I’ve also got a few thoughts to send you about Signalgate and Ukraine, but I'll send them separately.
By ChatGPT 4.5
I listened recently to a podcast hosted byMona Charen of The Bulwark. Her guest was pediatrician Paul Offit, one of the inventors of the rotavirus vaccine. She asked what had drawn him to this work. He told her that when he was five years old, he’d undergone surgery to correct a congenital foot deformity. He was sent to recover at a chronic care facility by the name of “Kernen’s Hospital for Crippled Children.” He remarked that these days, it would be given a more euphemistic name.
Perhaps such euphemisms come at a cost. I wonder if removing phrases like “crippled children” from our daily discourse has left too many people unable to visualize just what it is that vaccines prevent.
“When you’re in a chronic care facility in the mid-1950s,” Offit says,
—you’re in a polio ward. So I remember polio. There was one visiting hour a week. I remember children in iron lungs. I remember the so-called Sister Kenny hot-pack treatments,1 where they would take these excruciatingly hot packs and put them on withered arms and legs. So children were screaming. It was really a Dickens book. And it was scarring.
“I saw those children,” said Offit, “as I think I came to see myself … vulnerable and helpless and alone.” This, he said, inspired him to commit his life to preventing pediatric infectious diseases.
He determined to invent a rotavirus vaccine. He succeeded. With his colleagues Fred Clark and Stanley Plotkin, he created RotaTeq, one of the two vaccines now in common use. RotaTeq saves hundreds of lives around the world every day.
Offit is now a professor of vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, where he served as the chief of the division of infectious disease from 1992 to 2014. He also directs the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. According to his bio,
[He] was a member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is a member of the Food and Drug Administration Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, and a founding advisory board member of the Autism Science Foundation and the Foundation for Vaccine Research, a member of the Institute of Medicine and co-editor of the foremost vaccine text, Vaccines.
He is a recipient of many awards including the J. Edmund Bradley Prize for Excellence in Pediatrics from the University of Maryland Medical School, the Young Investigator Award in Vaccine Development from the Infectious Disease Society of America, a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health, and the Sabin Vaccine Institute Gold Medal.
This is why our new Secretary of Health and Human Resources used Offit as a foil in his stump speeches. People like this need to be shut down for good, he says. Arrested and imprisoned, perhaps.
Not long ago, Kennedy took to Joe Rogan’s podcast, where he again described Offit as a dangerous vaccinator who had “made a US$186 million deal with Merck.” No one knows where he came up with that. Offit made no such a deal. He couldn’t have, even if he’d wanted to. He didn’t own the intellectual property—it belonged to his laboratory.
RFK Jr’s lies about Offit have resultedin hate mail, physical altercations with anti-vaccine activists, and death threats. “One caller threatened my children,” Offit recalls.2 If you look at his Twitter feed, you can see how persistently he's harassed by people who believed what RFK Jr said:
I cite those just so that we all remember the stakes of this debate. Now let me call your attention to an exchange in the podcast. The video should start at the right place but if not, it begins at 27:36:
Here’s the transcript:
CHAREN: But he (RFK Jr] is also saying that they’re going to spend taxpayer money to do new studies on the link between vaccines and autism. So you were saying—about how many studies would you say have already been done on this idea?
OFFIT: Between fifteen and eighteen, roughly, in that range.
CHAREN: Okay. You know, I was rolling my eyes about the idea of spending taxpayer money on such a thing since it’s obviously not needed and the results are in and we know that there’s no link to the best of our knowledge. But somebody online—it’s “Popehat,” who does legal commentary—he said they’re going to falsify the results.
OFFIT: Right. He’s right.
CHAREN: And that’s what I thought. thought, there’s no other reason to do this, is there, than—
OFFIT: Here’s how you know this. Here’s how you know this is true. If you watch his Senate confirmation hearing in front of the HELP Committee, RFK Jr was asked by both Senator Sanders and Senator Cassidy from Louisiana, “Do you agree that the evidence is solid, clear, that vaccines don’t cause autism?”And he said no, that he didn’t agree with that, that if there was a good study, he would believe it. But then, at the end of that meeting, he holds up this “study,” which was not published in a medical journal or a scientific journal. It was not peer-reviewed. It was funded by an anti-vaccine activist group. And it was horribly flawed. There were all these confounding variables that weren’t accounted for. It was a useless paper—that’s why it was never published, [it was] by two authors who generally have their papers retracted. And this, to him, was a high-quality study.
That tells you everything you need to know about why he’s doing this study. He wants to try and shoehorn his fixed, immutable, science-resistant hypothesis into a study [which] he’s going to hold up, scare people even more about measles-containing vaccines, in the midst of an epidemic where we’ve had two deaths among 228 people. That’s a 1 percent mortality rate. That’s ten times higher than the normal mortality rate.4
CHAREN: Yeah, what was the mortality rate for Covid? It’s much higher than that, right? I don’t think the Covid rate was that high.
OFFIT: It was about that actually, in that range, yes.
