Good article, and reasonable. Tracy Beth Hoeg is wonderful.
I would like to comment on the dangerous idea that scientists should not debate non scientists. This is truly worthy of the medieval Catholic Church. First of all, every citizen, every adult human being has the right to have some sort of opinion on vaccines IF they are mandated for us, or for our beloved children. The idea that we should just shut up and obey, is pernicious. I also question the idea that "scientist" is some special elite caste. Many of the greatest scientific discoveries were made by amateurs ( Newton, Galileo, etc. come to mind). Science is really an attitude of empiricism. Science is about testing hypotheses, of being objective, and open, until something is demonstrated one way or the other. Science is never settled. So challenges should be welcomed.
Thank you for writing this piece. I saw the Rogan-RFKjr interview and was very impressed. Your fact-check has put a lot of what RFKjr said (he presents well) in perspective.
I think he will be a flash in the pan this election cycle. A lot of people are so desperate for someone other than Biden or Trump, I’m afraid they will grab at anyone who looks halfway decent.
Re your last paragraph, the idea of having a debate between two knowledgeable “people committed to speaking honestly” seems impossible now days. All we now get are two partisan liars trying to score points with their base - in science as well as politics.
Maybe it's just a matter of what you were trying to get out of the podcast (a discussion of vaccines in some cases I guess or evaluation of a politician in my case) but I boil down everything RFK says about vaccines to two things
- I'm only involved in this vaccine thing because of the environmental work I did on fisheries 20 years ago with mercury being the common link
- I'd like to know why the rate of autism has gone from 1/500 to 1/26 in two generations (1/150 to 1/26 just this century)
But this is only one of 10 things that those of us evaluating RFK as a candidate care about (and one of the least important). The real important issues are the effect of inflation on the middle class, the waste of money in the Russian civil war, Social Security, financial protection against the costs of health care (including the futures of Medicare and Obamacare), what's wrong with the union movement, censorship in academia (and increasingly everywhere), the cost of (need for) a college education, civil rights, and parents rights.
(As to the specific thing about childhood vaccine testing, the key word of RFK's that you missed was "prelicensing." I have no idea if it is relevant or typical political hackery on RFK's part or even whether you intentionally left it out.)
Congratulations for proving that you know more about vaccines than a Democratic congressman. Unfortunately, like most physicians, you aren't so good at debate. You missed the real issue and went for the red herring. Hotez shouldn't be asked to debate RFK, Jr.; he should be given a list of three physicians who are neutral on COVID vaccination effects, and then offered the opportunity to identify the physician on that list whom he wanted to debate.
Thanks for helping us with RFK, Jr., but the real problem is that medical professionals with profound influence, like Fauci, refuse to openly discuss the basis for their decisions.
And by the way, you might also want to take up a different subject: did Obamacare help, or hurt medicine?
I read the journal article referenced by Ms HoeG. The trial with 70k participants. It does not say what was in the placebo. If it was saline they would have said so which would have closed the debate. At least for me.
RFK’s thesis is that none of the childhood vaccines has been tested against an inert placebo. He claims to have a letter from the NIH confirming this.
RFKs position on this was crystal clear in the podcast. The bit you quoted even makes it clear also.
You are mischaracterising his position. You could have read the journal article, searched for placebo, and like me confirmed his thesis correct. It took me five minutes.
I actually kept an open mind in 2021 and I listened to Berenson…he turned out to be wrong about pretty much everything. The fact Hawaii hasn’t been ravaged by Covid these last 12 months as millions of Omicron infected mainlanders have traveled there is all of the evidence one needs.
Bottom line—we never found a “silver bullet” to stop Covid but the vaccines mitigated severity and masking mitigated spread through the Delta variant…and now everyone has some form of immunity and we are in the endemic phase.
I'm reminded of those who, when they don't like a statement or opinion, try and discredit the person making the statement with "He can't be trusted because he's making money selling books about this," all the while the other side is awash in a flood of $ from various sources. There's plenty of critique of RFK here, but zero look at the Hotez antics and malarkey (and marketing of his books) he spilled over the last few years. It would be fantastic if the studies used by the government to make public health policy were publicly available and free to read, but I've found in my anecdotal experience that it's getting harder and harder to find anything more than one paragraph abstracts. When I do find a link to studies, it then costs to view. We are supposed to have a classically liberal K-12 education so we can somewhat intelligently evaluate what the politicians and experts have to say. I suggest a publicly available digital library of the research (the entire study) used to create government policy. I've used my very basic middle-school science education to discern what an experiment should look like, and I've found some farcical "research" in my reading travels.
