In all of our conversations surrounding RFK Jr.’s appointment to lead HHS and the legitimization of his anti-vaxxer beliefs as a result, we have understandably been hyper-focused on measles. The reason for that is mostly that this is as stark an example of just how stupid and horrible anti-vaccination misinformation is combined with the horror that is measles infections. This disease was essentially gone as of the year 2,000, but it has come roaring back due to unvaccinated populations being slammed by major outbreaks this year. Three people have died and thousands have been needlessly infected with measles all because Kennedy, and people like him, want to play pretend with medicine and science.
But it isn’t just measles. Pertussis, commonly referred to as whooping cough, has also been on the increase over the past few years. While the data on who is getting infected is much more varied with pertussis, due primarily to the vaccine’s waning protections for it over time compared with measles vaccines, it’s still the case that the unvaccinated account for a heavy number of the infected and the deaths that have resulted from it. Kentucky appears to be getting hit particularly hard by pertussis, with the state tallying three infant deaths from the disease so far this year.
Kentucky’s three infant deaths from whooping cough over the past 12 months are the state’s first reported since 2018. None of the infants or their mothers had been vaccinated against the respiratory disease, the Kentucky Department of Public Health confirmed.
Kentucky is in the midst of its largest pertussis spike since 2012, says a Monday state news release that says the disease has increased nationwide as vaccination rates decline.
As of Nov. 19, there have been 566 cases of whooping cough identified in Kentucky, with health officials anticipating more cases as the year ends. Babies younger than 1 year old are at the greatest risk for whooping cough.
Local healthcare providers are advocating for the public to get themselves and their children vaccinated to prevent the spread of the disease, but Kentucky has a fairly terrible adoption of the pertussis vaccine. School-aged children in the state currently have a vaccination rate of roughly 85%. That may sound like a big number, but you’re typically looking at a target of 95% vaccination rate to achieve herd immunity. It’s herd immunity that best protects those most vulnerable, such as very young children and those who cannot get vaccinated for unrelated medical reasons.
And that is precisely who is dying in Kentucky from pertussis. Infants. Infants are dying, all so that Kennedy and the vaccine-deniers out there can sit on their stupid soap boxes and spew stupid.
“We are deeply saddened to learn of another infant death in Kentucky due to pertussis and are concerned by the volume of cases we are seeing throughout the commonwealth,” said Dr. Steven Stack, secretary of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services. “We continue to urge Kentuckians to get their whooping cough vaccine and to make sure they are up to date on all other recommended immunizations. Many illnesses can be prevented through vaccination, which helps protect not only the individual but also those around them.”
Unfortunately, the very person in charge of American health at the moment is not urging anyone to get vaccinated. Quite the opposite, in fact. And it all appears to be largely ego-driven.
Ego in favor of infants remaining alive. If that doesn’t turn your stomach, you have no soul.
We’ve talked a lot about measles throughout this year, which is particularly frustrating given that America officially eliminated this disease from its endemic state back in 2000. How we got here is a very simple story: too many people refused to vaccinate themselves and/or their children, giving the virus a foothold which it had been deprived for nearly a quarter of a century. And how that happened is also a frustratingly simple story: a combination of granola-munching liberals and the religious right in America got together in an unholy alliance to make up conspiracy theories about vaccines, claiming they cause autism and other complications.
If there is a singular face for this idiotic movement, it is, of course, RFK Jr., who now heads up the Department of Health & Human Services. There should be no preamble necessary to explain just how bad RFK Jr. has been in his current role, nor how directly responsible he is for the anti-vaxxer movement going back long before this current administration had the audacity to place American healthcare in his hands. We’ve been talking about how this administration’s inaction has put America’s measles elimination status at risk going all the way back to April.
We’re nearly there. To lose that status, a country must have endured continuous spread of a common strain of the disease over the course of 12 months. The CDC recently linked several outbreaks in America together via a singular strain, putting us at just over 10 months of continuous spread.
The Times obtained a recording of a call during which officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed to state health departments that the ongoing measles outbreak at the border of Arizona and Utah is a continuation of the explosive outbreak in West Texas that began in mid- to late-January. That is, the two massive outbreaks are being caused by the same subtype of measles virus.
The massive outbreak in Texas began in mid- to late-January and was declared over on August 18. In all, there were 762 cases of measles confirmed in the outbreak. Utah and Arizona started seeing some measles cases in June, but those outbreaks appeared to take off in August. To date, Utah and Arizona have reported 212 cases.
As ArsTechnica notes, America is not alone in this embarrassing failure, nor first. Canada just a few weeks ago lost its own elimination status for measles, having also endured 12 months of continuous spread of a singular strain. The cause for that is the same as in the States: non-participation in vaccination. And, frankly, the same people are responsible. Ignorance knows no borders, it turns out.
