"Il n'est pire aveugle que celui qui ne veut pas voir."

Yeah, right. I don't think this user ever wanted to support "that bunch".

https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/04/rfk-jr-s-anti-vaccine...

https://www.factcheck.org/2023/11/scicheck-rfk-jr-incorrectl...

"I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they’re causing. There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective."

N.B. from a logic perspective there's no conflict between "I would like this tech to work well" and "I don't think it works well [enough]" as positions, they're not mutually exclusive. Additionally, words like "safe" are relative. It's possible for a vaccine to avert more problems than they cause, whilst still creating sufficient damage that a reasonable person would consider them to be unsafe.

He then goes on to talk about the history of US vaccine legislation, which states that vaccine manufacturers are given blanket immunity for vaccines when they are "unavoidably unsafe", and that every vaccine is treated as immune under this rule.

This is a common point of confusion in discussion of vaccines. Most people make an ambient unstated assumption that vaccines are medical products and must therefore be safe, because otherwise they wouldn't be licensed. In fact US law considers them to products that inevitably by design make some healthy people sick or permanently disabled, and exempts them from the usual product safety rules as a consequence.

That RFK believes these things doesn't mean he wants to eliminate vaccines. You could at best argue for this indirectly, by arguing that he wants safety standards raised (put back) to the level that other treatments are held to, which would have the effect in practice of making vaccines unsellable, and thus that by implication he wants this outcome. But that is a tricky argument to make.

"I support safe vaccines, it just so happens that I don't believe that any vaccine is safe and I am not willing to trust the medical system to evaluate vaccines for safety and will continue to insist that all vaccines are unsafe" has the net effect of not supporting vaccination at all.

That's being extremely generous, many people with anti-vax beliefs have not arrived there through careful, rational consideration of anything specific.

To be fair, same can be said of pro vax people. Blind belief into what science have become is perhaps more dangerous than blind disbelief.

It amounts to noticing that few if any of the people you know or are acquainted with through two or three removals from personal contact, have suffered or died as a result of using said technology, and basing your own confidence solely on this privileged form of hearsay.

It sounds like something that should not work, but actually does a pretty good job as a high-pass filter for safety.

"Vaccines could be safe if we can demonstrate that the moon is made of cheese" is the same as "vaccines are all unsafe."

And additionally, would you think it is a good idea to generalise here?

Vaccines provide acquired immunity. And that happens only with a weakened or killed antigen. With everyone being different that means there is no 100% effective vaccine. It is only people like RFK who spread this disinformation.

Then there is the history of US vaccine legislation. He often misinforms people about it too. The legislation was put in place in the 1980s because the DPT vaccine was suggested to cause brain injury. When lawsuits piled up some vaccine makers stopped producing vaccines altogether to avoid being liable. Without insurance prices skyrocketed and no one could get the and hence the law was put in place under Ronald Reagan.

Even with this law there are alternatives to getting compensated. So, the whole point is one big disinformation.

The common point of confusion between people who spread this disinformation about RFK's position is that they are either arguing in bad faith or misinformed at best.

If the standards are "raised", then novel vaccines are going to be impossible in US because we are back at square one. Manufacturers cannot get liability insurance for the new vaccines and hence need to be very wary about producing these vaccines, lest they get sued.

It is often said that people should learn from history. But people in RFK's orbit seem to want to test history for themselves.

And for the sake of clarity Samoa tried RFK's approach and here's what happened: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

But then RFK being the politician he is, distanced himself from the situation. I am sure he is going to do the same once things don't work out. So, everyone should put their health in hands of someone who has never taken responsibility for his actions and words but demands higher standards from others.

It's going to boil down to what you mean by "safe". The way the word is used in vaccine approvals doesn't match how any normal person expects it to be used. If you go into a debate without being extremely well versed in the technical details, a guy like RFJ will crush you.

For example: most people assume vaccines are tested against an inert placebo like water, and will only be approved as safe if it doesn't cause more problems than the placebo does. This isn't what happens. The "placebo" in vaccine trials is usually another vaccine. This leads to the question of what happens if both are unsafe? The answer is the safety problem isn't detected and the FDA will approve the new vaccine as safe, because it didn't create a higher rate of problems than the older one did. And how was the older one approved? Well, by comparing it to yet another vaccine and so on.

One might assume this chain bottoms out somewhere against a real placebo, but not necessarily! There have been cases where two vaccines were tested against each other, and then both sides were declared safe based on comparisons with the other "placebo" meaning they end up selling the "placebo" as an effective vaccine in its own right. At no point is the vaccine tested against an actually neutral baseline. This is a very basic logic error that makes the evaluations unscientific, but public health officials accept it.

