More desperation from Your Local Epidemiologist
The prospect of Robert F. Kennedy Jr leading our nation's public health agencies has taken its toll on Substack's biggest CDC mouthpiece.
“Today, as someone who tries to help the public understand accurate scientific information, this is how I feel again. After going through the pandemic, watching rumors turn the public against the people trying to help them, it can suck the wind out of you. Right now, science communicators are exhausted and demoralized at the prospect of doing it all over again.”
—Katelyn Jetelina, aka Your Local Epidemiologist
Last week I wrote about a mainstream expert panicking about the prospect of misinformation spreaders like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Surgeon General of the state of Florida, having a role in public health. Katelyn Jetelina, PhD, aka “Your Local Epidemiologist”, encouraged her 280,000 followers on substack to take heart and continue to engage. According to her, this means:
Building bridges
Recognizing what you say matters.
Communicate with empathy
Listening (not simply hearing) “listen and not just hear” those who disagree.
I left a comment explaining why many Americans are hopeful that Kennedy heading the Department of Health and Human Services would actually turn things around by getting the conflict of interest out of our regulatory agencies and restoring some trust in our medical system.
As of today, the comment was the most popular of all the 152. But still no response from your local epidemiologist. So much for building bridges, communicating and listening to those who disagree.
Some alert readers pointed out the futility of engaging with Jetelina. They see her as a paid shill for the CDC which uses government money to purchase subscriptions to fund her writing and creates fake accounts to create artificial popularity. They think I am being naive by expecting that she would ever engage in good faith.
However, as I have frequently said on numerous podcasts, I do not engage with the expectation of changing a spokesperson’s mind. I do it to change their audience’s minds. Even if half of her subscribers are fake, there are still 140,000 people who read her material. These are the people I would like to reach.
A few days later, President-elect Trump announced that he selected Robert F. Kennedy, Jr to head the Department of Health and Human Services. The HHS is the parent organization of the CDC, FDA and the N.I.H. The NIH is the parent organization of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious diseases, which Dr. Anthony Fauci directed. If Fauci remained at his post, Kennedy could be his boss’s boss.
For those of us who have supported Kennedy's work through all of the character assassinations, through his long shot bid for the Presidency which was thwarted by his own Democratic Party at every turn, through his crusade to fight for our first amendment rights after his were mercilessly torn to shreds, this announcement came as a vindication on a scale few of us could have ever imagined a few years ago.
Not surprisingly, YLE posted another article, this one even more desperate.
In it she writes:
“Yesterday, President-elect Trump announced that RFK Jr. would be his pick to lead the Health and Human Services. If Congress confirms his position, someone with an established track record of ignoring reality will lead our nation’s health agencies, including the FDA, CDC, and NIH.
For many of us who have devoted our lives to public health, science, and medicine—driven by an unwavering commitment to improving the health and well-being of Americans—this strikes deep. A mix of profound sadness, anger, exhaustion, and disbelief because the playing field has now completely shifted: Instead of pushing forward toward a healthier society, it’s now about keeping us from moving backward.
Yesterday, I tried—over and over—to find the right words for a YLE post, struggling to convey what feels like an assault on our work and our mission.”
She tells us exactly where she is coming from again. Kennedy has a track record of ignoring reality. Which reality is she referring to? It’s the “safe and effective” reality, the one that pushed 3/4 of Americans to accept a therapy with no long term safety studies that couldn’t stop infection or transmission. While she may argue that it saved millions of lives (a theory based on specious CDC methodology), it was still nothing more than a therapy that benefited the recipient and nobody else.
The issue which she and establishment “experts” still cannot acknowledge is that it was forced upon tens of millions of people who would have preferred to sit this one out. Forcing people to take a therapy and shirking any kind of responsibility for bad outcomes is nothing short of medical tyranny.
Katelyn pleads for her camp who “have devoted our lives to public health, science, and medicine—driven by an unwavering commitment to improving the health and well-being of Americans…”
Is she really still unaware that there are also doctors and scientists from around the world who disagree with her who have also devoted their lives to the same causes? While believing she alone has the moral high ground she is actually letting us know how uninformed she is about how many qualified voices are that disagree with her.
She continues (emphasis hers):
“How do you express, in a few lines, the unsettling reality that someone with a catalog of lies so long is now tapped to be in charge of the public’s health? From his false claims that vaccines cause autism (they don’t), or that HIV does not cause AIDS (it does), or antidepressants are linked to mass shootings (they aren’t), or chemicals in water making kids trans (they don’t), or to Wi-Fi causing cancer (it doesn’t). The list of falsehoods feels endless.”
Sigh…
She is completely out of touch with Kennedy’s position as well as troves of evidence to support it:
Kennedy doesn’t believe that vaccines cause autism. He has stated that we cannot rule out the possibility that some vaccines may be linked to autism in some cases.
Many antidepressants include suicidal and homicidal ideations as possible side-effects on their package insert.
Kennedy has correctly stated that there are a number of hormone dysregulators in our kids environment. We still don’t know what effect these are having.
There is a massive number of studies which demonstrate EMF at much lower frequencies than what we are being bombarded with now will cause cancer in lab animals. These studies go back decades (links in the article below).