Canada achieved elimination in 1998. The US did the same in 2000. Elimination was achieved through hard-fought vaccination campaigns, as two doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine is 97 percent protective against the virus, and that protection is considered lifelong. But, since that time, vaccine misinformation and potent rhetoric from anti-vaccine activists—including current US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—have taken hold, driving vaccination rates down on a population level. While the vast majority of American and Canadian parents continue to vaccinate their children, certain pockets and close-knit communities have become dramatically undervaccinated, providing potential footholds for the virus.
The CDC is, right now, touting its plan to combat measles. On its website, it talks about how it is ramping up its vaccination programs, trying to vaccinate more people, build out surveillance programs to monitor the disease’s spread, and respond quickly to outbreaks.
I’ve reported on measles this year on a continual basis. I’m here to tell you one thing: if the CDC is doing literally any of the above, then it must be doing it in secret because I can’t square a single one of those claims with the reality we’re seeing across the country. RFK Jr. heads up HHS, under which CDC operates, and his messaging has been in direct opposition to what his child agency says it’s doing. He has questioned vaccines at every turn. He tore apart ACIP, the CDC advisory panel on immunization programs, and rebuilt it with anti-vaxxers that have already weakened our vaccination programs.
And it shows in the numbers. Perhaps you thought that the two outbreaks had waned and the rate of spread was in decline. It absolutely is not.
Sure, we’re at half the weekly new case rate compared with February and March. But those were the cold months, when viruses like this tend to spread more regularly due to more time being spent indoors without open windows for ventilation. Late winter and early spring are considered measles season and the fact that we’re already seeing a gradually rising spread rate, larger than before this past February and March, is extremely worrying.
The worst part of all of this is to be reminded that, while America did eliminate endemic measles in 2000, that came after focused vaccination campaigns kicked off in 1991. Nearly a decade of work, completely down the drain. All because RFK Jr., a bunch of Hollywood celebrities, and pockets of the ultra-religious couldn’t be bothered to listen to actual scientists and doctors.
In 1991, America endured 9,643 cases of measles. We’re on pace to achieve something like at least 2,000 cases in 2025. If it takes a couple of years to get back to elimination status at that number, it represents both needless suffering by the American people and a complete embarrassment to those in charge of America’s health.
I knew this was coming but this still is absolutely maddening. In all of our coverage of RFK Jr., particularly since his vile appointment and confirmation as head of Health and Human Services, it’s been abundantly clear that he’s an anti-vaxxer. While that may seem obvious to most of our readers, it’s important to note that there are a great many Kennedy fans out there who will tell you he’s not that and that he instead is merely seeking more science on the effects of vaccines. Some say this in genuine fashion, while most say it knowing precisely how full of shit they are. The man’s time at DHS has made any debate over this point academic, of course. Every action he’s taking is the action an anti-vaxxer would make, no matter what he may admit to or otherwise. Still, there was enough nuance and subtlety in all of this to give some folks the cover needed to claim that Kennedy isn’t what he plainly is.
Well, that time is now past. The CDC recently updated its webpage meant to educate the public on the lack of a link between autism and vaccines to indicate that, hey, there might just be a link after all.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its website to promote the widely debunked claim that vaccines may cause autism. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly linked vaccines to autism, and now the public health agency he oversees is publicly reversing its position to reflect that belief.
The CDC site previously said studies showed there was no connection between receiving vaccines and developing autism. HHS communications director Andrew Nixon said the agency updated the site to reflect “gold standard, evidence-based science.”
Okay, I’m not going to mince words on this: this change to this publicly facing webpage is unscientific, dangerous, and fucking evil. It’s one man and his cadre of handpicked anti-vaxxer cronies foisting upon the public guidance that is not built on science or medicine. And it’s patently obvious that the approach here is an unscientific one.
There is going to be some nuance here, but this is really important. Here is the banner at the top of the page after the changes:
Let’s go one by one. The first bullet point is by far the stupidest. Scientists simply don’t talk like this. If the CDC would like to have a webpage for every single potential cause of autism that studies haven’t “ruled out”, well, that is going to require a hell of a lot of webpages. Has science ruled out that ghosts don’t cause autism? Or that the hand of god isn’t directly involved? How about, oh I don’t know… turtles? Have there been enough studies done, peer reviewed of course, that specifically rule out the possibility that proximity to turtles doesn’t have some causative link to autism? I can promise you there hasn’t, because that would be insane.
In science, the burden of proof is on those who make a claim. In absence of that proof, the proper course of belief is in the null. In other words, scientifically, making a scientific claim puts the onus to prove it on the claimant and puts zero onus on anyone else. If I want to argue that turtles cause autism, I have to prove it. Otherwise, you assume no link exists. And that’s what the CDC’s page used to do. It used to say that there is no link, which is shorthand for the fact that no link has been proven to exist, which is precisely the right way to describe this.
