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Comment by aphantastic | Hacker News Reader

He is vaccinated and all of his children are as well. What specifically of his statements do you consider “anti-vax”?

Not sure if you're "playing dumb" (sometimes people do that on chat boards). Kennedy isn't just "pro-choice on vaccines", he's repeatedly amplified nonscientific views about vaccine safety. For example, as recently as 2023, "Autism comes from vaccines". Then he pivots to a more useful comment, that vaccines are exempt from the normal requirements on drugs to go through full clinical trials.

If you want to claim "autism comes from vaccines" you really have to put up some sort of evidence that supports the claim, and the reality is that there is no reliable evidence for the claim. Also, which vaccine? They use a wide range of technologies? Is it thimerosol... which isn't in any of the major vaccines used in the US today (and was unlikely to be a cause of autism in the first place, and is also still used in many contexts).

Ultimately, what RFK Jr is doing is sowing doubt in established science. I think he's doing it because he thinks the established science is corrupt, but I fail to see how he could possibly correct that while also casting doubt. If he ends up in a public health leadership position, he's going to find very quickly just how poorly his approach to public health works.

> he's repeatedly amplified nonscientific views about vaccine safety. For example, as recently as 2023, "Autism comes from vaccines".

I've heard this said in the NYT and elsewhere, but have yet to read any actual quotes of his __in context__.

> RFK Jr is doing is sowing doubt in established science.

the first rule of science is that it is never "established". This is especially true in health sciences, where thing that we were pretty sure were one way turn out not to be that way, or are much more nuanced than we thought. So challenging established thought is what scientists should be doing.

Now if RFK is a public health official then that is probably counter-productive and not really the place to be doing that. But he hasn't been a public health official to my knowledge so far.

I don't know that much about RFK but one thing I do like about him is that he's speaking out against the unhealthy processed food industry, which I don't hear hardly anyone else doing. (Lots of people say "eat healthy" but there's not that many people saying "these large multinationals are feeding you garbage for profit".

He said it on Fox. You can go view the video here: https://www.foxnews.com/video/6330950198112

When you say that science is never "Established", that's horse pockey. Established means we have a high level of confidence (not absolute). Yes, things get updated, for example we now don't go around saying that "stress causes ulcers". And when it comes to vaccines, multiple high quality studies have failed to find a relationship between vaccines and autism, while the original work has been discredited (shown to be false) and retracted. Yet the news cycle about that caused large numbers of people in the US to not get their kids vaccinated for many different things (and also blame the vaccines for their children's autism). (to be realistic, vaccines do have side effects and there is an entire program detected to detecting those problems).

As for whether he's been a public health official: no, but he has worked on environmental and public health problems before (I don't recall if this is before or after he ate so much fish he got mercury poisoning).

I don't think many people are complaining about him speaking against processed food, but again, the policy he promotes should be thoughtful, not knee-jerk.

He’ll head the Department of Health and Human Services soon, little use debating what his position is here when we will see it play out soon.

I do recommend you read his book, https://lfpl.overdrive.com/media/6093658, it seems you are of the misconception that a paper being retracted is a statement that it is false. In reality, it’s a statement that state officials (sponsored by big pharma) have threatened the livelihood of the author and/or publisher. It’s extortion, not science.

I'm sorry but I refuse to argue with people on the internet who think retractions are because the state threatened an author.

Further, I'm not going to read RFK's book. I place it in the same category as 9/11 Truthers- not even worthy of inspection.

Ah. Well that tells me all I need to know about your intellectual honesty.

I would LOVE it if there were reliable studies about whether specific vaccines cause specific conditions, how common those conditions are, etc. The CDC does not share my interest. Instead, they mostly just publish information-free booklets that attempt to guilt trip me into getting the vaccine. My experience as a parent is pediatricians attempting to coerce me to allow the vaccination of my child AND accept legal responsibility for any side effects. That is fucked up.

I was predisposed to be favorable towards vaccines when I first became a parent. But experience has taught me that those who push vaccines are simply uninterested in a convincing me, they are only interested in coercing me.

At this point if the CDC has a LOT of work to do to rebuild trust. I don't see it happening anytime soon.

In that case, you should read the book RFK Jr. published with Dr. Brian Hooker that provides a treatise on the topic, referencing 100+ published, peer reviewed studies on the topic. A free sample of the first few chapters is a available here: https://lfpl.overdrive.com/media/6093658

Of course, you should additionally read the various counter arguments that have been published, for instance: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5789217/, and likely more beyond.

Maybe the fact that he wants to let people choose whether to get vaccinated. That isn’t how we eradicated polio. It’s irresponsible.

So not “anti-vax” but rather “pro-choice”.

"anti-vaccinating people at the scale required to yield good public health outcomes" is sufficient to qualify for the label, IMO.

To be fair, vaccinating all humans, dogs, cats and other animals that can carry COVID-19 was never going to happen before the virus mutated, so you could also apply the label to reality itself.

To be fair, that’s not required to yield extremely strong public health outcomes, as evidenced by the extremely strong public health outcomes we saw in reality.

(If you’re about to go on some statistically illiterate sidebar about how the COVID vaccines weren’t actually that effective, you can save your breath)

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