Did you know all the above already? If not then you have no chance at winning over a neutral audience against a guy like RFK Jr. He will argue no vaccines are safe, you will protest that such a belief is insane and preposterous, and then he'll do something like cite US law or Supreme Court judgements where the systematic unsafety of vaccines is taken as a legal axiom. Or pick a specific example and he'll cite specific studies off the top of his head showing you were wrong.

Watch the interview with Lex Fridman if you don't believe me he can do these things. Don't underestimate the guy!

I would also not want to debate someone who vehemently denies saying things he has recently said on tape.

And someone's ability to win a podcast debate is not my primary concern for public health policy.

The fact that he runs from his own statements is severely telling and disqualifies him for reasonable people. Not some in this thread, though.

As an example of what can go wrong, CNN failed to understand the point I was making here and screwed up very publicly. They tried to use "crowdsourcing" to gather counterpoints to an argument RFK Jr made, in fact, the one about trials not using inert placebos. In other words they gish-galloped him. In return they got a 1,330 word rebuttal that goes through their list showing, that none of the studies they claimed used inert placebos actually did (except a few that weren't used by the US anyway):

https://x.com/SecKennedy/status/1932580198198964241

CNN probably didn't expect this kind of takedown, they seem to model him as some sort of Trump of Health. That was their error.

Like when he said SARS-COV-2 targets some ethnicities or that Lyme is a bioweapon?

>For example: most people assume vaccines are tested against an inert placebo like water, and will only be approved as safe if it doesn't cause more problems than the placebo does. This isn't what happens. The "placebo" in vaccine trials is usually another vaccine. This leads to the question of what happens if both are unsafe?

That doesn't happen because if you get to how that "another vaccine" was tested, it was against a placebo - or another, even more ancient vaccine, etc... Until you get a test against a placebo.

And because all along the chain, every new treatment was proven to be better than the previous one, the latest can only be better than a placebo.

And no, re-testing against a placebo now isn't going to show anything revolutionary: what you will only manage to do is denying children any standard of care and expose them to death and injury. All because "most people assume vaccines are tested against an inert placebo" instead of educating themselves on statistics and the history of medical testing.

>"taking this is only slightly less safe than taking that"

is absolutely not what the medical system is saying. Like, at all. You write bull. That doesn't work on me.

>even though they aren't by their own definitions

COVID vaccines were tested against placebos. The polio vaccine was tested against placebo; children died or were left disabled.

In fact, all childhood vaccines were tested against placebos.[0]

You are either an idiot parroting bullshit, or a liar and an accomplice to medical malpractice. Shame on you.

[0]https://www.voicesforvaccines.org/jtf_topics/why-arent-vacci... https://medium.com/@jsteier_29203/all-childhood-vaccines-wer... https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/05/health/vaccine-placebo-st...

The man who rejects germ theory in favor of miasma?

> Did you know all the above already?

I am aware that we do not do true placebo trials for vaccines, for good reasons.

First, please consider from where and whom you received this information. It was probably RFK Jr. or someone on social media or maybe a news article, right? Did you bother to scrutinize that information? Because it's not true. All vaccines (like other medications) are tested against the standard of care. For a first-in-class vaccine, that's going to be a saline placebo because there is no standard of care yet; for subsequent vaccines, it will whatever is the current vaccine. This is completely sensible. The idea that the vaccines on the market now were never tested against saline placebo is mis/disinformation promulgated by a lawyer whose name escapes me; some of those saline placebo-controlled trials for vaccines are listed [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pUMNBewb0kgTU7g3augmOtPG...).

If you have a passing understanding of common anti-vaxx talking points, RFK Jr.'s arguments are easy to debunk.

1. We used known safe and effective vaccines as placebos. Keyword KNOWN. We're not gonna debate the efficacy of the fucking polio vaccine, just be for real.

2. The reason we do this is because it's very unethical to deny medication that we currently administer and know works to human subjects. That would be treating people worse than we treat the general population. That's unethical.

3. We don't just do this vaccines, but ALL medication. When we make new drugs to treat cancer, we don't compare them against saline. Because that's evil. We compare them against known effective chemotherapy regimes.

4. All of this is besides the point, because using an inert placebo wouldn't help anything. How does using an inert placebo make a new medication more effective or more safe? It doesn't.

5. We DO use inert placebos all the time - just not in human trials. Because we want to give humans real medicine so they don't fucking die.

