After ACIP: Where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will likely go from here in his quest to eliminate vaccines

As I wrote last week, I really do miss the old days, when I didn’t feel obligated every week to write about the dumpster fire (or clown car) that has been antivax activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.‘s tenure thus far as Secretary of Health and Human Services and the not-so-gradual destruction of the federal infrastructure supporting vaccination, medicine, public health, and biomedical research in the US. Indeed, when I discovered that homeopathy advocate Dana Ullman—truly, a blast from the past!—is still around and actively promoting homeopathy, I was seriously tempted to take a one-week diversion from the current hellscape that is public health in the US to write about it. Another distraction that almost made me react to it the same way Dug the Dog in the movie Up! reacts to squirrels, occurred when antivaxxer and cancer quack with delusions of grandeur, Dr. Pierre Kory, called me out in a most hilariously incompetent manner for my having pointed out that vaccines do not cause sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Maybe I’ll deal with him next week here or this week on my not-so-super-secret other blog. No, the more I thought about it, the more I thought that I needed to follow up my three-part discussion of RFK Jr.’s dismantling the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) by purging all its science-based members, only to replace them with antivaxxers, the antivax-adjacent or -sympathetic, and the incompetent, all to produce a clown car of a meeting last week that started chipping away at vaccine practices in this country with something discussing where I thought he might go next with his crusade to eliminate—or restrict access to—as many vaccines as he can in the next three and a half years.

Leave it to RFK Jr. to provide me the perfect “in” to this further discussion by showing up last week on the misbegotten video podcast The Tucker Carlson Show, which is where right-wing conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson landed two years ago after his nonsense proved too much even for Fox News to countenance anymore. It’s a nearly hour-and-a-half interview, during much of which RFK Jr. predictably rehashes his usual old conspiracy theories and “make America healthy again” (MAHA) talking points, but a couple of things stood out that led me to write this post. What was that point?

Well, the interview is divided into five “chapters,” and one of them is entitled: Will There Be Compensation for the Vaccine-injured? It starts around the 48-minute mark, with this introductory exchange:

CARLSON: What about all the people who are injured by the covid vax. There are a lot of them. I know a lot of them. Some died; some were permanently disabled. Nobody seems to care. yyou never hear about them, and they don’t seem to be getting any help. Will that change?

RFK Jr.: Yeah, that’s going to change. I mean, as i said, the big impediment is the 1986 Vaccine Act, yes, and so it’s complicated about how we fix this, you know, so that we can get compensation to those people.

I will cut in right here, before I get to the rest of what RFK Jr. said, because I want to emphasize that RFK Jr. is going to change the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP), which was set up as part of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986. You might remember that when I last discussed how RFK Jr. will undermine, eliminate, or at least hugely decrease access to vaccines, I did mention the NVICP; indeed, the NVICP has been a fairly regular topic on this blog (particularly in my posts) going back to the very beginning. In any case, I predicted that RFK Jr. would undermine vaccination in these ways:

1. Co-opt the CDC to change its evidence-based policy-making apparatus to policy-based evidence-making designed to fuel antivax messaging. I provided multiple examples, and it’s only getting worse. It will only get worse, now that ACIP has been destroyed and remade as an instrument of antivax policy-making, even as science-based provaccine researchers and scientists are sidelined and/or purged.
2. Co-opt the NIH to direct research funds away from vaccines and towards studying “vaccine injury” and other antivax narratives (to support the policy-based evidence-making). Examples include defunding NIH grants to study mRNA vaccines, COVID-19, and the like. Similarly, putting antivaxxer David Geier in charge of a study to “find the causes of autism” is another example. (Spoiler alert: He’ll find that it’s the vaccines.)
3. Remake ACIP as an antivax committee, in order to remove recommended vaccines from the CDC recommended immunization schedule and refuse to approve new vaccines. (It is inarguable that he’s done this.)
4. Influence the Vaccine Court and the NVICP to compensate “vaccine injuries” that antivaxxers believe in but that are not supported by science. This will be the topic of the next couple of sections, as I don’t think I went into this enough. Moreover, RFK Jr.’s interview with Tucker Carlson and the reaction in the MAHAsphere, in particular RFK Jr.’s old antivax advocacy organization, Children’s Health Defense, give me more of an idea of how he will accomplish this.
5. Take control of the vaccine safety monitoring systems, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and the Vaccine Safetylink Database (VSD), to cherry-pick evidence designed to portray vaccines as dangerous. He’s already started insinuating that the VSD contains “proof” that vaccines cause autism that was being “covered up” by the CDC.
6. Co-opt the FDA to make approval of new vaccines more difficult and issue black-box warnings based on antivax fear mongering for existing vaccines. With Drs. Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad as FDA Commissioner and director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation & Research, the branch of the FDA responsible for approving new vaccines, respectively, this has already begun.

Let’s dive in. First, however, whenever discussing the NVICP and the Vaccine Court, it is necessary to briefly describe what the NVICP does, how it operates, and how the Vaccine Court works. I will then discuss what RFK Jr. said on The Tucker Carlson Show last week, how RFK Jr. misleads about the Vaccine Court, and where I see this going.

A brief history of the NCVIA of 1986, the NVICP, and the Vaccine Court

Let’s go back over 40 years ago, way, way back to the early 1980s, a time when I was in college and blissfully unaware of any of the antiscience nonsense and conspiracy theories that so dominate my thinking now that I am in the twilight of my career. On April 19, 1982, a sensationalistic news report hosted and produced by reporter Lea Thompson, DPT: Vaccine Roulette, first aired on the local NBC affiliate WRC-TV in Washington DC. The “documentary”/news report depicted children with severe injuries reported to be associated with the pertussis vaccine. The next day, clips from the news report were aired nationally on The Today Show, and the whole documentary was aired on NBC not long after that, feeding a sensationalistic frenzy, as described in this history thesis by Jinae Park:

Lea Thompson, the host and producer, portrayed herself as a crusader for the families and children who believed they had been affected by the DPT shot. According to an article published in the Washington Post shortly after the film aired, “eleven minutes of the film were devoted to the crippled children and their families, and less than two minutes to a description of a little girl with whooping cough.”¹⁵ Thompson opened the film by declaring that there was a “general void of information” about the DPT vaccine in the United States that she intended to remedy, but instead succeeded in sparking an anti-vaccination movement that still exists today.¹⁶

DPT: Vaccine Roulette was structured like a battleground. On one side, the side Thompson wanted the viewer to root for, were the people who believed the DPT vaccine was dangerous; Lea Thompson portrayed herself as a warrior fighting alongside families who wanted justice for their children. The other side, the ones responsible for stealing the lives of these children, was the United States government and the medical community. Alternating between awkward interviews with medical and government officials and heart-wrenching accounts from parents of “vaccine-damaged children,” the film was designed to elicit fear and anger from its viewers. The families Thompson interviewed were strategically chosen: Six families with six children at varying ages. Four boys and two girls living in normal homes with loving parents and more toys than they knew what to do with. These families would have been perfect if not for the awkward jerky movements and vacant stares from the children whose brains never developed properly, or the stress lines and dark circles on the faces of the parents. The loud and ominous heartbeat thumping in the background before rolling the interview footage warned viewers of another heartbreaking story about how the DPT vaccine destroyed a family.