As for the claim that studies proving a link have been ignored, they very much have not. They’ve either been exposed for their poor methodology or they’ve been debunked. That’s it. And the rest of the research out there indicates, again, there is no link between autism and vaccines.
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website has been changed to promote false information suggesting vaccines cause autism,” said Dr. Susan J. Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, in a statement. “Since 1998, independent researchers across seven countries have conducted more than 40 high-quality studies involving over 5.6 million people. The conclusion is clear and unambiguous: There’s no link between vaccines and autism.”
She went on to say, “Anyone repeating this harmful myth is misinformed or intentionally trying to mislead parents. We call on the CDC to stop wasting government resources to amplify false claims that sow doubt in one of the best tools we have to keep children healthy and thriving: routine immunizations.”
As for CDC’s new assessment of causes of autism, who the actual fuck knows what that means. So far, out of Kennedy at least, we’ve heard that the causes of autism are maybe vaccines, definitely Tylenol (except maybe not), and male circumcision. They’re all over the damned place and there is zero trust from anyone with a couple of brain cells to rub together that any new analysis coming out of this bullshit iteration of the CDC is at all trustworthy.
And, people, this matters. We are, right now, on the verge of losing our measles elimination status and it’s because of exactly this kind of bullshit from exactly these assclowns. That has happened because vaccination rates have been steadily falling for two decades and this is going to make it much, much worse. Kennedy should be dragged before Congress for hearings to explain why this change was made, on what scientific basis the change was made, and why in the world impeachment efforts to oust him ought not to begin immediately.
Anything less is Congress abdicating its responsibility.
Ken Paxton’s bullshit lawsuit against the makers of Tylenol, built on Trump and RFK Jr.’s bullshit press conference in which they pretended that science says acetaminophen causes autism, is off to a predictably bad start. I had a bit of a laugh shortly after this turd was filed, mainly because Kennedy himself came out after the lawsuit was filed to walk back the claims made in the press conference and acknowledged that all that science he and Trump cited “is not sufficient to say it definitely causes autism.” And, while Trump repeatedly instructed women to not take Tylenol while pregnant, a stance medical professionals overwhelmingly disagree with, Kennedy instead said women should consult with their doctors on its use.
A Texas Judge has rejected a request from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to issue a temporary order barring Tylenol’s maker, Kenvue, from claiming amid litigation that the pain and fever medication is safe for pregnant women and children, according to court documents.
In records filed Friday, District Judge LeAnn Rafferty, in Panola County, also rejected Paxton’s unusual request to block Kenvue from distributing $400 million in dividends to shareholders later this month.
Now, it’s important to acknowledge that Paxton is simply doing performative MAGA bullshit with this lawsuit. He’s running for the Senate seat currently held by John Cornyn, who is also seeking reelection. Wesley Hunt joins them to compete in the Republican primary for the seat. All of these men are simply attempting to out-MAGA one another.
The TRO request to keep Kenvue, current makers of the Tylenol brand, from stating that its product is safe for use by pregnant women and children, was always absurd. But it was made all the more so when Kennedy walked back his press conference claims. Judge Rafferty noted that she:
…denied the marketing claim, which even the Trump administration is not standing by. The day after Paxton filed his lawsuit, Kennedy said that “the causative association… between Tylenol given in pregnancy and the perinatal periods is not sufficient to say it definitely causes autism.”
Like I said in my previous post on this: very funny.
As for the dividend disbursement, for which Paxton relies on a Texas law preventing companies giving out such funds if they are about to become financially insolvent, the court simply didn’t have jurisdiction to issue any such order.
According to Reuters, one of Kenvue’s lawyers, Kim Bueno, explained that the problem with the state of Texas making this request is that Kenvue is based in New Jersey and incorporated in Delaware. “There was no jurisdiction to challenge that,” she said.
All this flailing about would be merely unbecoming, except that Paxton is a damned state AG. He should, and likely does, know better than all of this. As I said before, this is performative nonsense designed to do nothing more than gain primary votes in a Senate race.
But in today’s political climate, you can see just how much chaos can be generated by an ignoramus like RFK Jr.
While we’ve talked quite a bit about the horror show that is RFK Jr.’s position as Secretary of HHS, most of the focus of those posts has been around what is happening at the CDC. And for good reason, too. The ongoing measles outbreak, the quick hiring/firing of Susan Monarez, and all the anti-vaxx bullshit going on at ACIP have all occurred at the CDC, which is itself suffering from defunding, staffing shortages, and a morale problem that Kennedy personally appears to occasionally look at from afar while wondering, “Hm, how can I make this worse?”
But fear not, dear friends, because the other agencies under Kennedy are super fucked up, too! The most recent news comes from the FDA, which just lost its chief drug regulator because he appears to have been both extorting a drug company while also running a vendetta campaign against a former colleague.