Buzz: I am not going to get into the flypaper of RFK Jr. and vaccines. But a subject I am fairly well versed on is the JFK assassination. I know the facts and the theories pretty well. As you know RFK Jr. has implicated the CIA. This comment section is too short to go into that erroneous wormhole but here is RFK Jr. at his best:
In a July interview he said, “When Congress investigated my uncle's murder in the 1970s, the Church Committee did a two-year investigation, and they had many more documents and testimony than did the Warren Commission, this was a decade later, they came to the conclusion that my uncle was killed by a conspiracy.” Unfortunately, journalists rarely do their homework any more and no one looked it up. The Church Report actually said, “The Committee emphasizes that it has not uncovered any evidence sufficient to justify a conclusion that there was a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.”
I know you died but I just wanted to say I think it's really weird you chose to say that RFK Jr's claim that childhood vaccines are not placebo tested is "absurd" because Salk polio (not on schedule and hasn't been for decades) and Shringrix (not a childhood vaccine)
I commented earlier with some questions about the vaccine studies you cited as evidence of RFK Jr.'s wrongness. I tracked down a bit more information on one of them. In your article, you had stated that the HPV vaccine trials were one that proved RFK Jr. wrong, and I said that it did not seem so because the study you linked contained an undifferentiated sample of 12-26 year olds, and therefore was not a study on of children (at least not totally).
I believe I have now confirmed that the "placebo" in that study was the same HPV vaccine without the adjuvant. This is hardly a relevant control if one is looking to study vaccine safety, right? It seems very deceptive to call this a placebo (it is miles from a saline placebo), although this seems to be common practice.
So, it seems that we can put the HPV example in the "does not prove RFK Jr. wrong" pile, right? Not really conducted on children (one of his conditions) and not really a placebo (another of his conditions).
I'm just trying to be very careful here because this is a serious man with lots of good ideas that is being raked over the coals by the mainstream media and the Democrat establishment (but I repeat myself).
For those unaware, Dr. Buzz Hollander (the author of Buzz About Medicine) recently passed away 2 days after he wrote this post, on Sunday June 24th. His memory and beautiful legacy will certainly be a blessing the many lives he touched for years to come.
I'm trying to track down and read the studies that you and others have cited as proof of RFK Jr.'s wrongness. For yours,
"perhaps he has already forgotten the recent Covid-19 vaccine trials, almost all of which featured a saline placebo control" I searched pubmed and did see studies of the safety of this vaccine against a saline placebo, but I didn't see any on children. Could be there somewhere, can you provide a link? The "pre-license" aspect will be difficult to prove one way or another given the odd "licensing" of the covid vaccines--do we go by the date that the first child received a shot? If so, that is very early and so any study proving RFK Jr. wrong must have been published before that date.
"Yes, there is the above example of rotavirus, too." I read this entire article and then did a word search; the word "saline" appears nowhere. They never say anything about the nature of their placebo. Even if so, I think this was post-licensing? (from what information I can find online).
"The Salk polio vaccine was famously, and fascinatingly, tested in part against a saline control group." not really relevant since this vaccine is no longer given, right?
"The Shingrix shingles vaccine had a saline placebo arm." surely this was not given to children, right?
"So did an influenza vaccine trial in infants." followed your link but could not see anything but the abstract. Didn't even give me an option for paying for it, I have to have the approved institutional affiliation to read the article (which, to some extent, our tax dollars paid for, BTW).
"Ditto one of the HPV vaccine trials" the sample from the link you provided included females from 12-26, so again, not really a childhood vaccine (and certainly not what one thinks of when "childhood" vaccine is mentioned). And was this pre-licensure?
I'm giving RFK Jr. the benefit of the doubt that when he said "placebo" he meant real placebo, true placebo, not another treatment "placebo" such as an older vaccine as you mentioned.
I am trying to be open minded, but still haven't seen a single study that meets all of the requirements for saying RFK Jr. is wrong, which would include (1) randomized, (2) saline placebo-controlled, (3) pre-licensing, (4) vaccine safety study [not just effectiveness], and (5) sample consisted of children.
Even if you or someone else can find one, or 6, or 10 such studies, of the thousands that have been conducted on vaccines that are used to create government guidelines and requirements, do you think that this technicality precludes the medical establishment from taking him seriously? No debate, no revelations of the corruption in healthcare and academia, no putting the problems of the system on display?
Thanks.
p.s. an Oxford-style debate would solve all of the other problems you mentioned. It seems obvious that RFK Jr. would agree, do you think Hotez would? It seems pretty obvious who wants to discuss this and who is looking for excuses not to.
Good article, and reasonable. Tracy Beth Hoeg is wonderful.
