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Even the Wall Street Journal’s Editors Have Had It With RFK, Jr.’s Anti-Vax Con Job

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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 released, 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:

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 her 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:

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.

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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