Round up the usual quacks
The new members of US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s panel of vaccine advisers will review long-approved immunisation schedules for children and teens. The seven members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (Acip) met for the first time on Wednesday, weeks after Kennedy ousted all 17 of their predecessors.
The Acip recommends who should be vaccinated and when these immunisations should occur to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Ahead of the meeting, public health experts and politicians raised concerns about the qualifications of the new members – several of whom are vaccine critics.
Who the hell wants immunity from dangerous diseases anyway? Getting extremely sick builds character. Dying builds character x 11.
The health secretary sparked uproar when he removed all of Acip’s members on 9 June, and then hand-picked eight new members to serve on the panel – including one who dropped out hours before the first meeting.
You can see why that would stir uproar. The health secretary has no medical education or training. The health secretary is an ignorant conceited meddler who should be nowhere near any medical job of any kind whatsoever. The health secretary is a rank amateur who would be a failing insurance marketer if his name were not Kennedy.
Wednesday’s meeting began with the new chair Dr Martin Kulldorff telling the panel that he was fired from his job as a professor at Harvard University because he refused to get a Covid-19 vaccine.
Dr Kulldorff also announced the panel would launch new working groups to examine child vaccination schedules and vaccines that were approved seven or more years ago.
It’s just so much fun to be all rebellious and contrarian and shit, because you get to put the health of millions of people at risk. Oh boy, Ma, let me at it!
On Thursday, the group is scheduled to hear a presentation on the use of thimerosal in vaccines given by Lyn Redwood, a former leader of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group Kennedy used to run. Ms Redwood has been hired by the CDC to work in its vaccine safety office, according to the BBC’s US partner CBS News.
The decision for the panel to discuss thimerosal – a mercury-based preservative that has not been used in most vaccines for decades – was perplexing, Prof Hanage said. In the past, he added, Acip’s members had a wide range of vaccine expertise and would scrutinise vaccine recommendations for months. This time, Kennedy chose a panel of “people that are like him – people in the past who have shown an anti-vaccine bias”, said Dr Paul Offit, a former Acip member and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Cranks and quacks, in short. Way to make Murka great again.
I think they may actually mean that dying removes the weak from the population. Scary if they really think that.
That’s how social Darwinism works. The trouble is that wealth and social status ≠ intelligence, so we mostly end up with idiots running things. Survival of the shittiest.
The thing most people don’t realize is that, without vaccines and other modern medicines, they might actually be one of the ones who is selected against. Before modern medicine, even rich kids died. Would Kennedy have been selected for if he was born in a time before we had all the medicines he now is trying to end? It’s anyone’s guess.
If most diseases were bad enough that not getting vaccinated removed anti-vaxxers from the population I would approve. Unfortunately that’s not a 1:1 correlation so causality is harder to prove.
BKiSA, I could agree, but only if it only removes anti-vaxxers. I have no truck with people who put immunocompromised people in danger. And I’m a bit of a misanthrope, so that’s quite a step for me. ‘;-)