Kennedy is in! Now what?

Who knows? Grab the popcorn and watch the show!

Last week I was in the Operating Room when I received a text from a friend letting me know that RFK Jr. had just received enough votes to secure his position as the next Secretary of the DHHS.

“He’s in”, I said, “Kennedy is the head of HHS!”.

The two surgeons in the room groaned. I asked them why they thought this was bad news. One said that it was because he was unqualified and that he makes a lot of unsubstantiated claims. I asked for an example.

“He says that fluoride should be taken out of our supply of drinking water because it’s dangerous to kids.”

I asked them if they knew that the National Toxicology Program (a division of our own HHS) has asserted that there is an association between fluoride and a drop in kids’ IQ.

Neither were aware of this. But one continued, “he also says that vaccines cause autism and we know that they don’t.” I asked him how he knew this. Answer:

“There are a ton of studies that have proven this.”

I asked him if he had actually read any of them. He hadn’t. Like most medical professionals, they were well informed about matters pertaining to their speciality and take the time to read relevant literature, but when it comes to topics outside their field they rely on the media. However this line of questioning exposed the deficit not in their base of knowledge but in an understanding of epistemology—how we know what we know.

The postulate that no effect or relationship between two things exists is called the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis can never be proven. One may correctly claim that no study to date has proven a relationship between vaccination and neuro-developmental problems like autism, but one can never prove that there isn’t one. With larger and better data sets and better means of detection will come greater confidence in what is known. There could be an infinitesimal association with no clinical relevance that exists beyond our means of measurement, therefore we can never prove no relationship exists.

However, in the interest of protecting healthy children we should, at the very least, be interested in knowing how big or little the risk is, especially if we are exposing tens of millions of children to said products from the time they are born through adulthood. At this point in time, we have no idea what the risk is.

The surgeon countered, “What about tylenol? Are we going to waste resources and time to find out if every little thing has a tiny risk of something terrible happening?”

I looked at him and was about to say, “Yes! If you are giving a product to a hundred million people isn’t it incumbent on us as doctors to know what the risk is?”.

Just then, the surgical technician blurted out, “I never got my kids vaccinated with the Covid shots.”

Dead silence in the room.

I asked her why she didn’t. Did she read something somewhere? Did she know of other kids who were injured?

“No. It was just a feeling…”

I think that Kennedy’s appointment to lead public health in this country is going to spark lots of conversations like this one in the months to come. Hopefully this will embolden people to speak up when in the past they felt they had to keep their thoughts to themselves. In this case, when I pushed back against the two surgeons and divulged the deficits in their knowledge and understanding, the tech probably felt it was safe to throw her two cents in.

Where to go from here?

I am delighted to see Bobby at the helm. It’s been incredible to see this man endure years of baseless attacks from the media and certain family members and scorn from the medical orthodoxy, law-fare waged against him by his own political party and end up on top.

Kennedy will be the first to acknowledge that he didn’t do it alone. He stood upon the shoulders of passionate supporters who stumped for him, who shared his posts, who dared to echo his position in conversations, who contributed to his campaign for POTUS, who kept CHD running in spite of four years of government sanctioned censorship so that his message could percolate into the zeitgeist which very well may have lead to a popular vote victory for President Trump and ultimately Kennedy’s appointment to run public health in America.

My interest now is in how the medical establishment and their puppeteers, legacy media, will respond to this stultifying turn of events. How much longer will the talking heads be able to silence a member of the cabinet of the USG?

What of Dr. Peter Hotez, the vaccine fanatic with an autistic daughter who infamously refused a multimillion dollar appearance fee and the opportunity to discuss vaccines with Kennedy on the Joe Rogan Podcast two years ago, explaining that Kennedy wasn’t an expert and science doesn’t get settled through debates. His refusal was cheered by mainstream science communicators like Your Local Epidemiologist who argued that Hotez is too smart and honorable to stoop to a Rogan appearance with a misinformation spreader.

Would he be willing to talk things out with the Secretary of Health and Human Services in charge of billions of dollars in grant money?

I really do hope that Kennedy will take some time out of his busy schedule to appear regularly on all media platforms to defend his strategy and plans to his critics. The question is, who will have the cojones to face him on an even playing field? Anthony Fauci? Frances Collins? Rochelle Walensky? Deborah Birx? Paul Offit?

