RFK Jr. forces out FDA's top vaccine scientist, Peter Marks
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The wealth gap in America has pushed a larger amount of the population into ever tightening economic situations.. the psychological aspect of this brings people to want other people to feel suffering if they are.
Unfortunately the population is being fed fake enemies by the people in leadership positions.
It’s natural to respond to threats, and so they are.
Step 2. Use conservative media to make people hate those things.
Step 3. Get elected on the basis of manufactured hate.
Step 4. Get rid of your political obstacles.
Since the Southern Strategy, American conservativism has been encouraging and weaponizing hate for votes.
And since the gutting and exiling of mainstream conservatives ~2019+, it's fair to say they're now primarily a party of hate. (Both in their elected officials and supporters)
It isn't about actual slights against conservatives by liberals -- at this point those are only rhetorical cover for doing what they want to politically.
We tend not to use those words when we have an honest intent to understand someone else’s position.
You also have access to the internet so have the ability to find well written and thought out discussions of the other side when it comes to vaccines and Peter Mark’s opinions.
If all you do is consume media from your side of course the other side appears to make no sense.
If you want a good place to start you can look at the controversy of Mark’s overruling of FDA review teams to approve Elevidys which I would argue raises questions as to his judgement.
If I were to summarize the disagreement in the most neutral terms, it’s the risk vs benefit of vaccines.
And like all risk vs benefit choices, it comes down to a choice - there is no one right answer, it’s a value judgement. I work in the industry so see this all the time - someone makes the call “we have enough data to confidently say X”. People disagree all the time over this. You can always get more data to be more sure, but at some point you start wasting your time.
I’d say the argument from the RFK side is we don’t know enough about the safety of certain vaccines to make the risk vs benefit argument of mandatory vaccination. The same argument for food additives like red dye.
Marks likely disagrees - as is evident from him overruling 3 different teams on Elevidys - a drug that failed phase 3 yet Mark’s decided the risk vs benefit was good enough for FDA approval.
And before anyone says “yeah but look at the kooky things that side says”, you can do that for any argument. Even the pro-vaccine side says untrue things but that doesn’t mean the core argument doesn’t have validity.
Consider the measles vaccine. In the last 60 years in the US around 200 million people have been vaccinated with it. That has generated a lot of data on its safety and effectiveness. And not just short term safety--we've got plenty of data from people who were vaccinated in childhood and are now retired so we've got good data on long term safety too.
This data overwhelmingly says that is is extremely safe and effective.
The RFK Jr side has no statistically significant data to counter that, yet they still say it is not safe or not effective.
Or alternatively, I could understand if your concern with Elevidys was so glaringly bad as to drive single-issue support (and then it would strike me as worth it to actually investigate), but your "raises questions" wouldn't seem to indicate that either.
Every day we get new affirmation of the incompetence and malice of the Trump administration. The people in charge of the futures and lives of millions, such as RFK, don’t have public welfare or health in the front of their minds. Nor can they admit their own ignorance or acknowledge mistakes.
Asking one side to have an honest intent to understand and consider positions that have no basis in fact or reality or scientific method amounts to asking scientists to have an open mind about astrology, Ouija boards, and repeatedly discredited junk science. Of the two possibilities — RFK et al. know something the rest of us don’t about disease and vaccines, or he knows nothing and suffers from egomania — I think the evidence speaks for itself.
Dr. Fauci and others may have made mistakes, but they can admit to their mistakes in the face of enormous pressure to act and save lives. They didn’t make mistakes out of colossal stupidity, ignorance, and drug abuse.
Faced with flat earthers it makes no sense to teach the controversy. Instead rub their nose in theirown mesd. Let them be embarrassed instead because while they are unsalvable as human beings their humiliation may help salvage others more worthy.
I think you'll find it much easier in the future that if you find yourself disagreeing with the current administration, then you should assume you are wrong and missing some critical information.
Thinking that you know more than our betters is a quick way to get a taxpayer funded trip to El Salvador
This can be leveraged by the rich to get the poor to help make them (the rich) richer, and they'll install whoever they owe a favor to in whatever government post because they care about nothing.
Making it "only 2 sexes lol" is bad faith, incorrect semantics, or just bad branding to frame it that way. Semantics aside, what it's really about is that some people feel psychologically different than their biological gender. If you frame it that way, there's no reasonable option other than to give them freedom and acceptance. Hence, "only 2 sexes lol" and other distractions like "won't someone think of the children".