However, the FDA’s latest scandal includes a different Trump-era leader: the top drug regulator, George Tidmarsh, who left the FDA this weekend amid a flurry of events. The drama centers around allegations that, since joining the FDA in July, Tidmarsh used his position to exact petty revenge on an old business associate, Kevin Tang, who had asked Tidmarsh to resign from three companies six years ago, allegedly sparking a long-standing grudge.
Aurinia Pharmaceuticals, with Tang on its board, sued Tidmarsh recently over these allegations. And that lawsuit contains details as to what actions Tidmarsh took against Tang and his company. Those actions, if true, are almost too much to be believed.
The lawsuit contains brow-raising texts and emails from Tidmarsh to Tang and associates over the last six years, documenting taunts and threats, including “enjoying failure?”, “You will be exposed,” there’s “[m]ore bad karma to come,” “[t]he pain is not over,” and an ominous “I’m Not powerless.”
In early August, soon after joining the FDA, Tidmarsh announced actions that would effectively remove from the market a drug ingredient made by a company associated with Tang. Tidmarsh’s lawyer then sent a letter to Tang proposing that he extend a “service agreement” for “another 10 years,” which would see Tang making payments to a Tidmarsh-associated entity until 2044. The email was seen as attempted extortion, with such payments being in exchange for Tidmarsh rolling back the FDA’s regulatory change.
And then after that, in September, Tidmarsh hopped over to LinkedIn, of all places, to post publicly about how an Aurinia drug for treating lupus, already FDA-approved, didn’t work and that Aurinia hadn’t put the drug through the trials to prove it did. Aurinia’s stock fell by twenty percent that same day. But the drug had gone through FDA trials and was already approved for use in many, many other countries.
Tidmarsh resigned Sunday as the media shitstorm over all of this was kicking up. And that’s good; Tidmarsh has no business being in government in a role that is supposed to serve public health. But what this really represents is yet another data point in the circus that HHS and its child agencies have become under Kennedy’s leadership.
If the allegations in Aurinia’s lawsuit are true, Tidmarsh’s behavior would be egregious for a federal regulator. But already, the claims and other scandals have outsiders concerned that the high-stakes “soap opera” is destroying the agency’s credibility, as Stat reported Tuesday.
“We are witnessing nothing less than a clown show at FDA right now,” one venture capital investor told the outlet. “For the sake of patients, we need a stable and consistent FDA!”
“What’s happening at the top of the FDA is embarrassing,” a portfolio manager at a large biotech fund added. “How am I supposed to convince people, other investors, that this sector is doing important work when the leaders of the FDA are acting this way?”
There’s a solution and we all know what it is. A competent leader at HHS that can yank our public health agencies back into some semblance of professionalism would do wonders here.
But we’re not going to get that so long as RFK Jr. is at HHS.
When it comes to RFK Jr., I tend not to find much humor in the chaos he creates. The man’s work involves American health and illness, life and death, so it’s just generally not funny. And that holds true to Kennedy’s wielding of incomplete, inaccurate, and unsettled science to go before all of America and declare definitively that acetaminophen, of which Tylenol is the most famous brand, was at least partially the cause for autism spectrum disorder when expecting mothers took it for pain or fever while pregnant. It wasn’t funny when Trump went to the same microphone and did likewise, stating simply “Don’t take Tylenol” if you’re pregnant. It wasn’t funny when Sinclair decided to abuse its airwaves to disserve the public interest (hey, Brendan Carr, over here!) by spreading even more Tylenol disinformation. And it wasn’t funny when Senator Bill Cassidy took to the airwaves to complain about Kennedy’s nonsense when he was a pivotal voice and vote in confirming Captain Brainworm to head HHS in the first place.
But, I have to admit, this is very funny. See, Texas AG Ken Paxton, a man who I imagine has a Donald Trump body pillow to cuddle with at night, decided to run with the claims Kennedy and Trump made and has filed a lawsuit against the makers of Tylenol for their “deceptive” marketing and labeling practices for Tylenol.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing the maker of Tylenol, Kenvue and Johnson & Johnson, who previously sold Tylenol, claiming that they have been “deceptively marketing Tylenol” knowing that it “leads to a significantly increased risk of autism and other disorders.”
To back that claim, Paxton relies on the “considerable body of evidence… recently highlighted by the Trump Administration.”
Specifically Trump and Kennedy’s claims about Tylenol, actually. See, this is already funny. Here’s one passage from the suit itself, the entirety of which is embedded below.
There are many examples of drugs regulated by the Food and Drug Administration that include complete information regarding risks on their labels even when the underlying science—unlike here—is not fully settled. These labels reflect the aims of the regulatory system, which recognizes States’ authority to require warnings to inform consumers of certain risks. Pregnant women should be provided with complete information so that they can make informed decisions regarding the risks to which they expose their unborn children.
