The Vaccine Witches: Outlander Instructs

 Paul Offet posts on his "Beyond the Noise" substack/blog about RFKJR's plans to destroy vaccinations. 

It's a post worth reading, if only because it so succinctly describes just one of the maneuvers RFKJR and his MAGA  mob have used to cancel vaccinations.

Here is an excerpt:

"Despite his claim that anyone who wants vaccines can get them, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), is on the verge of eliminating vaccines from the United States. He believes that vaccines have replaced infectious diseases with chronic diseases. By eliminating vaccines, he believes he can eliminate all manner of chronic diseases, including autism. Here is how he plans to do it. On June 18, 2025, RFK Jr. directed his newly appointed Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which he recently stocked with members who have a history of anti-vaccine activity, to evaluate aluminum-containing adjuvants in vaccines. What are aluminum adjuvants and why are they in some vaccines? Aluminum adjuvants have been used in vaccines since 1926 to enhance the immune response, allowing for fewer doses and lesser quantities of vaccine components. Live, attenuated viral vaccines (such as the measles-mumps-rubella [MMR], varicella, and rotavirus vaccines) don’t require adjuvants. But some vaccines, which aren’t live (such as the DTaP, pneumococcal, meningococcal, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae type b, and HPV vaccines) wouldn’t work well without an adjuvant. Are aluminum adjuvants dangerous? Aluminum is the third most abundant element on Earth. It’s in soil, water, air, plants, and food. Aluminum is literally everywhere, including in breast milk and infant formula. In the first 6 months of life, babies will be exposed to about 4.4 milligrams of aluminum from vaccines, 7 milligrams from breast milk, 38 milligrams from infant formula, and 117 milligrams from soy formula. Not surprisingly, researchers found that the level of aluminum contained in an infant’s hair and bloodstream didn’t correlate with receipt of vaccines. In other words, aluminum in vaccines is a trivial addition to what infants encounter and manage every day from the environment. Consistent with these findings, researchers in Denmark recently studied 1.2 million children between 1997 and 2020 who received different quantities of aluminum in vaccines. They found no evidence that aluminum adjuvants caused autoimmune, allergic, or neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism and asthma. For RFK Jr., however, none of these reassuring facts or studies about aluminum matter. Sometime in the next few months, he will hold up a poorly done study claiming that aluminum adjuvants cause autism or diabetes or multiple sclerosis or asthma or eczema. Then he will do something that could eliminate vaccine manufacture in the United States. And, if you don’t believe that, just look at what happened in the United States in the early 1980s. On April 19, 1982, a local NBC affiliate in Washington, DC aired a one-hour documentary titled DPT: Vaccine Roulette. The film featured children with withered arm and legs wearing bicycle helmets, seizing, drooling, and staring vacantly up at the ceiling. The cause of this apparent brain damage, according to the film, was the “P” in DPT: the pertussis or whooping cough vaccine. The film launched a flood of lawsuits against vaccine makers. In 1981, one year before Vaccine Roulette aired, three lawsuits were filed against vaccine makers. By the end of 1982, lawyers had filed 17 lawsuits; during the next four years, they filed 41, 73, 219, and 255. The amount of money requested by plaintiffs increased exponentially from $25 million in 1981 to $414 million in 1982, $655 million in 1983, $1.3 billion in 1984, and $3.2 billion in 1985. The cost of defending these lawsuits exceeded sales from the vaccine. Vaccine makers left the business. The number of companies making pertussis vaccine dropped from seven to one, measles vaccine makers from six to one and oral polio vaccine makers from three to one. Americans were on the verge of losing childhood vaccines. Then, in 1986, the Regan administration stepped in, creating the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act which included the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP). Now people could be compensated for vaccine injuries through this special vaccine court, which was funded by a federal excise tax on every dose of vaccine. The bleeding stopped. Nonetheless, whereas 18 companies made vaccines for American children in 1980, only four remained by the end of the decade. Subsequent studies found that the pertussis vaccine didn’t cause brain damage. But those studies came far too late to save vaccines. Ironically, 25 years later, Samuel Berkovic, an Australian researcher, found that the children featured in Vaccine Roulette had Dravet’s Syndrome, a genetic disorder characterized by a sodium channel transport defect in brain cells. In other words, the pertussis vaccine was blameless."

