As most readers likely know, while the Wall Street Journal’s news pages often have very solid, well-reported stories along with barely-rewritten corporate press releases, the editorial page is a ferocious defender of conservative values and policies. A new Journal official editorial turns a blowtorch on RFK, Jr., and deservedly so.
The immediate trigger is CDC taking up, clearly at RFK Jr.’s instigation, the quackery of depicting vaccines as being a possible cause of autism. Even though this is mainly KLG’s beat, the Journal deciding to lambaste RFK, Jr. confirms that the disgust with him has gone beyond the medical/science community and is now mainstream.
It may seem like beating a dead horse to yet again have to point out the depth and severity of RFK Jr.’s dishonesty. He has lied repeatedly to Congress and therefore the American public:
RFK Jr. not only lied to @SenBillCassidy Re: his confirmation on multiple fronts, he then lied to Congress about it…
As Sen. Cassidy reminded us, even if a witness is not sworn in “it’s against the law to lie to Congress anyway”.
Pass S.2483, investigate & impeach RFK Jr. Now. https://t.co/53cwG91kKW pic.twitter.com/bNZ4KD4hfb
— Jesse International (@jesseintl) November 20, 2025
His lies have also killed people, yet the Senate overlooked that history in confirming him, out of traditional Congressional deference to the President over his senior staffing choices. From February:
Today on the Senate floor, U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i) underscored the troubling record of President Donald Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose efforts in Samoa to deceive families about measles vaccines led to a deadly outbreak that killed more than 80 people, many of whom were young children. Schatz urged his colleagues to vote against RFK Jr. in tomorrow’s confirmation vote.
“It’s not often that the stakes of a vote to confirm a cabinet nominee are this high. But tomorrow, when we vote on the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the stakes will be life or death,” said Senator Schatz. “ Mr. Kennedy, in his words, but more importantly in his actions, has proven over and over that he is a unique danger to society. But he’s on the edge of becoming the country’s top health leader with the power to unleash bygone diseases and undermine trust in science for generations to come.”
“For the first time ever, we will have a Health Secretary who has actively helped cause outbreak instead of to contain them,” he continued. “We’ll have someone in charge of medical research who’s taken every opportunity to undermine science instead of promoting it. We’ll have someone who’s never come across a wacky idea that he didn’t like, whether it’s that antidepressants are causing mass shootings or that chemicals in the water are turning kids gay… Those two things should be immediately disqualifying.”
Schatz recounted the story of how Kennedy traveled to Samoa in 2019 to discourage people from taking the measles vaccine which ultimately led to an outbreak in which thousands of people were infected and 83, mostly children, died.
Most of Trump’s other nominees are living up to their sorry track records. Ex-Fox news host Pete Hegseth has shown his true colors as a loudmouth ex platoon sergeant hyping up his tough guy act to try to compensate for the fact that he is totally out of his depth. We warned, based on watching her carefully during the foreclosure crisis in Florida, that Pam Bondi was a corrupt political hack, a lousy prosecutor but (at least at the level of Florida) an effective bureaucratic infighter. Her limited legal skills are being exposed, most recently with the dismissal of the Department of Justice cases against James Comey and Letitia James. We could easily continue with Scott Bessent and ICE Barbie but the point should be clear: Trump repeatedly chose un or seriously underqualified candidates for their ability to deliver soundbites. And now these empty suits are doing great harm, in RFJ Jr.’s case, along predicted lines.
Back to the excoriating Journal editorial. Its opener is suitably pointed:
Who decided to leave Robert F. Kennedy Jr. home alone at the Health and Human Services Department? Without adults to supervise the Secretary, he’s damaging public trust in immunizations, and now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been conscripted into his anti-vaccine campaign.
It soon turns to the CDC’s shameful change in posture on autism:
Now it [the CDC site] explains: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism. Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”
The studies haven’t been ignored. They’ve been examined and found deeply flawed. The updated CDC website points to a study by a University of Colorado, Boulder, environmental scientist, who also happens to have written for the newsletter of Children’s Health Defense. That’s the anti-vaccine outfit that Mr. Kennedy previously ran.
The study claimed to find a strong correlation between the use in vaccines of aluminum adjuvants and rising autism in the 1980s and 1990s. These adjuvants are additives that boost the patient’s immune response. But to repeat basic logic: Correlation does not prove causation. A Danish study of more than 1.2 million children this year found no link between aluminum in vaccines and autism.