I'm not trans so I don't understand it from personal experience, but it's not in my nature to write off surprising or counterintuitive behaviors as wrong.
Of note on the "2 sexes" subject btw:
- are there actually "only 2 sexes" in context of the genetically intersex?
- the dialogue usually isn't "there's no such thing as a simple biological sex of male or female for most people!!!!", and most people seem to confuse gender with sex or are just seeking excuses to hate on other people.
- many have been trying to suppress reasonable conversation, which is making it harder to just explain things to people. But a lot of us don't even bother trying to explain personally for ourselves when most conversations end up being exhausting bad-faith arguments just to justify our existence to someone spitting some points they heard on a podcast once. So it does tend to mean not a lot of us are going around just trying to explain to everyone like glorified jehovah's witnesses, and the popular perception is pretty distorted from the actual situation on the ground.
There was no significant difference in COVID deaths in places that did draconian shutdowns and the places that did not. Not in Florida, not in Sweden, not anywhere else.
Fine, we didn't know what COVID could do, and maybe it was prudent to be cautious. Rushing vaccines through certification is the opposite of that though.
And lastly there is the tale of massive corruption. A certain Ursula bought so many vaccine doses they could last a century if they had no expiration dates. These were bought with money that could have gone to much better uses than lining Pfizer's pockets. The same kind of corruption happened stateside too, it's just that the "free media" happened to stay mum.
Now go hit that downvote button and keep pretending you are smarter than everyone, nobody could ever fool you, and anyone who disagrees with you must be subhuman.
They worked?
Abysmal compared to what? In hindsight? Millions of lives saved in the face of a novel pathogen and public panic. The only people who lost confidence sit in the White house, pretending they know better than people who learned to read.
I don't know how you can possibly believe that. I think you are being disingenuous and it's impossible to discuss anything like this
Trump set that up. And he pushed COVID vaccines fairly hard at least for a while.
But of course this is a way too controversial / conspiracy way of thinking, that it's ridiculous and even dangerous and you shouldn't even be allowed to talk about it.
But maybe that is also a bit crazy actually, because what if it's true? And they make you afraid and shameful for talking about it? And like that they have everyone under their control. I find it suspicious that it's so looked down upon to even question things about vaccines.
Why don't people focus on their general health instead of taking more and more medicines and vaccines and whatnot. I believe if we start eating more healthy, clean the pollution out of our environments, supplement our bodies with nutritions we need that we lack in the food we eat (nutritional value has dropped due to pollution of our environment), drink enough clean water, be in nature a bit more, that we will build such a strong immune system that we need much less medicines and vaccines.
I believe that there's a yawning epistemological void built into this way of thinking that makes it unlikely that it will result in better health outcomes for anyone. However, I think a narrative most people can agree with is that a broken food system and healthcare system have fostered mistrust of the medical and public health establishment among many and driven people to seek alternative ways of finding "truth" and understanding the world around them.
I don't trust governments and big corporations in general. And I find it amazing how many people are so trustworthy about a new vaccine technology that hasn't been tested widely, globally organized by mayor governments and big corporations. And I've done a lot of research about it and I'm not convinced about the effectiveness of it. There are many studies with different results, that can be interpreted in many ways, could have been mangled with / cherry picked, has many parameters influencing it, etc.
And I find it weird that there is so little attention to so many obvious improvements we can make in our health and environment. But we do have the money for LBQT+ projects in South Africa or something.
And then if someone comes along who kind of questions it a little bit, he is condemned by a lot of people like he's some kind of psycho.
If I put that all together in one equation, I get a big frown. Not a trustworthy feeling.
It's easy and cheap in terms of time to whatabout, while costly in terms of time to cite ones sources.
Consequently, it's time-effective to troll via whataboutism, without any intention of having a substantive discussion.
For example,
> ... new vaccine technology that hasn't been tested widely... There are many studies with different results, that can be interpreted in many ways, could have been mangled with / cherry picked, has many parameters influencing it, etc.
That's easy to say, in the same way I could say,
'All vaccines that are approved for mass US use go through rigorous safety studies and demonstrate negligible to no safety concerns at scale.'
I've done a lot of research too.
Given our contradictory opinions, only facts actually matter.
Unfortunately, media-style driveby fact pulling has become the standard there as well. I.e. 'Look at this one study I found that supports my position.'
