Mike Pence Calls For RFK Jr.’s Ouster…But Not For The Reasons You Would Think
from the facepalm dept
There are lots of good reasons to call for the impeachment or ouster or RFK Jr. He’s flatly unqualified for the role. He’s introducing all kinds of health risks for diseases we shouldn’t even have to worry about any longer because he’s an anti-vaxxer con-artist. He’s so bad at his job that high level administrators at DHS and its child agencies are leaving in droves, sometimes after only being on the job for weeks at a time. These are all great, righteous reasons to state publicly that RFK Jr. must go.
Please welcome Mike Pence to the team, I guess. His organization also recently stated publicly that RFK Jr. should be exited from his cabinet position. That it took a failure to review an abortion pill to get him there and not all of that other shit I mentioned is disappointing, though not in any way surprising.
Former Vice President Mike Pence’s organization said Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “must go,” accusing the secretary of refusing to review the abortion pill mifepristone.
In a statement posted on the social platform X, Pence’s nonprofit, Advancing American Freedom, said, “HHS Secretary RFK Jr. continues to refuse to review the dangerous chemical abortion pill, mifepristone. Despite the calls of state attorneys general across the country and pro-life promises made to Congress, RFK Jr. has followed in the footsteps of the Obama and Biden administrations by stonewalling pro-life efforts at HHS.”
“RFK Jr. must go,” the group added.
Folks, I’m in no way qualified to talk at any length about mifepristone and how safe or not it is. I can tell you that the current FDA website says that it is when properly used, as does the Johns Hopkins website. Basically every medical organization that has anything to do with obstetrics and gynecology has said that the drug is very safe (and you would think they would know). The American Medical Association has pointed out that reducing access to mifepristone would lead to real harm for patients. Basically, almost every credible expert on this topic appears to agree.
I can also tell you the listing of side effects on the Mayo Clinic’s site is long. So, is a review of the drug warranted? I’m going to rest comfortably on the idea that I am in no way qualified to say one way or the other.
Like me, Mike Pence is also not a medical professional. Unlike me, Mike Pence has been remarkably silent about RFK Jr. as he’s taken a flamethrower to HHS, to federal vaccine guidance, and has overseen the worst measles outbreak in America in over three decades. Apparently failing to review an FDA approved drug with a decades-long track record of safety is just a bridge too far.
No more aborted babies, all of you! If they aren’t brought to term, how are they supposed to get measles and Hep B?
Filed Under: abortion, health, health and human services, mifepristone, mike pence, rfk jr., safety
Comments on “Mike Pence Calls For RFK Jr.’s Ouster…But Not For The Reasons You Would Think”
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aren’t you the video games guy why are you reporting on politics now
Uh oh.
You don’t really want to join forces with someone who calls for RFKj to be ousted from the HHS because he is not doing a bad enough job.
Maybe it’s time to start calling him “Mr. Poopy Pence”.
My 4 year old nephew would be DELIGHTED.
Amazingly Ironic that a group titled “Advancing American Freedom” is angry because RFk jr, isn’t doing enough to limit people’s freedom
Apparently, you can “advance freedom” by denying people access to medication that has been deemed safe by medical professionals. George Orwell would have nodded.
With the list of side-effects, it’s not the length that matters so much as the severity and likelihood of them. The ones for mifepristone don’t look especially scary to me, especially given what it’s being prescribed for. Acetaminophen has a much more alarming safety profile yet is much more commonly used and is available in dangerously high doses in most grocery stores. Even using it according to the directions for extended periods results in liver damage, and it doesn’t take much over the maximum recommended dose to cause immediate liver damage. Ibuprofen has a much longer and more alarming list of side-effects, yet again is available in most grocery stores at near the maximum safe dose.
Pence’s “concern” has nothing to do with safety, or he’d be pushing for the majority of current OTC drugs to be reviewed first. And frankly many of them we use routinely wouldn’t pass review under today’s standards for safety.
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Acetaminophen? Isn’t that the stuff these crackpots were trying to connect to autism?
I’m not taking the risk. I’m insisting on paracetamol instead.
Re: If there was a list of side effects and potential harms for pregnancy
that list would be much longer and much more alarming.
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It’s way less scary than the shit they advertise nonstop on television.
