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Antivaccine nonsense Politics

RFK Jr. suspends his campaign and backs Donald Trump. Quelle surprise.

Yesterday, antivaxxer turned independent Presidential candidate RFK Jr, suspended his campaign and backed Donald Trump, to the surprise of no one. Almost certainly, there was a quid pro quo.

After all this time, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by anything that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. does, and, for the most part, I’m not. Given all the foreshadowing and hints dropped by RFK Jr.’s running mate last week, I’m even less surprised that yesterday, the antivaxxer turned Presidential candidate did the most RFK Jr. thing ever and decided to suspend his presidential campaign and endorse Donald Trump for President, even appearing with Trump at a campaign rally:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his independent campaign for the White House and endorsed Donald Trump on Friday, a late-stage shakeup of the race that could give the former president a modest boost from Kennedy’s supporters. 

Hours later, Kennedy joined Trump onstage at an Arizona rally, where the crowd burst into “Bobby!” cheers.

Kennedy said his internal polls had shown that his presence in the race would hurt Trump and help Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, though recent public polls don’t provide a clear indication that he is having an outsize impact on support for either major-party candidate.

Kennedy cited free speech, the war in Ukraine and “a war on our children” as among the reasons he would try to remove his name from the ballot in battleground states. 

“These are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump,” Kennedy said at his event in Phoenix.

One can’t help but wonder if there’s a quid pro quo here, given that it wasn’t too long ago that Trump called RFK Jr. to seek his support. (More on that later.) It was the day after the failed assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania, and during the conversation, which RFK Jr.’s son posted to social media, apparently because he thought that Trump wasn’t antivax enough.

RFK Jr.'s son RFK III doesn't think Trump is antivax enough.
RFK III doesn’t think Trump is antivax enough.

Even though RFK III took his post down quickly after his father, who was quickly forced to apologize, had apparently gotten very upset by his breach of confidentiality, it was still easy to find the video everywhere:

Of course, no one should be surprised that Trump’s approach to his antivaccine beliefs is largely transactional. Back before the pandemic and before he became President, he had been occasionally parroting antivax misinformation about vaccines causing autism dating back to 2007. However, during the pandemic, when he thought that developing a new vaccine for COVID-19 could save his campaign and lead to his reelection, he was all-in on “Operation Warp Speed,” which is why antivaxxers, even though they recognize a kindred antivax spirit even before he was elected President in 2016, never entirely trusted Trump, who—much to my relief and the relief of vaccine advocates—never really used the vast power of the Presidency to promote policies friendly to antivaxxers. True, before being elected, Trump did play footsies with Andrew Wakefield and RFK Jr., the latter of whom he met with during the Presidential transition period to discuss his chairing a “vaccine safety commission.” Nothing came of that offer, fortunately.

I speculated at the time that the reason Trump called RFK Jr. was to try to entice him to drop out of the race and endorse Trump for President by dangling an offer of a job in his administration in front of him. I speculated about several possibilities, all of which would be devastating for public health—and medicine in general—in the US, positions including FDA Commissioner, CDC Director, or even Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), who would be the boss of any FDA Commissioner or CDC Director but would also be in charge of overseeing Medicare and Medicaid. Trump himself seemed to have suggested a potential quid pro quo in an interview last Tuesday, three days before RFK Jr. suspended his campaign:

For much of the race, Trump and Kennedy’s rhetoric about each other might have made it seem unlikely they’d potentially join forces. The former president has previously said he’d “take Biden” over Kennedy and variously called the independent a “far more LIBERAL than anyone running as a Democrat” and a “Democrat ‘Plant,’” while Kennedy accused Trump of having filled his last administration with “swamp creatures” and claimed Trump “torpedoed the Constitution.”

With rumors swirling that Kennedy is about to kiss the ring, Trump changed his tune. “He’s a brilliant guy,” Trump said of Kennedy in a CNN interview Tuesday. “He’s a very smart guy. I’ve known him for a very long time.” He added that he’d “certainly” be open to giving Kennedy a job in a new Trump administration.