With regards to the measles vaccine and similar widely deployed ones, it is scientifically defensible to say there haven't been issues at scale. (Because we would have seen them)
And with regards to newer mRNA platforms, the irony is that they're conceptually safer than traditional vaccines, because we're skipping intermediate biological steps and directly creating the outcomes we want, rather than trusting our (incredibly complex) immune systems to get things right.
Time will tell on long term results, but from a pathways perspective I'd take a newer mRNA vaccine over a newer live/attenuated vaccine any day of the week.
And we should all try to value each others' passion, whether or not we agree.
The issue with this line of thinking is that the brainrot has taken hold of significant numbers of people even in societies with working healthcare and food system (although not completely sure what that is).
For reasons we don't fully understand (but probably have something to do with the ubiquity of highly processed, low nutrition, low fiber, high calorie density foods -- plus the lack of time to cook and the breaking-up of family & community fabrics among lower income communities), we've created a society that makes more of us fat, more than our first world peers, even while dangling many Americans (especially children and the poor) over the precipice of starvation. This is a broken food system.
We have similar issues with health care: we spend more on healthcare than any other country in the world, by a mile. The US spends about 1.5x to 3x per capita on healthcare (adjusted for PPP) compared to most of the other OECD countries. However, our health outcomes are... not great. We hover around 50th place in the world on most metrics, close to Panama. Additionally, our healthcare system is byzantine and deeply, deeply painful to interact with.
If people in countries with high-performing health and food systems are getting infected with America's particular brand of brain worms, all I have to say is: you really don't understand how good y'all have it in this particular respect, and consider that mistrust of government regulation may worsen the situation, not improve it.
You (Americans) are not that special :). Antivax brainrot was started by that Wakefield study in the UK, distrust of government/establishment is and was widespread in many countries, sometimes for good reasons. Moreover many of the brainrot-infected people actually have it good and don't need any regime change. What I think has actually happenned is that spreading disinformation has become cheap thanks to soc. networks and that was then weaponised by the most unscrupulous people. This is not connected to any physical reality except access to capital by the baddies. What is now happenning is the disinformation beast - the name for that which I like is disordered discourse - has to be perpetually fed or it will eat even those who it brought to power. So now it is destroying institutions. It will get worse everywhere, I'm afraid.
Why are these mutually exclusive? The scientific community agrees that Americans have unhealthy diets and lifestyles and that this needs to be addressed. They also agree that it is good for people to spend time in nature and that some exposure to pathogens helps in building immunity (this is actually the idea behind vaccines).
> Well, maybe, it could be, perhaps, that the vaccines were not that effective as they were marketed, has there been mangled / cherrypicked with data
The “vaccines cause autism” study is the definition of manipulated and cherry-picked data, yet RFK Jr still pushes it and claims like it. You don’t have scientific evidence on your side that proves vaccines are dangerous/causing health problems, so why should anyone take your claims seriously? Vague statements like “what if it’s true” is not good policy.
Yes, but the new mRNA vaccines work in a very different way. Normally you would need to take a vaccine one or two times, in a span of several years or even just one time in your life, and then you trained your imune system against the pathogen.
With mRNA vaccines, you are not really protected against the pathogen, you are still vulnerable, although supposedly less. And you need to take boosters kind of regularly.
Apart from that, mRNA is a very new technology that hasn't been tested a lot. Normally a vaccine has a testing period of 5-15 years before it is deployed to the public. That is to me a valid reason to be sceptical about the technology, and I find it suspicious that there is so much opposition to people that are sceptical about it.
> Why are these mutually exclusive?
Not saying they are, but there's a right balance between them, like everything. I remember a lot of studies showing that Vitamin D treatment was just as effective as the vaccine, but there wasn't much attention for it, probably because you can't patent it and make lots of money with.
> Vague statements like “what if it’s true” is not good policy.
There are lots of things to question and to be sceptical about. I think many people are prejudgemental about the criticism and are closed minded about it. And then we cannot even have a healthy discussion about it. Which is a reason for many people to be more suspicious about the whole thing.
That's an incomplete understanding.
If you really want to understand vaccines, you need to start by understanding our immune system, because every vaccine platform interacts with it.
Basic primer links, in order of increasing verbosity. Note that all of these are first-semester, undergraduate-level understandings of the topic for people who actually develop drugs. The details get much more complex.
[0] https://www.cedars-sinai.org/blog/why-vaccine-boosters.html
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279364/#_i2225_whichpa...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4590614/
> With mRNA vaccines, you are not really protected against the pathogen, you are still vulnerable, although supposedly less.
