[Orac note: Well, my talk is done, and it appears to have been well-received. Unfortunately, as far as I know, it’s not available on YouTube or elsewhere. Believe it or not, I think things are finally settling down to a new chaotic normal, to the point where I’m ready to get back to blogging. I’ll see what I can do this week. In the meantime, enjoy (I hope) this post about RFK Jr. and how easily antivaxxers see through his MAHA con.]
In September, I wrote about how, after having given up his quixotic campaign for President and (predictably) finally bent the knee to Former President Donald Trump in return for the promise of a high ranking health-related position in Trump’s cabinet, should he win, longtime antivax conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. unveiled his agenda to “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA), an obvious nod to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. As I noted at the time, in terms of policy MAHA was a clever combination of the semi-reasonable with the usual “wellness” exaggerated claims about pesticides and the value of alternative medicine. (Seriously, RFK Jr. proposed dedicating half of the NIH budget to “integrative” medicine and health.) It was also difficult not to notice, given RFK Jr.’s history, one huge omission. Nowhere in his MAHA manifesto did RFK Jr. mention vaccines, according to him for a long time one of the main causes of what he has misleadingly called America’s “sickest generation.” Certainly some antivaxxers did notice at the time. To me, it was obvious that RFK Jr. knew that most of the public saw his antivax views (except, perhaps, with the exception of anti-COVID-19 antivax views) as totally bonkers and that by ignoring vaccines and focusing on food, pesticides, and attacks on big pharma he could sound more reasonable to the general public who weren’t deeply ensconced in the MAGA bubble.
He was probably correct about that. However, over a month later, I’m noticing increasing backlash from antivaxxers, and this amuses me. How much trouble it will bring RFK Jr. going forward, I do not know, but it’s an opportunity to look at another real world example of the phenomenon I discussed last week, namely how antivax is much more an ideology, a world view, even a religion, than it is an actual medical or scientific viewpoint, as we see once again how the more radical elements of the antivax movement do not like pragmatism at all.
It began when I saw Dr. Paul “Hang ’em High” Alexander—whom I used to call Dr. Paul “We Want Them Infected” Alexander for his advocacy of a “let ‘er rip” approach to the pandemic when he served in the Trump administration in 2020 but who has over the last couple of years started advocating hanging Anthony Fauci and public health officials—expressing his agreement with COVID-19 quack Dr. Peter McCullough’s disappointment with RFK Jr. over MAHA’s omission of vaccines in a Substack entitled MAHA (MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN) is misdirection; McCullough is 100% correct! I am calling on Bobby Kennedy Jr. to FOCUS on failed OWS & Malone Bourla etc. mRNA vaccine! MAHA is distraction, Sasha is CORRECT, see her last piece I promoted, this MAHA sidelines the deadliness of OWS & Malone Bourla Bancel et al. mRNA vaccine, come on Bobby Jr., I know Malone is cupping balls for a job but. (Yes, I do intentionally include the full headline and subtitle just to show you a bit of Alexander’s “style,” such as it is. Classy guy, right?)
Let’s take a look.
Antivaxxers see through RFK Jr.’s MAHA omission
Right at the beginning of his jeremiad, Alexander assures his readers—most of whom are undoubtedly fans of RFK Jr.—that, unlike accusations of “controlled opposition” and “limited hangouts” that I discussed last week, he does not believe that of RFK Jr. (at least not yet):
I don’t in any way believe that Bobby Jr. or Tulsi is like some classic controlled opposition nor part of any criminal cabal working to harms and destroy humanity. Of course, not POTUS Trump who was greatly misled in the COVID fraud.
But I do believe the Trump campaign (I am not sure who) has silenced Bobby Jr. on OWS and Malone et al. deadly mRNA vaccine and this is not a good look and Bobby Jr. has lost credibility.
