The Secretary Of Health & Human Services Doesn’t Believe In The Foundation Of Modern Medicine

Failures

from the medicine-101 dept

We discussed RFK Jr.’s recent appearance before Congress, where he bravely declared that the current measles outbreak in America has absolutely nothing to do with him, despite that definitely not being true. But, unsurprisingly, that wasn’t the only craziness that Kennedy put on display in the hearing.

The Secretary of HHS doesn’t believe in the foundational theory that powers modern medicine.

Read that again. It’s an insane sentence, the sort that should be fiction. What we’re talking about here is the germ theory of disease, which is the accepted science when it comes to how many diseases infect and spread through pathogens. We mentioned in a post last year, which was chiefly about how Kennedy decided to take his grandkids swimming in a creek filled with poop, that he had also written in a 2021 book that he doesn’t believe in germ theory, and instead believes in what he incorrectly labels “miasma theory”.

It’s one thing to write something in a book as we were mired in a global pandemic. But Kennedy both admitted that he doesn’t believe in germ theory, and defended that belief, before Congress.

In the hearing on Wednesday, Sanders called attention to Kennedy’s denial of germ theory while raising one of Kennedy’s shaky arguments for debunking. In opening statements, Sanders warned Kennedy that he wanted to question the “things that you have written which call in doubt the very existence of the germ theory.”

Sanders pointed out a 2024 study led by the World Health Organization and published in The Lancet that found that since 1974, vaccines had saved an estimated 154 million lives, including 146 million children under the age of 5—or, as WHO put it, vaccines saved the equivalent of six lives every minute of every year over the past 50 years.

“My question is a simple one,” Sanders said, “do you still believe that one of the central tenets of the germ theory, that vaccines sharply reduce infant mortality, is quote-unquote simply untrue?”

Kennedy first did what he always does: try to tell you that the experts and studies have no idea what they’re talking about, or are hopelessly corrupted tools of industry. He does this so often that you can set your watch by it. If a study agrees with him, it’s a good study. If it doesn’t, it’s bad. He’s more like Trump than any of us realized.

Then he launched into his own justification and offered up a 2000 study that he claimed demonstrated that it was improved nutrition and sanitation that reduced childhood deaths this century, and explicitly not medicines like vaccines. Unfortunately for Kennedy, Bill Cassidy piped up with a, oh, let’s call it a minor correction.

The study by Guyer notes that sanitation, among other public health strategies introduced in the first half of the 20th century, drove major declines in mortality. But, as Cassidy noted during the hearing, it’s not all that the study found. Cassidy looked up the studies Kennedy raised and read through them during the hearing.

The Guyer study highlighted that vaccination did not become widely used until after the middle of the century, thus it cannot account for mortality declines prior to that. But it concluded, as Cassidy read out loud at the hearing:

The reductions in vaccine-preventable diseases, however, are impressive. In the early 1920s, diphtheria accounted for about 175,000 cases annually and pertussis for nearly 150,000 cases; measles accounted for about half a million annual cases before the introduction of vaccine in the 1960s. Deaths from these diseases have been virtually eliminated, as have deaths from Haemophilus influenzae, tetanus, and poliomyelitis.

Kennedy tried again, with another study, but Cassidy pointed out that it had the same issue as Kennedy’s first: it measured data from the beginning of the century to the early 1970s. Many of the vaccines Kennedy rails against had barely been out during the period the study analyzed, or in many cases hadn’t come out at all. Speaking specifically to the measles vaccine, released in 1963, Cassidy said:

“There’s 3.5 million cases of measles per year before the vaccine came along and about 550 deaths, and then the vaccine took those to less than 100 [cases] and like zero deaths,” Cassidy said. “So a tremendous impact of the vaccination.”

The problem with Cassidy is that he’s acting like he’s trying to convince Kennedy to change his mind on this. He’s not going to. Not ever. He’s made that clear.