So, to start with, regulating OTC drug labels is the responsibility of the FDA. If these companies were not properly including warnings on their standardized labels, the remedy for that is getting the FDA involved, which has regulatory teeth and enforcement mechanisms to declare OTC drugs to be “misbranded.” Tylenol has been around for decades. The idea that this hasn’t been an issue for the better part of a century, but now is, is plainly absurd.
But I want to pay very close attention to Paxton’s claim that warning labels include risks even when the science isn’t settled, but that this isn’t one of those cases. In this case, according to Paxton, the science is settled, making this all the worse.
But that’s all kinds of bullshit. The science here isn’t remotely settled. The scientists of those very studies cited by Paxton have complained about how the administration is drawing conclusions from studies that they are very upfront about being inconclusive. None of Kennedy’s data was “new.” It was merely new analysis of old studies.
“The causative association between Tylenol given in pregnancy and the perinatal periods is not sufficient to say it definitely causes autism,” Kennedy told reporters. “But it’s very suggestive.”
“There should be a cautious approach to it,” he added. “ That’s why our message to patients, to mothers, to people who are pregnant and to the mothers of young children is: Consult your physician.”
That’s always been the message. And that is very funny. Paxton just got pantsed by the very person he cited in his lawsuit, in which he claimed this was all settled science. Even Kennedy, a man capable of saying outrageous things when it comes to healthcare and science, walked this back. And, in doing so, he tore an enormous hole in the lawsuit that Paxton, a Trump bootlicking sycophant, just filed.
Drink that shit in, because it’s delicious.
Now, even Kennedy’s walkback is still bad, of course. He’s acting like this is all more sinister and direct of a relationship than there actually is between autism and Tylenol. “It’s very suggestive” is a line without meaning, scientifically. Suggestive to whom? And to what degree? It’s typical Kennedy, taking outlier studies and pretending they mean much more than they do, even as researchers complain about the methodology of those studies, or their inconclusive nature. He did this with his claim that America’s men are suffering greatly from reduced sperm counts, and now he’s doing it here.
But in a country that could use a good laugh at the moment, I’m not going to pretend like what he did to Paxton isn’t funny.
You may be tired of hearing about measles by now, but measles is not tired of infecting Americans. It’s worth reminding ourselves that this is a disease that was declared gone in America. Cases and transmission rates were so low in 2000, thanks almost entirely to the widespread promotion and adoption of the MMR vaccine, that we officially put the disease on America’s pay-no-mind list.
But thanks to RFK Jr.’s promotion of vaccine conspiracy theories, ironically demoted in preference of conspiracy theories more recently of Tylenol and circumcision, fewer people got themselves or their children vaccinated and the case counts began to rise. The ultimate betrayal of our public health system was performed by Donald Trump and his compliant drones in Congress in putting Kennedy in charge of HHS and America’s health. That was combined with whatever that whole DOGE experience was supposed to be, which helped to reduce HHS staffing by at least 1/8th of its previous workforce. Once that was done, the consequences for disease control became inevitable.
You will have heard about the huge measles outbreak that began in Texas. We also just talked about another outbreak that is currently underway in South Carolina that is seeing hundreds of children in quarantine. But those are certainly not the only places where measles cases in at least double digits are popping up in 2025. Here’s a map that shows where cases are occurring, with the larger circles being a large number of cases.
It’s basically everywhere, including in Alaska and Hawaii. That map is also lagging behind CDC’s reported counts, which itself lags weekly, as the reporting is only updated every Wednesday. And those numbers? Yeah, they are almost certainly wildly under-reported.
Nearly two months after a deadly, massive measles outbreak in Texas was declared over, the highly contagious disease continues to spread across the country. The U.S. has now confirmed 1,596 cases this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the highest annual number in more than three decades.
But the true total could be even higher, says Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
“If you talk to people on the ground, including not only in Texas, but other states, they all say the same thing, which is that the numbers are much worse than that. Probably closer to 5,000 cases,” Offit says. “And it’s not done.”
Not by a long shot. If you’re not from the Southwest, you probably haven’t even heard about the new outbreak occurring along the border of Arizona and Utah, where over 130 total cases of measles have been reported just this year. That’s about half the number of measles cases that occurred in 2024 nationally. Minnesota also is seeing a surge in new cases very recently. While the officially reported case count there is listed at 20, experts expect that to grow as those cases have been popping up these past few weeks.
So how many outbreaks have there been this year? Way more than you probably think, and definitely way more than Kennedy or anyone at HHS is talking about.
All told, the CDC has confirmed 44 measles outbreaks in 41 states this year. The agency defines an outbreak as three or more cases that are linked.The vast majority of cases were in people who were unvaccinated; 27% percent have been in children under the age of 5. About 1 in 8 measles cases have resulted in hospitalization.
This is all preventable. We can’t seriously want to go back to the days like in 1990 when there were nearly 28,000 cases of measles… can we? And what horrible, painful thing do we have to do to make sure more people, and especially children, aren’t getting this horrific and deadly disease?
