Robert Kennedy Jr. and vaccine safety review

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You deserve a trophy, ma'm. Everyone should be like that. Aren't the vaccines ok after all? What are people afraid of? If there's anything terrible about them we all should know. If there's no problem the confirmation comes through science once and for all.

The real issue is that the conspiracy theorists are never satisfied. If concrete proof that the vaccines are clean and honest shows off, the theorists come up with a new statement on how "they" forged all lab tests to make everybody believe the vaccines are what they really aren't.

I'm not saying there aren't people in the world pretty capable of the most outrageous acts but if there's no solid proof there can't be solid claims. It's in the rights of people taking a vaccine or not and submitting their kids to that but it's not right saying whoever does the opposite are "sheeple", "dumb", "asleep" and so on. Not without proof.

I've had bad flu.

CDC strongly recommends flu shots for certain high risk groups including asthmatics and people over 50. Since I'm both of those and my past experience of having flu as a young man was hellish, I do get vaccinated every year.

I got the vaccines when I was a kid. My parents and grandparents did not. My kids did. There are clear signs of autism in all four generations. This suggests to me that there is a strong genetic component in the type of autism that members of my family have. It also suggests that vaccinations of any kind are unlikely to have played a role in the expression of those autistic traits.

I get a flu shot every year.

In my case, my mother's side shows lots of signs of autism, even though it is small.
My father's side is huge gregarious bunch that has parties every year.

I believe they recommend everyone get a yearly flu shot now, I never get it as I believe it is more likely to make me sick than actually stop me from getting the flu. Very very rarely get sick like that, knock on wood of course.

I was just throwing out the idea that maybe things like that can aggravate underlying autism, it is a spectrum of course. I know mercury can really mess you up psychologically so what would that do to someone that had underlying predisposition to autism already? Lots of things have genetic components and predispositions as I am sure you know like alcoholism for example. I think you are looking things much too black and white, I think skepticism is healthy and maybe placating someone who represents an opposing view by letting them be heard out might actually reach the people you haven't reached before because preaching to the converted really accomplishes nothing.

I've never had a flu shot,don't plan on it either.I haven't had the flu in over twenty years.Even being exposed to people that did have it.The last flu epidemic here was brutal,some friends lost their son to it on Christmas Day.He was around nineteen,felt bad that morning.Went to the hospital and died that evening.Tragic.The hospital was so full people were on cots in the halls with it.My daughter was visiting and caught it,I cared for her during it.She was so sick she thought she was dying,and I worried she might.It was the first time I ever knew someone that died from it.My thought on it is that if you have a weakened immune system it could be a good idea to get one,other than that I'll just take my chances with it.
The last vaccine I received was a Tetnaus booster,I get cut a lot working in the yard and and handle manure in the garden.It made a huge knot in my arm and there was a metallic taste in my mouth for a few days afterwards.I wish they would just use plain Tetnaus in the booster,not the whole DPT shot.
Kids are not the best at hand washing,so I can understand the value of vaccinating them.One gets sick and they all get it.

OK, let's take quite a simplistic look at this.

In science, we accept that our results could just be down to chance. If I wanted to know whether WrongPlanet users like Angela Merkel, I could randomly select from the list and just so happen to select four who do and six who don't. In reality, of 100 WrongPlanet users, 72 like Merkel and 28 don't. But look - my sample says that WrongPlanet members probably don't like Merkel. Oops.

In a vaccine study, maybe some of your cohort were already infected or the nurse missed the vein or they already had undiagnosed autism or they happened to be sick and throw up the oral vaccine or they were immunocompromised, whatever.

To counter this, we analyse statistics and work out the probability that our results are just down to chance. If the chance is less than one in twenty, we have a significant result and we publish it. Hooray! This is simplistic and going out of fashion but necessary for illustration.

Of course, one in twenty is actually quite a lot. If there have been 10,000 papers published on vaccine safety, we'd expect there to be about 500 saying that they were unsafe just based on chance (see here for an illustration in cartoon form). They don't mean that vaccines are unsafe or that anyone is trying to mislead (although some people do occasionally fudge things a bit - a classic case is testing so many things that something will inevitably show a relationship - and there are other problems like journals refusing to publish negative results or anything that isn't surprising). Stack those 500 papers in front of a biased non-scientist who doesn't understand statistical significance or the complexities of meta-analysis, and, well, it would be like asking me to land Air Force One or get a bill through Congress.

If Trump wanted to re-examine this, well, waste of government money but OK. Commission an expert. Get someone at the CDC or FDA to do a fresh systematic meta-analysis.

Why is it a waste of money? Well, the CDC don't sit on their hands while the evidence changes. If evidence emerged that vaccines were unsafe then they would already have acted, without the president telling them to do so. A politician commissioning a review, and putting a non-scientist with loud pre-existing biases in charge just reeks of a publicity stunt and probably a rigged review. Vaccine safety, like every other drug, is under constant ongoing review and a big publicity stunt doesn't make them safer or provide better scrutiny. If anything, the results of this either way will have disproportionate impact on public perception.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_%28 ... measure%29

I think this is the military equivalent of chaff--countermeasures designed to confuse the enemy.

Get people arguing about something so you can covertly do something else.

Boiled down, you have way too much faith in the US government and government in general. The progressive cult of experts, the supposed technocracy, have shown themselves no different than the politicians and oligarchs that came before them. No less corrupt, no less callous, no less intolerant. People who see things in such moralizing black and white terms are not any different, anything that challenges their non-thinking dogma is blasphemy. Doth protest too much, methinks; progressives haven't seemed to figure that one out yet. Americans do not like to be lectured and told what they can and can't do so the entire idea of settled science runs contrary to our national character. As I said to begin with, I don't have an issue with a committee or investigations because if there is no link then no link should be found and it will have shined a spotlight on the cause of autism and the safety of vaccines which separately are important topics in their own right.

Our government wastes a lot of money obscene amounts, a drop in the oceans is all this is. Even that wall would be a drop in our ocean of debt but besides I thought deficit spending didn't matter? Now everyone is a fiscal conservative? It's stimulating the economy!

So your proposed solution is getting a lesser Kennedy to do the review?

You've spent months complaining about dynastic politics and corruption and getting rid of career politicians. I have huge respect for those members of the Kennedy family who do great things, and the same for the Romney family and even the Bush family, but RFK Jr. is a prime example of someone who has only achieved anything in life because of nepotism and family connections. Losing his dad at such a young age obviously had a huge impact on his life, but that doesn't mean he should be granted plumb government jobs.

Did you not read the post where I explained why this isn't true?


Fair point, but it's still money that could be better spent elsewhere - again, a review by someone with relevant expertise would be the obvious and sensible way of doing it. Or would you like Bill Maher to review whether the wall will stop illegal immigration?

This is a bit of a non-sequitur to say the least. This isn't a conversation about stimulating the economy or reducing the deficit. You seem to have confused me with someone else.

If stimulating the economy is the aim, and it's a laudable one, then giving a load of money to a trust fund baby isn't the best way of doing it.

Trump and Kennedy are avid supporters of the false notion that vaccines cause autism, and Trump himself has a long history of abusing disabled people, but of course all the useful idiot Trump supporters are open minded about this venture.