Sound familiar? Sounds like 2016’s VAXXED, doesn’t it? The “experts” linking DPT to severe neurological damage were also largely antivax, such, such as Robert Mendelsohn, author of Confessions of a Medical Heretic, and someone about whom I’ve written before and who was very influential as an antivaxxer and general critic of medicine (i.e., a “medical heretic”) in the 1980s. (I even read his book when I was in medical school in the late 1980s. It was a gift from my girlfriend at the time, and I was more or less nonplussed by all the bizarre claims in it.) In contrast to the antivax faux “experts,” the scientists and physicians from the FDA and CDC interviewed were all largely hapless and unprepared, not to mention filmed in as unflattering a way as possible. As I’ve written before, there was no good evidence linking the DPT vaccine with severe neurological injury, and subsequent studies only continued to find no link. That did not stop this film from becoming a sensation, as Park also writes:

The documentary was sensationalistic and cited false information, but it had the same effect on the United States as Dr. Wilson’s speech had on England. Through extensive news coverage, fear of the DPT vaccine spread through the country, and no amount of reassurance from medical professionals or the government could stop it. This fear led to massive lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers and supply shortages of the DPT vaccine throughout the country. From 1982 to 1986, panic over the diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus vaccine in the United States started in the media and ended on the Congressional floor. In 1986, after years of confusion and debate about the DPT vaccine, the structure of the American court system changed with the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. The science was irrelevant in these debates; from scared parents to bankrupt vaccine manufacturers, the effect of fear during this time was more significant than any research study.

I also like to note that the woman whom I like to call the Grande Dame of the antivaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher, got her start here. Believing that her child was one of the children “damaged” by the DPT vaccine, she formed Dissatisfied Parents Together, whose name she later changed to the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) and and wrote an influential book, DPT: A Shot in the Dark.

Against that backdrop and fearing that vaccine manufacturers would desert the US market en masse, Congress intervened, passing the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Act of 1986, which set up the NVICP and the Vaccine Court. Basically, the law says that claims for vaccine injury must go through the Vaccine Court first, a court that is funded by an excise tax on every dose of vaccine. Contrary to what you will hear in antivax circles, there are actually many advantages to complainants, not the least of which is that they can recover reasonable court costs, win or lose, and the standard of evidence to prove their claim and receive compensation tends to be less onerous than in general civil courts. There are also “table injuries” for which automatic compensation is granted. Antivaxxers hate the system because it does try to be science-based and even though, when it errs, it tends to err on the side of compensating injuries known not to be caused by vaccines. Indeed, I like to say that the Vaccine Court basically bends over backwards to try to compensate complainants, even at the risk of drifting a bit into some more dubious science, given the freedom it allows complainants in terms of “expert witnesses.” Indeed, in some cases all that is required is a “biologically plausible”—not biologically demonstrated—mechanism by which the vaccine might have caused the injury.

Antivax lawyers really hate the Vaccine Court because they can only collect standard hourly rates, which means that they can’t gamble on obtaining huge settlements and taking their huge contingency fees out of those settlements. Here’s the thing. HHS controls what is on the list of table injuries and has a large role in recommending settlements to the Department of Justice, as the process for seeking compensation is described on the website for the NVICP:

What is the process?

1. An individual files a petition with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
2. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services medical staff reviews the petition, determines if it meets the medical criteria for compensation and makes a preliminary recommendation.
3. The U.S. Department of Justice develops a report that includes the medical recommendation and legal analysis and submits it to the Court.
4. The report is presented to a court-appointed special master, who decides whether the petitioner should be compensated, often after holding a hearing in which both parties can present evidence. If compensation is awarded, the special master determines the amount and type of compensation.
5. The Court orders the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to award compensation. Even if the petition is dismissed, if certain requirements are met, the Court may order the Department to pay attorneys’ fees and costs.
6. The special master’s decision may be appealed and petitioners who reject the decision of the court (or withdraw their petitions within certain timelines) may file a claim in civil court against the vaccine company and/or the health care provider who administered the vaccine.