I would like to comment on the dangerous idea that scientists should not debate non scientists. This is truly worthy of the medieval Catholic Church. First of all, every citizen, every adult human being has the right to have some sort of opinion on vaccines IF they are mandated for us, or for our beloved children. The idea that we should just shut up and obey, is pernicious. I also question the idea that "scientist" is some special elite caste. Many of the greatest scientific discoveries were made by amateurs ( Newton, Galileo, etc. come to mind). Science is really an attitude of empiricism. Science is about testing hypotheses, of being objective, and open, until something is demonstrated one way or the other. Science is never settled. So challenges should be welcomed.
Thank you for writing this piece. I saw the Rogan-RFKjr interview and was very impressed. Your fact-check has put a lot of what RFKjr said (he presents well) in perspective.
I think he will be a flash in the pan this election cycle. A lot of people are so desperate for someone other than Biden or Trump, I’m afraid they will grab at anyone who looks halfway decent.
Re your last paragraph, the idea of having a debate between two knowledgeable “people committed to speaking honestly” seems impossible now days. All we now get are two partisan liars trying to score points with their base - in science as well as politics.
The scripted lies of the Biden administration were far more egregious than anything Robert Kennedy said off the top of his head in a podcast.
once again everyone wants to attack RFK Jr so long as he's out of the room.
Maybe it's just a matter of what you were trying to get out of the podcast (a discussion of vaccines in some cases I guess or evaluation of a politician in my case) but I boil down everything RFK says about vaccines to two things
- I'm only involved in this vaccine thing because of the environmental work I did on fisheries 20 years ago with mercury being the common link
- I'd like to know why the rate of autism has gone from 1/500 to 1/26 in two generations (1/150 to 1/26 just this century)
But this is only one of 10 things that those of us evaluating RFK as a candidate care about (and one of the least important). The real important issues are the effect of inflation on the middle class, the waste of money in the Russian civil war, Social Security, financial protection against the costs of health care (including the futures of Medicare and Obamacare), what's wrong with the union movement, censorship in academia (and increasingly everywhere), the cost of (need for) a college education, civil rights, and parents rights.
(As to the specific thing about childhood vaccine testing, the key word of RFK's that you missed was "prelicensing." I have no idea if it is relevant or typical political hackery on RFK's part or even whether you intentionally left it out.)
Congratulations for proving that you know more about vaccines than a Democratic congressman. Unfortunately, like most physicians, you aren't so good at debate. You missed the real issue and went for the red herring. Hotez shouldn't be asked to debate RFK, Jr.; he should be given a list of three physicians who are neutral on COVID vaccination effects, and then offered the opportunity to identify the physician on that list whom he wanted to debate.
Thanks for helping us with RFK, Jr., but the real problem is that medical professionals with profound influence, like Fauci, refuse to openly discuss the basis for their decisions.
And by the way, you might also want to take up a different subject: did Obamacare help, or hurt medicine?
I read the journal article referenced by Ms HoeG. The trial with 70k participants. It does not say what was in the placebo. If it was saline they would have said so which would have closed the debate. At least for me.
RFK’s thesis is that none of the childhood vaccines has been tested against an inert placebo. He claims to have a letter from the NIH confirming this.
RFKs position on this was crystal clear in the podcast. The bit you quoted even makes it clear also.
You are mischaracterising his position. You could have read the journal article, searched for placebo, and like me confirmed his thesis correct. It took me five minutes.
I actually kept an open mind in 2021 and I listened to Berenson…he turned out to be wrong about pretty much everything. The fact Hawaii hasn’t been ravaged by Covid these last 12 months as millions of Omicron infected mainlanders have traveled there is all of the evidence one needs.
Bottom line—we never found a “silver bullet” to stop Covid but the vaccines mitigated severity and masking mitigated spread through the Delta variant…and now everyone has some form of immunity and we are in the endemic phase.
I'm reminded of those who, when they don't like a statement or opinion, try and discredit the person making the statement with "He can't be trusted because he's making money selling books about this," all the while the other side is awash in a flood of $ from various sources. There's plenty of critique of RFK here, but zero look at the Hotez antics and malarkey (and marketing of his books) he spilled over the last few years. It would be fantastic if the studies used by the government to make public health policy were publicly available and free to read, but I've found in my anecdotal experience that it's getting harder and harder to find anything more than one paragraph abstracts. When I do find a link to studies, it then costs to view. We are supposed to have a classically liberal K-12 education so we can somewhat intelligently evaluate what the politicians and experts have to say. I suggest a publicly available digital library of the research (the entire study) used to create government policy. I've used my very basic middle-school science education to discern what an experiment should look like, and I've found some farcical "research" in my reading travels.
Came for the Dan Snyder bashing, left with a side ache due to your candor. I will be billing you! Great piece though, thanks for sharing.
