt fine about making up studies because she saw the report Kennedy sent to Congress to justify his changes to COVID vaccine recommendations. Kennedy spent the pandemic writing anti-vax books and being a top spreader of misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine. The problem for Kennedy is that the science doesn’t support him, so the report cited a study under investigation for potential issues with methodology and conflicts of interest, as well as another that has never been peer-reviewed. The report also made claims that were directly refuted by the papers cited.
Kennedy has been an out and proud anti-vaxxer for years. His brain is filled with nothing but conspiracy theories and whale juice. So it’s not surprising that he would thwart efforts to vaccinate children worldwide—but it’s still awful to see yet another way in which the United States is retreating from the global stage.
Related | Kennedy’s HHS sent Congress ‘junk science’ to defend vaccine changes, experts say
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