People who are given placebos in trials aren't "denied medication". They can always take it after the trial has ended and they're unblinded, if the trial succeeds.

> How does using an inert placebo make a new medication more effective or more safe?

Imagine - bear with me here - imagine that an unsafe vaccine got approved. It uses some technology that's unsafe. We know this happens because vaccines are sometimes pulled from the market for being unsafe after approval.

Now imagine you have a second vaccine in trial, which shares some technology with the first, and it gets tested against the first before it's realized that was unsafe. People suffer or even die but the FDA declares it to be perfectly safe because the control group are suffering at the same rate, and for the same reasons.

Now consider what happens when it's discovered by the population that the government claimed a vaccine was safe but it was actually hurting people, and those who never took it at all were better off. It destroys their trust in the system of course.

That's why you have to use inert placebos. There's nothing unethical about this. It's a standard safety precaution. The alternative, as you are now discovering, is that the entire system is torn down and one day there may be no vaccines at all - banned by constitutional amendment - because the sort of people who are pro-vaccine kept making false claims about safety due to dangerously optimistic testing practices.

This isn't true.

We do use inert placebos, but for some medications, we are not going to be doing that in human trials for obvious safety and ethical concerns. Keep in mind: we do NOT just jump to human trials. We also do cellular trials and animal trials.

Again, if we're trying out a new cancer drug, we're not going to give the control group saline - we're going to give them a chemotherapy regime that we know works. I don't understand what's not clicking for you because it's actually very simple and intuitive.

And, as an aside: the government has not recommended any vaccines that are unsafe. You may feel the COVID vaccines were not safe. That doesn't mean they're unsafe. In addition, there are numerous reasons why a medication might be pulled, and it's quite rare that the reason is safety in absolute. Some medication may be less safe than another so we obsolesce said medication - but even that does not mean that it is unsafe. Just inferior.

With any medication, or in fact any substance, including even water, there are risks. We're generally very aware of the risk before the medication is administered and we work to minimize them in various ways. The simple reality is that dozens have vaccines have worked together to eradicate many diseases in the US, and these health initiatives have been very successful. Other countries are not so lucky, so they are dealing with diseases that we haven't touched in decades.

Please bare in mind that viruses and bacteria are not risk-free, nor are they necessarily the type of thing you can just recover from. For example, about 2% of people who contract Polio will develop paralysis. 2% is extraordinarily high. Just because you might be fine, or you know people who are fine, doesn't mean that the disease is low-risk. With COVID specifically, we're still uncovering long-term effects of infection. With viruses like HSV, we're also uncovering long-term effects like increased risk of cancer and potentially dementia.

Just because you get sick and seem to recover, doesn't mean that what happened was safe and done.

How are you qualifying this strategy as "ultra-high risk"? How well do you understand the new drug and vaccine regulatory process in the US? An "unsafe" (vague) vaccine will be discovered via postmarketing surveillance (e.g. Rotashield). If two unsafe vaccines are trialed comparatively and the adverse event rate is unusually high for both groups than what was previously reported, that's not going to go unnoticed even if it appears like there's no significant difference between the two statistically. Your concern also assumes that because the first approval was erroneous that all subsequent ones will be too, which is an unfounded assumption.

If you want to claim that the medical profession have "routinely lied as a group about many things in the past", you'll have to back that up because I don't agree and will not accept your assertion at face value.

> Although it’s typically not viewed as a partisan board, the Biden administration had installed the entire committee.

After some degree of googling the history of ACIP I had not found any explanation and thought maybe someone here(who is actually American and maybe follows this kind of thing more closely?) would just know

Looks like there are actually some comments now that are more clarifying.

> Are you just asking questions to smokescreen for this executive power grab?

I’m just trying to understand the background. I get that this is a sensitive topic, but I’d ask that we keep things civil and give people the benefit of the doubt when they’re asking honest questions.

..is just simply not true. Nobody said masks didn't work. They said that cloth masks werent as effective as surgical masks. And it wasn't about protection of self, it was about not spreading the virus. Vaccine effectiveness was also something that was being guessed at first, and then corrected. Nothing wrong with either, as this was an unprecedented time.

This distrust of government sentiment would be valid if your camp a) had actual source of truth beyond Joe Rogan , and b) didn't overwhelmingly vote for Trump who lies WAY more about everything.

The phrases used by @refurb are commonly repeated phrases, but they are missing nuance.