Buzz: I am not going to get into the flypaper of RFK Jr. and vaccines. But a subject I am fairly well versed on is the JFK assassination. I know the facts and the theories pretty well. As you know RFK Jr. has implicated the CIA. This comment section is too short to go into that erroneous wormhole but here is RFK Jr. at his best:
In a July interview he said, “When Congress investigated my uncle's murder in the 1970s, the Church Committee did a two-year investigation, and they had many more documents and testimony than did the Warren Commission, this was a decade later, they came to the conclusion that my uncle was killed by a conspiracy.” Unfortunately, journalists rarely do their homework any more and no one looked it up. The Church Report actually said, “The Committee emphasizes that it has not uncovered any evidence sufficient to justify a conclusion that there was a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.”
The exact opposite of what RFK Jr. said.
I know you died but I just wanted to say I think it's really weird you chose to say that RFK Jr's claim that childhood vaccines are not placebo tested is "absurd" because Salk polio (not on schedule and hasn't been for decades) and Shringrix (not a childhood vaccine)
I commented earlier with some questions about the vaccine studies you cited as evidence of RFK Jr.'s wrongness. I tracked down a bit more information on one of them. In your article, you had stated that the HPV vaccine trials were one that proved RFK Jr. wrong, and I said that it did not seem so because the study you linked contained an undifferentiated sample of 12-26 year olds, and therefore was not a study on of children (at least not totally).
I believe I have now confirmed that the "placebo" in that study was the same HPV vaccine without the adjuvant. This is hardly a relevant control if one is looking to study vaccine safety, right? It seems very deceptive to call this a placebo (it is miles from a saline placebo), although this seems to be common practice.
So, it seems that we can put the HPV example in the "does not prove RFK Jr. wrong" pile, right? Not really conducted on children (one of his conditions) and not really a placebo (another of his conditions).
I'm just trying to be very careful here because this is a serious man with lots of good ideas that is being raked over the coals by the mainstream media and the Democrat establishment (but I repeat myself).
For those unaware, Dr. Buzz Hollander (the author of Buzz About Medicine) recently passed away 2 days after he wrote this post, on Sunday June 24th. His memory and beautiful legacy will certainly be a blessing the many lives he touched for years to come.
Two hyperbolic liars. Not really a debate
I'm trying to track down and read the studies that you and others have cited as proof of RFK Jr.'s wrongness. For yours,
"perhaps he has already forgotten the recent Covid-19 vaccine trials, almost all of which featured a saline placebo control" I searched pubmed and did see studies of the safety of this vaccine against a saline placebo, but I didn't see any on children. Could be there somewhere, can you provide a link? The "pre-license" aspect will be difficult to prove one way or another given the odd "licensing" of the covid vaccines--do we go by the date that the first child received a shot? If so, that is very early and so any study proving RFK Jr. wrong must have been published before that date.
"Yes, there is the above example of rotavirus, too." I read this entire article and then did a word search; the word "saline" appears nowhere. They never say anything about the nature of their placebo. Even if so, I think this was post-licensing? (from what information I can find online).
"The Salk polio vaccine was famously, and fascinatingly, tested in part against a saline control group." not really relevant since this vaccine is no longer given, right?
"The Shingrix shingles vaccine had a saline placebo arm." surely this was not given to children, right?
"So did an influenza vaccine trial in infants." followed your link but could not see anything but the abstract. Didn't even give me an option for paying for it, I have to have the approved institutional affiliation to read the article (which, to some extent, our tax dollars paid for, BTW).
"Ditto one of the HPV vaccine trials" the sample from the link you provided included females from 12-26, so again, not really a childhood vaccine (and certainly not what one thinks of when "childhood" vaccine is mentioned). And was this pre-licensure?
I'm giving RFK Jr. the benefit of the doubt that when he said "placebo" he meant real placebo, true placebo, not another treatment "placebo" such as an older vaccine as you mentioned.
I am trying to be open minded, but still haven't seen a single study that meets all of the requirements for saying RFK Jr. is wrong, which would include (1) randomized, (2) saline placebo-controlled, (3) pre-licensing, (4) vaccine safety study [not just effectiveness], and (5) sample consisted of children.
Even if you or someone else can find one, or 6, or 10 such studies, of the thousands that have been conducted on vaccines that are used to create government guidelines and requirements, do you think that this technicality precludes the medical establishment from taking him seriously? No debate, no revelations of the corruption in healthcare and academia, no putting the problems of the system on display?
Thanks.
p.s. an Oxford-style debate would solve all of the other problems you mentioned. It seems obvious that RFK Jr. would agree, do you think Hotez would? It seems pretty obvious who wants to discuss this and who is looking for excuses not to.