So many people who opposed him and then take the time to understand what is actually saying, not what they have been told he is saying, come to realize he is completely sane. Bernie Sanders is on that list fwiw.
The proof here seems to be an interview with someone (owner of the LA Times) who talked with RFK for a few hours came away believing he knows more than doctors. Is that right?
Not knowing something isn't what makes them idiots. Spouting off about it as though they do is what ruins their credibility. At the very least it demonstrates that they're bad at vetting their sources.
I was talking about Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong not Dr. Ben Carson. Care to show any evidence that Soon-Shiong is an idiot?
Just because one doctor is stupid doesn't invalidate all doctors, does it? In that case, Dr. Ben Carson would be proof that Dr. Fauci is also an idiot.
Of course not, but it highlights the risk of Appeal to Authority: one's expertise in a specific field does not make them experts in others, even ones adjacent to their own. For a more local example, I have a lot of experience writing Python. Someone outside the field might mistakenly think my opinions on, say, Java, are equally informed. They're not.
Of course not. That would make him an expert on developing oncology drugs, not on the ethics of drug safety and especially not on communicable disease control.
If chemotherapy meds had the incredibly low adverse reaction rates of common vaccines with the same typically high effectiveness, I bet his general opinions on the subject would be different. No, of course we shouldn't require school children to get preventative chemotherapy because the risk-reward ratio would be awful. And of course we should vaccinate them against polio because there's trivial risk in the prevention compared to the life-altering effects of the illness.
He filed to get the FDA to revoke the polio vaccine. He’s rabidly anti-vax, routinely spewing lies that have been debunked repeatedly. He is absolutely a nut case that happens to have some points of view that many could agree with.
My wife's a doctor, and had patients begging her for leftover Vioxx samples after Merck pulled it from the market, preferring to take their chances with heart issues rather than living in agonizing pain that Vioxx was especially good at treating.
Just because a drug works well doesn't mean that it's moral to release a drug that knowingly kills tens of thousands of people a year and then hide that data.
I agree. In my opinion, hiding the risk was the sin, not releasing the drug. Many, many people with chronic pain conditions would gladly accept the risk.
It's kind of the same with any treatment: chemotherapy may make you incredibly sick before it saves you. Willow tree bark may fix your headache but cause you to bleed profusely. Homeopathy may make you die of whatever you were sick with before it cures your dehydration. Everything has its tradeoffs.
We need to the full information in order to make our own choices. Right now pharma companies hide a lot of the information, including from clinical trials from drugs. All the data should be released and not hidden so that people can make their own choices on what medications they take and if they want to risk taking it, that's fine because they have all the information and they can make their own risk/reward judgement.
Looks like you, me and RFK Jr. are perfectly aligned.
If you hit upon a scientifically accurate conclusion through an unrigorous process, basically by pure chance, this doesn't make you a good scientist.