Time to put mifepristone on Weapon of Mass Destruction list, right Pence?
Missing the forest for the trees
When you write
you make clear that you don’t get what this is even about. Mifepristone is extremely unsafe for the fetus. And in contrast to the mother, the fetus might end up a worthwhile human being (namely a white man) if allowed to mature inside of its host.
When Pence’s organisation states
it is clear that the “danger” with mifepristone is seen in the context of “pro-life”, namely in the pill actually doing what it is intended to do.
Like with “pregnancy centers”‘ misleading advertising, the only legitimate “abortion pill” in that context is a placebo. Or at least anything as painful and dangerous to the mother that one would never employ it except in situations of extreme danger to the life of the mother.
Pence whistling to the canines
By using the GQP trigger-word ‘abortion’ he’s either subtly trying (yah right)to undermine his ex-boss by forcing his feckless colleagues to either take on Brain-worm Bobby or risk being called out by the pro-birth crowd, or he’s calling out to the MAGAt crowd about the eeevil pill and trying to regain some credibility in the party after 47 dumping him for the second round.
Even when things go more or less correctly, pregnancy and child birth are far and away the most dangerous time of a woman’s life. The truth is that mifepristone doesn’t even need to be that safe. The fact that it is that safe is basically just icing on the cake. Given the dangers of pregnancy and birth, mifepristone is safer than it even needs to be.
I would assume that the only reason Mike Pence is opposed to anything, is that it’s not Christian enough by his standards. So it would either be about abortion, or the affair with a so-called journalist. I would never imagine Mike Pence opposing RFK Jr. on the basis of science.
Called it.
Having been personally involved in two uses of mifepristone, no it’s not a wonderful thing to be sticking in your body willy nilly, but as with most drugs you must consider it in the context of “compared to what?”. Two of my children died in utero but were not automatically aborted by the body. Mifepristone ended those pregnancies safely where there was otherwise a serious risk of sepsis. I shudder to think of a world where the drug would not have been available.
I hope someday the pro-life crowd as a whole steps back and realizes the damage they do to real living people on behalf of theoretical ones.
Re: By and large they're pro-BIRTH, not pro-LIFE
First and foremost sorry for your losses, that’s a horrible thing to happen to a person once, that it happened twice just compounds the tragedy.
I hope someday the pro-life crowd as a whole steps back and realizes the damage they do to real living people on behalf of theoretical ones.
That would require them to care about the mental and physical well-being of the pregnant person too, so sadly that’s not likely to happen any time soon. Much easier to consider the pregnant person irrelevant or acceptable collateral damage so they can focus all their efforts and advocacy on protecting the precious life within… right up until it’s born, at which point it gets dumped right into the ‘not my problem’ mental bucket they’d already put the parent(s) in.
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Well, listening high ranking MAGA crowd members it seems that they would like to see women subservient to men. It will be more something like
Wonder where Pence of all people could have learned that from...
Folks, I’m in no way qualified to talk at any length about mifepristone and how safe or not it is. I can tell you that the current FDA website says that it is when properly used, as does the Johns Hopkins website. Basically every medical organization that has anything to do with obstetrics and gynecology has said that the drug is very safe (and you would think they would know). The American Medical Association has pointed out that reducing access to mifepristone would lead to real harm for patients. Basically, almost every credible expert on this topic appears to agree.
If multiple groups with credibility and expertise on the subject have already piped up with either a clean bill of health for the drug or a warning of how badly things could be if it wasn’t available then I’d say it’s pretty clear that Pence’s objection isn’t that it hasn’t been ‘reviewed’ but that the ones doing so keep getting the ‘wrong’ answer and he’s determined to keep having it ‘reviewed’ it until they get it ‘right’.
"States' rights" wasn't good enough?
“HHS Secretary RFK Jr. continues to refuse to review the dangerous chemical abortion pill, mifepristone. Despite the calls of state attorneys general across the country and pro-life promises made to Congress, RFK Jr. has followed in the footsteps of the Obama and Biden administrations by stonewalling pro-life efforts at HHS.”
It’s almost as if putting women in their ass-backward states into a permanent underclass wasn’t enough. Leave it to these christian mouth-breathers always having to smear their god feces both near and far, across state lines even.