RFKJr is replacing the vaccine committee with cranks., 14 June 2025
RFKJr's culture war political stunts will have real world consequences on financial access to life-saving vaccines.
RFKJr is replacing the vaccine committee with anti-vax pandemic denier cranks.
After sacking the entire vaccine committee, RFKJr announced with whom he intends to replace them, and they’re lots of anti-vax Great Barrington Declaration MAGA Qanon types.
Cody Meissner was pushing natural herd immunity anti-vax nonsense in FDA VRBPAC meetings a couple years ago, and signed the Great Barrington Declaration.
Martin Kulldorf was a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, and was hanging with Scott Atlas and them in 2020 as they were found to be plotting to make more Americans sick with covid.
Robert Malone is an anti-vax anti-science misinformation spreader.
Joseph R. Hibbeln has a history of studying the role of omega-3 in suicides among soldiers in the military.
Retsef Levi seems to be not a medical expert, he’s a MIT professor in the school of management. Retsef Levi was formerly a soldier in IDF Intelligence who called MIT student Gaza protesters “lost souls” who should be punished for calling for MIT to divest, and wrote a covid contrarian article that had to be unpublished, and was co-authored with Joe Ladapo, the notorious covid denier anti-vaxxer Florida man surgeon general that made up a study and called vaccines “the antichrist” of products.
Vicky Pebsworth is a anti-vax activist with the anti-vax organization NVIC.
I don't know James Pagano or Michael Ross, but I'm sure something will turn up that's bizarre, it seems inevitable.
🗞️ In the news
The New Republic - Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling / June 11, 2025 Bill Nye Asked RFK Jr. to Stop Texting Him: “Okay, No More” Bill Nye the Science Guy revealed the miles of texts he kept getting from the health secretary. Nye showed the magazine “miles and miles” of texts from RFK Jr. in an old exchange that only ended when Nye put his foot down with the virulent conspiracist: “Okay, no more texts,” he told Kennedy. Those texts included links to conspiratorial articles focused on vaccines, but the missives weren’t effective at changing Nye’s mind. Instead, they only convinced him that Kennedy is “not suited for this job.” “Just no self-awareness,” Nye said.
POLITICO - There’s one vice RFK Jr. isn’t talking about The health secretary, who wants Americans to make healthier choices, rarely mentions smoking. By Danny Nguyen and David Lim 06/10/2025 06:59 PM EDT “Attempting to combat chronic disease without tobacco control is like attempting a triathlon without a bicycle,” said Brian King, whom Kennedy pushed out of his job as the Food and Drug Administration’s top tobacco regulator in April. “You’re destined for failure before leaving the starting line.”
WIRED - David Gilbert Jun 9, 2025 1:57 PM The Bleach Community Is Ready for RFK Jr. to Make Their Dreams Come True - Online communities dedicated to the use of a toxic bleach solution to treat everything from cancer to autism believe Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is interested in their cause. While Kennedy has a long history of promoting anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, he has not explicitly promoted chlorine dioxide as a treatment. However, in January, during his Senate confirmation hearing, he referenced chlorine dioxide while praising Trump for “looking at all of the different remedies” for Covid, using it as an example of the open-mindedness that Kennedy characterized as a “demonstration of leadership.” Since Kennedy mentioned chlorine dioxide, groups dedicated to chlorine dioxide use on platforms like Telegram and Facebook are filled with new members and increased activity. (Telegram did not respond to a request for comment; Meta said it was reviewing the groups WIRED flagged and would remove any it determines violate the company’s policies.) Activists who have spent years fighting to highlight the dangers of chlorine dioxide are now deeply concerned that the Trump administration could seek to approve its use as a cure for a wide variety of ills. “The bleachers are back, making connections with powerful people, reaching RFK and Trump,” says Fiona O’Leary, an Ireland-based activist who has autistic children and has spent years trying to highlight the dangers of toxic bleach solutions being sold as an autism cure. “Bleachers want RFK to approve chlorine dioxide as a treatment for autism, cancer, and other conditions. It is like watching a horror show.”
CIDRAP - CDC reinstates hundreds of workers - News brief June 12, 2025 Chris Dall, MA A group representing fired CDC employees told the AP that the reinstatements don't undo the damage that Kennedy and the Trump administration are doing to public health. "Bringing a few hundred people back to work out of thousands fired is a start, but there are still countless programs at CDC that have been cut, which will lead to increased disease and death," said Abby Tighe, one of the founding members of Fired But Fighting.
CIDRAP - Study finds live avian flu virus in raw milk for more than 1 day at room temperature, 1 week in fridge News brief June 2, 2025 Mary Van Beusekom, MS "Although pasteurisation was shown to effectively inactivate influenza viruses in milk, unpasteurised milk still poses a risk of infection, both from occupational exposure in dairies and from the consumption of raw milk." H5N1 has been detected in more than a thousand US cattle herds, other mammals, dozens of dairy workers, and several people with no direct contact with infected animals.
RFKJr's culture war political stunts will have real world consequences on financial access to life-saving vaccines.
CIDRAP - Groups call for continued insurance coverage for COVID vaccines in pregnancy - Chris Dall, MA June 12, 2025 Dozens of medical and public health organizations have signed a letter urging insurers to continue covering COVID-19 vaccination in pregnant patients.
My letter to reps:
Continue coverage for covid vaccines in pregnancy. This is a matter of life and death and serious known risks to the pregnant and babies when moms to be are unvaccinated. The far fringe departure from modern medicine coming from the HHS isn't right.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) is a well-known quackery service promoted for various diseases which have no cure.
There's a reason that this is promoted for diseases with no cure – people are desperate and therefore vulnerable and easier to exploit. The diseases people claim that hyperbaric oxygen therapy can treat remain uncured. There are only very few reasons hyperbaric oxygen chambers even exist, such as for vasculitic ulcers and of course The Bends. But for the past few years it's being promoted to desperate people with Long Covid. In one story recounted from reddit, the person paid up front for a number of sessions in the hyperbaric oxygen so when they were in danger of bursting an ear drum, they actually said they went and got tubes in their ears that they didn't need for any other reason than to finish the sessions, and then they later reported it really didn't help anyway. Anti-vax covid minimizers and covid deniers at least 3 years ago started pushing hyperbaric oxygen treatment along with the rest of the weird unproven and later disproven covid cures like ivermectin. Some of those doctors have been prescribing this right-wing unproven stuff for covid and long covid, and some wrongly claim that long covid is actually typically caused by the vaccines, which defies evidence.
Often reputable facilities with the hyperbaric oxygen chamber equipment will deny service to people referred for stuff that's not FDA approved, and so less reliable facilities are making money offering the treatments.
AP - 4 charged in death of 5-year-old boy ‘incinerated’ in hyperbaric chamber explosion By COREY WILLIAMS Updated 6:09 PM EDT, March 11, 2025 NBC News reported the family’s attorney said the boy received multiple sessions for sleep apnea and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. These conditions aren’t among those approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for marketing of hyperbaric oxygen therapy treatment — a fact reiterated by Nessel, who described the boy’s treatment as “unsupported by medical science.”“Because these treatments were so medically unsound, patient insurance policies would not cover the use of these chambers to treat these conditions,” Nessel said. “This business was a pure cash-flow, for-profit business.”
Quote:
"There's this inevitability narrative that we hear from the tech companies all the time and that is a bid to steal our agency."
— Emily Bender on the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast.