RFK wanted nothing to do with anti-vax movement

By Hudson Driver –

Robert F. Kennedy wanted nothing to do with autism and the anti-vax community. He avoided the ladies who tried to scold him at his talks. He was only interested in mercury in the Hudson River.

But one day, Sarah Bridges, who’s son got severe autism, showed up at his house on Long Island with an 18-inch thick piles of scientific studies and dumped it on his stoop. She rang his doorbell.

“I’m not leaving here until you read those,” she said when RFK answered the door.

“I’m accustomed to reading science,” says RFK, who successfully brought 40 scientifically-based lawsuits against Hudson River polluters and turned it from a lifeless flow that caught fire into a pristine habitat.

“I didn’t read the studies, I read the abstracts,” he narrates. “When I got about six inches down in that pile, I was dumbstruck by the huge delta between what the public health agencies were saying and what the actual peer-reviewed published science was saying.”

Public health officials parroted “safe and effective,” he says.

From that revelatory moment, RFK started digging. Because of his family’s connections, he could get most everybody on the line. He spoke with Francis Collins, then head of the NIH; Kathleen Stratton, of Immunization Safety Review; and Marie McCormick, of the then Institute of Medicine.

“I asked them about the science and I realized they were completely non-conversant with it,” Kennedy alleges. “They were just parroting this phrase, ‘Safe and effective.’”

But the straw that broke the camel’s back was that everybody referred RFK to Paul Offit, as the supposed expert on vaccine safety. Paul was a vaccine developer and partner at vaccine-maker Merck (Merck named Offit Maurice R. Hilleman Chair in Vaccinology, a position funded by Merck at $90,000 annually).

“If I call an EPA science guy or regulator, he’s going to have some self respect and try to answer my questions,” Kennedy says. “They’re not going to direct me to a coal industry lobbyist. This was bizarre.”

He called Offit anyway. “I caught him in a lie,” Kennedy says. “He knew I caught him in the lie.”

Today, RFK has been named Health and Human Services secretary under Trump. So far he has moved to eradicate chemical coloring in processed foods. He has directed his agency to recommend vaccines only based on science, not based on cronyism or on profits from royalties.

RFK says the nation’s vaccination recommendations are made by a money making machine that makes bank on taxpayer’s money. The agencies that are supposed to vouch for public health and safety are completely captured by the pharmaceutical industry, he adds.

Here’s how it works: the Food and Drug Administration gets 50% of its budget from the pharmaceuticals. The Centers for Disease Control pays $5 billion to the pharmaceuticals to buy vaccines.

“If you work at CDC, you do not get promotions by finding problem,” RFK says. “You get promotions by increasing uptake.”

“The NIH is just an incubator for pharmaceutical products,” he continues. When vaccines are developed, they’re handed over to universities for trials, phase 1 and 2. The universities get up to $300 million to run these trials.

“They are always successful because they make them successful,” RFK points out. The pharmaceuticals conduct the phase 3 of testing, and they all divide up the royalties.

“I saw the process and how it worked,” he says. “It’s regulatory agency on steroids.”