You can see where this is going. With antivaxxers in ACIP and, over time, all over the relevant HHS offices, you can see HHS medical staff adding conditions that vaccines definitely don’t cause (e.g., autism) to the list of table injuries and recommending compensation at step #2 for more and more conditions, whether caused by vaccines or not. You might further envision that the policy-based “evidence” created by RFK Jr.’s minions could be used to justify greatly broadening the list of conditions viewed as “vaccine injury,” thereby bankrupting the fund that supports the Vaccine Court and building pressure to take certain vaccines off the CDC schedule. Manufacturers might take the most targeted vaccines off the market.

This brings us back to RFK Jr.’s interview with Tucker Carlson.

He’s going to “revolutionize” the NVICP!

After the exchange between Tucker Carlson and RFK Jr. that I quoted above, RFK Jr. went on to say:

We just brought a guy in this week who is going to be revolutionizing the the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which is a program that…you know…when when Congress or when congress passed the Vaccine Act and gave immunity from liability to vaccine companies, it, it recognized that, that vaccines were, in the word of the in the, in the description the characterization of the American Academy of Pediatrics were unavoidably unsafe, that some people, like for every medicine, some people are going to be injured and killed, and so it set up a program that’s in the federal government called the Vaccine Court, and they have a trust fund.

First of all, be afraid. Be very, very afraid when RFK Jr. says he’s going to “revolutionize” anything related to vaccines. Before I discuss that more, though, I do have to point out that the whole “unavoidably unsafe” trope is utter bullshit. First of all, as far as I’ve ever been able to ascertain, the AAP never said that vaccines were “unavoidably unsafe.” RFK Jr. is conflating a very specific Supreme Court ruling with a more general statement that was actually made only in a dissent. Specifically, this whole antivax trope came from Bruesewitz v. Wyeth (2010), a legal decision from which antivaxers frequently cherry-pick and misrepresent a passage concluding that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe”. John Snyder wrote about this for us on SBM when the ruling was originally made, and you can find more here and here and here.

Basically, the case was about whether a section of the NCVIA preempts all design defect claims against vaccine manufacturers. The Supreme Court ruled 6-2 that it did for claims brought by plaintiffs who seek compensation for injury or death caused by vaccine side effects. This doesn’t mean that there remains no recourse for parents who think that their child was injured by a vaccine because of a design defect, just that they can’t bypass the Vaccine Court and go directly to state or federal courts, which also contradicts RFK Jr.’s other claim that the NCVIA of 1986 exempts vaccine manufacturers from civil liability for vaccine injuries. As for “unavoidably unsafe,” it’s a terrible term meant to communicate that there are some products whose benefits outweigh their risks but do have risks that can, by the very nature of the product, never be eliminated completely. Also unfortunately, Justice Sonia Sotomayor used the term in her dissent, thus inadvertently providing ammunition for a thousand antivax activists for 15 years, RFK Jr. included.

RFK Jr. then continued:

The trust fund is endowed by a 75 cent surcharge on every vaccine, and that program is supposed to—there’s supposed to be a Vaccine Court that’s supposed to be generous and fast and and give the tide to the runner. In other words if there’s doubts about you know whether somebody’s injury came from vaccine or not, you’re going to assume they got it they and…and…compensate them, and it’s paid out uh over $5 billion now to about 12,000 people, and we’re looking at ways to enlarge that program so that covid vaccine-injured people can be compensated.

First of all, the Vaccine Court does, in essence, operate like what RFK Jr. described: It tries to make it as easy as possible for complainants and lets them introduce expert witnesses that would otherwise likely be disallowed in a regular civil court case, and even consider compensation based on just a plausible mechanism for vaccine injury. As I like to say, the Vaccine Court bends over backwards to try to compensate borderline claims of vaccine injury. Even that, however, is not enough for RFK Jr., because the Vaccine Court does try to be science-based as well. Moreover, because RFK Jr. is antivaccine, he does not approve of a no-fault system to compensate true vaccine injuries. He wants to punish vaccine manufacturers. He wants them to lose lawsuits and be subject to huge judgments, particularly punitive damages. He wants to use lawsuits to drive vaccine manufacturers out of the US, which which was what was in danger of happening in the mid-1980s and was the very outcome that the NCVIA of 1986 was passed to prevent.

