Robert F. Kennedy, Jr Thinks You're Stupid

RFK Jr’s been on TV a lot lately and every time he says something worse. Between his frequent bullshit and my month-old son’s needing things like food and diaper changes, I haven’t been able to keep up.

Recently he had an interview where he said - trying to defend his terrible leadership as Texas faces its largest measles outbreak and the US sees multiple deaths due to measles - “we’re always going to have measles no matter what, as the vaccine wanes quickly.” He also stated “we need to do better at treating kids who have this disease, and not just saying the only answer is vaccination.” He’s literally the guy in the hot dog suit from that sketch from I Think You Should Leave going “we’re all trying to find the guy that did this.” He’s literally partially responsible for these outbreaks and these deaths are on his hands, AND he sent even more kids to the hospital with Vitamin A toxicity, but he’s gonna try and deflect.

While yes, an antiviral treatment for measles would be nice, the best solution remains to not get measles at all because while some kids and adults bounce back, too many end up hospitalized and now multiple are dead. I pointed this out and someone tried to reply that “measles are deaths are rare, we should investigate the hospital!” But they forgot that the reason measles deaths are so rare is because we had literally eliminated the disease by 2000, due to high vaccination rates. When we stopped vaccinating, disease rates rose and therefore deaths are happening, and it is entirely preventable.

His line about the vaccine waning quickly is also incorrect, obviously. The disease was eliminated because we vaccinated widely - that two-dose series conveys nearly lifelong immunity for most people (even one dose is 93%!) and it’s rare that people require additional doses except in certain circumstances.

Kennedy is saying these things after he announced that he would “determine the cause” of autism by September. Sure, he eliminated most of the staff that was working on autism spectrum disorder and people have been researching the cause for decades and we have many studies assessing vaccines, environmental toxins, and other factors all proving what doesn’t cause autism and pointing to the fact that it’s likely genetics even though we haven’t figure out exactly what genes yet. But RFK Jr’s gonna bring in new people and figure it out in five months! I guess that’s easy to do when you have a foregone conclusion and you plan to just manipulate research to conform to it. RFK Jr has profited for decades by spreading misinformation about vaccines, going so far as to say “There is no vaccine that is safe or effective.”

David Geier has been tapped to lead the study to “find the cause” of autism. He’s a charlatan who was convicted of practicing medicine without a license and sold harmful therapies like chelation, and promotes anti-vaccine rhetoric, which is exactly what he’ll do with this “study” - which will just be more propaganda (for more, here’s an article by the always-knowledgeable Dr. Andrea Love).

Meanwhile Peter Marks (previously the Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, who oversaw the Food & Drug Administration’s vaccination programs) and Kevin Hall (top nutrition and metabolism scientist at the National Institutes of Health) have been forced out of their positions not because they weren’t excellent at their jobs (which they were) but due to censorship and preconceived narratives. Dr. Marks said in his resignation letter, “However, it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.” Dr. Hall, in his letter, states that he was unwilling to conform his research to “fully support preconceived narratives of [NIH] leadership about ultra-processed food addiction.”

It’s important to note that RFK Jr is saying all this and claiming that he is undermining vaccines for the sake of kids with autism. As I told someone recently, I have many fact-based reasons to hate on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, but there’s also the fact that every time he opens his mouth, he lets us know how uninformed and incompetent he is for the job in which he was placed (but thank God he isn’t Black or any of that other DEI stuff, amirite?). He literally does not understand the people he is supposedly trying to “make healthy again.” At the press conference where he discussed finding the cause of autism, he stated it was because autistic children “will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date, many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

That pissed a lot of people off, including all the autistic people who do…all of those things every day.

Yes, some autistic kids are disabled or severely nonverbal, and I don’t want to diminish those parents’ point of view. Emily May and others have pointed out that RFK Jr is “talking about their kids” (May acknowledges that vaccines did not cause the autism, but that doesn’t make it any less difficult to parent). Kids (and adults) who are rendered nonverbal or otherwise severely disabled by their autism deserve a huge amount of support and services, as do their parents.

However, RFK Jr goes on to paint all autistic folks with the same disabled brush, the first thing he talked about was inability to pay taxes implying that they’re an undue burden on society. He refers to autism as a disease and an epidemic, neither of which it is (increased ability to recognize and diagnose something does not make it an epidemic - Dr. Love talks more about this in this article).

He doesn’t talk about autistic folks as people, he talks about them as weapons in his war on vaccines. He uses them as anecdotal “proof” despite better-quality evidence that vaccines did not cause their condition. And again, if he was really concerned about disability, he would not have cut massive amounts of the funding for newborn screenings or research into developmental disabilities or autism.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. thinks we’re all idiots who cannot see that he is completely incapable of making America healthy. He must resign or be fired.