How many millions will die?

by
“The Quack” (or “The Quack Doctor”) by Jan Victors, a Dutch Golden Age painter and a student of Rembrandt. The painting presents a traveling charlatan or snake-oil salesman, performing in a bustling public square. The quack’s confident performance masks the emptiness of his cure-alls.

It’s a serious question because of the rising tide of official pseudoscientific US Health policy.

A few innocent sounding letters sum up the root cause – RFK Jnr.

A prime and recent example is the ‘medical disinformation’ report that was sent to congress to defend COVID vaccine schedule change. As reported by NPR on June 13…

A document the Department of Health and Human Services sent to lawmakers to support Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to change U.S. policy on COVID vaccines cites scientific studies that are unpublished or under dispute and mischaracterizes others.

One health expert called the document “willful medical disinformation” about the safety of COVID vaccines for children and pregnant women.

…

“This is RFK Jr.’s playbook,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the Committee on Infectious Diseases for the American Academy of Pediatrics and an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “Either cherry-pick from good science or take junk science to support his premise — this has been his playbook for 20 years.”

…

One the 2024 preprint coauthors refuted the idea that their research found myocarditis and pericarditis were caused by the COVID shots, rather than COVID infection, noting that the study did not compare outcomes between people who were vaccinated and those infected with the COVID virus.

The problem is obvious. Elected members of congress are not subject matter experts, and so they rely upon agencies to provide them with the very best and most accurate evidence-based information. If the agencies themselves have been corrupted, then the flow of information is no longer reliable.

Something akin to this is not new.

The rise of pseudoscience as a complete replacement for science has happened before. History often reveals the dire consequences of past mistakes and so we should pay attention to it.

Having been empowered by the idiot-in-chief to “go wild on medicine”, RFK Jnr has grabbed hold of this remit and is running hard and fast with it.

But first, let’s first mull over a bit of history.

Trofim Lysenko

Back the the early decades of the Soviet empire, Trofim Lysenko, a pseudoscientific crank, gained an unprecedented degree of power over Soviet scientific policy. He very much had his own distinct and supposedly “scientific” beliefs that pivoted around a very solid rejection of the prevailing scientific understanding of genetics.

His whacky ideas became known as Lysenkoism.

Because he rose to power and was granted total authority by Stalin, he could promote his “science” and suppress and persecute anybody who dared to disagree with him. More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress his scientific opponents. He even ended up sending his own mentor Nikolai Vavilov to prison where he then died.

Lysenko speaking at the Kremlin in 1935. Behind him are Stanislav Kosior, Anastas Mikoyan, Andrei Andreyev and Joseph Stalin.

In that time it was clearly understood and demonstrated that the characteristics of an organism are carried by inherited genes. Lysenko dismissed this concept, rejected all the evidence that verified it, and instead insisted that the concept of a gene was a “bourgeois invention“. His big claim was basically what is termed Lamarckism.

The idea was basically akin to something like this – A blacksmith gets strong muscles from his work. His son will inherit those same strong muscles.

In practical terms, Lysenko’s big claim was that he could use his Lamarckism “scientific insights” to radically increase crop yields. The belief was this – he could expose seeds to humidity and low temperature, and hence would forever transform everything these seeds yielded, including successive generations, into something far more productive.

The problem is obvious to you now – it was all pseudoscientific bullshit.

He pursued this vigorously and with total authority, firing and destroying anybody who dared to voice any objection, and then smashed head first into the inevitable brick wall of reality.

By forcing his whacky policies upon the entire farming populace of the Soviet Union the result was widespread crop failures, and starvation. Millions died in the subsequent famines.

His whacky ideas spread beyond the Soviet Union. The People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong also adopted his methods starting in 1958. The results were calamitous and contributed to the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1962, in which some 15–55 million people died.

As for Lysenko himself, he retained his position of power after Stalin died. A letter signed by more than three hundred scientists, the so-called “Letter of three hundred“, was sent to Nikita Khrushchev, seeking his removal, but Khruschev ignored that and retained him. Nevertheless, his influence faded with the passing of Stalin and so mainstream science did re-emerge and gained enough traction to openly critique his utterly discredited ideas. By about the mid 60s many articles in the Soviet press pleaded for a return to real science, and so in 1965 he was finally removed.

It took many years for the Soviet Union’s biology and agronomy sciences to recover.