So, this is a classic story of true witch hunt--foment a fear with horrifying images; point to an occult culprit; destroy your witch, burn her at the stake. 

Last night, Mad Dog happened across, on youtube, the wonderful scene from "Outlander" where Jamie points to Claire's smallpox vaccination scar and asks if this is the mark of a witch? Is Claire a witch? Jamie is living in 1718, (when people believed in witches)  and Claire was born in 1918 and received a small pox vaccination as a child. Of course, nobody in 1718 had ever seen a smallpox vaccination scar, had ever had a vaccine of any sort. That would not happen until 1796.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB49rx_VFXE

Had Claire been born in 1982, she would not have had that telltale vaccine scar, because smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980 and vaccines for smallpox were discontinued. 

It was a canny choice to make Claire a nurse, then, later, a physician, because of all the accomplishments of humanity, the big leaps have nothing to do with empires, or even industrialization, but with medicine, and public health. The recognition of "germs" of micro organism, viruses, parasites and bacteria has led to an entirely different experience of life on Earth. Life today is vastly different, for every resident of advanced societies more owing to the freedom from devastating diseases and epidemics than because of railroads, airplanes or even steel plants. 

But RFKJR does not believe in the germ theory.

There is a chapter in an obscure novel Mad Dog recalls because it's called "Of Jonas Salk and the Real World," in which an old doctor tries to convince his younger colleague to forgo the wealth and affluent life style of a private practitioner in a wealthy suburb, and choose instead the life of a researcher in infectious disease at the dawn of the AIDS era. 

Dave Garroway

He tells the story of Dave Garroway, who was, in the 1960's a famous TV personality, who has to introduce Jonas Salk at some fancy dinner and Garroway says he could not think of what to say, but then his seven year old son, watching him put on his tuxedo, asks what's up, and Garroway says, 

"Well, tonight I'm going to introduce Dr. Salk, who cured polio," and the son asks, "But what's polio, Dad?" And Garroway looks out at the audience and says, "Can you imagine any seven year old of our generation or of any before ours, not knowing what polio is? That's the best introduction to Dr. Salk I can think of."

The old doctor says, 

"The history of man on this earth is, for the most part, pretty uninspiring. All those kings and dictators and strongmen: just a bunch of cavemen hitting each other over the head with clubs. I never could get very interested, you know? They were all doing pretty much the same thing, through the ages, for pretty much the same reasons, when you get right down to it. But there have been some men who've really made this world different. I'm not talking about changing some line on a map. I'm talking about guys who really changed life the way every little guy leads it. Jonas Salk was one of those men."

Dr. Salk

And RFKJR has decried the polio vaccine as doing more harm than good:

SV40 and Cancer: He has claimed that some polio vaccine batches between 1955 and 1963 were contaminated with Simian Virus 40 (SV40), which he alleges caused an increase in soft-tissue cancers that killed more people than polio itself.

--From Google AI

So now Mr. Kennedy has taken us on another time travel trip, back to the days before vaccines, when wards were filled with kids in iron lungs and limbs were withered and lives ruined.

Back to the time before vaccines.

Nobody has ever said vaccines are entirely without risk, but risk has to do with numbers and experience, and those are of no interest to the forces of darkness led by Mr. Kennedy.

He want's to take us back to times of superstition, before science.

Make America Great Again.

RFKJR and True Believers

 Cleaning out the drains in the sinks and shower of my bathroom this morning put me in mind of autopsies and biology and ultimately, of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. 

I know the connection may not be obvious, but bear with me.

Pulling up the black mold and fungi and hair surprised me, as none of it was evident until I unscrewed the drain screen, and got down into the pipes with an old tooth brush. Then the source of that faint moldy aroma became obvious. 

Tradesmen are never surprised to find stuff behind the dry wall--yards of wires completely denuded of their insulation by mice, which the home owner had no idea had lived in the attic. Mechanics finding undetected, unseen stress fractures, rust and other injuries to the mechanisms.