CHAREN: It was? Okay. So, we have RFK Jr.’s idée fixe, you know, his inability to be persuaded by evidence. And so I’m wondering: You’re on the inside, you know these people, what is the reaction in the medical world, in the scientific community. I mean, aren’t people—why aren’t people—don’t people have their hair on fire? Why isn’t there more of a, you know, rebellion and saying, “This is completely bonkers, we’ve turned the page back to, you know, 1650?” Where’s the outcry? …
OFFIT: I think people are a little scared. That’s my sense of it. I think people who work for hospitals or universities or medical schools, all of which receive federal funds, are a little scared that what they perceive as a vindictive administration—that in any way if they speak out, that they would be punished. I really do think that’s what’s going on. I just had somebody call me today, from a group called Vaccinate Your Family, who said, “Where is everybody? Where is everybody? Where’s the American Academy of Pediatrics? Where’s the American Medical Association? Where is the American Association of Public Health? Where are these associations?” Because everybody’s standing back. Because they’re a little scared, I think.
CHAREN: Well, that’s very discouraging because a little courage would go a long way here. We need people who are responsible and who know things to correct misinformation. And if they don’t, then they’re actually partly to blame for what happens, aren’t they?
It’s more than discouraging. It’s nauseating. What could be more morally obvious than the obligation of these organizations to speak out?5
In 2021 (with half a million Americans already dead), RFK Jr. petitioned the government to revoke its authorization of all Covid vaccines. He has said that no vaccine is safe or effective. He has claimed the MMR vaccine causes autism. He has claimed the polio vaccine caused an “explosion in soft tissue cancers” that killed “many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.” He has claimed that Wi-Fi causes cancer and makes your brain leak. He has claimed that antidepressants cause school shootings. He has claimed chemicals in the water make children transgender. He has claimed the herbicide atrazine “induces complete feminization and chemical castration” in frogs. He has claimed Bill Gates planned to install tracking devices in Covid vaccines. He has claimed Lyme disease is a manmade bioweapon. He has claimed that Covid was designed to spared the Chinese and the Jews. He has insisted that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are great treatments for Covid. He has insisted that routine childhood vaccinations have never been safety-tested. He believes HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. He describes the use of the life-saving antiviral drug AZT as “mass murder.” He rejects the germ theory of disease. As a direct result of his intervention, 83 young Samoan children died of measles. The guy is crazy as an outhouse rat, with a proven record of getting small children killed. There is no way to fix someone this insane.
The future is hard to predict. But no forecast could be safer than this: If you give a lamentable crackpot like RFK Jr a prominent public platform, bestow upon him him an aura of authority by making him both a cabinet official and the head of our major medical bureaucracies, and give him the power to make decisions about vaccine research, mandates, and recommendations, the result will be dead children—as surely as night follows day.
Dead adults, too. But it’s the risk to children that makes this so morally obscene, and it’s the involvement of children that makes the cowardice of everyone who went along with this so remarkable.
It’s a universally-accepted moral principle that because children are helpless, vulnerable, and incapable of making complex decisions about their own safety, adults must ensure they’re not harmed or abused. But no major organization of physicians or medical professionals spoke out against RFK Jr’s nomination. None said the obvious: Putting the nation’s most noxious anti-vaccine activist in charge of our health bureaucracies is so outrageous, so insane, that only a demented society would countenance this.
The American Medical Association, which has 270,000 members, is by far the largest professional organization for physicians in the United States. It’s a lobbying powerhouse. It has a huge advocacy shop in DC. It spends millions electing its preferred candidates in every election cycle. The “Core Purpose” of the AMA, according to its website is, to “promote the science and art of medicine and the betterment of public health.” It publishes the AMA Journal of Ethics, too.It said nothing. Nor has it uttered a peep about our withdrawal from the World Health Organization; our abandonment of efforts to surveil, control, or even communicate about H5N1; the crippling of bureaucracies charged with monitoring disease outbreaks and the safety of the food supply; or the comprehensive destruction of American biomedical research infrastructure.
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America—which RFK Jr believes to be an impossibly powerful pro-vaccination cabal—had this to say about his nomination:
The men and women in our industry wake up every day focused on improving public health and treating the most devastating diseases affecting patients. Biopharmaceutical innovation has made tremendous progress in the fight against disease—dramatically improving cancer survival rates, curing hepatitis C, and eliminating devastating diseases like polio and smallpox. This industry is a crown jewel of the American economy, giving American patients more medicine choices than anywhere else in the world and supporting millions of high-paying, high-tech jobs around the country. We want to work with the Trump administration to further strengthen our innovation ecosystem and improve health care for patients.
No, I’m not sure how any of that was relevant, either.
The American Society for Microbiology, the Society of Infectious Diseases Pharmacists, the HIV Medicine Association, the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, the Infectious Disease Society of America, and The Society for Healthcare Epidemiology in America jointly sent a letter to the Senate that did not mention RFK Jr’s name, as if merely uttering it would bring bad luck. The letter expressed the hope that some unnamed nominee would be partial to “evidence-based decision-making and communications,” and would have “an experienced understanding of medicine and science.”
The scientific evidence is clear: vaccines are one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine, responsible for saving millions of lives and preventing countless illnesses worldwide. Vaccines truly are a scientific achievement of epic proportions—a safe and effective way to activate the natural ability of our immune systems to fight diseases that would otherwise kill or harm millions.
It then said it stood ready to work with Mr. Kennedy should he be confirmed.
The American Hospitals Associations said it looked forward to working with the Trump administration. The American Academy of Pediatrics offered a pallid affirmation that vaccines were “an invaluable part of the fabric of our society for decades and are one of the most significant medical innovations of our time.” It expressed the hope that “science continues to underpin all decision-making, policies and programs.”