I highly doubt that Katelyn Jetelina has ever heard Kennedy’s numerous interviews or read his books. What must be in the mind of someone who relentlessly discredits a person whom they have never listened to? Note that I am giving her the benefit of the doubt. What if she did research his position thoroughly and then use only strawman arguments against him? Would she really risk her credibility as a “science communicator”? She’s being very foolish and/or deceptive.
She ends her post with an outpouring of emotion:
“I leave you with this: “
“I came across this sculpture while visiting the Met last spring. It is called “Body as Shell” by Alwar Balasubramaniam. At the time, it felt like a perfect expression of how residency sometimes feels… sleep-deprived, exhausted, struggling, and fighting within a system that doesn’t always work for patients in the way they need.
Today, as someone who tries to help the public understand accurate scientific information, this is how I feel again. After going through the pandemic, watching rumors turn the public against the people trying to help them, it can suck the wind out of you. Right now, science communicators are exhausted and demoralized at the prospect of doing it all over again.
But we will. I will keep showing up and doing my best to help you sort the evidence from the rumors.
The only thing we mustn’t do is say everything is now pointless and give up on what’s real and true. We’re tired, sad, and afraid. But we’re still here. We’re not going anywhere.”
Katelyn, I support your right to say what you want, even if I disagree vehemently with your logic and understanding. However if Bobby gets confirmed, I am sorry to say that you and your camp will in fact be going somewhere.
“If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags."
Of course, I took the opportunity to respond to YLE on her post (I’m not forking over for a paid subscription to stay silent). I didn’t cite all the counterfactual citations above. Instead I hoped to appeal to her vast audience by pointing out the amount of hubris she must have to claim 100% certainty of the facts. Here’s my comment:
For a scientist you seem to be missing something important: skepticism of your own position. Those who push the envelope of our understanding of the world are confident of very few things. One is the fact that their contributions to their field will always be refined or even overturned. It's a matter of time.
That is why our understanding moves forward and why scientific opinion is, or at least was, granted the most credibility. The biggest critics of "the science" are the scientists themselves.
In the two years that I have been following your commentary here I have never seen you disagree with the CDC and their positions. It is also quite clear that you cite studies that support their position without ever acknowledging that there are others that tell a different story.
There is a substantial amount of uncertainty with regard to everything in the medical sciences. We as doctors make only one promise, that we will not intentionally do harm. Think about that. We cannot even promise that we won't do harm because our understanding is always changing.
In the spring of 2022, six months after the Biden administration pushed for Covid vaccine mandates even though we knew very well that the shots did not stop transmission, many scientists and doctors were trying to communicate the fact that the mandates were not only unethical but destructive.
I am a doctor and I have vaccinated my children in compliance with the CDC's immunization schedule. The Covid shots were different. The published trial results and memoranda between Pfizer and the FDA clearly show evidence of fraud. You have to look a lot harder than "the results" section.
When I engage with people about controversial topics, I take special interest in people who have changed their mind about the topic. They were certain that they were right, but then they saw something that changed everything for them.
Here is a summary of why I changed my mind about the safety of the Covid shots and the credibility of the news sources that touted their miraculous benefit. Rather than stoking anger and fear about these remarkable turn of events, perhaps it’s time to actually listen to what RFK Jr. and the scientists and doctors who support him are saying.
In this article I demonstrate how both the "antivax" and medical orthodoxy use data to mislead their audiences. Then I show you how the original Pfizer trial was rigged to hide safety concerns and how the FDA and the CDC turned a blind eye to them.
https://madhavasetty.substack.com/p/safe-and-effective
The article I linked in my comment above is just the tip of the iceberg. I don’t expect her to read it or respond. The hope is that a few thousand (maybe more?) will. By treating the CDC as infallible with regard to public health, no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, her position is based in pure faith. Faith is, after all, believing in something no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary. And so by using the CDC position as the litmus test for reality, she is not being objective or scientific, she is being dogmatic.
The prospect of Bobby heading the HHS is tantalizing, however his Senate confirmation is not at all a sure thing. What can we do to shift public opinion in his favor?
Please leave your comments.
I am sorry to say that I know more people than I can count who think like YLE, which is to say, they don't think. They have a credo. They know how many angels dance on the head of a pin (as it were, as per CDC guidance, I guess), and if you don't agree with them, you heretic, be damned to the fires of Hell! Or, at least, the grey precincts of Purgatory.
Your strategy of paying for a subscription to YLE and there leaving ample and thoughtful comments is a most original one, and, I think, a very good one. My own strategy has been to make transcripts of censored and shadow-banned videos. What I mean to say is, aside from writing books and blog posts, and making videos and podcasts, there are many other ways, some a bit unusual, to work with the power of words. I thank you for your efforts.
Intelligence has been bred out of doctors of medicine.
The field attracts conformists.
The process rewards those who bow to authority.
Their educations are nothing more really than a standardized process yielding standardized dullards.
Any decent lawyer could take a look at the mountains of research that the field is based upon, and with a little sunlight, expose what, in the end, is, well,
Medical Madness.