RFK Jr. also appears to be leaving something very important out. Ever since COVID-19 vaccines were fully approved by the FDA, those injured by them have been eligible for compensation through the Vaccine Court. However, as you might remember, there was a period of time where the vaccines were used under an emergency use authorization (EUA) by the FDA. As you might recall, in an emergency (like a pandemic due to a virus for which there is no FDA-approved vaccine), the FDA can issue an EUA for a vaccine before it’s fully approved, provided that it is satisfied that the product is safe and effective and very likely to obtain full approval. For the period of time between the EUA and full FDA approval of the mRNA-based vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna, compensation fell under a much more stringent and less generous compensation program known as the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, (CICP).

UC-Hastings law professor Dorit Reiss has explained that vaccines issued under an EUA are probably not covered by the NCVIA of 1986 and the Vaccine Court, but under a much more restrictive system:

In essence, COVID-19 vaccines manufacturers, distributors, and administrators are currently almost completely exempt from liability because the vaccines – and other COVID-19 products – are under a Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP) declaration. The only exception – the only situation where you can sue these actors – is if you can show they engaged in “willful misconduct”.

The conditions are rather restrictive, too. The vaccine maker must have acted:

• intentionally to achieve a wrongful purpose;
• knowingly without legal or factual justification; and
• in disregard of a known or obvious risk that is so great as to make it highly probable that the harm will outweigh the benefit.

Reiss further notes:

People harmed by a vaccine covered by the declaration may turn for compensation to the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program – which is hard to use.

It’s a narrative that RFK Jr. has long been playing fast and loose with. In any case, as I’ve said before, I never objected to including even vaccine injuries from the EUA-period use of COVID-19 vaccines before full approval occurred in the NVICP. If that’s all RFK Jr. were proposing to do, I probably wouldn’t have much problem with it. However, his implication that anyone suffering an injury from COVID-19 vaccines can’t be compensated under current law makes me think that he has more in mind than just that.

It turns out that my suspicions are justified, starting with this gem from RFK Jr.:

We’re changing the program so that you know we’re we’re looking at ways to enlarge the statute of limitations. It’s only three years, and a lot of people don’t discover their injuries till after that.

No, a three-year statute of limitations for filing a vaccine injury claim is actually pretty generous, because the vast majority of adverse events due to vaccines occur very soon after vaccination or, at most, a few weeks after vaccination. It’s rare—basically unheard of—for a true vaccine injury not to be identified much sooner, as in weeks to months after vaccination, at most. RFK Jr. is merely trying to open the floodgates for all manner of claims not based in science where the complainants or parents of a complainant didn’t “notice” the injury until years later. I suppose that an argument could be made for lengthening it, based on not wanting to penalize children for their parents being slow to recognize a vaccine injury, but I highly suspect that that’s not what RFK Jr. is about here.

Next up:

There’s no discovery in that program, there’s no rules of evidence. The program has devolved into lawyers from the justice. You’re not suing the vaccine company. You’re…you’re petitioning my agency, and it’s represented traditionally by the Department of Justice, and the lawyers in the Department of Justice. The leaders of it were corrupt, and they were…they saw their job as protecting the trust fund rather than taking care of people who made this national sacrifice, and we’re going to change all that, and i’ve brought in a team this week that is starting to work on that this week. So you know that’s one of the things we’re doing, but we’re looking at everything.

This is a very lawyerly way—and, of course, RFK Jr. is a lawyer—of deceptively describing the Vaccine Court. Yes, it is true that there is no discovery process unless the Special Masters request it, but one must remember that discovery goes both ways. Moreover, one must also remember—again—that the Vaccine Court was designed to be a no-fault compensation system. It does not assign blame or impose punitive damages. It’s there to compensate vaccine injuries; that’s it. It is designed for speed and no-fault compensation. Adding discovery or the regular civil court rules of evidence to the Vaccine Court would be far more likely to slow its actions down by gumming up the works than to make it easier for complainants.

