RFK, Jr. likes to talk about pharma company conflicts of interest at FDA and other agencies. He is a walking conflict of interest. For those who don’t know, he makes millions of dollars from trial lawyers by spouting his vaccine and drug conspiracies. He has refused to end those relationships and in fact is doing everything in his power to enhance his personal wealth by aiding those trial lawyers through his actions at HHS. His anti-vax nonsense alarms many Reps. I will stick to my prediction that RFK, Jr. will be gone by the fall. And he should be.
Florida intends to eliminate vaccine mandates–which basically just say that if you want your kid in a public school they have to have certain vaccines. People have forgotten that before vaccines we had hundreds of thousands of deaths of children due to infectious disease. My father had two siblings who died very young from infectious diseases. Apparently we have some knuckleheads in the Rep party who think that a return to routinely having children die from infectious diseases will be beneficial to the party.
I am not unsympathetic to the put-in-your-body-what-you-want theme, but there are instances when public health “trumps” that notion. I also think there are reasonable concerns about whether we have too many vax on the childhood schedule and that should be explored. But here is what the impact of Florida’s decision and RFK, Jr’s actions will be. The smart parents will continue to vax their children and their children will be pretty safe when the unvaxed kids start getting sick. The stupid parents who fall for conspiracy theories won’t get their kids vaxed and those children will start getting sick, some seriously ill and some will die, as we are already seeing with measles. They will spread the diseases to other unvaxed kids.
Now think about this, is that a decision the children made about their own bodies? No, an adult, a stupid adult, made that decision for them. If you explained to a child that if you don’t get vaxed you might get sick and die, what choice do you think the child might make? So this isn’t some autonomy issue, this is about idiot parents abusing their child by raising the risk that they get a serious infectious disease. And when children start dying, who do you think is going to pay the political price? That’s right, it will be the Reps. So as usual, and as with tariffs, Reps are showing an uncanny aptitude for self-destruction.