So impeach him or convince Trump to make Kennedy his next cabinet firing. That’s all that’s left to do. Because we certainly cannot continue having someone run HHS who doesn’t believe in the very baseline theory for medicine.

Filed Under: bill cassidy, germ theory, health & human services, rfk jr.

RFK Jr. Takes His Grandkids For A Mother’s Day Swim In A River Of Human Shit

Failures

from the health-nut dept

Look, folks, I have to admit that I’m running out of ways to open these posts about RFK Jr., so let’s just do this quickly. He’s a vaccine skeptic with a ton of bad ideas on public health policy, is letting the current measles outbreak expand for no good reason, has promised to have the cause of autism uncovered by the tail end of summer, will get the government to stop poisoning all of America with chemtrails, and might kinda be into a light version of eugenics. I’ll remind you again, should you have forgotten, that this is the man in charge of American healthcare.

Perhaps as alarming is some news that slipped by me a couple of weeks back: RFK Jr. has written in a book that he doesn’t believe in the germ theory of disease, opting instead for the miasma theory. What’s that you say? You haven’t heard of the miasma theory? Well, that’s probably because it was abandoned around the time his Nazi-appeasing grandfather was born.

The miasma theory was advanced by Hippocrates in the fourth century BC^[3] and accepted from ancient times in Europe and China. The theory was eventually abandoned by scientists and physicians after 1880, replaced by the germ theory of disease: specific germs, not miasma, caused specific diseases.

Just impeach this guy already, damn it.

But my main point in bringing up yet another of Kennedy’s absurd healthcare beliefs isn’t merely to add a 59th reason he shouldn’t be the Secretary of HHS. It’s also because it makes what he posted to ExTwitter over Mother’s Day all the more strange.

Yes, Kennedy took his grandkids on a hike! And a swim! In a creek in which you are prohibited from swimming due to dangerous bacteria in the water? Why? Well, because it suffers from known sewage runoff, dear friends. Kennedy took his grandkids swimming in literal shitwater.

The creek is known for having a sewage overflow problem and posing a health hazard to any who enter it. The National Park Service, which manages the Rock Creek Park, strictly bars all swimming and wading in Rock Creek and the park’s other waterways due to the contamination, specifically “high levels of bacteria.”

A notice on the NPS website advises “Stay Dry, Stay Safe,” warning, “Rock Creek has high levels of bacteria and other infectious pathogens that make swimming, wading, and other contact with the water a hazard to human (and pet) health. Please protect yourself and your pooches by staying on trails and out of the creek. All District waterways are subject to a swim ban—this means wading, too!”

If I wanted to be kind to Kennedy, I could refer to this as the George Carlin method of healthcare. One in which you intentionally expose yourself to as many health dangers as possible in the misguided attempt to build up your immunity.

Now, if you watch that entire Carlin special, as I have, you know just how much tongue and cheek stuff is in there. But even if you wanted to take Carlin’s words at face value, he was a fucking comedian. He was the functional equivalent of a professional clown, whereas Kennedy’s clownery is as unprofessional as it gets. And, also like Kennedy, he too has zero medical training or background.

It would be easy enough to think that Kennedy will lie in whatever bed he’s made by swimming in unclean water, of course. But there are children to consider here. I, for one, wouldn’t want Kick or — checks notes — Bobcat, to get some flesh-eating bacteria inside their tiny bodies and have something horrible happen. Were Child Protective Services to witness a parent bathing their children in their home in a solution concocted of water, feces, and urine, those children would be whisked away and put in the charge of actual thinking adults. But here Kennedy is doing essentially the same thing, but out in a stream.

And the larger point is, again, that this man is in charge of American healthcare at the moment. He believes in disease theories from the 1800s, doesn’t like vaccines, thinks everyone should get measles and the weaklings will die, and is now a documented shit-diver.

Really, honestly, truly… how much more does anyone need to boot him from his post?

Filed Under: bacteria, germ theory, health and human services, healthcare, rfk jr.