You are protected against the pathogen, because you're generating the same targeted antibodies as other vaccine platforms stimulate.
Also, that mRNA injections are inherently consumed by the immune system as part of their function is specifically what increases mRNA vaccines' safety profile, as opposed to other vectors (e.g. carrier viral). [0]
The fact that boosters are needed has nothing to do with mRNA being used as a vaccine platform, but is instead a characteristic of the virus being targeted -- if you made a measels vaccine using an mRNA platform, it would also be a once-lifetime vaccine. (Because measels isn't as liable to mutate as flu-type viruses)
Why isn't that done? Because mRNA platforms are newer, and we've already figured out effective vaccines for the more "easy", less mutating viruses of consequence.
[0] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...
> I find it suspicious that there is so much opposition to people that are sceptical about it.
Because (a) COVID was a worldwide pandemic, (b) during that pandemic certain people used vaccine skepticism for political gain (whether or not it had any factual basis), and (c) there are people (RFK Jr) who make a substantial amount of money by talking/writing about vaccine skepticism.
The annoyance and hostility towards those making bad faith arguments for personal gain are less to do with closing down discussion and more to do with judging people who actively harm public health.
Or to put it another way, if RFK Jr knew that measels vaccinations would stop the outbreak in Texas, do you think he would say so?
So why do they say for the COVID vaccines that you are still able to get it? And people also do?
There is no amount of general health that is a replacement for not getting deadly diseases. We should acheive the best results by vaccination and other measures and should we deprive ourselves of this option we should not advance any of the other aspect of public health.
Let me reiterate this statement
>will build such a strong immune system that we need much less medicines and vaccines.
Is absolutely nonsense.
There is no substitute for not getting deadly health destroying diseases. General public health is a slog that if it improves it will do so over many years and it will do so faster if people get fewer deadly diseases.
Then we can still of course have certain medicines for people with lowered immune system.
And regarding pollution, I think we should get rid of it, but also adjust for it as long as it's there, by supplementing our bodies with the nutrients lacking in our diet because of the current pollution.
That's not how viral genetic evolution or our immune systems work.
R0 isn't typically effected by the strength of a population's immune systems, but the severity of symptoms is.
That's because the most infectious time is during initial viral replication and shedding, before your immune system has scaled its response (which takes time) enough to decrease viral load.
If everyone in the world had super immune systems, COVID would have still been a pandemic, but we would have had fewer deaths.
The problem is that you have formed strong opinions about this topic whilst knowing almost nothing about it.
We can't eliminate all disease by living healthier lives and we can't even make the people we have as healthy as they might be. In the actual world and in a fictional best of all possible worlds vaccination makes us healthier.
How is it that various native tribes weren't affected by the virus? Difference in immune system obviously. So better immune systems definately helps lower diseases and prevent pandemics.
Then suddenly the other team brings up the same thing and the same people shout them down.
We have a partisan lean on life expectancy [1]. Maybe the win-win is for blue states to stop fiscally bailing out rural ones [2] and focus on improving their own governance.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/09/01/america-li...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_taxation_and_spendin...
It's presently unclear who decides what is spent and by whom. Withholding funds seems like a valid Constitutional crisis to provoke. At some point, a Democrat will be President. Cutting transfer payments to red states is precedented by Trump.
Between robotics, industry and WMDs, the unfortunate reality is that cities have force projection far outclassing the previously impossible-to-hold country. I suppose it's inevitable that eventually asserts itself.
If you lack money, you get to die alone waiting in urgent care after ER said it "wasn't serious". And your next of kin get a bill for $20k.
It's the best solution. But it's being rejected by its beneficiaries.
Covid-era vaccination requirements provide the framework for a next-best fallback. Cities subsidise travel between their extremities and their cores--we can invert that into a cost for entering the core.
I sympathise with you. I'm not seeing a solution outside suspending this moronic minority's right to make decisions for themselves and their children or leaving the parts of the country that have chosen this fate to their own devices. In that framing, the question is which is leakier: suspending civil rights or literal viruses?
France, Germany and Greece are included not just the Eastern countries.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11588923/
While it’s easy to blame anti-vaxxers, a large contributor are people who saw waning immunity and immigrants from countries with poor immunization rates.
Even with 100% immunization youll still have outbreaks occasionally as people come in and out and the vaccine just doesn’t “take” in some small percentage.
Thus, number of measles cases doesn't tell the full story. One also needs to look at far rates of hospitalizations and complications.