With the appointment of RFK Jnr, pseudoscientific beliefs are now pushing actual science to one side.

The Rise of US Lysenkoism

As I’m sure you are aware, RFK Jnr is a well-known anti-vaccine crank. This is so much so that prior to his current appointment, the Center for Countering Digital Hate identified Kennedy as one of 12 people responsible for up to 65% of anti-vaccine content on Facebook and Twitter.

Let’s be wholly clear about vaccines. I should not need to add the following, but alas I do.

Vaccines have been the most successful medical interventions ever created, and without them the world would be a very very different place. Diseases that once ravaged humanity have been obliterated – this is wholly factual …

Smallpox, one of the most contagious and deadly diseases in humans, no longer exists. Other diseases such as rubella, polio, measles, mumps, chickenpox, and typhoid are nowhere near as common as they were a hundred years ago thanks to widespread vaccination programs. 

Now some of this is starting to come back because confidence in mainstream science has been undermined and is being replaced by an anti-vaccine crank with total pseudoscientific BS.

Beyond what RFK Jnr says he intends to do, what we have actually seen him do is this …

This CDC panel, also known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), was widely regarded as the international gold standard for vaccine decision-making … but honestly, no longer.

Who is now on the CDC Vaccine Committee?

The one name you might know is Robert W Malone – He is the crank who claimed he invented mRNA (he was involved in early testing, but his actual involvement was very limited), vigorously criticised the COVID vaccine, and promoted the now famous claim for ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment on the basis of no evidence. (For completeness, no they don’t work against COVID. As the FDA famously pointed out on Twitter at the time “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, ya’ll. Stop it“)

Other names are not so well known, but if curious you can find an AP article here with further details such as …

…The new appointees include Vicky Pebsworth, a regional director for the National Association of Catholic Nurses. She has been listed as a board member and volunteer director for the National Vaccine Information Center, a group that is widely considered to be a leading source of vaccine misinformation.

…Other appointees include Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician and epidemiologist who was a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, an October 2020 letter maintaining that pandemic shutdowns were causing irreparable harm…

…Abram Wagner of the University of Michigan’s school of public health, who investigates vaccination programs, said he’s not satisfied with the composition of the committee.

“The previous ACIP was made up of technical experts who have spent their lives studying vaccines,” he said. Most people on the current list “don’t have the technical capacity that we would expect out of people who would have to make really complicated decisions involving interpreting complicated scientific data.”…

Well hey, with this collection of cranks, being combined with others who don’t know what the hell they are doing and should never ever be appointed to something like this, what could possibly go wrong?

Now What?

As one commentator beautifully sums it up …

This is American Lysenkoism. Lysenko’s crank agricultural science, which became the official science of the Soviet Union, ultimately resulted in the death of millions of people. The only question now is – will RFK Jr surpass Lysenko with a higher body count? The smart money is on yes.

… and also via another …

Do not underestimate RFK Jr.’s determination to eliminate access to all vaccines—yes, all vaccines. He is antivax to the core and has been so since at least 2005, no matter how much his stans try to latch onto what they like about his “make America healthy again” (MAHA) agenda, like the emphasis on tackling obesity and unhealthy diets (never mind that it doesn’t really do even that) and assiduously whistling past the graveyard when it comes to RFK Jr.’s two decade history of rabid antivax activism. Being antivax to the core, RFK Jr.’s endgame is to eliminate access to all vaccines or, failing that, to make access to them as difficult as possible and to stoke as much fear, uncertainty, and doubt about them as he can, the goal being that people will fear vaccines more than they fear the diseases that vaccines prevent, at least until these diseases come roaring back as vaccine uptake plummets.

The new reality is that we now live in a world where unwarranted fear of vaccines is being ramped up to such a degree that there is now a rising tide of people who are far more terrified of vaccines than they are of the horrendous diseases that the vaccines have been well-proven to prevent.

Further Reading

Lysenko

Vaccines & RFK Jnr

Some of my earlier RFK Jnr rants on Medium

Tweets

Here the MAHA report is broken down for you and revealed to be total BS …

  • The above tweet links to an NPR article dated Jun 13 – you can find a link to it here. (it’s the same article I refer to and quoted from earlier)

This is the kind of stuff he is now promoting to an audience of millions …

The essence of the problem we now face is this …

The real-world impacts are already here …

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