Comment by ifyoubuildit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ifyoubuildit | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com