RFK Jr. made headlines this week for two very different things that he has been credited with writing: new vaccine language on the CDC’s website that’s infuriating and a raunchy note to a maybe-lover that’s just creepy. Let’s start with the sex—it is Wednesday, after all. Information about an affair between Kennedy and journalist Olivia Nuzzi has been coming out in dribs and drabs. We first learned about the “digital affair”—they say it never happened IRL—when he was running for President last year. More of it dripped out a few weeks ago when his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, started her book tour. Some was teased by Nuzzi who is also releasing a book. And some of it—the most titillating reveals yet—were put out there by her ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza, who is also a journalist. Before I go on, I want to note that these details were published on Lizza’s Substack and then repeated by a number of almost-credible news outlets like The New York Post, The Guardian, and Yahoo News. It’s unclear how much fact checking there was before the internet got ahold of things like the “poem” I mention below. Perhaps I should have refrained from adding to the noise until a more trustworthy source verifies the poem’s authenticity, but RFK Jr. has told us about his brain worm, dropped a dead bear in Central Park, and single-handedly ruined public health in this country. Lizza claims to have access to an email in which RFK Jr. wrote the following to Nuzzi:
I don’t like to yuck anyone’s sexual yum, and I’m certainly not one to tell you whether it’s better to spit or swallow. I will say, however, this particularly fantasy has more than a few lack-of-consent red flags. Some people want to be tamed and subdued, which is cool, but forcing open someone’s mouth, holding their nose, and inserting your dick certainly requires advance consent and an agreed upon safe gesture (a safe word won’t work for obvious reasons). In fairness, we don’t know that Bobby isn’t into consent. Maybe the next line of that email was “Do you want to do this with me? Check here for yes and here for no.” Still, he’s a married man who is 39 years her senior, and by all accounts they weren’t already in a sexual relationship where some level of consent might have been implied. It reads creepy old man, and in normal political times it would have been enough to cost him his job. Lizza claims this is just one of many emails he has that would confirm the creepy old man image. He says many of them are not fit for public consumption but credits Bobby with teaching him what felching is. For those who don’t know, you can read about what it is and how it can spread STIs in this NIH article, at least until Kennedy decides that drinking out of your partner’s anus is totally raw-milk-safe. We all knew Kennedy—who is a lawyer, not a doctor—has some pretty f**ked up views about health. Despite assurances from the suckered Senators that confirmed him, we all also knew he’d force HHS to spew those views. This week Bobby made the CDC change its language on vaccines and autism. The agency ditched science and probably its reputation for the next twenty years or so. To be clear, this is all about leadership. I’m sure the dedicated public health experts who are still there—the ones who have now been shot down, shot at, and furloughed—are as horrified by this change as we are. Until now, the website said definitively that “vaccines do not cause autism.” This statement was definitive and accurate. As we’ve been over many times, the myth that vaccines cause autism was created by a single study published in the Lancet in 1998. The study included just 12 children and suggested that the MMR (Measles, Mumps, and Rubella) vaccine was behind the increase in autism diagnoses. That study has since been retracted because the author, Andrew Wakefield, faked it. He has admitted to cherry picking results and falsifying data and has lost his medical license as a result. “Why did he make it up?” you ask. “Money,” I explain to nobody’s surprise. It turns out that two years before he published this study, he was hired by a lawyer who wanted to sue drug companies over the MMR. He also had invested in an alternative to the MMR. (I highly recommend this series of articles in the British Medical Journal that not only explain the fraud but examines the damage that this single study has done.) In the decades since Wakefield’s study, the possibility of a connection between vaccines and autism has been studied over-and-over again. There are now over 50 high-quality studies that together include data from over 15 million children worldwide. The research has examined multiple vaccines, ingredients used in vaccines, dosing schedules, and immune responses. All of these studies have concluded that there is no link between vaccines and autism. But Kennedy spent those decades spreading vaccine falsehoods anyhow. He founded the Children’s Health Defense (CHD), a leading anti-vaccine organization. CHD sued the government over vaccine mandates, and Kennedy helped sue vaccine manufacturers. And now—in a turn of events that baffles the mind and suggests we really are living in some kind of alternative timeline—he’s running HHS and thereby in charge of what a number of formerly