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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

Yeah he seems like an idiot. Don't care. We need to protect the ability for people to say crazy and unpopular things or the power will be abused to censor people who aren't crazy, just unpopular. Which is already happening.

Ignaz Semmelweis was persecuted in the medical community for his insane idea that doctors working in maternity wards should wash their hands and he later died in a pysch ward from his mental breakdown over it. If it happened today he would have been banned from YouTube too.

We're not post-science, in 2020 people were ridiculed and banned from social media for saying covid came from a lab and that's a pretty accepted theory now. I'm sick of only hearing popular opinions that are run by as brand-friendly from banks and payment processors. I want to hear from people who say things that aren't popular.

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I wasn't familiar with that story, so I read a brief summary. That anecdote mostly predates the modern scientific method, taking place in the 1840s. PNAS, for example, wasn't founded until 1915, and double-blind testing didn't begin formally until 1950[0]. Anecdotes like that are exactly what informs our modern scientific method. Medical research doesn't occur in the form of politicians spreading thoroughly debunked misinformation on YouTube. There is no legitimate research being suppressed here. Real research occurs in well-established journals, with well-understood and justified research methodologies. There is still room for improvement, of course, in both research and practice. But these days, the incentives are mostly well aligned to prevent that kind of story happening, and get the best results out to people as soon as possible. You will have a hard time coming up with a modern example of overlooked medical research that is well supported by research.

> I want to hear from people who say things that aren't popular.

Why, though? What have you gotten out of that experience? Are you an expert in epidemiology and immunology, to evaluate the studies yourself? You can't "decide for yourself" in the field of medical research. You need years of education and a career to even begin to operate in that arena. You need to rely on experts and the established methods and organizations to do the research and synthesize best practices. If you really want to contribute to the conversation about immunology and vaccine safety, you need to go get a medical degree and hop into the established field of research. If you can't do that (I sure can't!), then you need to trust real medical experts. Politicians on YouTube are not real medical experts.

RFK Jr isn't proselytizing some new, well-supported medical theory rejected by the establishment. He's just spouting complete nonsense that has been debunked to an absolutely ludicrous degree. Spreading this misinformation has a real, human cost. Vaccine refusal is directly responsible for tens of thousands of preventable deaths in the US annually[1,2]. Spreading medical misinformation has real, serious consequences. It is absolutely correct for platforms that care about public health to refuse to provide people like RFK Jr a megaphone.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_history_of_the...

[1] https://globalepidemics.org/vaccinations/

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/adults/vpd.html

> He's just spouting complete nonsense that has been debunked to an absolutely ludicrous degree

As someone who has only recently become aware of rfk in any form other than people referring to him as a kook, I'm surprised by statements like these.

Maybe his positions in the past were more extreme? This is from a town hall tonight, I'm curious if this is the kind of complete nonsense that you mean:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KLxBwIupF88

The highlights seem to be that he and his kids are vaccinated, but that he wants to see childhood vaccines subjected to placebo controlled trials (and he claims with some substantiation that the existing ones have not had placebo controlled trials, though I can't validate that).

I don't know, it didn't seem all that whacky to me.

What you're missing is the "why?". Why is vaccine safety such an important issue to him that he's bringing it up during a presidential candidate town hall? What problem is he trying to fix with these new studies? The answer is he's bought into a bunch of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. His demand for improved vaccine safety is based on a false premise that vaccines cause various problems. That premise is what has been thoroughly discredited, and everything about his argument falls apart from there. He's not trying to fix any real problem, because there is no problem to fix. The only result here is spreading misinformation about vaccine safety, which increases vaccine hesitancy, which increases preventable deaths.

There are plenty of links to sources on his Wikipedia page, if you'd like more information.

> Why is vaccine safety such an important issue to him that he's bringing it up during a presidential candidate town hall?

I didn't catch this particular part of the live broadcast, but if it's anything like the rest of it, either the moderator or the audience asked him about it.

It seems like everyone associates him with vaccines, so it's a question that would obviously come up in the context of "how are you not a kook", and so he has to talk about it. I've seen him say explicitly in another interview that he's not running on vaccines, but if people ask him about it he'll respond.

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