Very typical. Trump hates you if you don’t praise him, but will suddenly love you to death if you butter him up. Adding to my belief that this is probably (although not certainly) all a quid pro quo, tt was also reported that RFK Jr. had apparently reached out to the Kamala Harris about the same thing, asking for a cabinet position in her administration in return for his dropping out and endorsing her. Quite appropriately, she rebuffed him, ignoring him, leading to speculation that the timing of RFK Jr.’s announcement that he was suspending his campaign and endorsing Trump, sure looks like sour grapes:

On Thursday, the independent candidate filed paperwork to withdraw from presidential ballots in Arizona, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes confirmed. The withdrawal came ahead of a press conference Friday morning—Kennedy has refused to confirm or deny reports that he’s planning to end his campaign and endorse Donald Trump.

He made the move in Arizona after Harris spurned a request for a meeting—while the Trump campaign appeared to open the way for a cabinet role.

A move by Kennedy to quit could spell bad news for Harris in states where margins are ultra-tight, pollsters say.

Or, as someone else put it:

Quite the embarrassment, actually.

And yesterday:

Cringe.

RFK Jr.’s reversal is particularly ironic and hilarious given many of his past statements about Donald Trump:

I couldn’t resist including that response. It is, however, amazing how so many who claimed they could never support Donald Trump end up obsequiously bending the knee, their past statements forgotten.

The full transcript of RFK Jr.’s announcement can be found here. (Odd, but I didn’t know that RFK Jr. had joined Substack, but it sure makes sense.) It’s a grievance-filled conspiracy-fest of a rant that claims that the Democratic National Committee had conspired to keep him off the ballot, also echoing Republican talking points that the DNC had “precipitated the palace coup against President Biden” after Biden’s disastrous performance at the first Presidential debate and that the press had promoted Kamala Harris’ popularity and rise in the polls. Here’s a little taste:

President Biden mocked Vladimir Putin’s 88% landslide in Russian elections, observing that Putin’s party controlled the Russian press, and that Putin prevented serious opponents from appearing on the ballot. But here in America, the DNC also prevented opponents from getting on the ballot and our television networks exposed themselves as Democratic Party organs. Over the course of more than a year, in a campaign where my poll numbers reached at times into the high 20s, the DNC-aligned mainstream networks maintained a near-total embargo on interviews with me. During his 10-month Presidential campaign in 1992, Ross Perot gave interviews 34 times on the mainstream networks. In contrast, during the 16 months since I declared, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN combined gave me only two live interviews. Those same networks instead ran a continuous deluge of hit pieces with inaccurate, often vile, pejorative, and defamatory smears. Some of those same networks then colluded with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage. 

Nice move, there, RFK Jr., to try to liken the DNC to Vladimir Putin, although one has to wonder: Which is it? Elsewhere in the speech RFK Jr. sucks up to Putin by echoing Russian propaganda about his invasion of Ukraine:

I want to say a word about the Ukraine war. The military-industrial complex has provided us with the familiar comic-book justification that this war is a noble effort to stop supervillain Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and to thwart his Hitler-like march across Europe. 

In fact, tiny Ukraine is a proxy in a geopolitical struggle initiated by the ambitions of the U.S. Neocons for U.S. global hegemony. I’m not excusing Putin for invading Ukraine. He had other options. But the war is Russia’s predictable response to the reckless Neocon project of extending NATO to encircle Russia.

The credulous media rarely explain to Americans that we unilaterally walked away from our two intermediate nuclear weapons treaties with Russia, and then put nuclear-ready Aegis missile systems in Romania and Poland, and that the Biden White House repeatedly spurned Russia’s offer to settle the dispute peacefully.

The Ukraine war began in 2014, when US agencies overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine and installed a handpicked pro-West government that launched a civil war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

Um, no. Just no. It’s also funny how, in endorsing President Trump, RFK Jr. neglects to mention just who it was who actually “unilaterally walked away from our two intermediate nuclear weapons treaties with Russia.” (Yes, it was President Trump in 2019.)