While news about measles in recent months may have been a surprise, it’s also alarming. Experts warn that the number of cases (and possibly deaths) are likely to increase. And due to falling vaccination rates, outbreaks are bound to keep occurring. One study estimates that between nine and 15 million children in the US could be susceptible to measles.
But there’s also good news: we know that measles outbreaks can be contained and the disease itself can be eliminated. Learn how to protect yourself and your family. Engage respectfully with people who are vaccine hesitant: share what you’ve learned from reliable sources about the disease, especially about the well-established safety of vaccination.
Too late, Harvard. This country has been conditioned to distrust “experts” and “knowledge” and “data.” We do shit on vibes now.
This is going to get worse before it gets better. The story of how we eliminated measles long ago is found in that same 1990 statistic I cited earlier. The public was so horrified with what was happening to children in this country that they were ready to get a safe and effective MMR vaccine to put it to an end.
Why in the hell do we have to wait for those horrors to resurface before we put this diseased genie back in the bottle?
Look, folks, I’m sorry, but RFK Jr. is going to force us to talk about sperm. And I’m very much going to try to keep the jokes at an absolute minimum, because, as per usual when Kennedy starts spouting off about something health-related, this isn’t actually funny.
At this point I don’t think it makes sense to write up an intro to the post about how batshit crazy RFK Jr. is, how awful it is that he is currently running HHS, and how dangerous his policies and ramblings are. I’ve said it all before many, many times. He sucks, you get it, let’s move on.
Kennedy is very interested in your teenager’s sperm. He’s been talking about it for nearly a year now, typically as it relates to his claims that today’s teenage boy has a lower sperm count than men in their sixties and seventies. He growled out this claim once again at a recent White House presser.
RFK Jr: "Today the average teenager in this country has 50% of the sperm count, 50% of the testosterone of a 65 year old man. Our girls are hitting puberty 6 years early … our parents aren't having children."
Let’s focus in real hard on the claim about teenagers’ sperm count. You know, like putting it under a microscope, as you would do to analyze the sperm concentration in a sample! But not a teenage boy’s sperm count, because, like… why are you even collecting that in the sort of significant numbers that would be required for a proper sample size in a study?
Contrary to Kennedy’s claims, sperm counts decline with age, so young men have much higher counts than older men. And data about sperm counts in teen boys largely does not exist.
Well, of course it doesn’t exist. Why would it? Why in the absolute hell would the parent of a 15 year old be getting that child’s sperm concentration medically tested? Generally, this just isn’t a thing.
This is the hallmark of an RFK Jr. claim. You take outlier studies in unsettled science and declare the minority position conclusively right, so long as it aligns with some larger philosophy you have. In this case, two philosophies of Kennedy’s: a war against environmental chemicals like pesticides and a sort of man-dominated fascism in which hyper-masculinity is of high value.
And here is where I’d like to coin a term: masculofascism. Yes, hyper-masculinity has long been a tenant of fascism generally, but this is, I think, differently emphasized in America’s modern day version. Masculofascism isn’t a word currently — Hi, Webster’s Dictionary! Feel free to adopt this one! –, but I asked Google to tell me what it thinks it would mean on a lark
I mean, come on comrades and friends, I might as well have asked Google to describe RFK Jr. to me.
Anyway, back to sperm. Are sperm rates for teenagers falling? How about for young men, or even men generally? Is this even a thing?
Well, like all manner of health-related topics, it’s complicated.
“This is a very contentious issue in our field, and for every paper that you find that suggests a decline and raises an alarm for this issue, there’s another paper that says that the numbers aren’t changing, and that there’s no cause for concern,” said Dr. Scott Lundy, a reproductive urologist at the Cleveland Clinic.
In fact, this is a topic and debate that goes back decades. Studies have been coming out since the early 90s suggesting that sperm counts in men were in decline compared with their male counterparts in decades past. In fact, the 50% reduction line is just as old.
In 1993, scientist Louis Guillette shocked Congress when he testified at a hearing that “every man sitting in this room today is half the man his grandfather was.”
Guillette was referring to a generational decline in sperm count. A year before his testimony, a review of papers published from 1938 to 1991determined that the average sperm count had fallen around 50%.
As Dr. Lundy indicated earlier, there are other studies that show no decline, too. More of those, actually. Following that hearing, in follow up studies, 35 more studies were done on this topic analyzing historical data, and 27 of them either showed no change or an increase in sperm count (21), or had inconclusive data (6). Only eight of them showed any kind of decline in sperm count or semen quality, a minority position. It’s the minority position.
Oh, and that study’s methodology was heavily disputed.
“The paper was widely, wildly cited,” but “the statistics were not solid,” said Dolores Lamb, who researches male infertility at Children’s Mercy Kansas City.
I’ll just add to all of that the simple fact that the American population in 1990 was 248.7 million people. In 2023 it was 336.8 million. Somehow, amidst all this drop in sperm count and fertility, the population grew 35% in 30 years.