It is also true that the usual rules of evidence used in civil court don’t apply in Vaccine Court. That’s by design! However, again, that is actually a good thing for complainants because it allows them to introduce a lot of evidence that normally wouldn’t be allowed in civil court. One example is that in the Vaccine Court the Daubert standard for expert witnesses is very much—shall we say?—relaxed compared to civil court, which allows complainants to use expert witnesses who would be highly unlikely to meet that standard and be allowed in civil court. How else do you think people like Mark Geier were allowed to testify and got away with it? As for the lawyers representing HHS, who else would represent HHS other than lawyers from the Justice Department?

Finally, yes, of course in the Vaccine Court complainants are not suing vaccine manufacturers but rather petitioning HHS for compensation. Again, that’s by design! The NCVIA of 1986 was always intended to provide a no-fault alternative to the tort system! That’s why RFK Jr.’s complaint that complainants before the Vaccine Court are petitioning HHS, rather than suing vaccine manufacturers, to win compensation is deceptive, designed to make it sound as though the government is trying to “hide” vaccine injuries. However, it’s actually a good thing and, again, by design! Remember the history that led to the NCVIA of 1986. The idea of the law was to force vaccine claims to go first through the Vaccine Court, which was intended to be faster, easier, and far more likely to compensate real vaccine injuries. Moreover, win or lose, complainants receive payment to cover their expenses from bringing their case before the Vaccine Court and, importantly, can then sue in federal court if they fail to win compensation in Vaccine Court.

I will admit to some relief about one thing. In my previous article, I predicted that RFK Jr. would add nonsense to the list of “table injuries” (more properly, On-Table injuries). These are specified injuries following a listed vaccine that occur within a specified period of time, as outlined on the Vaccine Table, located at 42 USC § 300aa-14. In general, On-Table injuries are automatically presumed to have been caused by the vaccination, and the petitioner is thus considered entitled to compensation unless it can be affirmatively shown that the injury was caused by something other than the vaccination. I was rather surprised that RFK Jr. didn’t say that he planned to add certain conditions considered to be “vaccine injuries” by antivaxxers to the list of On-Table injuries. I suspect, however, that he’s still planning to do that. He’s just waiting for the results of, for example, David Geier’s “study” looking at the causes of autism. (Again, spoiler alert: Geier will conclude that vaccines cause autism.) He’s probably waiting for other “investigations,” such as ACIP’s working groups looking into supposed cumulative injury from the childhood vaccination schedule. After all, he needs “evidence” to add even an antivax fantasy vaccine injury to the Table.

Think of it this way. RFK Jr. wants to take us back to the bad old days of 40 years ago, which was pre-NCVIA, because he and his lawyer friends want to sue vaccine manufacturers for huge payouts, even though the vast majority of cases will fail, with the plaintiffs receiving nothing, not even compensation for the costs of bringing suit. Fortunately, RFK Jr. can’t do that without an act of Congress. What he can do is to screw up the system so that it doesn’t work and more cases end up in the traditional tort system. Again, remember that RFK Jr. wants to punish vaccine manufacturers. He wants to put them out of business or at least make the legal climate in the US so hostile that none of them want to do business here. The end result would be the same as banning vaccines.