Amusingly (to me, anyway), in his speech RFK Jr. also more or less confirmed all the narratives in the press that he had previously derided false, such as the reporting that he had reached out to the Harris campaign to try to get a cabinet position in return for dropping out of the race and endorsing her:

Less than two hours after President Trump narrowly escaped assassination, Calley Means called me on my cell phone. Calley is arguably the leading advocate for food safety, soil regeneration, and ending the chronic disease epidemic that is destroying American health and ruining our economy. Calley has exposed the insidious corruption at the FDA, NIH, HHS, and USDA that has caused the epidemic. Calley had been working on and off for my campaign, advising me on those subjects, which have been my primary focus for the last twenty years. I was delighted when Calley told me, that day, that he had also been advising President Trump. He told me President Trump was anxious to talk to me about chronic disease — and other subjects — and to explore avenues of cooperation. He asked if I would take a call from the President. President Trump telephoned me a few minutes later, and I met with him the following day.

A few weeks later, I met again with President Trump and his family members and closest advisors in Florida. In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues. In those meetings, he suggested that we join forces as a unity party. We talked about Abraham Lincoln’s team of rivals. That arrangement would allow us to disagree publicly and privately on the issues over which we differ, while working together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance. I was a fierce critic of many of the policies of his first administration, and there are still issues and approaches upon which we continue to dispute. But we are aligned with each other on key issues like ending the forever wars, ending the childhood disease epidemics, securing the border, protecting our freedom of speech, unraveling corporate capture of the regulatory agencies, and getting U.S. intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing, censoring, and surveilling Americans, and interfering in our elections.

Following my first discussion with President Trump, I tried unsuccessfully to open up similar discussions with the Harris campaign. Vice President Harris declined to meet or speak with me.

Oddly enough, I had never heard of Calley Means before this. A quick bit of Googling, however, revealed that he is pretty much what one would expect him to be: An advocate for quackery. After losing his mother to pancreatic cancer in 2022, he co-founded a group called TrueMed with Justin Mares. A quick perusal of the website shows that it’s a company that facilitates tax-free HSA/FSA spending on healthy food and exercise (which is fine, depending on how they are defined), but also lots and lots of supplements. It also promotes dubious devices like near-infrared lights, a “biotstrap,” and others, supposedly getting these paid for by HSA/FSA money. He’s also a co-author of a book promoting “metabolic” cures for all diseases. So of course he’s a health advisor to the Trump and Kennedy campaigns. Because of course.

Vice President Harris’ judgment was sound. I highly doubt that RFK Jr.’s endorsement would have done her any good, and it might have done her harm. Reading between the lines, though, I’m more convinced than ever that there must have been a quid pro quo. Here’s hoping that it’s not the case that RFK Jr.’s dropping out will help Trump much (or at all), although, given how similar their supporters are regarding their conspiratorial beliefs, I did always suspect that RFK Jr.’s presence in the race probably did hurt Trump more than it did President Biden (before he dropped out of the race) or Kamala Harris (now that she is the Democratic nominee), but at this point, who knows? The same article above notes that RFK Jr.’s “departure could, however, have less of an impact now than it might have done earlier in the year,” given the decline in his support over the last few months.

I’ve been writing about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for a long time now. As hard as it is for me to believe as I type this—it makes me feel so old!—RFK Jr. first came to my attention in a big way nearly two decades ago, when in the summer of 2005 he “came out” as an antivaccine conspiracy theorist. That’s when Salon.com and Rolling Stone, to their shared eternal shame, co-published his conspiracyfest of an “exposé,” Deadly Immunity, which blamed the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal, which had been used in several childhood vaccines until 2001, for an “autism epidemic.” The whole narrative, being a conspiracy theory, posited that at a conference held at the Simpsonwood Retreat and Conference Center in Norcross, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, in 2000 the CDC had started actively adjusting “inconvenient” data that had to eliminate the link that it had supposedly shown between thimerosal and autism. In my first post that ever went viral, I deconstructed all the misinformation and conspiracy mongering shortly after, as did others, who noted that the entire Simpsonwood transcript was not at all consistent with any effort to “cover up” a link between mercury and autism, but rather included a debate about how best to deal with confounders in a study by Verstraeten et al. (Of course, to antivaxxers, any adjustment for confounders that eliminates a link between vaccines and whatever bad health outcome that they attribute to vaccines is always a “coverup,” not science doing what science is supposed to do and being rigorous.) Years later, I referred to this as the Simpsonwood conspiracy theory and, sometimes, part of the central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement, in which They (the CDC, government, FDA, medical profession, big pharma, and who knows who else—aliens, possibly) “know” that vaccines cause autism but actively work to cover up any incriminating evidence.