When I was a sophomore in college, one of my classmates, looking over the shoulder of our professor, a man with a PhD in biology, as he dissected a frog, trying to show us the spiral valve in its heart, asked him, seemingly out of thin air, "So, you know when someone is ninety and is found dead in bed, or some guy just drops dead walking down the sidewalk, what killed them? Was it just nothing?"

And the professor, without looking up from his work, said, "No. Everyone must die of something." But he had, presumably, never taken a course in pathology. He was an amphibian expert. 

Which seemed eminently logical to me, and the ten students all nodded: That makes sense. Everyone dies of something.

But to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that something is not a COVID virus, or measles or tuberculosis or HIV. People with healthy immune systems are not going to die from infectious agents; they will live forever...or something. 

As long as they don't eat processed foods.

It made me think of two other people.  Both were patients of mine when I was still training. One was a twenty-two year old woman at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital with Hodgkins Disease. The oncologists had had a devil of a time trying to get her lymphoma to respond to their poisons, but she seemed to have finally gone into remission. This was in the days before CT scans, but her chest X rays were clear and she felt better, and she was eating again and her skin was rosy and she was sitting up in bed with her lunch tray just delivered, and I happened to be in the room and her aunt was sitting by her bedside, and she raised her hand to her head and said she did not feel well, and I took her blood pressure which had plummeted, and I rolled the head of her bed down and pushed the bedside button for help, and then she looked over to her aunt and she said, "Remember when Carol died? And we got out all those little white cards to mail to all the cousins and relatives, and we filled them out, dozens of them, one by one?"

And her aunt looked alarmed and looked from her to me.

"I think you're going to have to get out those cards now."

And, sure enough, she arrested right in front of us and despite all our efforts, she died. 

She knew there was something going on we could not see. At autopsy, they found every organ riddled with Candida, an organism which can cause vaginal infections in healthy women, but ordinarily doesn't cause much problem,  but she had it everywhere, and I looked through the microscope in the pathology lab and lung, eye, liver, virtually every tissue just overwhelmed with these cylindrical shaped, ghostly Candida organisms.  It is true, her immune system had failed her--if you have a marginally functional immune system it can fight off Candida, but after all that chemotherapy, and the lymphoma itself rendered her immune system kaput.

Another patient, a twenty one year old woman was brought to the ER by her fiancé, short of breath. She was a little dusky, but in the fluorescent lights of the ER it was always tough to judge skin color. The ER resident had done blood gases which showed her blood oxygen levels were low and her carbon dioxide levels high, and I was sure he had hit vein, not artery as these levels would have been characteristic of venous blood. This was before those pulse ox devices they put on your finger now which measure blood oxygenation, or some equivalent, and the only way you could know about arterial oxygen saturation was to puncture an artery, usually done at the wrist, and sit there and watch as the plunger in the syringe pulsed up, heart beat by heart beat, until you had about five cc's and then plunge it into ice and run it up to the lab. So, I did that, and the oxygen was still low so I accepted her to the intensive care unit. In those days, even a big hospital like The New York Hospital only had one ICU on the medical service and one on the surgical service. There were only twelve beds in our medical ICU and so someone had to judge who was sick enough to warrant a bed and that night it was my job as a senior medical resident.  She was a little drowsy, but she was answering questions and she didn't look all that sick, but those gases were atrocious and I had drawn them myself so I trusted them, and I took her up to the ICU. 

She died within about an hour. 

We were all pretty shocked. We had not thought, for some reason, to intubate her, that is to put her on a respirator. I don't know why. It just happened so fast. One minute she's talking to you, respiratory rate a little fast, but blood pressure and pulse not bad and then, poof!

At autopsy, she had lungs which had the consistency of liver. Just thick and soppy. Lungs are usually like big sponges, with lots of air and , well, spongey, but her lungs were simply not compatible with life--no way they could exchange air. I felt dreadful about not intubating her, but all the old attendings (who were younger than I am now, I'm sure, but they seemed like old wizened men to me then, the kind who had seen it all) all of them, to a man said, "That's what influenza does." Wouldn't have mattered if you had put her on a respirator. She could not move air through those lungs.  Her influenza titers were high. There was an epidemic going round and our wards were filled--we had patients on gurneys in the hallways.

Influenza just does that. 