Alexander then cites an interview between Shannon Joy and Dr. Peter McCullough, antivaxxer and spokesperson for a COVID-19 antivax grift The Wellness Company, with the title Exclusive With Dr. Peter McCullough: ‘The MAHA Movement’s Focus On FOOD Is A Dangerous Distraction’ From The REAL Cause Of Death & Disease, COVID Shots & CDC Recommended Vaccines! (Oops, I did it again with those titles beloved of antivaxxers):
I will admit that I didn’t watch the whole thing, as it runs well over an hour and I generally can’t stand watching that much of videos like this, but I did find and listen to the relevant parts, which I will get to later in this post. I also found the interview on Apple Podcasts—WTF, Apple?—where there is a transcript autogenerated that is, unlike YouTube machine-generated transcripts of videos, surprisingly accurate and easy-to-read. (The downside, however, is that you can only access the transcript in the Apple Podcasts app.) I include the video (above) for those of you who are sufficiently completist (and masochistic) to want to watch the whole thing.
Alexander characterizes it this way:
People like me, I worked for Trump administration prior (I greatly support Trump and know he is the best option, ONLY option), but a future job there will not silence me, we want proper accountability and NOW and no nepotism and cronyism and favors. None. We are watching.
McCullough’s new presentation and video is 100% on point about MAHA and I applaud his stance. I am with him. I said this prior. See my prior stack too. So has Sasha Latypova, see below. This MAHA thing is a game, a misdirection, I am sorry Bobby Jr…I call it as it is. Or how I see it. Love all you do, and I remain in support, but this is a dangerous distraction. Please either sideline MAHA till after the election, or bring it but with your focus on the deadliness of OWS and the Malone et al. mRNA vaccine.
Your Bobby Jr. newfound silence on deadly failed OWS (which you always hammered before joining Trump) and the Malone Sahin et al. mRNA vaccine is troubling; I am saying it Bobby Jr., it is very troubling for you have integrity and now AWOL on what matters. Despite the huge admiration I have for you, I can also say your silence on the vaccine etc. is very troubling.
I didn’t know what the heck Alexander meant by “OWS,” and so I searched his Substack for other uses of the abbreviation and quickly found that he was referring to “Operation Warp Speed,” the incredibly ill-advised name for the Trump administration’s 2020 initiative to develop a vaccine against COVID-19, a name that almost single-handedly stoked preexisting concerns and suspicions about a new vaccine to a white hot flame. (I know, I know. It wasn’t just that name for the vaccine initiative, but the name sure didn’t help overcome the suspicion held by many that COVID-19 vaccine development, particularly development of the mRNA vaccines, was being recklessly rushed.)
It is also amusing how Alexander is demonizing Dr. Robert Malone. You remember Malone, right, the man who became an unhinged antivax conspiracy theorist because, at least so I surmise, of envy that he had not been given the credit that he thought he was due as the “inventor of mRNA vaccines.” Never mind that he only published a couple of papers about introducing mRNA into cells to get it to make protein, and then as a graduate student in the early 1990s. In any case, Malone sought to bolster his status as the supposed “true inventor” of mRNA vaccines, rather than Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine last year for their work developing technology used to produce mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines. Just for my own amusement, I’ll repost what Malone posted to X, the hellsite formerly known as Twitter, after he’d learned of the award:
The funny thing is that, in some areas of the antivax crankosphere, Malone is viewed as a traitor, even worse than vaccine advocates like Dr. Peter Hotez or Dr. Anthony Fauci because he is a poseur. These days, the accusation is that Malone is angling for a job in a second Trump administration if Trump wins and is therefore sucking up to RFK Jr. His ego is also on full display in his claims that he is The One True Inventor of COVID-19 vaccines but that big pharma (and Katalin Karikó, Drew Weissman, Moderna, and Pfizer) have hijacked and corrupted his invention.
But let’s get back to what antivaxxers are saying about MAHA. Before I get to what McCullough claims, I think that his citation of someone named Sasha Latypova, an antivaxxer of whom I’d never heard before, is very revealing, especially the part where she writes:
When I was a graduate student at Dartmouth College, we used to frequent a pizza joint in Hanover, NH called “Everything But Anchovies” (EBA). This election season, the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) policy makes me think about that name. The MAHA policy can be renamed into EBV – Everything But Vaccines. You are not allowed to discuss the most significant cause of chronic illness, especially in children.
Amusingly, Latypova then lists several video clips dating back several years in which RFK Jr. is shown saying what he’s been saying since at least 2005 when he first “came out” as an antivaxxer, namely that vaccines are poisoning our children and making them chronically ill. Even more amusing (to me, at least) is the reason why RFK Jr. is supposedly memory holing his previous demonization of vaccines. While it is true that he hasn’t come out and said that vaccines are safe and effective, his silence about his previous bête noire (even more than all his longstanding claims about pesticides, GMOs, and the like) was striking.
She then contrasts RFK Jr.’s former statements with all his plans to stop the “mass poisoning” of America by, well…posting recent social media posts in which RFK Jr. hypes food, chemicals, and the like as the cause of chronic disease:
…and then listing times when he blamed vaccines for childhood chronic illness.
But why? What Latopova writes here is quite revealing:
Make Chronic Illness Your Own Fault Again! At a minimum, it’s the fault of those bad farmers that need to be regulated harder into low-yield/high price food making practices. It’s not because you and your child have been injected gazillion times with non-self proteins, and now have an allergy to your normal environment, no. NO. You are not allowed to discuss THAT reason.
Any reason but THAT ONE.
Drop it, and put your digital choke collar back on! You are supposed to shut up about that, and get on board with the Uniparty pushing for more government regulation in agriculture and food, i.e., making the food scarcer and less affordable, just like the Agenda 2030 all-inclusive package envisions -Pestilence, War and Famine.
Again, it is very interesting—and telling—how Latopova distinguishes from her supposed causes of chronic disease that are and aren’t a person’s fault, viewing vaccines as not being the person’s fault (because of school vaccine mandates, naturally) but viewing getting rid of all the things that Alexander, McCullough, and Latopova view as “poison” as a nefarious plot to make it “your fault” if you are chronically ill.
Now let’s look at the interview with McCullough.
Peter McCullough: MAHA is “misdirection”
We’ve been writing about Dr. Peter McCullough for a long time, because he was one of the early doctors to “go rogue,” so to speak. I remember that he came out as anti-COVID-19 vax back in 2021, when he first started showing up fear mongering about a COVID-19 vaccine-caused “Holocaust” or “depopulation,” or even arguably 2020, given that he notes in the interview that he published an editorial in October 2020 warning about the vaccines, two months before the public ever had access to them. These days, like so many others who started out as just anti-COVID-19 vaccine, McCullough has branched out. He’s now generally antivax and also sells quackery at The Wellness Company, such as his nattokinase-based “Spike Detox” concoction designed supposedly to treat all the horrible things that the spike protein produced by mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines supposedly cause.
In any event, before getting to MAHA, Joy and McCullough discuss all the usual antivax tropes, pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and lies, including how “spikopathy” due to the vaccine is the cause of cancer, cardiac arrest, and all sorts of other horrific health problems. It’s all a lead-up to Joy noting:
On day one, Dr. McCullough, when RFK Jr. made his speech suspending his campaign, I came on my show and I said, there are some very glaring omissions here in this speech. And most importantly, COVID-19 lockdowns, the kill protocols, Operation Warp Speed, the COVID-19 vaccines and the childhood vaccine schedule, the mandated. And none of that is all food and pharma, food and pharma.
Well, fast forward to MAHA and it seems as if it’s just getting worse and worse and worse. We’re seeing a complete omission of discussion on that, at least from my perspective. And then there’s this whole new crap of characters.
McCullough, unsurprisingly, agrees with Joy:
We’re being poisoned. Somebody is poisoning us. So we look around us and we see people sick with myocarditis, or neuropathy, or blood clots.
Maybe we would think, no, it’s not the vaccine. We’re being poisoned with something. When I first heard this, I said, oh my Lord, this is the biggest deflection, misdirection campaign I’ve ever heard of.
And I was shocked it was coming from Robert F. Kennedy. And whether it’s intentional or whether it’s just a byproduct of this new concern, it’s taking eyes off of this COVID-19 vaccine debacle and then kind of deeper concerns about the accelerating COVID-19 vaccines being added to the routine child’s schedule and the accelerating childhood schedule.
Amusingly, Joy thinks that, if only Trump and RFK Jr. would let their antivax freak flags fly, they would definitely win:
That’s absurd. You do not have a product that is so heavily marketed as a COVID-19 vaccine that only gets 1.6 percent of the population to take it, despite all of the coercion and the propaganda, and say with a straight face that, oh, you can’t mention this. This is a hot political topic.
This would drive him over the threshold if Donald Trump just acknowledged it. So that doesn’t pass the test for me in any way, shape, or form. I think that there is likely a larger agenda and that potentially pharma is behind this.
McCullough, no slouch at marketing himself, takes the cue and goes all conspiratorial, because of course he does:
The question is, who are these people and where were they in 2020? Just to look this up, so Casey Means is a former Stanford ear, nose, and throat resident. So she’s a resident and she drops out of her residency in the fifth year to become an entrepreneur.
And she is a founder of a company called Levels Health and it deals with metabolic health data. So she’s a new born entrepreneur in this health space. She has no publications on nutrition or metabolism.
She has no credentials on food additives or any of this territory. And then there’s [Calley Means], her brother. He’s co-founder of another company called TrueMed.
I do love how McCullough seems peeved that people he views as Johnny-come-latelys have more influence with RFK Jr. and Donald Trump than he does. Ego certainly does drive a lot of this hostility, just as it does with Malone’s hatred of mRNA vaccines. In any event, like Joy, McCullough sees the malign influence of pharma as he complains about the recent event hosted by Senator Ron Johnson, American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion, that featured quacks and activists, along with some old school GMO fear mongerers like The Food Babe—I kid you not, Vani Hari—who was big a decade ago for deceptively fear mongering about “yoga mat” chemicals in food and saying that she won’t eat food with ingredients that she can’t spell—dismissing them thusly:
So what I think’s happened is, I think they must have a tremendous promoter, publicist. I mean, for people who have no track record, no scientific track record, to suddenly appear in the Senate and suddenly appear on every podcast under the sun and Joe Rogan with these various statements like weapons of mass destruction. And look at what they’re going after.
This is really interesting. Now, there are societies of preventive medicine. There are US Preventive Services Task Force.
There’s the entire field of clinical nutrition. There were no diet nutrition experts at the Senate hearing. None.
There was none of the major entities were represented there at all. And suddenly the podcasters and these young entrepreneurs, you know, they’re now going to lead America with a cancer transplant surgeon. I mean, the whole thing, it looked like a circus to me when I looked at this.
Amusingly, McCullough’s not entirely wrong here. He just doesn’t perceive that he’s riding around the three rings of the same quack circus, packed face to buttcrack into the same clown car with the rest of those whom he considers clowns, blissfully oblivious to the huge shoes on his feet, the squeezehorn in his hand, and the paint on his face. I suspect that he’s just peeved that he wasn’t invited to testify at Sen. Johnson’s food quackfest along with The Food Babe and Jordan Peterson. If he had, he’d be singing the praises of the whole “roundtable.”
And, remember, to McCullough, vaccines are so much worse than just “artificial” ingredients in food:
To make us healthy, vaccines have to come off the market, the COVID-19 vaccines. And I think we need a critical re-evaluation of the vaccine schedule. Immediately all mandates for vaccines have to be dropped immediately.
The 1986 Vaccine Injury Compensation Act should be rescinded. So the company should have liability. Those are the first steps.
Way more than trying to change the food dyes in Lucky Charms.