In the intervening two decades, RFK Jr. evolved from not just an antivax conspiracy theorist but to an all-purpose conspiracy theorist, embracing (of course) lab leak conspiracy theories, including one claiming that Ashkenazi Jews were immune to COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease, because it was an “ethnically targeted bioweapon.” As for being “not antivaccine,” I like to point out how since at least 2014 he was likening vaccination to the Holocaust, trying to persuade Samoan officialsthat the MMR vaccine was dangerous (in the middle of a deadly measles outbreak!), and claiming that today’s generation of children is the “sickest generation” (due to vaccines, of course!). Indeed, a few years ago his own family even called him out for his antivaccine activism, while, predictably, RFK Jr. has, as so many antivaxxers have done, gone all-in on COVID-19 pseudoscience and conspiracy theories and become anti-mask, “anti-lockdown,” and pro-quack treatments for COVID-19.

Over the years, I have expended much digital ink debunking and deconstructing RFK Jr.’s various antivax utterances, while countering his false claims that he is “not antivaccine,” in particular after RFK Jr. decided last year to run for President. As I said at the time, his entering the race was something that I thought I’d never see, particularly his challenging President Biden for the Democratic nomination. Unsurprisingly, RFK Jr. failed utterly to gain any traction in the Democratic Party, which rejected him.RFK Jr., being the malignant narcissist that he is, however, could not stand that, and so he decided to run as an independent. That worked out well for him for a while, leading him to be able to grift more than he had ever grifted before in terms of raking in campaign funds. For a while he even enjoyed surprising popularity for an independent, but eventually his popularity came crashing back to where the most popular independent and third party candidates end up, in the mid-single digits. I speculate that, grifter that he is (and given how grift recognizes and is attracted to grift), RFK Jr. looked for ways to maintain the public profile and unfortunate relevance that his Presidential run had brought him, likely by making a deal with Trump for a job in Trump’s administration if he were to kiss the ring, although not before seeing if he could get a deal from Vice President Harris.

As much as I fervently hope that Trump doesn’t win this election, given what a disaster a second Trump presidency would be for public health (and everything else), one tiny consolation to me if Trump does win would be the likelihood that Trump, being the dishonest man that he is, would likely renege on his offer of a job. After all, Trump only loves sycophants, toadies, and lackeys, and he recognizes that RFK Jr. is not fully loyal. Again, grift recognizes grift, and Trump is nothing if not the consummate grifter. He knows that RFK Jr. could not be relied upon to be loyal. Obviously, that would be the tiniest of tiny consolations, and I’d much rather see Trump defeated and RFK Jr. banished back to the antivax fever swamp, where he belongs.

By Orac

Orac is the nom de blog of a humble surgeon/scientist who has an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his copious verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few probably will. That surgeon is otherwise known as David Gorski.

That this particular surgeon has chosen his nom de blog based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights that he originally encountered when he became a fan of a 35 year old British SF television show whose special effects were renowned for their BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction ever televised, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.)

DISCLAIMER:: The various written meanderings here are the opinions of Orac and Orac alone, written on his own time. They should never be construed as representing the opinions of any other person or entity, especially Orac's cancer center, department of surgery, medical school, or university. Also note that Orac is nonpartisan; he is more than willing to criticize the statements of anyone, regardless of of political leanings, if that anyone advocates pseudoscience or quackery. Finally, medical commentary is not to be construed in any way as medical advice.

To contact Orac: [email protected]

48 replies on “RFK Jr. suspends his campaign and backs Donald Trump. Quelle surprise.”