Masks absolutely work, just ask any nurse who didn't catch COVID while working 12-hour shifts for weeks in a COVID ward. The issue like you said is the right type of mask, and wearing it properly.

Half the time people were wearing masks with their nose poking out, or under their chin. Even wearing it fully covering - if it isn't airtight, and you haven't pinched the wired nose connection removing the small gap, it still won't work.

Similar with vaccines, science isn't exact, so a statement made at the start of the pandemic is not going to be the same 12-18 months later. There were dozens of variants of COVID each with different levels of risk. A vaccine doesn't guarantee you won't catch the virus, but can minimise or reduce symptoms, reduce spread, prime your body with some antibodies for your body to start combating it sooner.

So it's easy to say someone "lied". But data changes. Also, you have to make statements for the general population (lowest common denominator), not people with an educated / scientific / medical background.

Vaccines, masks, social distancing are all part of the Swiss Cheese Model which will reduce risk, but not eliminate it.

“Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks.” - Fauci statement on March 8, 2020

"Wear a mask." — Dr. Anthony Fauci, CNN interview, May 21, 2020

It's wild to see people wave their hands to explain that away.

    > LaPook, March 8: There’s a lot of confusion among people, and misinformation, surrounding face masks. Can you discuss that?

    > Fauci: The masks are important for someone who’s infected to prevent them from infecting someone else… Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks.

    > LaPook: You’re sure of it? Because people are listening really closely to this.

    > Fauci: …There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.

    > LaPook: And can you get some schmutz, sort of staying inside there?

    > Fauci: Of course, of course. But, when you think masks, you should think of health care providers needing them and people who are ill. The people who, when you look at the films of foreign countries and you see 85% of the people wearing masks — that’s fine, that’s fine. I’m not against it. If you want to do it, that’s fine.

    > LaPook: But it can lead to a shortage of masks?

    > Fauci: Exactly, that’s the point. It could lead to a shortage of masks for the people who really need it.

Im really curious why you hold that opinion though. Do you not care that much about what the actual truth is? Like do you hear/read about how Fauci said opposing things supposedly, and just don't care enough to check the facts? Or is there another reason why you believe he is contradicting himself.

Even in this one conversation - "The masks are important for someone who’s infected to prevent them from infecting someone else…" to "And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face." to "I’m not against it. If you want to do it, that’s fine." to "It could lead to a shortage of masks for the people who really need it."

Just in this one interview it goes from "if you're healthy you don't need one" to "masks can actually make things worse" to "if you want to do it, it's fine" to "don't do it, it could lead to a shortage".

Then a month or two later, he's supporting strict mask mandates even for healthy people.

If there is another health crisis, this guy should never be allowed to talk to the media ever again.

Given the text of the conversation, which happened early on, and things were unknown, its pretty easy to see the rhetoric is Fauci highlighting the possibility of shortage for masks for the medical staff given that in public they may not be that effective. Then later on, when there were enough masks for everyone and more studies came out, the recommendation was to wear masks.

And of course, masking, social distancing, quarantine, and vaccine were all proven to work post-hoc through studies overwhelmingly. So the big bad government was right all along.

The interesting thing is that you a) ignore his first sentence which clearly states his intent to prioritize medical professionals, and b) conflate his caution against shortages with him telling people to mask up.

The 2 explanations of why you think like this is either you are incapable of reading comprehension, or you are so ideologically driven that you basically make up reality in your head real time that fits your world view. And either reason is why conservatives should no longer be tolerated - because its not about my view vs yours, its about actual reality vs your insanity.

Did you not read the same thing I read? He held 4 different positions in the same interview - healthy people shouldn't wear masks, then masks actually make things worse, to "I don't care if you wear them", to "healthy people wearing them causes shortages".

Then add on top later on he demanded oppressive mask mandates for everyone.

You call that a public health care expert?

And that's not even getting into his political answers about the Wuhan lab and his involvement.

The guy is a terrible, terrible public health leader, yet because he's Team Blue(tm) you give it all a pass.

Again, you either lack basic comprehension of written text, unable to imagine the conversation taking place with a context in mind, and understand that just because the message wasn't communicated the way you would have preferred doesn't mean the message is wrong or contradictory.

Or you understand all that, but you have intimately tied your ideological beliefs into your identity to the point where admitting you are wrong is basically saying to yourself that you are shell of a person.

One last question: suppose we took random people off the street, and then gave them that transcript and asked them to interpret what Fauci was saying, and the vast majority of them agreed that nothing in that message was contradictory - would you change your mind? Or would you think that you are more "enlightened" than all of them?