Twitter piles on:
If the RFK Jr’s CDC were really interested in conveying truth, the Autism and Vaccines page would look more like this. pic.twitter.com/OzeabbzAuc
— IntegralAnswers (@IntegralAnswers) November 22, 2025
The Journal was correct to finger RFK, Jr. personally:
Needless to say, in keeping with the Journal having roused itself to fiercely criticize RFK, Jr., high circulation media outlets piled on:
The Journal also gives a tidy, layperson-friendly debunking of RFK, Jr. scaremongering on aluminum:
He is also breaking his pledge to Mr. [Senator Bill] Cassidy [chair of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee] not to push vaccines for children off the market. Early next month Mr. Kennedy’s handpicked Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices will discuss aluminum adjuvants and could require manufacturers to remove them from vaccines. That could force a dozen vaccines out of use.
The aluminum ingredient in vaccines isn’t the same as what’s in kitchen foil. Aluminum is naturally present in plants, soil, water and many foods, including vegetables, tea and chocolate. During the first six months of life, infants ingest significantly more aluminum from breast milk or formula than they get from vaccines. But RFK Jr. is on an ideological crusade. Reformulating these vaccines with different adjuvants would cost billions of dollars and could take years.
The Journal then turns to corruption:
In other news, Mr. Kennedy last week hired Calley Means as a senior adviser. Mr. Means has made a small fortune hawking dietary supplements, which (unlike vaccines and pharmaceuticals) can be sold without proof of their effectiveness.
It’s a shame that the Journal missed the elephants in the room here. From a September post:
Let’s point out the obvious: RFK, Jr. is up to his eyeballs with conflicts of interest with respect to vaccines, not just his need to defend his history but also his current interests. Did you know that Make America Health Again is copyrighted and RFK, Jr. reported earning $100,000 in licensing fees in his financial disclosure forms?
Headlines alone tell the story:
RFK Jr. says he’s not anti-vaccine. But he could profit off claim in vaccine lawsuit. ABC
RFK Jr. plans to keep a financial stake in lawsuits against the drugmaker Merck NPR
At Hearing, Warren Slams RFK Jr. for Dangerous Conflicts of Interest, Profiting From Anti-Vaccine Conspiracies Elizabeth Warren
RFK, Jr. has also promoted wearables as part of advancing his branded MAHA agenda. From ABC:
Last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the agency was launching a campaign to encourage all Americans to use wearables to track health metrics.
Wearables come in the form of watches, bands, rings, patches and clothes that can be used for a variety of reasons including monitoring glucose levels, measuring activity levels, track heart health and observe sleeping patterns.
“It’s a way … people can take control over their own heath. They can take responsibility,” Kennedy said during a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Health. “They can see, as you know, what food is doing to their glucose levels, their heart rates and a number of other metrics as they eat it. and they can begin to make good judgments about their diet, about their physical activity, about the way that they live their lives.”
He went on, “We think that wearables are a key to the MAHA agenda — Making America Healthy Again. My vision is that every American is wearing a wearable within four years.”
Let’s turn to one he mentioned, glucose monitors. Gee, by happenstance, the Administration pick for Surgeon General, Casey Means, sells a continuous glucose monitor and a related app.
KLG explained that they’ve been demonstrated to be bunk:
The Levels [Casey Means] program, on the other hand, recommends continuous monitoring of “everything” so you can take charge of your body and your health. But as Dr. Alex Harding put it in a recent opinion piece in STAT News, Longevity Seekers Misunderstand a Fundamental Truth About Biology:
“Biohackers” and other longevity seekers…would have you believe that if you diligently measure your every bodily function and meticulously tailor your nutrition and exercise regimens, you can reprogram your body to live longer and evade dreaded diseases, just as a computer can be programmed to perform virtually any desired task.
(The) logical flaw (here) is to assume that the biological processes in your body are just as predictable and controllable as transistors on a microchip. What they don’t understand, or choose to ignore, is that the human organism is far too complex and unpredictable for that level of control.
This brings us directly back to one of the main selling points from Casey Means MD of Levels: Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) as a proxy for metabolic health. On the surface, this makes sense. If your glucose tolerance (capacity to reduce plasma glucose level after a high-glucose meal) is low, high blood glucose levels persist and will lead to a greater glycation burden. In diabetes glycation is responsible for damage to small blood vessels, which causes circulatory problems in the periphery, often leading to foot and leg amputation and vision loss due to retinal damage. This onset is insidious and must be stopped. CGM was developed for diabetics to closely monitor their blood glucose levels, and as the technology has improved it has made management of diabetes easier.
The goal of the biohacker is to use CGM to optimize his or her diet with respect to glucose levels. However, the surprising result is that CGM really doesn’t work very well. It turns out that in any given individual, the same meal does not produce the same effect on glucose levels. From the STAT News article:
The trouble is, our bodies’ glucose response to food intake is far too inconsistent to produce informative results. Researchers in a recent study fed participants identical meals separated by one week in a highly controlled hospital environment, while the participants wore continuous glucose monitors. Even when eating identical meals under these artificial conditions, the glucose measurements from a given participant looked no more similar than when the participants each ate an entirely different meal. A scatterplot the researchers made comparing the glucose results from one meal against the identical meal a week later looked like it could have been made by a person throwing darts blindfolded.