Lamestream media may have been able to ignore him like an eccentric uncle at Thanksgiving dinner but now he’s in charge of a lot of money—taxpayer money—which funds the medical establishment and, directly and indirectly, the Pharma cartel. It will be interesting to see them squirm, especially if Kennedy is able to end Pharma commercials on TV. How is Pfizer going to buy good coverage if that happens? How are the media execs going to play this?

As for right now, things haven’t changed. “The Vigilant Fox” reported on substack that MSNBC didn’t waste a moment before resorting to their playbook:

MSNBC Shamelessly CENSORS Feed During RFK Jr.’s Swearing-In Ceremony

“On Katy Tur Reports, MSNBC told viewers they were about to “listen in” to Trump’s comments about RFK Jr. before his swearing-in as HHS Secretary. But in an awkward and sudden shift, Tur informed them that, nope, they weren’t going to hear any of it.

Instead, they would watch it—while MSNBC brought on a doctor to offer commentary and insult RFK Jr. instead.

Just as RFK Jr. was about to speak and Dr. Drew Updike wrapped up his commentary, MSNBC cut to a commercial break. How convenient!”

This is what MSNBC didn’t want anyone to hear (Kennedy’s comments)

“For 20 years, I’ve gotten up every morning on my knees and prayed that God would put me in a position where I could end the childhood chronic disease epidemic in this country. On August 23rd of last year, God sent me President Trump.

“He’s kept every promise that he’s made to me. He’s kept his word on every account and gone way beyond it. I’m so grateful to you, Mr. President. A lot of people told me that I couldn’t trust President Trump—that I better get it in writing.

“And we did a handshake, and everything that he told me he was going to do, he has done. And I’m so grateful to him. And I’ve told you before, I genuinely believe that you are a pivotal historical figure, and you are going to transform this country.”

Yesterday I read an “op-med” piece on the popular networking platform for medical professionals, Doximity. The author of the article titled “I’m a Doctor, and I’m Appalled at the Silence From the American Medical Association” cited complaints of a single physician, who asked to remain anonymous, about how the powerful lobbying group for doctors, the AMA are not responding to physician concerns and interests. Among other issues, the unnamed doctor complained about Kennedy’s appointment as the head of the HHS:

“In November, we had an AMA meeting. We asked our AMA lobbyists if they thought RFK would be nominated, and they said, no, we do not think so, and that he probably would have some kind of advisory role. The whole idea of him being nominated made everybody laugh because he has no qualifications to run HHS.

I watched both of the [confirmation] hearings, and he’s absolutely unqualified to be in charge of HHS, and not only because he has promoted vaccine disinformation and that he’s promoting fluoride disinformation. But when he was asked about Medicare and Medicaid, he showed his incompetence.”

To be honest, I wanted to respond like this guy:

thekaylorbetts

A post shared by @thekaylorbetts

“If you thought masks were an effective protocol over Covid, I don’t care about your opinion on RFK Jr. and the MAHA movement.

If you think that the Covid vaccine worked how it was supposed to, and how it was sold to you, and you think it was totally safe and effective, and you thought that I was supposed to get it because it would help protect others who got it, if you think that it was a good idea to be obsessively using hand sanitizer to prevent something spreading that’s completely airborne, and if you think things like Vitamin D and ivermectin and monoclonal antibodies to help prevent and treat Covid were all pseudoscientific conspiracy theories, and if you can’t see by now or you deny that you got lied to by the mainstream media and big Pharma and Western Medical Professionals and the government and our health officials, then I have one message for you: I really, REALLY don’t care about your opinion on RFK Jr. and whether or not he’s qualified to lead the HHS and the MAHA movement because quite frankly the credibility of your opinion was lost on me AGES ago.

And that’s the f*****g vibe today baby.”

Instead I penned by own “op-med” and submitted to the Doximity editorial staff. I received an email back saying that it was under review and I won’t be told if it was rejected or approved and that approval often takes months. My guess is that it will never make it to the Doximity platform, so here it is…

As the majority of the medical community watched in disbelief and horror as Robert F. Kennedy collected the necessary Senate votes required for his appointment to head public health in this country, some of us held our breath, never expecting that such a much needed referendum on “the science” could ever occur so quickly.

We as medical professionals have lost the trust of the public. While we would like to think it is because of dangerous misinformation spreaders like Mr. Kennedy, the reality is that we haven’t earned it. Mistakes were made during the pandemic, but were they really so excusable? I argue that they weren’t.