There’s a lot wrong with that article. Dude’s almost as nutty as RFK Jr. and seems not to know some very basic facts:

Later, his knee-jerk reaction against Covid vaccines was the result of the attack on his reasoned questions raised in the film Vax about MMR vaccines laced with mercury. The film successfully got Big Pharma to remove the mercury. But Bobby, having been savaged by the industry, now became Mr. Anti-Vax, opposing anything injected by a needle (except, it appears, steroids to build muscles). Sorry, I’m no fan of Big Pharma—but I need proof before I tell people not to wear a mask during a pandemic. I need the proof—and his only proof was to accuse Big Pharma and the FDA of being liars. They are. Still, that’s not proof.

RFK Jr. was “Mr. Anti-Vax” long before VAXXED, which was far from “reasoned” in its “questions” (JAQing off, actually). He “came out” as an antivaxxer in 2005 with his “Deadly Immunity” article, 11 years before VAXXED. Also, MMR never had mercury in it because it’s an attenuated live virus vaccine.

I also had some weird feelings while reading that article, even though the link was posted on a Dutch sceptical site.
In a way it read like a kind of defense of RFK Jr., exept for his current positions and his support for Trump, while there already was a lot wrong in his past.

That’s what I thought. I mean, if you worked with RFK Jr. on any “journalism” any time after 2004-2005, you either knew he was an antivax conspiracy nut job and didn’t care or you were a conspiracy nut job too.

A guy who claims to be primarily concerned about healthy food endorses an obese man who eats at McDonalds and wants to abolish food safety labeling (it’s in Project 2025).

“Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.”
– Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Courtney Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy, Chris Kennedy and Rory Kennedy

…an obese man who eats at McDonalds and wants to abolish food safety labeling (it’s in Project 2025)

Ugh. I don’t want to write anything in defense of Donald Trump. But the fact that something is in the “Project 2025” document simply doesn’t mean that it’s something Donald Trump wants to do. “Project 2025” is a wish-fulfillment white paper from the Heritage Foundation. They’ve been writing and publishing these kinds of white papers since the Reagan Administration, and they’ve had at best mixed success in getting Republican administrations to pay attention to them and implement any of their suggestions. And Donald Trump has explicitly repudiated “Project 2025”.

“Project 2025” absolutely outlines a plan that some folks in Trumps orbit want to pursue. And if Trump were elected, it’s pretty much a dead certainty that a substantial number of members of his administration would actively try to implement it. And Donald Trump’s repudiation of it has been entirely lacking in details. He’s said some parts are “too extreme”, but as far as I know he hasn’t actually said which parts. And the fact that some parts are “too extreme” would imply that other parts are perfectly reasonable.

But it’s simply not true to state that Donald Trump wants to abolish food safety labeling, based solely on what’s written in the “Project 2025” document.

And Donald Trump has explicitly repudiated “Project 2025”.

1) Donald Trump is a grifter who will say anything to get what he wants. If he said the sky is blue, I’d check.
2) He has a very short attention span. It would be very easy to keep him distracted while implementing Project 2025.
Tim Walz had it right. “Years of coaching Football has taught me that if someone has a playbook, they intend to implement it.”

Also, “stop anybody who wants to be able to block me from implementing my every whim” is absolutely Trump’s style anyway. He doesn’t have to care about food labelling in particular; it would be sold to him as stopping him from being able to resell cheap ketchup (at a markup for his brand) to go with his failed steak business and that would be enough.

That’s honestly one of the more dangerous things about Trump: he absolutely wants to be a dictator and able to do whatever he wants without having to care about whether or not it’s illegal, and that makes it really easy for smarter people to play off of him to advance their own deregulatory agendas. Government experts stopped Trump from being a dictator before? No problem! We’ll just play off of Trump’s grievances, fire all the experts, install boot-licking toadies in their place, and then we can do whatever we want! It’s perfect for anybody who wants to avoid scrutiny, or anybody who’s more interested in being ‘right’ than the truth. And RFKjr has already demonstrated that he’s in at least the second of those two classes, and he hasn’t exactly ruled out the first either…

Donald Trump is a grifter who will say anything to get what he wants. If he said the sky is blue, I’d check.

I mean, sure, but, he’s not Bizarro. The fact that he explicitly repudiated “Project 2025” isn’t actually evidence that he secretly wants to implement it in its entirely.

He has a very short attention span. It would be very easy to keep him distracted while implementing Project 2025.

Sure:

“Project 2025” absolutely outlines a plan that some folks in Trumps orbit want to pursue. And if Trump were elected, it’s pretty much a dead certainty that a substantial number of members of his administration would actively try to implement it.

But that’s very different from claiming that Donald Trump wants to abolish food safety labeling based solely on the fact that it’s part of Project 2025.

Tim Walz had it right. “Years of coaching Football has taught me that if someone has a playbook, they intend to implement it.”

Frankly, this is pretty close to nonsense. Donald Trump doesn’t “have” the Project 2025 document; it’s just a document that the Heritage Foundation has publicly offered as a playbook for a Trump administration. Which, again, is something they’ve been doing for four decades, with mixed success. The fact that a third party has offered Donald Trump a playbook simply isn’t evidence that he intends to implement it.

But saying, “There are a lot of folks associated with Donald Trump who are also associated with Project 2025, and in a second Trump administration, Donald Trump is probably going to appoint a lot of them to senior posts, and if he does they’re going to try to use those positions to implement as much of Project 2025 as they can, and he’s likely to go along with a lot of it, and a lot of it is downright scary,” is too apparently too nuanced. So instead we get over simplified claims that because something is in Project 2025, ipso facto it’s something Donald Trump personally wants to do.

A Project 2025 co-author seems sure that it has Trump’s support, according to an interview captured by a hidden video camera, described on CNN.

“(Russell) Vought said his group, the Center for Renewing America, was secretly drafting hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos that would lay the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans if he wins, describing his work as creating “shadow” agencies. He claimed that Trump has “blessed” his organization and “he’s very supportive of what we do.”

“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said. “And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence … whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work.”

Unlike during his first term, Trump doesn’t have to worry about blowback costing him re-election if he wins in November. He’s free to implement whatever craziness he wants.

I’m aware of the Heritage Foundation. (Once even worked in an office literally next door to their building). Donold is on record praising them, repeatedly. 2025’s co-authors were mostly his former staff – the staff who still support him. Shady Vance wrote a forward to 2025’s chief person’s new book (which has been postponed until after Nov. 5). Donold only distanced himself from 2025 after his campaign realized it is not popular and is getting lots of deserved attention.

There is no low too low for either Donold or Junior.

Ironies being ironies, a candidate who is totally anti-vaccine and supposedly deeply concerned about “chemicals” in the environment is backing a candidate who still prides himself on his role in delivering COVID-19 vaccines and is talking about disbanding the EPA.

Kennedy turns out to be just another rich, white male with a grievance.

It seems he’s obsessed with getting the power and fame his power and uncles had and is willing to do anything to get it.

Some time ago in these pages, I offered the opinion that Kennedy had narcissistic tendencies. His behaviour certainly follows that pattern. The causes he has adopted tend to be one’s where there is a community of almost single issue people who provide adulation to their readers. It was almost inevitable that he would get tucked into the Trump cult. It almost happened in 2016.

Junior complains about “hit pieces with inaccurate, often vile, pejorative, and defamatory smears.”

Yes, how dare they expose his lies by quoting him?

Meanwhile, former Trump administration health adviser, Canadian “researcher” and vituperative loon Paul Alexander posts on Substack that he doesn’t like former Trump opponents jumping on the bandwagon for personal gain.

“I know you all and I will ensure the frauds you are is known…no, you won’t get no Trump jobs for I will ensure the vetting precludes you and also, you are frauds, you are not Trump supporters, you are Johnny come Latelys’, opportunists, and there can be no trust with any of you! You are slimy distrustful people, grifters, money whores…you have spent 3-4 years pimping on people…damaging Trump as you supported DeSantis, then Kennedy Jr., then Biden etc. you did all you could to damage Trump and undermine him…remember I was around you…in and out…you lowlifes and now want a job? you will sell your own mother for 2 $…I know you people, broke bread with you…you are disgusting…traitors you all are…and I know you all…and all you have done. and yes, I will call you out.”