Many of our influenza patients seemed to get better and then they relapsed severely; their blood gases went south and they died from "superinfection" with staph aureus. The lungs had been so blasted by the influenza, they were defenseless against the staph.

Bobby Kennedy, Jr, having read an article by Tony Fauci which reported staph superinfection in some patients dying of influenza, concluded that even Tony Fauci "admitted" that influenza does not kill patients, staph does. Which is, of course, like saying if you bleed to death in the emergency room after an auto accident, you died from bleeding, not from the auto accident.

But back to microbiological cause of deaths: None of the microbiology is, of course, visible to the naked eye, nor even knowable by the bedside interns, residents and attendings. You just know what these patients look like on the autopsy table, when the invisible, the microbiology, become evident.

It's what pathologists do. Internists know everything but can do nothing. Surgeons know nothing but can do everything and pathologists know everything and can do everything, but too late.

That was the old joke among the wags at the hospital.

So, all I'm saying is, when you're talking about disease, what makes people sick, there's a lot to learn and a lot which is unseen by people without training, technology and experience.

So when Bobbie Jr. denies measles kills kids, or when he says COVID does not kill anybody, except for people who have damaged their own immune system by eating processed foods, or when South African President Mbeki says HIV does not cause AIDS, but it was poverty and homosexuality that causes AIDS, somehow-- they are people who have never taken a course in pathology and they have certainly never done a year's internship at The New York Hospital, or the Mass General or anywhere else.

Before the germ theory of infectious disease, there were all sorts of explanations--God's wrath, bad air, the universe being out of balance in an individual. 

Alexandre Yersin

The Black Plague was punishment for bad deeds until Alexandre Yersin found Pasturella pestis (later named Yersinia pestis) in the buboes in 1894. Centuries of mystery were solved by a man with a microscope working out of a straw hut during a plague outbreak in Hong Kong, alone, because the British masters of Hong Kong dismissed him as some French speaking nerd, and made the hospital available only to a more respectable scientist, who never bothered to cut into the buboes and missed the offending bacillus.

The story of Alexandre Yersin should be taught in every middle school in America. The guy was a Swiss student who spoke French and German and wound up working with Louis Pasteur in that famous Paris lab. But Yersin, who may have been on the autism spectrum, maybe not, yearned for adventure, and although Pasteur wanted him to continue his work on tuberculosis in Paris, Yersin inveigled a letter of reference from Pasteur and then hopped a boat to French Indochina, where, from his clinic in Na Trang, he had been delighting in listening to the tigers roar at night. When plague broke out in Hong Kong he hopped a boat to go there. 

He not only figured out which bacteria caused the disease, he raised anti serum to it, so when it broke out in Indochina (now Vietnam) he was able to save the villagers. Chance favors the prepared mind.  He also figured out the connection to rat fleas. Quite a guy. Ask  any American middle school child you know if he's ever heard of Yersin.

For that matter, ask any middle school student you know who Banting and Best were, and what they did. You can give them a hint: University of Toronto, 1922. Another hint: Diabetes.

Banting & Best

Theories about what caused plague, type 1 diabetes, AIDS are a textbook of mistaken ideas, but methods which are rigorous enough to lead to the truth ultimately prevailed.

One thing all these stories share is difficulty, how hard it is to learn anything in biology and science, and how what you think you know one day may change the next until the implacable method we call "the scientific method" gets applied, and it's not enough to be correct, you have to show how you came to your conclusion, how you excluded other possibilities and why your explanation and your evidence, which other investigators can reproduce, makes the most sense.

For Bobby, none of this applies. He just says it.  As Christopher Hitchens noted: statements without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.  Big claims require big evidence.

The temptation to skip all that hard work, to skip the arduous steps of sitting through classes, lectures, labs, of listening to "experts," is immense.  You know these experts are going to be wrong about a lot of stuff, so why bother listening to them at all?

Just get out there and say something, like, it's all about your diet. People who eat well and have strong immune systems as a result never die. Certainly not from COVID or influenza or measles.

Just say it. It's so easy.

 It's simply enough to cry out: Do you BELIEVE!?!

 I BELIEVE!

Not in God, necessarily, but in whatever Mr. Trump or Mr. Musk or Mr. Miller or Mr. RFK Jr says.