While we may disagree about what was known and when, the reality is that if the public doesn’t trust medical authorities, any future breakthrough, miraculous or not, will be of little value because few will trust it. We have to regain the public’s trust, and that can only happen if we take an open and sincere look at what happened over the last five years.

It is unfortunate that the Senate voted almost unanimously along party lines. This will no doubt be used to politicize his appointment. The truth is that very few, if any, of these politicians were equipped to judge a man whose understanding of the literature and regulatory processes far exceeded theirs. In that sense, Kennedy’s appointment was a testament to the sway the new President has over his party. My point, which I will defend below, is that the Senate got it right but for reasons they were unaware of.

First, I want to dispel the idea that because Kennedy has no medical training that should disqualify him as a legitimate Secretary of HHS. Going back 40 years, only three of the last ten HHS Secretaries (Drs. Tom Price, Louis Sullivan and Otis Bowen) were medical doctors.

Like most doctors, I am well versed in topics around my own specialty but defer to the CDC around matters of public health. I have vaccinated my children in compliance with the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule. I never once questioned their opinion and recommendations–until Covid.

Why did we isolate everyone instead of the historically accepted strategy to protect the most vulnerable, quarantine the ill and let the healthy continue to work and develop natural immunity?

In April of 2020, Director of Illinois DPH, Dr. Ngozi Ezike unequivocally stated that anyone who tested positive for Covid at the time of death would be considered a Covid fatality no matter the true cause of death. To make it clear, she offered the example of a person dying in hospice of a chronic illness. If they tested positive, they were a Covid death.

And what of this PCR test that was used as the gold standard for diagnosing disease? Nobody knew what the sensitivity and specificity of this test was. If an asymptomatic person tested positive, that was a Covid case. This flew against our historical definition of a “case” and undoubtedly exaggerated the true impact of the disease as well.

And then the mRNA vaccines. The Pfizer formulation which was authorized in December, 2020 boasted a 95% efficacy in preventing symptomatic Covid-19. It was a miracle of modern medicine. But was it? Though not reported in the seminal paper in the NEJM (Pollack et al), Pfizer investigators only tested one in 20 participants who expressed Covid symptoms in their trial. This was made clear to the FDA’s VRBPAC (Vaccine and Related Biological Product Advisory Committee) in a memorandum weeks before authorization discussions took place. No claim about efficacy is possible if only 5% of the symptomatic were tested. Why didn’t Pfizer test them and, more concerningly, why didn’t the FDA ask any more questions?

This astonishingly high efficacy was used to justify inoculating all participants in the control arm of that trial, eliminating any chance of determining medium or long-term safety signals. And yet the public was repeatedly assured that these products have undergone rigorous safety testing.

Reports of serious adverse events began to pour into the CDC’s VAERS system, one that had been proven by a paper (Lazarus, et al) sanctioned by the CDC itself that demonstrated the VAERS detected only 1 to 10 percent of vaccine adverse events. Very few, if any, of these reports were investigated by the CDC and were thus ignored.

Kennedy was one of the few outspoken voices that echoed my concerns. That is why I left my clinical practice in the autumn of 2021 to work for his organization, Children’s Health Defense as the Senior Science Editor for The Defender, its on-line publication.

Since my return to clinical medicine I have asked dozens of the health care professionals I work with a question. Not one doctor or nurse I spoke with knew that if a child that suffers harm from a vaccine on the childhood immunization schedule that the manufacturer cannot be held liable for damages. Why is that?

There is no other product, medical or otherwise, that enjoys that kind of legal protection. This protection was offered to the industry in 1986 through an act of congress, known as The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, because our own medical associations acknowledged that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe”.

While this is not an admission that vaccines are all harmful, it carries the assumption that the benefits of vaccination far exceed risks. It is an assumption which seemed reasonable four decades ago when children were required to receive only a dozen shots. There was no epidemic of childhood chronic disease then. There is now, and our children receive over 70.

While the concomitant rise in chronic disease and vaccine load does not prove causality, we should be able to acknowledge that if vaccines were responsible in part for this alarming uptrend this is exactly what we would be seeing.

At what point will we agree that more research is needed? I suggest that we have reached that point now. Valid criticism around the pandemic response and public concern about the safety and utility of the CDC’s immunization schedule is what has propelled Mr. Kennedy to the top of the DHHS. Are we going to support the deep dives into the data Kennedy has promised or will we continue to deride him and undermine efforts to definitively answer these questions?·