“I will ensure Trump world knows each of you and deeds.”

The idea that RFK Jr. could have the inside track to a big-time health job in a new Trump administration, leaving Paul out in the cold, has evidently pissed him off greatly, as has the realization that there’s serious competition in the race for slimiest Trump ass-kisser. 🙁

As much as I fervently hope that Trump doesn’t win this election, given what a disaster a second Trump presidency would be for public health (and everything else), one tiny consolation to me if Trump does win would be the likelihood that Trump, being the dishonest man that he is, would likely renege on his offer of a job.

in 2016/17 Trump did meet/act like he was going to make RFKjr some sort of “vaccine safety” position and then didn’t (with anti-vaxxers bitterly claiming big pharma had bought off Trump). To me, Trump doing something that controversial seemed more like a thing to do in a second term, which is what Trump will have if he wins in 2024. It’s both amusing and alarming how easily the anti-vaccine crowd can so quickly forget Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” when the hope that Mr. Wormbrain could get a cabinet position for them.

Interestingly it’s hard to find which booster of this highly effective Covid vaccine were on at this point. How many jabs for COViD so far?

Have you never heard of evolution, John? Apparently it’s a thing in biology.

Try studying stuff before posting your ignorance all over the internet.

Because viruses e v o l v e, smooth-brain–meaning the boosters will need to be d i f f e r e n t (like the flu vaccine you fail to get every year).

Not exactly. What I’m trying to find is if you took the original two jabs, and are staying up-to-date, how many boosters have you had so far as of 2024? I could understand why pro-vax folks wouldn’t want this to be clearly stated. But it seems important to establishing just how effective the jabs have been through the last 3 years.

Actually recommendation was if not vaccinated vaccinate. If vaccinated, get boosters depending of risk group status, Te lla exactly how tells exactly the number of boosters recommended ( if this was what you mean).
As monkey told yiu, this is RNA virus. It mutates fast. Do you not understand that ?

Yes. However the number of boosters are likely behind the evolution, since it appears that most of the people up-to-date still get infected. Moreover doesn’t risk of mRNA getting where it isn’t supposed to go (the heart) accumulate with each subsequent dose? If not, why not?

Moreover doesn’t risk of mRNA getting where it isn’t supposed to go (the heart) accumulate with each subsequent dose?

You are not even wrong, and I have neither the time nor the crayons to explain to you why.

JLB RNA viruses do evolve fast because they are RNA viruses, There are no proofreading, as in the case DNA.

re RFK Jr:

—He “suspended his campaign ” but didn’t just quit….I wonder why

Supposedly, if he gets 5% of the total vote, he will receive money back from the government because he was a candidate! He wanted to withdraw from swing states because he doesn’t want to be called a spoiler but it was too late for a few of those states (3?) which may hurt his boy Donald. However being on the ballots of large states ( CA, TX, FL, NY) plus others may lead to the magic number.

— I read about his use of testosterone to build muscle but I also read elsewhere that he has had several serious episodes of a fib that required electro conversion therapy… now I’m not an MD but doesn’t using testosterone sound rather foolhardy ?

re Bill Maher:

I don’t watch him but I read reactions to his latest cr
Medicine killed Friends star, Matthew Perry.
his rants are approved by FOX, Adams, Null et al.

In related news…

RFK Jr ( The Hill. today) claims he was unfairly shut out of the race and now supports Trump. He says his former party needs a candidate who can articulate their positions, succeed in an interview and put together a sentence in English, unlike their current choice, VP Harris.
Interestingly, Kennedy, like other alt med/ anti-vax proselytisers I follow, frequently critiques reality-based critics’ basic skills and formal educational achievements when they themselves leave much to be desired in these areas.
RFK Jr, super sleuth, failed to discover volumes of research establishing autism as being genetic/ pre-natal in origin and 5G as quite harmless. He writes entire books about the “dangers” of vaccination and takes testosterone despite having a serious CV condition. Not so smart.
( See also Gary Null, Mike Adams, Naomi Wolf, Steve Kirsch)

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