Where we are going

I hate to say it yet again, but I see very dark days ahead for public health. Nearly everything that I predicted RFK Jr. would do to decrease confidence in vaccines and make them harder to obtain, he is doing or planning to do, and what he said in this Tucker Carlson interview is just the latest example. I didn’t even get into a lot of the other nonsense that he regurgitated yet again, such as requiring “saline placebo” controls in randomized clinical trials (RCTs) of vaccines, even in cases where, as I’ve pointed out, it would be unethical and impractical to do so, or his claim that all cause mortality was higher in the vaccine group in the original RCT of the Pfizer vaccine. (Hint: It wasn’t a statistically significant difference, which he failed to note, and the study was not designed or powered to look for differences in all-cause mortality, which would have taken a much larger number of subjects.) Think of all this as more “flooding the zone” with antivax fear-mongering and conspiracy theories, something that RFK Jr. has been doing for 20 years, such as his claim that the Verstraeten study found a hugely elevated risk of autism that is attributable to the hepatitis B vaccine birth dose. Personally, I think RFK Jr. was mixing up his conspiracy theories, as Verstraeten didn’t look at just the hepatitis B vaccine; he looked at all thimerosal containing vaccines as a risk factor for autism. His study was the basis for what I like to call the Simpsonwood conspiracy theory that was the basis of RFK Jr.’s 2005 article Deadly Immunity. In any case, the claim is utter nonsense, as Dr. Vincent Iannelli has described.

RFK Jr. did, however, basically reveal that one of my other predictions is coming true, namely that RFK Jr. will co-opt our current vaccine safety monitoring systems to allow antivaxxers to do poor quality studies with pre-defined outcomes based on cherry-picking the data there:

…what we’re going to do now is we’re going to do all the kind of studies that the Institute of Medicine originally recommended, and we’re going to do observational studies, retrospective studies, and epidemiological studies, but we’re going to do real science, and the way that we’re going to do that is we’re going to make the databases public for the first time. We’ve gone into cdc, we’ve gotten the data from CMS which is Medicaid/Medicare. We’re getting the data from the Vaccine Safety Datalink, which is the biggest repository for HMO health records, so those records would have all the records of vaccination and then the subsequent health claims, and you can do a cluster analysis and look at see if there’s an association, but and we’re going to do some in-house studies ourselves, but more importantly we’re going to make this data available for independent scientists so everybody can look at it, and then we have already put out requests uh grant requests, the general scientific communities, so that any scientists with credentials can apply apply for a grant and tell us how they want to go about studying these.

And we’re so we’re going to get, you know, we’re going to get real studies done for the first time, and we should have some answers by September, some initial indicator answers, and then it’ll take over the next six months these large studies by independent scientists all over the world. We anticipate there’ll probably be about 15 different major teams who are all trying to answer this question and within six months we’ll have definitive answers after September.

September, I remind you, is less than two months away. He’s talking about reporting a result in less than three months, if you give him until the end of September. Even giving him an additional six months after that makes it implausible that anything his “studies” report will actually be scientifically valid. You can’t go through grant applications, peer review them, get the money out, and then have the scientists do the studies in less than a year unless the scientists have already been chosen and the results predetermined. “Gold Standard Science” (the mantra of MAHA)? Don’t make me laugh. This is a program to generate “data” and “studies” that RFK Jr. can use in the Vaccine Court to justify adding autism to the list of table injuries for, say, the MMR vaccine and for his FDA to use to add black box warnings to vaccine package inserts or even to remove licensure to vaccines.

I will conclude, as I have been concluding all my posts since RFK Jr. took over as HHS Secretary, with a variant of my warning about him. Do not underestimate RFK Jr.’s determination to take your vaccines away, to make it as difficult as possible for you or your children to access them, or to eliminate them altogether. That has been his mission since he “came out” as an antivaxxer 20 years ago. It’s still his mission. Don’t believe what he says when he claims he’s “not antivaccine” or that he doesn’t “want to take away anyone’s vaccines.” He’s lying. Believe what he was saying during the nearly 20 years before he was nominated to be HHS Secretary. He was antivax then, and he is antivax now. He wants to get rid of vaccines because he truly (and erroneously) believes, based on bad science, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories, that they cause far more harm than good. All the grift that he’s engaged in around vaccines does not change that; it’s just icing on the cake for him, to make money crusading for what he already believes.