The daughter of US president John F. Kennedy has denounced her cousin, Robert Kennedy Jr, as a “predator” who is “addicted to attention and power”. This means awkward silences around the dinner table and chaos at Christmas at Hyannis Port.
It is also reasonable to assume that Caroline Kennedy knows her cousin better than most.
In his financial disclosures, Robert Kennedy listed his major source of income in the past year from referral fees from multiple law firms, including an $US850,000 payment from the office of Wisner Baum, whose civil lawsuit against Merck’s Gardasil vaccine went to trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court last week.
In 2021, Kennedy took to social media calling for anyone who had a story to tell of an adverse reaction to the vaccine. Ambulance chasing is such a cliche. Soliciting sounds so much nicer.
There have been more than 150 studies that overwhelmingly support the use of the Gardasil vaccine. The most compelling is a Scottish study that has found precisely zero cases of cervical cancer of all 40,000 women vaccinated before the age of 13 three decades ago while a 20,0000-strong cohort of unvaccinated women suffered cervical cancer at a rate of 8.4 per 100,000.
A study in Australia found that, of the nine million Gardasil vaccines administered to males and females as of 2017, 354 adverse reactions were regarded as serious. This included 30 cases of anaphylaxis and five of Guillain-Barre Syndrome with the preponderance being fainting episodes.
If nothing else, Kennedy’s confirmation hearing in front of the Health, Education, Labour and Pensions Committee promises to be an engrossing piece of cabaret.
Yes, a worm lodged in his brain and ate a section of it but died in his epidural space so no harm done. All right, he did say he developed mercury poisoning from eating tuna sandwiches, which he claimed in a deposition gave him cognitive dysfunction, but he’s as smart as a whip now.
It is true that he was a gormless junkie with a 14-year-long heroin addiction, which includes a conviction in 1984 for boarding a plane in possession of the drug, but isn’t that why they put erasers on pencils?
Possibly because of these travails, Bobby Kennedy Jr seems to suffer a form of selective amnesia, as if his public statements once uttered immediately vanish from the record.
In interviews, he often professes that he is not anti-vaccination. But when we go to the third umpire, the denunciations don’t stand up. Last year, Kennedy said in a podcast interview that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective”, and told Fox News that he still believes in the comprehensively debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism. When the deception is laid bare, he babbles about double blind placebo testing of vaccines, ignoring the ethical concerns of subjecting children in the placebo groups to suffering infection and dying in the name of science.
US Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell might have one or two questions to ask the Trump nominee after a key legal adviser to RFK Jr, Aaron Siri, petitioned the US Food and Drug Administration to withdraw its approval of the polio vaccine last year. McConnell suffered from polio as a child and, at 82, is old enough to remember the last polio epidemic that generated 58,000 cases and more than 3000 childhood deaths in the US alone in 1952.
McConnell may even recall the joy that greeted the announcement of the release of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine.
By the way, Salk’s vaccine was the subject of double blind placebo testing that led to the infection, long-term illness and incapacity among some members of the placebo group.
Polio has all but been eradicated from the planet. Two countries stand out as the exception – Pakistan and Afghanistan.
There is a story here, too, which RFK Jr and his army of vaccine sceptics won’t want to hear. US intelligence agencies were recovering the needles used in child vaccinations for polio in western Pakistan and testing them for DNA in an attempt to locate Osama bin Laden.
In terms of providing an approximate location for the architect of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and numerous other terrorist outrages, it worked. In response, Islamist extremists in Pakistan took to murdering health workers and polio vaccine efforts stopped almost immediately.
The Taliban has suspended polio vaccinations in Afghanistan because those administering the vaccines are often women.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccination activism has had real world consequences. In July 2018, two nurses in Samoa administered the MMR vaccine to two children.
The vaccine came in powdered form and had to be diluted with water. Tragically, the nurses used muscle relaxants instead and the two children died as a direct result.
The following year, Kennedy visited the South Pacific nation and met with other anti-vax activists, heaping praise on them and pushing anti-vaccination messages to Samoans.
In just 12 months after the death of the two children, measles vaccination rates fell from 74 per cent to 31 per cent in Samoa, whereas in American Samoa measles vaccine rates, administered by the US, remained at 99 per cent. A traveller to Samoa from New Zealand carrying measles infection arrived just two months after Kennedy’s visit.
Between August and December of 2019, more than 5000 people were infected and 79 people died. Sixty-one of the first 70 deaths were aged four or younger, and all but seven of the dead were under 15 years of age.
Not confined to anti-vaccination activism, Kennedy pointed a finger at the FDA in a tweet now long ago removed in which he accused the organisation of “actively suppressing”, among other things, “sunlight and exercise”, “psychedelics” and “peptides and raw milk”.
It’s the sort of rhetoric one might expect to hear from a hirsute hippy in Byron Bay, but if Kennedy gets through the confirmation process, in terms of public health outcomes in the US, he could make Typhoid Mary look like Albert Schweitzer.
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