So RFK, Jr. is about to try to get Medicare, Medicaid, the VA and private insurers to pay for a fad1 among the affluent that does not work very well if at all.
The bigger reason I am not keen about RFK, Jr.’s keen interest in my extensive personal experience on the bleeding edge of dietary supplements, diet and alternative treatments. I have suffered more harm from alternative treatments than from conventional medicine, even having had a serious Covid side effect.2 And as you can imagine, I go to efforts to be careful, getting solid referrals and doing research. Don’t get me started on the product sold by multi-level marketing, or the obvious scam products on YouTube.
But even with all of the understandable reservations about research in the orthodox medicine, it’s a paragon compared to what you find in the alternative treatment arena. The “studies” are underpowered (too few participants, sample bias….). It’s doubtful that they reported on participants who dropped out (because the program bothered them? Because they were getting no benefit?) So it’s a crapshoot. And you can be harmed in more than your wallet. If I was despite investigation and having a good idea of what makes for a decent study, what about the general public?
So yes, I am very leery of a head of Health and Human Services who uses his post to promote Make America Healthy Again when he collects royalties from that name. You should be too.
Sadly, RFK, Jr. like Trump and his appointees, is highly resistant to normal shaming, so neither the Journal’s high dudgeon nor humor will drive him out of office.
RFK Hospital: A groundbreaking new series inspired by the medical advice of RFK Jr.pic.twitter.com/KupGYSFdEs
— Dr. Jonathan N. Stea (@jonathanstea) November 22, 2025
Perhaps he’ll fall victim to his own bad advice?
_______
1 The only way to have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting with hailing distance of having “every American” sporting a wearable.
2 Took 2 attempts at outpatient surgery, the second successful, so this was costly. And I made a point of not taking an mRNA vaccine, viewing them as too experimental. I had had only one J&J shot.
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Oh my! Oh my! Epstein meant privatization of top diplomacy. Kennedy means privatization of top public HC position. What’s this? Anarco-neo-libertarianism? I am running out of prefixes.
You could take it that all these attacks on RJK jr may be part of some internal struggle for power in DC or perhaps an effort to knock out a Trump ally to weaken him. I am wondering though if there may be a more mundane explanation for what is going on. Take a look at the media attacks on him which was led by the Wall Street Journal. You have to ask yourself how many reporters, editors, etc. that work for those media corporations have children and/or grandchildren. And that what RFK jr’s actions are a direct threat to them and that he is now a clear and present danger to them. Letting measles run free is just a start but letting a dozen vaccines go out of use because he has a kooky theory about aluminum adjuvants and wants them removed is just nuts. The writing is on the wall that America will become a hotbed for all sorts of preventable diseases because a guy who isn’t even a doctor and may be getting his ideas from 4chan is now in charge of America’s health for the next three years. He has to go.
” a fad among the affluent ”
Perhaps those “love poems” are another “fad among the affluent” that RFK,Jr follows. The Due Dissidence boys try to explain it all through their laughter. Warning: “felching” explanation is not for the faint of heart.
This suggests that aluminum in vaccines is benign, which contradicts the design purpose of an adjuvant. It is supposed to mimic a pathogen and provoke the immune system to react against it, as opposed to breast milk or formula. There is also a difference of a single concentration spike of aluminum vs. persistent low concentration. It doesn’t prove a long term harm, but it presents a potential for it.
No that is not correct. Do not Make Shit Up.
See KLG below: ” It does not mimic the antigen/pathogen.”
Yet people like you completely ignore all the background toxicity of short term profit and only fixate on vaccines. Especially when its framed as a freedom and liberty choice vs big gov public dynamic. All of which leans heavily towards an ideological frame work of the world based on markets and some deity rewarding the winnars. From the same sorts in the past that supported monopolies just on the notion of shareholder value and zero social good. Its absurd.
Worst of all these sort promote a total collapse of society, sinners go to hell, righteous ascend or lived, and ring in the new utopia.
RFK, Jr is a world class grifter, just like his boss, the POTUS.
I don’t believe there is connection between vaccines and autism but I get so tired of these people acting like mercury/aluminum ingestion is somehow the same as direct blood stream injection. It’s not. It’s one of the reason inhalation is more of a problem that consumption because of how it enters ur blood stream.