It’s important to stress that the equivocation of the major medical associations, and their failure to register their objections—in terms so plain even the dimmest senator could understand them—almost certainly made a difference. Several Republican senators were wavering. They might have found it bracing to be reminded that Elon Musk was not the only one with a lot of money to spend on primaries.
There were honorable exceptions. The American Public Health Association, which has 25,000 members, sent an appropriate letterto the ranking members of the relevant Senate committees, as did acoalition of 87 smaller left-wing interest groups, some of which seemed to be connected to medicine. But the big organizations? The American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, in particular? They stayed silent even after RFK Jr’s testimony, which demonstrated beyond all doubt that he is medically and scientifically illiterate, insane, mendacious, completely unqualified for the job, and intensely irritating, too.
“I think they [the AMA] should stand up and say with a clear voice what we all know to be true: this guy is uniquely unqualified. This guy is scary,” said Rob Davidson, an emergency physician in Michigan and executive director of the Committee to Protect Health Care [which] organized more than 18,000 physicians to sign a letter urging senators to oppose Kennedy’s nomination. … Davidson said some of his physician colleagues have renounced their AMA membership. “I had thought better of them,” Davidson said of AMA. “It’s hurting their reputation with physicians.”
It’s a matter of record that their silence gave more than one craven excuse for a senator exactly the cover they sought:
Some GOP senators have noticed the lack of opposition to Kennedy and taken it as permission to vote for a longtime Democrat and progressive environmentalist who’s demonized industries long seen as bulwarks of their party. “I believe that silence is consent,” said Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) after agreeing to send Kennedy’s nomination to the floor in a Senate Finance Committee vote last week. “The fact that they haven’t [opposed Kennedy publicly] suggests to me that folks that I’m instructed by are OK with this nomination.”
When asked for comment, the president of the American Association of Pediatrics, Susan Kressly, told Roll Call, “We are pediatricians, not politicians.”
For the love of God—since when are pediatricians absolved from responsibility on the grounds that it’s a political matter if children live or die?
Good luck staying out of politics, too:
The cowardice of the American Association of Pediatrics, in particular, is striking. If a professional organization of pediatricians isn’t obliged to speak up on behalf of the children who will pay the price for this mass abdication of responsibility—and pay it in brain-damage, blindness, deafness, disfigurement, sterility, paralysis, agonizing suffering, and death—who is? Why does this organization even exist?
And what is it exactly that they feared? Are the heads of our medical associations now at risk of being tortured and shot in a basement? Deported to a gulag? Yes, but only if they’re mistaken for Venezuelans. Odds are they would have been just fine.
So why this timorousness? “The AMA and other organizations,” wrote Roll Call,
likely want to maintain relationships with the Trump administration and Congress as they consider policies that could have widespread impact on doctors, including prior authorization reform and physician payment policy. Kennedy is also said to be looking at making major changes to the way Medicare pays physicians.
groups thought to have the clout to steer policy and funding in Washington because they enjoyed bipartisan support and huge lobbying budgets have remained silent about Kennedy. They haven’t spoken up even though he has accused them of fraud and conspiracy, and promised to hold them accountable. That’s not because they aren’t worried, but because they didn’t think they could stop him—or think the cost of speaking out would be too steep, five people representing health groups, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said.
The cost of speaking out would be too steep? The cost of not speaking out will be tiny corpses. No wonder Americans don’t trust the medical profession.
“They think he’s the wrong person for the job,” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, one of the few groups to openly decry Kennedy’s bid to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. “With good respect to all my buddies, they’re making the false assumption that if they stay silent, they will get something in return.”
Their assumption may be true or false—and it’s false—but the calculation itself is grotesque. If, upon contemplating a preventable holocaust of American schoolchildren, your first response is not, “How do I stop this,” but “What will I get in return if I go along with this,” something is deeply wrong with you.
Medpage Today was so taken back by the silence of the medical organizations that ittried emailing them for comment. They “did not respond at all by press time,” they reported, speculating that they were laying low because, if confirmed, JFK Jr “would hold enormous sway over issues that physician groups care about.” Does this mean that protecting children from crippling diseases we know exactly how to prevent it is not an issue they care about?
Writing for The Hill, Scott A. Rivkees, a pediatrician and the former Surgeon General of Florida, offered what he wrongly believed to be a more charitable explanation of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ stance :
[M]any pediatricians, like other physicians, are now afraid. The American Academy of Pediatrics is an organization with more than 67,000 members. The decision not to oppose the RFK Jr. nomination was not made by a vote of members but by its executive and administrative leadership. The reaction to this position was swift and vicious, with the academy being called “cowardly” and members threatening to cancel or not renew their membership. This issue, though, transcends cowardice. Instead, it reflects a fear of speaking out and retribution that now grips American medicine.
Actually, no. That doesn’t transcend cowardice. That’s what cowardice is.
“The changes affecting medicine,” Rivkees continues,
are just one part of the colossal changes our country is seeing. It is now recognized that our sense of community, our moral compass and our intrinsic kindness and decency are being supplanted by meanness.
How does this avalanche of change affect the pediatrician who spends their day protecting and treating children? We now see fear in the practice of medicine, fear that our opinion is not respected and long-standing and validated medical practices are being trashed. We fear the medical community can no longer regulate itself to the detriment of high-standard healthcare. We fear the overt threat that the purse strings of medicine and health care are being squeezed with more than US$880 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid being considered in Congress.