1970 - "smoking is harmful"

Checkmate, scientists!

In all seriousness, we don't need a vast conspiracy for this. It's called being wrong and changing your mind, we do it all the fucking time.

Nobody expects what people said about Tuberculosis in 1920 to be 100% accurate today. But for some reason, people expect what was said about Covid in the beginning to ALWAYS be accurate. Why would that be the case? It's a novel disease. Yeah duh our understanding is going to change.

And don't you think it's smart to not make definitive statements if you don't really know?

This is all basic public relations 101.

I agree their PR could have been a little better. But, it was also not that bad all things considered. The thing is conspiracy theorists would've rejected any vaccine, and there's nothing anybody could have done about that. Ultimately the CDC can't make stupid people unstupid.

(Use your context tool, an agentic LLM could do better! Click on profile and then comments before you judge someone so quickly!)

Keep in mind, this proof has to deal with the fact that 1) a majority of people got vaccinated and 2) a majority of people got infected.

The strongest case you can make here is that for a brief period of time being vaccinated appeared to maybe have reduced symptomatic infections. That's not what unlikely to transmit means.

Here's an actual study from nejm: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2116597

There was a brief period where this study shows 2 doses reduced the rate of transmission by 68%...during a short window of time. This effect was much less and even shorter lived for later variants.

Ultimately, pretty much all of these people would go on to contract covid, making the claim that the vaccines would make you "unlikely to transmit" very obviously untrue. Remember, the statement wasn't unlikely to transmit for a few months. It was unlikely to transmit, period.

Even if they continued to reduce transmission by 68%, which they clearly didn't come close to, "unlikely to transmit" would still be an overstatement.

This I what a fleshed out argument looks like. Do you have anything substantial to offer in return?

EDIT: strong work there.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/07/coronavirus-vaccine-dr-fauci...

> White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci that the chances of scientists creating a highly effective vaccine — one that provides 98% or more guaranteed protection — for the virus are slim.

> Scientists are hoping for a coronavirus vaccine that is at least 75% effective, but 50% or 60% effective would be acceptable, too, he said.

> The FDA has said it would authorize a coronavirus vaccine so long as it is safe and at least 50% effective.

From August 2020 before the phase III trials were complete.

The Phase III trials dropped in November and showed something like 98% efficacy, but they only followed people for ~3 months, over which time the vaccine actually is that effective. But waning of antibodies and immune escape by the virus severely drags that number down, although prevention of severe disease remains high due to T-cell immunity. People thinking that Fauci said the vaccines would be something like 98% effective against infection and transmission are committing a Mandela effect fallacy.

I vividly remember that time period because I was in the camp which expected this coronavirus to behave like other common cold coronaviruses and to periodically reinfect people. I was following that reinfection tracker on BNO news pretty religiously. And I recall vividly that the whole idea that the vaccine would be a magic shot that would instantly shut down the pandemic was something that _people_ wanted desperately to believe, but responsible authorities like Fauci weren't ever actually saying that. The initial Phase III results, combined with the lack of data on reinfections at the time, led to a lot of wildly optimistic beliefs which were not scientifically grounded at all.

Then Omicron happened, and it did actually surprise scientists with how much the virus drifted and how much it escaped from existing antibodies. Which was something that nobody really quite predicted, but was in line with general predictions that the coronavirus was never getting eradicated and would eventually become a new seasonal coronavirus. Fauci may have said some things in 2021 that were technically contradicted by Omicron, but there were a lot of wildly optimistic claims after the initial good results of the Phase III trials, and I suspect that any incorrect statements by Fauci were couched in uncertain terms. And nobody during this pandemic was batting for a thousand.

Surely you can point to a YouTube recording of one?

I can open a newspaper any day and see a medical headline that's wildly inaccurate for the reason that by the time such information waters down to the average joe, the messaging has been warped. That's just how it works. This is not a reason to lose faith in the biomedical industry and their products, it isn't their fault.

To make an analogy, you know how it's not uncommon here on HN for people to poke fun at government officials for not understanding technology? It's the same thing. We don't go and distrust the tech companies for those statements.

My recollection was that the messaging was quite clear overall: the vaccine was there because it a) greatly reduced the risk of a serious outcome for the individual, b) reduce the risk of infection for the individual, and most important c) reduced the amount of COVID floating around the general population, and thus the overall rate of infection.

I'm sure one can point to individual counterexamples, but anyone claiming the overall message from *actual officials who actually understand the subject matter* was otherwise is being disingenuous.