Going back to my first production of reagent antibodies in rabbits 40 years ago, it is my understanding that an adjuvant enhances the immune response to an antigen during vaccination. It does not mimic the antigen/pathogen. Some object to Wikipedia, but this description is correct and straightforward and explains aluminum as an adjuvant. The primary adjuvant used in the laboratory is Freund’s Complete, which contains heat-killed Mycobacterium extraxct. The enhanced response to the Mycobacterium antigens leads to an enhanced response to the specific antigen, usually a pure protein or fragments thereof. If you mistake Freund’s incomplete adjuvant for the complete in subsequent injections, the rabbit is likely to die of anaphylactic shock.
Having said that, aluminum can be a poison, as Buddy Ebsen found out the hard way. But the miniscule amount of aluminum in an intramuscular injection of a vaccine preparation is unlikely to cause any harm, while enhancing the immune response.
At one time, there was some talk of aluminum from cookware contributing to Alzheimer’s disease. That is a rabbit hole to be avoided.
It’s most interesting that the 1st and 2nd most settlement prone, fined and penalized sectors of the USA economy, by a very large margin, are the tag team duo Financial Services and Pharmaceuticals, who together during the 2020 2024 period racked up $65 billion and $59 billion respectively.
However, as AI cannot confirm any successful conviction rate for either sector, it is reasonable to suggest that government agencies tasked with monitoring and regulating these serial offenders are themselves serial offenders in neglecting their core mission duty and service to the public.
Might this trio share common interests, say like with the SV40 (Simiais Virus) for example.
SV40 had a proven negligent role in the Polio Vaccine 1955 to 1963, however, extensive studies conducted by ‘regulatory’ agencies concluded those contaminated vaccines did not cause health effects in humans – but research continues (in 2025) to examine SV40’s biology.
How come?
Research into SV40 is continuing 60 years later because it’s a foundational tool for investigating fundamental mechanisms of oncogenesis (how cells become cancerous).
So no harm in Polio Vaccines but foundational for cancer – research.
Might the monopolies of Finance, Pharma and Government be more than we bargained for?
Dr Suzanne Humphries shines some light on that
https://x.com/DrSuzanne7/status/1988666633251172523
SV40 (Simian vacuolating virus 40/Simian Virus 40) did contaminate some cell lines used to produce the Sabin polio vaccine through 1963. SV40 was identified in the late-1950s IIRC. The first papers on it were published in 1961. There was no way to know some of the cultured cell lines used to produce the Sabin vaccine were contaminated with SV40. Today the assay could be completed an hour.
Negligent? I do not understand the use of this word here. There is no evidence that those who were exposed to SV40 through the Sabin vaccine got cancer at a higher rate than those who were not exposed. There was no SV40 in vaccines produced after 1963.
The oncogenic potential of SV40 is mediated by its Large T-antigen; a similar protein is found in other cancer-causing viruses such as oncogenic human papilloma virus (HPV). These proteins act by interfering with the tumor suppressors p53 and Rb, which leads to unregulated cell proliferation and tumor growth.
Dr. Suzanne Humphries is connected to RFKJr’s anti-vaccine Children’s Health defense. Caveat emptor.
KLG was far too polite. Humpries is an anti-vax nutter. We don’t allow commenters who pollute the site with crankery.
Robert Kennedy (RFK, Jr.) is married to actress Cheryl Hines who played Larry David’s fictional wife on Curb Your Enthusiasm (Curb). In one episode, Cheryl leaves Larry because Larry was preoccupied with the Tivo guy. Larry then tells Jeff that he would have been ok had Cheryl left him for a bald man, but Cheryl’s new boyfriend has “thick Kennedy like hair.” Interesting coincidence.
Earlier Curb seasons were quite funny with great storytelling and character development. Curb jumped the shark around the time of Larry’s fictional divorce with Cheryl. (Larry David apparently had a real life divorce, which he mirrored in the show.) Do yourself a favor and do not watch anything past Season 8. The show devolves into a never-ending cascade of one-time guest characters and recurring characters treating Larry like garbage and Larry responding as a curmudgeon. Cheryl’s character in earlier seasons helped to prevent this.
Because I wrote the preceding two paragraphs, I watched some Curb clips on Youtube, and I saw an image of RFK, Jr. for the first time. Unsurprisingly, Kennedy and Hines have some pretty strange medical beliefs. Both of them look unhealthy from too many drugs and cosmetic surgeries. Everything about Kennedy—his words, lies, inconsistencies, appearance, and greed—suggests that he so incompetent that he must be promoted. Has Kennedy even talked to or read the works of any doctor or medical scientist in ten years? Meanwhile, the awful plastic surgery Hines has undergone does not hide her age or disappointment from guilt by association with her husband. Hines probably shared a good number of laughs off-camera with the other Curb actors and their antagonism to Larry the character. Cheryl the person apparently didn’t learn anything from Cheryl the character. A good number of Youtube clips show Hines defending her odious (real life) husband.