But this, exactly this, is why their silence is craven. Who do they imagine will rush in to save them from these circumstances? The Americans? We are the Americans, and if we don’t stand up to this, no one is coming to save us.
What’s very striking about this moral failure is that those involved clearly feel no anxiety about being judged as cowards, or not enough to prompt them to act otherwise. There remains, in our culture, a stern taboo against physical cowardice. But moral cowardice now passes almost unremarked.
Consider Scot Peterson, the Broward County sheriff who hid outside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and made no attempt to enter the building while a gunman systematically murdered the students inside. He was tried on seven counts of felony child neglect, three misdemeanor counts of culpable negligence, and a count of perjury. “These were the technical charges,” wrote Jamie Thompson in The Atlantic. “But in the eyes of the public, what he was actually on trial for was cowardice.”
… A Florida state senator called Peterson “a cowardly accomplice to murder.” The editorial board of the South Florida Sun Sentinel called him “despicable.” One grieving parent called him a “piece of garbage”; another tweeted that he should “rot in hell.” This “wasn’t a training issue or a policy issue,” Scott Israel, who at the time of the shooting was the Broward County sheriff, and Peterson’s boss, would say. “It was an issue of courage.”
Peterson became known as the “Coward of Broward.” But his cowardice should be far more sympathetic to us than the cowardice of our major medical associations. We respond to danger by instinct. We fight, we flee, or we freeze. Running toward gunfire is profoundly unnatural. None of us, if we’re honest, except those who’ve found themselves in that situation, have any idea whether we would.
The number of children who will die in mass shootings is a very small fraction of the number who will die of epidemic disease in the absence of routine and universal childhood vaccination. It is no less appalling a tragedy and waste when a child is killed or severely brain-damaged by measles, or paralyzed by polio, than it is when he is killed, brain-damaged, or paralyzed by a bullet. Blindness, deafness, disfigurement, sterility—all are common sequelae of the childhood diseases we now know very well how to prevent. All were common. My great aunt Belle was deaf as a consequence of measles contracted in childhood. All will be common again if we cease to vaccinate children as a matter of routine.
Inculcating fear of vaccinations among one’s fellow citizens isn’t a minor lapse of judgment. Making a career of it, as RFK Jr has, is sick, immoral, and demented. It’s as demented as handing out AR-15s to disturbed and violent adolescents.
To refuse to say so—when you’re the nation’s foremost authority on pediatrics—is hardly much better.
Since RFK Jr’s appointment, the CDC hasn’t held a single public briefing, despite multiple disease outbreaks. Kennedy hasn’t met with, or been briefed by, any of the CDC’s infectious disease experts on measles. In his first public statement about the outbreak, Kennedy described the situation as “not unusual” (false) and claimed those who had been hospitalized were there “mainly for quarantine” (false).
He published an opinion piece on the Fox News website, which has been reproduced on the HHS website (and thus given an official imprimatur). This at least includes the words, “MMR vaccine is crucial to avoiding potentially deadly disease.” But these words are in the headline, not the article, meaning he didn't write them—they were put there by an editor. The article itself seems to be the product of an agency tug-of-war. Someone managed to slip in the sentence, “Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.” But the rest of the article is nonsense. It probably did more harm than good. “Studies have found that vitamin A can dramatically reduce measles mortality,” Kennedy writes, neglecting to say that there’s scant evidence this is true if you’re not deficient in vitamin A to begin with, that the effect isn’t anywhere near as “dramatic” as that of being vaccinated, and vitamin A, at high levels, is toxic. He doesn’t mention that the MMR vaccine is 97 percent effective against measles. He also wrote:
Tens of thousands died with, or of, measles annuallyin 19th century America. By 1960—before the vaccine’s introduction—improvements in sanitation and nutrition had eliminated 98 percent of measles deaths.
The “with, or of” formulation is beloved of anti-vaxxers, who like to claim that someone who has just patently died of an infectious disease would have been fine but for some other, undetected cause of mortality. The paper to which he links shows no such thing—the claim is simply untrue.6 And “better sanitation” will not prevent the spread of an airborne virus, particularly not the most contagious one known to man.
“We must make vaccines accessible for all those who want them,” he adds, after doing all he could to hint that no one in his right mind would want them, but “the decision to vaccinate is a personal one.” He offer no suggestion that it is morally wrong to make oneself host to a deadly infection amid an epidemic that has already killed two children. It’s just one of those personal choices, like whether or not to pierce your nose. “Good nutrition,” he concludes, “remains a best defense against most chronic and infectious illnesses.” No. Vaccines are the best defense against infectious illness and genetics the best defense against chronic illness.
Facing massive criticism, he subsequently allowed, in a Fox interview, that the one might make the “personal choice” to be vaccinated “in highly unvaccinated communities like Mennonites—it’s something that we recommend.” But almost in the same breath, he claimed that vaccine injuries were more common than known (false) and that a dozen Mennonite children had been injured by vaccines in the county at the center of the outbreak (give me a break). He added, “We don’t know what the risk profile is for these products,” (false) and claimed that acquiring measles through infection would protect you from cancer and heart disease (false—and what’s more, measles causes immune amnesia, leaving children at far greater risk for infection by other pathogens). He enthusiastically promoted cod liver oil as a measles prophylactic (dubious). He claimed that cod liver oil, steroids, and antibiotics led to “almost miraculous and instantaneous” recoveries (false), indicating, among other things, that he doesn't understand the difference between a viral and a bacterial infection. “Those therapeutics have really been ignored by the agency for a long, long time,” he added (false). He said cod liver oil was “the safest application of vitamin A” (false), and offered that when he was a kid, he went to measles parties (idiotic).
