From Pasteur to Bobby JR

 

During the dreadful year of 1918 influenza killed more people than the bombs and bullets.

The Black Plague killed somewhere in the neighborhood of half of all people in Europe. No war ever killed half of all the people in Europe.

COVID killed millions.

Now they're saying shiny things with hooks are bad for you.

So, if you are really concerned with Defense or Homeland Security, you would focus not so much on huge things, like rockets and bombs, but on tiny things you cannot see with the naked eye: microbes, viruses and all like that. You would make public health your first priority.

It's no accident then, and really not much of a secret, that the United States government has a secret facility at Ft. Dietrich Maryland to house, study and possibly weaponize infectious agents rather than nuclear bombs. 

Now vs Then (or RFKJR Now)

One thing which requires government, or at the very least a functioning health care system, is protection of the population from epidemic illnesses.

As dreadful as malignant disease is, as widespread as diabetes and coronary artery disease are, nothing quite threatens any organized society--which functions only when people can congregate and engage in commerce, education and group efforts like construction, transportation and government--nothing threatens all that like infectious disease.

One thing government has done for religion, even in a country which once valued the separation of church and state, is it has battled epidemic infectious diseases so people could congregate to worship together.

But now, we have the anti-science mob, who say, "I do my own research," and who now prevent the population from getting direction and advice from those folks who really do actual scientific research.

A few years ago, up here in New England, a fearsome outbreak of Respiratory Syncytial Virus tore through communities and hardly a soul did not know some family who had an infant, toddler or preschooler who wound up on a respirator and the hospitals were overwhelmed.

Remarkably, the American scientific establishment has now come up with a combination of vaccine and therapy which has, in a very significant trial proven to be quite effective at preventing the virus from hospitalizing kids and saving them when they get really sick with RSV. 

This vaccine triumph has happened at the end of a long, arduous, fraught, frustrating road, with many failures and sometimes harm to patients, but it is a remarkable achievement.  Bet you haven't heard. No surprise there. Your ignorance is by design.

The vaccine is actually given to pregnant mothers, who develop antibodies and pass them on to their incubating offspring. This is necessary because RSV kills kids less than a month old, and very often before age 1, so there's no window in their short lives to vaccinate in these neonates.

Parents are and should be understandably cautious about vaccinating a pregnant woman, so the study and its safety assessment and its efficacy should be widely discussed and examined, and you know women will be going online to educate themselves. It's a big decision, but there is good information, if only it were available.

Typically, the Center for Disease Control, puts out a lot of information about stuff like this, and it had a whole press package ready, until RFK JR nixed it. Nobody is going to get any "propaganda" from the CDC, the NIH or any federal department of public health as long as RFK JR is Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Here's Paul Offit says of RFK JR:

He has restricted CDC attendance at scientific conferences, eliminated presentations to large audiences, and limited updates on CDC websites. In other words, he [RFK JR] has muzzled the CDC.

And Offit should know, as Offit is on the FDA advisory committee about vaccines. What we have here in RFK JR is really just one bizarre actor in the freak show that is the Trump Administration.  

RFK JR  is a man who was selected because he is the ultimate in oppositional/defiant personality Mr. Trump so loves. 

But, in this case he is positioned to do a world of harm.

It's not like Kristi Noem, the Tammy Faye of the cabinet, with her artificial eyelashes, super blush cheek highlights, who delights in dressing up like a "bad-ass" she-warrior and prancing around borders and prisons, when she is not executing her own pets--the harm she does, while cringe worthy, is nevertheless limited to a few thousand unfortunates--the harm RFK JR and his godfather, Trump, will do can run into the millions.

RFK JR does not believe in germ theory. When he tries to read the scientific literature he reads with a conspiracy theory mindset--finding malevolent intent in every lab, in every paper.  Doing his Own Research RFK JR read Tony Fauci's article on the superinfections seen in fatal cases of measles, and--Aha!--memo to world: RFK JR discovered people do not actually die of measles pneumonia, but of a bacterial (staph aureus) "super infection" pneumonia. So why vaccinate against measles when it's the bacterial that's killing people?  

Of course, this is like saying the man who hemorrhages to death in the emergency room after an auto accident died of bleeding, exsanguination, rather than from the auto accident.  

People whose lungs have not be ravaged by measles or influenza or leukemia or lymphoma do not get staph pneumonia. 

RFK JR does not want you getting your information from the CDC, or the National Institutes of Health. He wants you getting your information only from him. He doesn't have to burn books or medical journals: He can keep you from ever holding one in your hand. He doesn't want NIH doctors going to medical conventions to share their study results with other doctors, because that is like some sort of ritual in a secret society and all the rest of us are left out. Of course, FOXNEWS and RFK JR himself could attend these meetings, but then they'd have to sit through hours and days of presentations, looking at slides, listening to questions from the audience challenging or supporting the findings of research scientists and that is just such hard work and boring!

Better to do your OWN RESEARCH and just know things without bothering to do all that hard work!

And learning stuff means you might have to be faced with stuff you've never heard of before and that can be so unnerving: Ask your school age child, or your college student offspring if they have ever heard of Alexandre Yersin.

Mad Dog will bet you dollars to doughnuts not a single kid will know.

These kids may know about Caesar or Napoleon or Hitler or any of a variety of merchants of death, but ask them if their schools ever taught them about Yersin, or, for that matter Jonas Salk.

Yersin

You can Google these guys, but just briefly: Yersin worked in Pasteur's lab but he had wanderlust badly and wound up in French Indochina just in time for a major outbreak of the black plague in British held Hong Kong. He managed to not only identify the bacillus which causes plague but he raised an antiserum to it so when it made it's way to Vietnam he was able to save his the people all around his village clinic,  and even though he is French, from the country which subjugated their country, there are monuments to Uncle Yersin in Vietnam today. They do not think of their erstwhile Tony Fauci as an authoritarian to be denounced: they know what he did and they understand how his science saved them.

Polio Ward

As for Jonas Salk, Dave Garroway summarized his achievement best. He had to introduce Salk at a banquet and as he was getting dressed in his tux, his seven year old son asked him what the big occasion was, and Garroway said he was going to introduce Jonas Salk, the man who invented the cure for polio. 

And the kid asks, "But what's polio, Dad?" 

And Garroway turns to the audience and says, "Can you imagine any kid of our generation who never heard of polio? That's the best introduction I can possibly give."

I suspect that was the best introduction Salk had ever heard.

These men, Salk, Yersin, along with Banting and Best, who discovered insulin, and saved the lives of countless children and they are the real heroes in history, although that history is not taught in public or even in private schools. 

Best & Banting

The history of the world is a pretty uninspiring thing, when you look at what men have done: hitting each other over the heads with clubs, and then escalating to arrows, then guns then nuclear bombs. But there is another history, that of science which changes for the better the lives of every citizen, in his own village, in his own family.

That is the history RFK JR does not know, or if he knows anything about it, he responds to it in some lunatic way, defying it, denying it, condemning it. I can only imagine where his pathology arose. 

If those who are horrified by Trump would only keep the spotlight on RFK JR, eventually, even the most obtuse will see the truth. The camera has only to show the man and his disease often enough.

And sunlight, ultimately, may prove to be the best disinfectant.