legitimate agencies say. The new language reads, “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” That’s not how science f**king works. Proving a negative is philosophically impossible. Science doesn’t rule things out. Science looks at correlations—most kids get the MMR and some of them get autism—and then tries to determine if one causes the other. One study is rarely enough to prove that two things are or are not causally connected which is why researchers spend a lot of time confirming results with additional studies. Science looks at the accumulation of evidence, and the accumulation of evidence in this case overwhelming suggests that vaccines do not cause autism. But does it rule out the possibility that a future study would find differently? No. That’s the beauty of science. It’s always open to possibilities. I would argue that we’ve wasted enough time and money trying to recreate the results of one bulls**t faked study and appease people who built whole belief systems on top of it, but if someday new evidence is found, so be it. Until that time, however, it’s important to abide by the best thinking of the moment. Unfortunately, the best thinking never seems to come from Kennedy. As just a few examples, I give you raw milk, beef tallow, cod liver oil, and having an affair that’s done entirely over email while you’re running for president. (There’s a paper trail, and you never even got the blow job.) Vaccines may be the single most important public health advancement in the last 100 years or so. There’s a lot of data that shows just how good they are—154 million lives saved globally over the past 50 years. The United States has used vaccination to get rid of smallpox, polio, diphtheria, and until recently, measles. We’ve also used vaccines to spare children from getting childhood illnesses like chickenpox and rotavirus and to practically eliminate the risk of cervical cancer (if people get the vaccine, that is). And then there’s the Covid vaccine that got us out of our houses and opened the world again. I’d really hoped that watching what a brand-new vaccine could do in real time was going to be the end of the road for people like RFK Jr. and their brand of conspiracy-theory-laced skepticism. [Sighs audibly.] But it’s only gotten worse. In a purely political move, the CDC’s website does actually still contain the subhead “vaccines don’t cause autism” but there’s a footnote attached that reads: “[this header] has not been removed due to an agreement with the chair of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that it would remain on the CDC website.” That would be Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, who is a physician. Like most actual doctors, Cassidy whole-heartedly supports vaccines. He apparently agonized over whether to confirm Kennedy because of Bobby’s anti-vaccine history. In a speech in February, the Senator explained that he voted for confirmation only after he secured three promises from Kennedy: 1) that he would consult Cassidy regularly, 2) that he would protect access to vaccines, and 3) that he would continue to listen to the recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Perhaps the two men chat weekly, but from the outside it looks like Kennedy’s not keeping those promises. He changed guidance on Covid vaccines that made it harder for some people to get, suggested that it was dangerous to pregnant women, and cancelled $500 million of funding designed to build on the success of mRNA vaccines. As for following the guidance of ACIP, he might do that going forward but only because he fired all 17 of the existing members of the committee and replaced them with people who are more friendly to his anti-vaccine view of the world. (They meet next week and seem poised to change the recommendation that all babies get the Hep-B vaccine before leaving the hospital. That is a very bad idea that could kill kids.) Cassidy made the rounds of political talk shows this weekend trying to do damage control by telling people that vaccines don’t cause autism and they should listen to their doctors on this issue. He did not, however, call out Kennedy directly either for lying during his confirmation hearing or for being criminally stupid on this issue. Bill got played, and he knows it. I think I’ve mentioned our family rules before. They include things like “never eat anything bigger than your head” and “when in doubt go left.” Rule # 15 is “I don’t care if you raised it since birth, your {insert name of wild animal here} will eat you.” We adopted it after reading lots of stories of people attacked by their beloved pet tiger, chimpanzee, or bear (to the surprise of pretty much no one). Just this week there was a story about an Ohio grandmother who rehabilitated deer on her property and was mauled to death by a buck. Bill forgot Rule #15 when he tried to tame a wild anti-vaxxer and now we’re all being mauled, possibly not in the way Bobby would like to maul Olivia, but mauled, nonetheless. HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE!Sex on Wednesday is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Sex on Wednesday that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
|
There's A Paper Trail, And You Never Even Got the Blowjob
0 comments:
Post a Comment