Comment by discretion22 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by discretion22 | Hacker News Reader

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It seems to me that there are two different things being conflated. I've listened to a number of his interviews and do confess he's not always easy to follow but this seems partly due to a history of speech problems which he has worked to overcome.

There is consensus (even by RFK Jr from what I hear in interviews) that vaccines confer good immunity to the population and help control serious diseases that historically killed or maimed millions of people.

There is also an argument RFK Jr. makes which is that the vaccine solutions contain many harmful components other than the actual vaccine and these components are responsible for many harmful outcomes due to their presence. These harmful side effects should not be considered acceptable and there should be work to eliminate these harms because they are not really acceptable.

However, these positions seem to be routinely headlined as being anti-vaccine. They are not. The argument is anti-harm and that seems to be something people would normally support. Only through misrepresentation of his comments do people come to believe he is against vaccines and he should be "rightly maligned".

His interview with Jordan Peterson was very interesting, especially as it did highlight some of RFK Jr's blindspots on politics. Worth taking time to listen to the whole thing even though it is quite long.

> There is also an argument RFK Jr. makes which is that the vaccine solutions contain many harmful components

.. and he started down that path by repeating, without checking, highly bogus discredited "science" about the harmful effects of thimerosal and a deliberate widespread conspiracy regarding its use.

When he jumped on that public bandwagon it had already been out of use for more than a decade after being used for some two decades prior in trace amounts that caused not great issues.

Everything he said was either false, 30 years out of date, or both.

He really hasn't improved much since.

Remember when pharma companies rolled out a vaccine in record time with nearly zero safety or efficacy studies and claimed it was both safe and effective and got lots of media and researchers to parrot the same. And then when asked for data they said it shouldn’t be made public for something like 50 years? And then we learned it wasn’t nearly as safe as claimed and a lot of the impossible to spread from the injection site claimed were untrue at scale and whatever measure of effectiveness used didn’t include immunity or transmission. History is littered with junk science claims by entities with financial incentives. Unfortunately, there are probably also incentives to identify risk in competitors products.

Unfortunately, “science” has done a good job of discrediting itself lately and shown to be susceptible to corruption, influence, and outright fabrication. How can anyone trust a paper discrediting another any more than the original research when the liability associated with those harmful effects would be astronomically damaging to influential organizations?

I don’t have any issues with most traditional, dead virus vaccines, but also have no trust in pharma or even public institutions to do what’s in the public’s best interest when it is not aligned with theirs or causes other harm to them.

We need more pharma sceptics, imho. They hold a considerable amount of power over the population and take in absurd profits in the process. Anyone who challenges that will be misrepresented and maligned publicly, if not removed through more violent means. I’m sure Kennedy’s know that more than most dynasty families.

I remember when the COVID-19 pandemic first appeared and the R values were announced.

I remember immediately volunteering to be part of locally run trials to test probably suitable vaccine classes already in the pipeline and I remember being an active part of a trial within months.

I recall the planning and the effort spent to bring modern critical path JIT approaches to traditional vaccine development that ran multiple variations of every traditional stage as much in parallel as possible thereby shortening the entire runway without compressing the neccesary time for each critical stage.

I recall having discussions with a world renowned epidemiologist from here in my home state who I worked with as a young student in mathematics some 40 years ago about the quality of the science and the diligence being taken.

History is littered with easily disproven junk science claims by political entities that play to feelings of the masses by saying whatever plays to their base.

Here is one of many articles covering RFK's antivaccine conspiracy stance: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-robert-f-kenn...

I use that phrase because it is an accurate descriptor. He has literally published articles claiming a grand conspiracy to poison Americans, rejecting all data from repeated vaccine trials and studies by the international scientific community.

Vaccine trials use the real vaccine that would go to consumers, all of it. There is robust study of the whole package, not just the component that interacts with the immune system.

RFK is a bogus baseless conspiracy theorist, regardless of his current PR campaign.

His thoughts have lots of traction, I think he needs to be engaged and not dismissed as a joke. There is a lot of distrust on the right in how covid played out. We are all on the same team here and everyone would be better off if we all realized it. The other side is not evil, they are trying to do what they think is best for everyone.

Most evil people had good intentions.

Not sure that's true, but I'm sure that people with good intentions who are very stupid do often cause unintended harm.

(Here by "stupid" I mostly mean "unable to perceive the world accurately, relative to other people with the same resources at their disposal, and unable to differentiate objective reality from false ideas that make them feel good in some way".)

> misrepresentation of his comments

"We need to, prior to licensing vaccines, do gold standard safety testing, like every other drug approval requires. We need to do double-blind placebo testing."

- We do mate.

Kennedy also said that he wanted to ensure “that vaccines are subject to the same kind of safety scrutiny and safety testing that other drugs are subject to."

- They are already subjected to more safety scrutiny and more safety testing.

"the hepatitis B vaccines that are currently approved had fewer than five days of safety testing."

- 2 years of human clinical trials is a longer length of time than 5 days.

If there were significant harms then they would arise is the rigorous trials done before a vaccine is released. This isn’t exactly an unstudied area and his extraordinary claims have no scientifically reviewed evidence. He’s just a guy saying things.

> rigorous trials

Good thing we don't have any warp speed vaccines that compress this vital process!

mRNA vaccines have been studied for decades. Vaccinations in general, for significantly longer.

Specifically, how many studies, and for what length, would you have been satisfied with? What is your specific epidemiological and medical background that led you to decide on that length of time? What is the specific number of elderly deaths you would have allowed, before giving people the completely optional ability to take those vaccines?

I ask none of those questions in bad faith, but I'm rather tired of the 'no no no no' attitude on the right, where nothing was ever going to be good enough and the real answer you want is that we should've vaccinated no one at all, ever.

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