But we’re not done. More recently, in 2021, Shanna Swan wrote the book Count Down. Swan is a reproductive epidemiologist and argued that sperm counts had fallen by 52% (man, that number keeps coming up) across several continents from 1973 to 2011. In that same book, she argued that the median sperm count would reach null in 25 years. That would essentially end the human race as we know it, of course, which sounds quite alarming. And Swan, to be clear, is well-credentialed.
But it’s very difficult to square her claims with the fact that the population in most if not all of the continents she studied over that same time period has increased, not decreased. Here’s the North American population chart since 1950. If you can spot any sort of real cause for concern, feel free to point it out.
But men’s groups lost their minds over her paper. They argued that something was going on that was causing men to lose their masculinity. That’s the theme here. No longer are men real men. We’re something less than that now and you can tell because we don’t produce as many DNA missiles as we used to.
Unfortunately for all this testicle-wringing, Swan’s methodology was also questioned. As was the analysis based on point in time sperm samples generally.
Lamb said the analyses from Swan and her co-authors had a major weakness in their methodology. They assumed that laboratories in different parts of the world were collecting and testing semen in the same way, she said, when in fact the methods likely varied.
Swan stood by her team’s results, saying in an email that they accounted for differences in methodologies across studies, as well as the challenges of getting accurate sperm counts.
Lundy, of the Cleveland Clinic, said measuring sperm counts can be hard to do consistently. The count itself can go up and down depending on the frequency of ejaculation, time of year, or whether someone is injured or has a fever.
His analysis last year found a subtle decline in sperm count among men in the U.S. from 1970 to 2018 but one that most likely wouldn’t affect fertility in real life.
And, of course, there are a ton of potential mitigating factors to account for that could also impact a point in time sperm sample. Smoking effects sperm vitality. While smoking is largely on the decline (probably also seen as a decline in masculinity), there’s no indication a smoking status was accounted for in the samples analyzed for these studies. Alcohol also lowers sperm count and I really hope we aren’t going to argue that America saw a steep decline in alcohol consumption from 1970 to the 2010s (yes, there is currently a trend in America for reduced alcohol consumption, but that’s too new to show up in this data).
And, hey, I’ll give Kennedy some credit: studying pesticide effects on human reproduction, as well as many other healthcare factors, is a worthy area of study. But he undermines his own position when he takes the minority view of a scientific endeavor or area of study and simply declares that view dispositive. And he does this all the time.
And it’s often hypocritical. You know what else vastly decreases sperm count?
Testosterone replacement therapy — a treatment that has exploded in popularity among young men looking to feel more energized or to increase their sex drive — can also shut off sperm production entirely.
“Men on testosterone are almost uniformly azoospermic and totally infertile, and sometimes that is only partially reversible if they’ve been on high-dose testosterone for many years,” Lundy said.
Kennedy himself told Newsmax in 2023 that he takes testosterone replacement as part of an “anti-aging protocol.”
And, of course, there is vastly more to human fertility, or even male fertility, than sperm count. Nuance is what is at play here, not simple answers to complex issues. Or non-issues, as is likely in this context.
But you won’t get that out of Kennedy. Instead, you get that fourth bullet in Google’s interpretation of masculofascism: a devaluation of critical thinking and a preference for quick and simple action in lieu of intellectual discourse.
A more perfect description of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I cannot find.
Measles is so back, baby! I know, you had thought we were done talking about this vile disease. After all, the outbreak that started in Texas among communities that are relatively unvaccinated finally slowed down at the tail end of the summer. That came after that outbreak almost single-handedly generated more cases of measles in America than had occurred since 1992, as well as caused three deaths. This all occurred under the watch of RFK Jr. as head of HHS. Kennedy is largely responsible for the disease’s return, thanks to his long anti-vaccine advocacy and due to his direct mismanagement of the measles outbreaks. He also blames the victims of the disease, too.
Those who wanted to cover for Kennedy and the Trump administration attempted to point to the Texas outbreak starting before Trump was in office. That’s both not really true and besides the point since the explosion of cases happened well into the year, but it’s also a moot point since there are more outbreaks than just that one. 44 outbreaks, in fact, according to the CDC, compared with only 16 outbreaks in all of 2024. And, as always, the cases largely effect children and the unvaccinated.
And to give you yet another real world example of how this is all playing out, an outbreak is South Carolina has resulted in the necessary quarantining of 150 children due to their being unvaccinated.
Last week, officials in Greenville identified an eighth measles case that is potentially linked to the outbreak. Seven outbreak cases had been confirmed since September 25 in neighboring Spartanburg, where transmission was identified in two schools: Fairforest Elementary and Global Academy, a public charter school.
