Among serious scientists and medical professionals, there is little serious debate over whether vaccines have added years to vulnerable lives and played an enormous part in the global increase in human life expectancy over the past century.
[NOTE: World Heath Organization epidemiologist Naor Bar-Zeev estimates that since 1974, vaccines have prevented 154 million deaths. Even if that estimate is wrong — a consideration indulged here for those suspicious of the WHO — even if the result is only one-third of Bar-Zeev’s number, then a population larger than Spain’s has been spared early preventable death through vaccines.]
President-elect Donald Trump‘s choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services — a federal agency that contains the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and which controls about 25% of the federal budget — is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who does not believe vaccines are safe.
Kennedy, a lawyer and former heroin addict, is sometimes referred to by the anodyne label “vaccine skeptic.” Yet “skeptic” is not the word to describe Kennedy’s opinion that there is “no vaccine that is safe and effective,” as he asserts in the video below.
(To use a religious analogy, a skeptic is the equivalent of an agnostic — one who has doubts. Kennedy’s position on vaccines is akin to that of an atheist — one who strenuously does not believe, who refutes.)
In the resurfaced video, which commenters are calling “scary” and “terrifying,” Kennedy lies and denies ever saying “no vaccine is safe and effective.” When interviewer Kasie Hunt shows him video evidence of him saying exactly those words, Kennedy equivocates.
Next Hunt plays audio of Kennedy, his distinctive voice unmistakable, recounting how he accosts new parents carrying babies and threatens them by saying they should not vaccinate their children, suggesting that any parent allowing a child to be vaccinated was harming that child.
Kennedy tells the story in an effort to encourage others to also harass random parents wherever they encounter them — in supermarkets, hiking trails, etc. — and hit them with anti-vaxx evangelism.
Kennedy openly discusses warning parents against vaccinations, and asserts if the parent “heard it from me, then if he heard it from ten other people, maybe he won’t do it, maybe he will save that child.”
Kasie Hunt: You recently said, “There’s no vaccine that’s safe and effective”. Do you still believe that?
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) November 15, 2024
RFK Jr: I never said that.
Hunt: Play the clip.
RFK JR (in the clip): There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.
pic.twitter.com/GJs4KstYg8
Kennedy also talks about “77 vaccines” people are given — later changing it to 14 when questioned. Currently WHO lists these 14 diseases against which children in developed nations are commonly vaccinated: diphtheria, Haemophilus influenzae type B, hepatitis B, Japanese encephalitis, measles, meningitis A, pertussis, invasive pneumococcal disease, polio, rotavirus, rubella, tetanus, tuberculosis, and yellow fever.