Although he acknowledged there was a connection between measles and undesirable complications like death, he said measles had a “very, very low infection fatality rate,” and claimed that only a tiny number of children had died of measles before the introduction of the vaccine (false). He later said that it was “very, very difficult for measles to kill a healthy person” (false), and suggested you would only die of measles if you didn’t eat well and have a good exercise regime (false).
Of a child who died in Gaines County, he said, malnutrition “may have been an issue.” He’s prone to this kind of wild fabulation. Texas health officials said the child had “no known underlying conditions,” and Mennonites are known for their vigorous, healthy lifestyle and avoidance of processed foods. “We’ve had two measles deaths in 20 years in this country—we have 100,000 autism diagnoses every year,” he added. “We need to keep our eye on the ball.”
The CDC posted information about vitamin A on its website after RFK Jr hawked it as a treatment for measles. The New York Times now reports that local health officials in Texas can’t persuade parents to vaccinate their children because they think “vitamin A is protective, like the vaccine.” Katherine Wells, director of public health in Lubbock, Texas, said thats seriously ill children are getting cod liver oil instead of medical treatment: “If they’re so, so sick and have low oxygen levels, they should have been in the hospital a day or two earlier,” she said.
“We’re already are dealing with people that think measles is not a big deal,” said Leila Myrick, a family medicine doctor in Seminole. “Now they’re going to think they can get this miracle treatment and that they definitely don’t need to get vaccinated. It’s 100 percent going to make it harder.” Kennedy then went on Fox to say that immunity to the measles vaccine wanes over time (false), meaning “older people are essentially unvaccinated” (false).
Last week, he said that cell phones “produce electromagnetic radiation” that causes cancer. He suggested that farmers “should consider maybe the possibility of letting [H1N1] run through the flocks so that [they] can identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it,” a suggestion likened by a poultry veterinarian at North Carolina State to “putting Ebola in the middle of New York City and not isolating people.” It did not occur to Kennedy that the virus is universally fatal in birds, meaning there would be no birds left; or that poultry chickens are bred to be nearly genetically identical, so none will be immune to it; it certainly didn’t cross his mind that the birds would suffer miserably, or if it did, he didn’t care. Most important, it didn’t occur to him that this is the most efficient way you could imagine to incubate viral mutations and turn a bird virus into one that will start killing humans in very large numbers.
KFF Health News reports that the NIH has urged researchers to remove references to mRNA vaccine technology from their grant applications:
The mRNA technology is under study at the NIH for prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, including flu and AIDS, and also cancer. It was deployed in the development of Covid19 vaccines credited with saving 3 million lives in the US alone—an accomplishment President Donald Trump bragged about in his first term. A scientist at a biomedical research center in Philadelphia wrote to a colleague, in an email reviewed by KFF Health News, that a project officer at NIH had “flagged our pending grant as having an mRNA vaccine component.”
“It’s still unclear whether mRNA vaccine grants will be canceled,” the scientist added. NIH officials also told a senior NIH-funded vaccine scientist in New York state, who does not conduct mRNA vaccine research but described its efficacy in previous grant applications, that all references to mRNA vaccines should be scrubbed from future applications. Scientists relayed their experiences on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional retaliation by the Trump administration.
The NIH was studying a new mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer. In its first trial, the vaccine was given to 16 patients. Half had an immune response and were still alive, without a relapse, 18 months later. Pancreatic cancer killed my mother. It’s known as a rapid death sentence. You're fine one day, and the next, the Grim Reaper shows up on your doorstep and tells you that you’re coming. You don’t have time to pack your bags. Family history is a risk factor. I don’t dwell on it, but every now and again ,it does occur to me that like my mother, I might think I have a little upset stomach one day and be dead the next. My mother never got to see her grandson grow up. To think this promising research has been quashed by an insane conspiracy theory is almost too much to bear.
That so many Americans are accepting this—passive and bewildered, or polite and meliorating, or simply indifferent—seems worthy of some thought. People are obviously capable of telling themselves that habeas corpus has only been suspended for immigrants (or people who look like immigrants, or people who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time), so this is no concern of theirs. But how do you convince yourself that neither you nor anyone you love will ever be stricken with cancer? Wouldn’t cancer be one of those “kitchen table issues” that supposedly people care about more than they care about democracy?
It may seem unfair to castigate the medical associations when the ultimate responsibility for this catastrophe falls on Trump and the GOP. But the cowardice of civil society is new; or at least, it is only now becoming clear to us that the rot is not confined to the GOP. It has spread through American society.
I’ve made an example of the medical associations because the facts and the moral issue are so incontestably clear. To knowingly behave in a way that ensures the agonizing deaths of children is so obviously wrong that it isn’t open to political or moral debate. As for the GOP, it goes without saying: They knew what they were doing would result in dead children, but they were too cowardly to object. They were intimidated by Trump, his base, and Elon Musk, to the point that they simply couldn’t bring themselves to say, “We cannot place a witch doctor at the head of our health bureaucracies.”7
The cowardice is astonishing. Look at this coward:
After relieving himself of this self-flattering speech, he voted to make the nation’s most dangerous quack the 26th United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. They all did, except for Mitch McConnell. What does it say that only the man who was personally crippled by polio managed to object to this?8
God knows, we have been witnessing the most extraordinary cowardice for years from the GOP (Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney apart). Just when you think there are no new depths for them to plumb, here comes Marco Rubio, reversing every one of his deeply held principles as he emerges emerge from a tête-à-tête with his Russian counterparts babbling about the “great deals” we can now do with Moscow.