Of course, the two, extreme exaggeration about potential harms of food ingredients and antivax conspiracy theories, frequently go together, as we have seen so many times over the nearly 20 years of this blog’s existence. That’s not to say that McCullough doesn’t perceive what is obvious, that RFK Jr.’s MAHA is all a sham designed to downplay the quackiest aspects of his agenda, even as it does propose things that are pretty quacky, like devoting half the NIH budget to “integrative” quackery. He also goes on and on about how so many of these people, RFK Jr. included, are angling for government jobs and, shockingly appropriately, points out how they lack qualifications, particularly qualifications needed to manage large organizations. Even RFK Jr. lacks experience running a large organization. McCullough also realizes this:
When I’m with Sharyl Atkisson, and Sharyl is tough on the vaccine, so she asked him about it, and Trump said, well, some people say the vaccines are good, some say they’re bad, and he goes, but, he says, there’s gonna be some research that comes out on the vaccine next year, we’ll know the answer. So I thought that was interesting that he said that, because obviously he’s punting till after the election. What if Trump really understands the vaccines are bad?
What if he really understands it, but he’s being coached, and he’s gonna try to win an election, and this is their strategy. All he has to do once he gets in office and say, you know what, new government report comes in, vaccines are bad, I told you something was gonna come in, we’re gonna pull them off the market. So I thought that interview was interesting, and again, all politics is presidential politics, if he doesn’t get elected, none of this happens, he has to get elected first.
Of course, I’ve been writing about Sharyl Attkisson since she started letting her antivax proclivities start to show, and this was way back when she still had a legitimate job at CBS News, where she published antivax-friendly pieces and probably fed information on vaccine stories in the works to an antivax group. She’s been antivax going back at least to 2007, when she was publishing articles sympathetic to the idea that vaccines cause autism.
It was at this point that Attkisson destroyed my irony meter when she interjects that Casey and Calley Means “also insinuate multiple times during that interview [with Joe Rogan] that food needs to be regulated like drugs, that food can be as dangerous or toxic or poisoning to the human body as pharmaceutical products and drugs.” Why do I say that? I’ve been complaining about the DSHEA of 1994, which led to the regulation of supplements as food, not drugs, and how it facilitated all manner of quackery through weak regulation. McCullough, remember, is selling nattokinase and bromelain-based supplements to treat “COVID vaccine injury.” Perhaps Dr. McCullough perceives in such proposals a threat to his livelihood.
Factional disputes in the antivax movement
Looking back over this dispute, I have a hard time deciding whether it is an example of a dispute between factions who claim that it is “toxins” in the food that are making everyone sick and those who claim that vaccines are The One True Cause of chronic illness. I can’t help but think of the classic movie, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which satirized religious and revolutionary movements through the comical (sometimes darkly comical) misadventures of the main character Brian, who was born on the same day as (and next door to) Jesus, and, as a result, ends up being mistaken for the Messiah. Basically, the whole kerfuffle comes across as a match between The People’s Front of Judea (say, McCullough, Petroya, Alexander, and all the more “radical” antivaxxers alarmed at RFK Jr.’s failure to mention vaccines in his MAHA agenda) battling The Judean People’s Front (say, Calley and Casey Means, The Food Babe, and their allied ilk), with RFK Jr. being viewed as either a turncoat or opportunist and Trump the useful idiot. (Come to think of it, that characterization of Trump is, in many ways, spot on.)
Splitters!
It’s all just another reminder of how much the antivax movement is based on ideology more than anything else. There is no science to support their claims for how deadly and ineffective vaccines supposedly are. Rather, as I’ve said many times, the antivax movement is more akin to a cult of purity. So is the allied “food safety” movement that fear mongers about all the exaggerated or non-existent “toxins” (basically anything they deem “artificial”). What we are seeing here is a war between pragmatism (RFK Jr. not mentioning vaccines in his MAHA agenda because he knows how it will be received by most people, all despite his two decade history of radical antivaccinationism) and fanaticism embodied by Peter McCullough, Paul Alexander, and Sharyl Atkinson, who just want to let their antivax freak flag fly high and are deluded enough to think that it will be received well by rational people.
Normally, I’d just get out the popcorn and enjoy the show that this fight entails, but I can’t. Trump might actually win, and RFK Jr. might actually be Secretary of Health and Human Services next year if he does.