Across those two schools, at least 153 unvaccinated children were exposed to the virus and have been put in a 21-day quarantine, during which they are barred from attending school, state officials said in a press conference. Twenty-one days is the maximum incubation period, spanning from when a person is exposed to when they would develop a rash if infected.
As the ArsTechnica post goes on to note, Spartanburg has more unvaccinated children as a result of religious exemption than anywhere else in the state. South Carolina as a whole used to have the 95%+ vaccination rate that experts indicate provides the kind of herd immunity that keeps everyone safe, but that has dropped in the past several years to 93.7%. That might not seem like a big deal, but it is. And it’s even worse nation-wide when it comes to school-aged children.
The latest data indicates that the MMR vaccination coverage for US kindergartners was just 92.5 percent in the 2024–2025 school year, down from 95.2 percent in 2019–2020. Non-medical exemptions are now at 3.4 percent, an all-time high.
I am confident that any Almighty that may exist, and certainly any one worth believing in, doesn’t want you to get measles. If we don’t reverse the trend on our MMR vaccination rates, these outbreaks will continue to sprout up and more people will become infected. Eventually more of them will die.
But I don’t see that trend reversing while RFK Jr. is still in charge of American healthcare.
It’s story time! I came home from the grocery store over this past weekend very proud. I rushed to tell my wife about how I was complimented in the check out line by the very nice woman behind me. She mentioned that she was impressed by how I “Tetris-ed” my groceries on the conveyor belt, carefully organizing my purchases not only in proper order so that they’re bagged together (drinks/alcohol, then frozen stuff, then refrigerated items, then warm storage items), but also so that there is no unused real estate on the belt itself. Hence the “Tetris” comment.
My wife’s response was: “Honey, your spectrum is showing.”
This isn’t to make fun of autism spectrum disorder, of course. Quite the opposite, actually. It’s an acknowledgement that I’m somewhere on that spectrum, as are many more of us than probably realize it. I’m an IT guy. This isn’t unexpected.
But I had no idea that one of the potential causes for my landing there was because my parents made the choice to have me circumcised after birth.
During a cabinet meeting on Thursday, Kennedy, a longtime proponent of the unfounded theory that vaccines cause autism, went on a tangent about the causes of autism.
Specifically, he talked about how he saw a TikTok video of a pregnant woman “gobbling Tylenol.” Kennedy said that the woman took Tylenol “with a baby in her placenta,” even though the fetus develops in the uterus. In addition, Kennedy said that infant boys who are circumcised have double the rate of autism.
But Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who voted to confirm Kennedy both in the Senate Finance Committee and on the Senate floor, expressed confusion.
“That’s new,” he told The Independent after chuckling.
Chuckling? Kennedy waxing poetic about how an ancient ritual that’s been around for eons is suddenly causing a spike in autism rates over the past several decades isn’t funny. Spelling your name wrong with a useless “h” in it is funny, but this is something else. The bumblefuck who doesn’t have even the basics down about how in utero development works is running healthcare policy for the entire damned country and he just claimed that there is a link between autism rates and circumcision. The proper response to this is hearings, specifically impeachment hearings for Kennedy, not a guffaw.
Some people, at least, including a large majority of the voting public, don’t find any of this humorous.
Many Americans seem to not trust Trump and Kennedy’s claims. A poll from KFF found that just four percent of Americans believed their claims about Tylenol and autism were definitely true, while 30 percent said it was probably false and 35 percent said it was definitely false.
But Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), a member of the HELP Committee and a sharp critic of Kennedy, said Kennedy’s bizarre and unfounded claims are no laughing matter.
“We’re talking about whether or not parents can rely on the information provided by the Secretary of Health and Human Services,” she said. “ It’s really not funny. This whole thing is dangerous. People will get sick and die based on it. And I think it’s horrible.”
If you’re wondering, these claims are largely built upon a Danish study from 2015 that found that circumcised boys were more likely to be diagnosed with ASD compared with boys who had not been circumcised. And as you would expect, the methods and conclusions drawn by the study were heavily critiqued. It shows a correlation, but no causation. And, as is the case with ASD diagnoses generally, the real factor at play here appears to be contact with medical professionals versus those who have less of those contacts.
The 2015 study found that the risk of autism was higher among circumcised boys under age 5, but after age 5, the association disappeared. “If circumcision truly caused autism,” said Gounder, “that association should continue even after age 5. They’re likely picking up on the fact that kids undergoing circumcision in the health care system have greater contact with the health care system and have parents with higher levels of education and income — all of which are associated with being diagnosed with autism at a younger age than other kids. That association may disappear once kids start school, when teachers and counselors pick up on the symptoms.”
Folks, the timeline for how long it’s going to take to unwind the destruction of trust that Kennedy is currently sowing in our governmental medical institutions is going to be measured in decades. And please miss me with any claims that the COVID response or anything else that may have also caused similar distrust is in any way on par with what is currently going on at HHS. It’s not, and it’s not even close.