… “They’re scared shitless about death threats and Gestapo-like stuff,” a former member of Trump’s first administration tells me. According to one source with direct knowledge of the events, North Carolina senator Thom Tillis told people that the FBI warned him about “credible death threats” when he was considering voting against Pete Hegseth’s nomination for defense secretary. Tillis ultimately provided the crucial 50th vote to confirm the former Fox & Friends host to lead the Pentagon. …
January 6 further catalyzed GOP fear of Trump-inspired violence. Romney told his biographer, McKay Coppins, that an undercurrent of anxiety thwarted Republican efforts to formally punish Trump for his role in inciting the riot. “One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety,” Coppins wrote in his book. “When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.”
Former Wyoming representative and prominent anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney told CNN that House GOP members confided to her that they were “afraid for their own security—afraid, in some instances, for their lives.” Representative Jason Crow of Colorado told NBC News after January 6: “I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues last night, and a couple of them broke down in tears—saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment.”
Is this supposed to absolve them? They’re members of the United States Senate. They can appropriate the funds to build moats around their homes filled with crocodiles, then pass a law mandating the death penalty for the next cretin who makes a death threat against them. Really, I don’t want to hear another word about how they’re whimpering in fear. These are grown men—immensely powerful men—and if they don’t want to act like it, they should resign.
The Democrats are even more pathetic, if such a thing is possible: Look at them skulking around Congress and licking themselves uncontrollably, rolling over to expose their bellies, peeing themselves, then meekly helping the GOP pass their budget. But the most worrying sign is that the problem no longer seems to be confined to our politicians. Some kind of rot has infected the whole American elite.
We are watching the moral collapse of the news media and the legal profession. Jeff Bezos announced that it would be for the best if the Washington Post declined to offer an endorsement in the presidential election. The owner of the Los Angeles Times did likewise. Bezos then announced that henceforth, the Washington Post would be writing about the glories of free markets. Amazingly, he seemed to feel no shame.
Trump sued CBS News for editing an interview with Kamala Harris that wasn’t to his taste. Despite some brave talk from the news division, CBS’s parent company looks like it’s going to capitulate and settle. Trump sued ABC for defamation because George Stephanopoulos described him as a rapist (as Trump has been legally adjudicated to be, according to the judge who presided over the trial). ABC offered Trump a written apology and a US$15 million donation to his presidential museum. .
Trump issued an executive order directing his Attorney General to investigate lawyers who are trying to block his actions. He issued another revoking the security clearances of lawyers who represent his rivals or attempt to stymie his agenda in court. “Trump’s decision to target major law firms that represent clients he doesn’t like is an unprecedented challenge to the legal profession,” writes Bloomberg Law:
Yet this assault on the practice of law has met with a shocking silence from US major law firms. …
It’s difficult to overstate the threat to the legal profession from the US government claiming the power to dismantle law firms that take on cases the president doesn’t like.
The judge hearing Perkins Coie’s challenge said reading the executive order sent “chills down my spine.” Any lawyer reading these orders should feel the same way.
Trump’s executive orders; his lawsuits; his social media incitement against judges, lawyers, law firms, prosecutors, and the media—all have no purpose but to stifle dissent and crush any opposition to him by means of the legal system. If he succeeds, no one will be able to avail himself of a lawyer to oppose his policies or defend themselves from his persecution.
One of the firms he threatened for representing Trump’s political rivals was Paul, Weiss—who settled to the tune of US$40 million. The terms of the settlement included the firm’s acknowledgment of “the wrongdoing” of former partner Mark Pomeratz. That wrongdoing was successfully prosecuting Donald Trump.
Above the Law summarized the effect of their capitulation like this:
This bodes absolutely terribly for the industry. It’s an admission from one of the biggest and most powerful law firms in the nation that fighting a likely unconstitutional Executive Order in court just isn’t worth it. The harm that the Trump administration can bring is too great, and the court system is unable to counter the blatant lawlessness the far right is engaged in. Faced with calls to stand up to the Trump administration and defend the rule of law, Paul Weiss blinked. And law and order is worse off for it.
As a Paul, Weiss alum, I am disgusted. I am betrayed. These are smart, strategic thinkers who cravenly placed cowardice and personal greed over the rule of law, the long term interest of their clients, their peer firms, every single one of their people from the most famous partner to the nameless mail clerk. They have betrayed me and every alum and the legacy of every attorney in the name Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and Garrison.
The tech companies? They’re rolling over, too. Trump sued Meta for suspending his account after January 6. Meta just agreed to pay US$22 million to President Trump’s future presidential library.
There are more examples, too numerous to mention. The overall portrait is grim: America is surrendering—and surrendering needlessly, because these are winnable fights.
… The relative lack of opposition is especially striking given how extreme Trump’s policies have been, eclipsing anything he did during his first term. …
[S]topping Trump will require effective political opposition. But so far, the Democrats mostly seem missing in action. Democratic leadership in Congress has been remarkably subdued. Yes, Democrats have voted against Trump’s awful cabinet appointments, but they have done little to call attention to the dangerous effects of his policies. The speed and ferocity of Trump’s actions appear to have left them stunned. …
Trump’s America is not Hitler’s Germany. There is still considerable space for voicing political opposition, yet many Americans appear to suffer from an epidemic of mass cowardice. To be sure, there are those who are rightly scared to protest … However, many more millions of Americans can protest without incurring great personal risks yet are choosing to tune out the news. They are protecting their emotional wellbeing instead of fighting for their democracy.
While the US is not yet a fascist society, acting as if it is could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The only thing that will stop Trump from moving the US and the world further toward right-wing authoritarianism will be a resistance movement even greater than that which arose in his first term. With the civil service under attack, the courts essential yet limited in power, and Democratic leaders so passive, a mass movement is needed to save American democracy.
What happened to the idea that courage is desirable—and at junctures like these, obligatory? How has the taboo against behaving like a coward eroded so thoroughly, and when did it happen?
So many seem determined to keep their heads down and pray Trump doesn’t notice them. But a million moral bromides, homilies, and clichés should be instructing them that this won’t work. Alligators eating you last, etc. And all of this because they’re terrified of Donald Trump? Some burger-stuffed elderly party from Queens in an absurd toupee?
Comprehensive cynicism about courage has descended up upon us. This is worthy of remark. Cowardice has, in every society, been viewed as a moral and tangible sin, punishable by scorn, social condemnation, even death under military law. “Prove a man a coward, and you leave him utterly deprived of character, so that none can honor him or suffer his society,” reads an 1863 letter to The New York Times:
… It is as much the duty of our citizens to be brave by their firesides as of our soldiers to show pluck “before the enemy.” …. To run away from the cause of Constitution and Government when they are in their crisis, just because war is hard work and costly, is more disgraceful and craven than to run away from Stonewall Jackson for fear of bodily harm.
There is a citizen courage and a citizen cowardice, analogous to these traits in military life, and alike deserving of the highest praise or blame. … Perhaps, Mr. Smith and Mr. Gunnybags may not have thought of the thing in this light, as they have croaked, and coddled, and clamored, and played the civic coward generally. Those leaders of opinion who “shamefully abandon” their trusts, and “cast away” their principles, as scared soldiers throw away or surrender their arms, are precisely the political cowards they seem, and as such will be remembered. There is a style of Copperhead exactly analogous to the military sneak who “induces others to do the like,” and who actually works to make others as bad as himself. There are, too, plundering contractors and pilfering officials, who “quit their posts” as good citizens to rob the Government. Now, to compel all these cowards and sneaks “to suffer death” would overwork the undertakers, which, of course, humanity forbids. They are, however, precisely the same curse to our civil and political contest that arrant cowards are to an army on the battle-field.
It is the sailor’s duty never to give up the ship; the soldier’s, never to give up the fight; the American’s, never to give up the Republic. E.B.H.
The existence of this letter suggests, of course, that cowardice has always been with us. The author is obviously responding to it. What is new is the absence of stigma associated with it—the failure of cowardice to arouse the instinctive indignation we see in this letter. Prominent Americans would not be behaving this way if they sensed that their peers were judging them—harshly.
The causes of this moral collapse are complex, but its effects are obvious. There is no way precisely to calculate how many will die of poverty, or in wars that might have been prevented, because no one will stand up to the madman in the White House who is determined to destroy the foundations of American prosperity and global security. But it is clear that the number will be vast.
There is a reason that in most times and places, cowardice has been condemned.
Next: Mark Bloch. Then: When and why did this moral transformation happen?
Sister ElizabethKenny was an Australian bush nurse who developed a novel approach to treating acute infantile paralysis caused by polio. It involved passive exercises and hot compresses.
Why eight books instead of one? I haven't read them all, but they seem to cover similar ground. He must have thought, each time, that he just hadn’t explained the evidence clearly enough.
He was wrong. People who refuse to vaccinate their children do not lack for clear and compelling arguments in favor of it. They lack for the intelligence to understand the arguments or the moral sense to act on them. These are the only options. When people ascribe doubt about vaccines to the public’s “loss of trust in the medical establishment,” they’re correct, but the suppressed premise in this argument is that they lack the ability to understand arguments and data, and must therefore take what the medical establishment says on trust. Again, the use of a euphemism, or the refusal to say plainly what’s going on, harms our ability to solve the problem. Offit’s first book did not solve it—and neither did the other eight—because the solution, under these circumstances, is not a book that explains why vaccines are safer than the diseases they prevent, but vaccine mandates. People must not be allowed to get their children and others killed. It’s not a personal choice.
A smaller percentage are perfectly capable of understanding these arguments, but find it financially rewarding or psychologically satisfying to pretend otherwise. People like this are insane and evil. Spreading fear about vaccinations for money, as Kennedy does, is all the more repulsive because it is a tacitly eugenicist exercise, be that agenda conscious or unconscious. He may well believe that only people clever enough not to believe him deserve to live. Whatever the case, it’s disgusting beyond words.
I'm not sure what he means by this. CDC statistics indicate that measles typically kills between 1.5 people per 1,000 cases, so yes, two deaths out of 228 would make this outbreak about ten times more deadly than then we would expect.Is he suggesting that this is something more than a statistical fluke? A particularly lethal strain?
A vaccine skeptic who has long promoted false claims about the connection between immunizations and autism has been tapped by the federal government to conduct a critical study of possible links between the two, according to current and former federal health officials. The Department of Health and Human Services has hired David Geier to conduct the analysis, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. [My emphasis.] Geier and his father, Mark Geier, have published papers claiming vaccines increase the risk of autism, a theory that has been studied for decades and scientifically debunked. David Geierwas disciplined by Maryland regulators more than a decade ago for practicing medicine without a license. He is listed as a data analyst in the HHS employee directory.
Public health and autism experts fear that choosing a researcher who has promoted false claims will produce a flawed study with far-reaching consequences … “It seems the goal of this administration is to prove that vaccines cause autism, even though they don’t,” said Alison Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation, a nonprofit organization that funds autism research. “They are starting with the conclusion and looking to prove it. That’s not how science is done.” President Donald Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have repeatedly linked vaccines to autism. Kennedy has often cited studies by David Geier and his father, a physician, asserting that their research reveals the negative effects of vaccines.
Jessica Steier, a public health researcher who leads the nonprofit Science Literacy Lab that scrutinizes research on high-profile health topics, said that the Geiers’ research is riddled with basic flaws and that the pair have “demonstrated patterns of an anti-vaccine agenda. This is a worst-case scenario for public health … It’s a slap in the face to the decades of actual credible research we have.”
It says nothing about measles deaths in America at all. It treats Aberdeen in Scotland, New Zealand, and certain Australian states; it offers the figure “98 percent” nowhere; and it shows that these populations exhibited massive spikes in deaths from the measles at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. It says nothing about 1960, save to note that the vaccine was introduced then. Their data, in fact, ends in 1914, after which the fatality rate declined to roughly the rate we would expect in a population that isn’t vaccinated. The paper specifically notes that it’s unclear why these sharp spikes and drops in mortality occurred, but it may have been because the provinces in question were remote and initially immunologically naïve: “Measles,” the authors note, “can cause tremendous mortality rates across all ages when it first contacts an isolated population.”
RFK Jr’s use of this paper to make a point it does not support shows that Offit is right. RFK Jr either can’t read or is willing to enter into evidence a paper that says x, claim it says notx, and trust that no one will read it, all to satisfy his perverse emotional agenda. So yes, he will indeed wave around the upcoming waste-of-money study on vaccines and autism, whatever it shows—and we already know what it will show—to prove that he’s been right all along. When he does, parents across America will be terrified. It will be hard for doctors to convince them that the Secretary of Health and Human Resources is completely bonkers, particularly because his anti-vax organizations continue to saturate the Internet with their propaganda. So they won’t vaccinate their children. And we will see the kinds of disease outbreaks we have not seen in generations.
Trump is too stupid to understand how demented Kennedy is. He’s long been a proponent of the theory that vaccines cause autism. There are rumors that Barron Trump is autistic. I have no idea if that's true, but if it would explain Trump's fixation on the idea that autism is caused by vaccines. But nothing is necessary for Trump to develop a fixation with an idea. All but a handful of the GOP senators knew better, however. They voted as they did because they were cowards.
The past few days have made it all too clear why the Senate’s refusal to reject the rest of Trump’s clown car nominees was just as ignominious its refusal to reject JFK Jr.
I briefly dated a guy in college who told me “my problem” was that I included courage in my expectations for men, and that was unrealistic. This was back in the early 90s. Then I solved for the question “how do you know if someone is courageous” by marrying a 🇬🇪 political refugee. I know a lot of people out on the streets protesting and calling their reps everyday, etc. But the institutions seem to think if they can just keep out of notice for 4 years everything will be ok and that they have no obligations beyond the preservation of the institution. From abroad (Canada) this is clearly cowardly and ludicrous. But Americans don’t seem to see it.
A useful continuation of Part I. You nailed the basic problem in Part I, and hit it again here:
"moral cowardice now passes almost unremarked." This has become the default setting for far too many people and institutions in our country. As you noted in Part 1, this probably stems from a failure to inculcate moral standards, which in turn stems from an inability (or outright refusal) to determine a factual basis for a moral code. And I don't know what to do about this, other than do my best to teach and to practice a moral code, thereby serving as an example in our family. Walk the walk, don't just talk the talk. But we're facing a systemic failure, which is in the process of destroying us. We won't have to wait for AI to kill us off, we're doing it to ourselves.
I briefly dated a guy in college who told me “my problem” was that I included courage in my expectations for men, and that was unrealistic. This was back in the early 90s. Then I solved for the question “how do you know if someone is courageous” by marrying a 🇬🇪 political refugee. I know a lot of people out on the streets protesting and calling their reps everyday, etc. But the institutions seem to think if they can just keep out of notice for 4 years everything will be ok and that they have no obligations beyond the preservation of the institution. From abroad (Canada) this is clearly cowardly and ludicrous. But Americans don’t seem to see it.
A useful continuation of Part I. You nailed the basic problem in Part I, and hit it again here:
"moral cowardice now passes almost unremarked." This has become the default setting for far too many people and institutions in our country. As you noted in Part 1, this probably stems from a failure to inculcate moral standards, which in turn stems from an inability (or outright refusal) to determine a factual basis for a moral code. And I don't know what to do about this, other than do my best to teach and to practice a moral code, thereby serving as an example in our family. Walk the walk, don't just talk the talk. But we're facing a systemic failure, which is in the process of destroying us. We won't have to wait for AI to kill us off, we're doing it to ourselves.