Secretary of Death
The Senate Gives Consent to Pestilence and Plague
Now call we our high court of parliament:
And let us choose such limbs of noble counsel,
That the great body of our state may go
In equal rank with the best govern'd nation
— Henry IV, part 2, Act V, ii
Despite the warnings, and even pleadings from his own family, Robert Kennedy Jr was confirmed by the United States Senate as the next Secretary for Health and Human Services. Republicans in the Senate decided they feared President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement more than they feared death itself.
Kennedy, an ignorant, superstitious, moronic, murdering, fool, has been given a platform to spread his destructive propaganda against vaccinations, fluoridation of public drinking water, and even pasteurization of milk.
“There’s no better person to lead our campaign of historic reforms and historic faith in American health care,” said Trump, casting aside his own legacy of pushing the speedy creation of a vaccine for Covid-19 in “Operation Warp Speed.” Instead, Trump will create a Presidential Commission, “Make America Healthy Again,” to support Kennedy’s work.
Wait until Kennedy comes for Trump’s Big Macs and Diet Coke diet.
The sole Republican vote against Kennedy came from former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who bears the responsibility of allowing Trump’s return to office. McConnell, a survivor of childhood polio, put out the following statement:
“I'm a survivor of childhood polio. In my lifetime, I've watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.
“Individuals, parents, and families have a right to push for a healthier nation and demand the best possible scientific guidance on preventing and treating illness. But a record of trafficking in dangerous conspiracy theories and eroding trust in public health institutions does not entitle Mr. Kennedy to lead these important efforts.
“This Administration – led by the same President who delivered a medical miracle with Project Warp Speed – deserves a leader who is willing to acknowledge without qualification the efficacy of life-saving vaccines and who can demonstrate an understanding of basic elements of the U.S. healthcare system. Mr. Kennedy failed to prove he is the best possible person to lead America’s largest health agency. As he takes office, I sincerely hope Mr. Kennedy will choose not to sow further doubt and division but to restore trust in our public health institutions.”
Somebody should ask McConnell if he has any regrets voting for Trump for president, or any regrets about letting Trump escape conviction by the Senate twice after he was impeached, every time the senator has to issue a statement condemning the White House.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski sent her regrets, but couldn’t quite make it to voting against Kennedy.
I continue to have concerns about Mr. Kennedy’s views on vaccines and his selective interpretation of scientific studies, which initially caused my misgivings about his nomination. Vaccines have saved millions of lives, and I sought assurance that, as HHS Secretary, he would do nothing to make it difficult for people to take vaccines or discourage vaccination efforts. He has made numerous commitments to me and my colleagues, promising to work with Congress to ensure public access to information and to base vaccine recommendations on data-driven, evidence-based, and medically sound research. These commitments are important to me and, on balance, provide assurance for my vote.
But you’ll be happy to know the Alaska Republican has found an issue with Trump so important it moved her to introduce a bill to stop one of his executive orders. Murkowski’s bill will change the name of Mt. McKinley back to Denali. Priorities.
We’re in the age of witch doctors, internet quacks, healing with crystals, essential oils, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and ingesting bleach through a plastic straw.
Plague and Pestilence
“On this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.” — Albert Camus, The Plague
Measles
The United States effectively eliminated measles in 2000. At one point, there was a hope we could eliminate measles worldwide.
Unfortunately, the New York Times reported Thursday on another outbreak of measles in the United States, this time in Texas:
A worsening measles outbreak has taken root in Texas, sickening two dozen and hospitalizing nine on the western edge of the state, where childhood vaccination rates have dwindled in recent years.
As of Tuesday, 22 children and two adults had been infected, all of whom were unvaccinated, local health officials said. The outbreak comes as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a staunch critic of childhood vaccines, has been nominated to be the country’s next health secretary, causing public health experts to worry that similar upticks of preventable illnesses will become more frequent.
“There’s a feeling this is going to be more and more common,” said Dr. Cameron Wolfe, an infectious disease expert at Duke University.
But it’s just the measles, right?
The most common side effects of measles — a high fever and a blotchy red rash — typically resolve on their own within a few weeks. But serious complications, including pneumonia and brain swelling, are possible, especially for children younger than 5.
Roughly one in five unvaccinated people who become infected with measles is hospitalized, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Ms. Anton said that all nine of the hospitalized patients were school-age children, and that many of them had spent time in the intensive care unit.
Our new Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy has an unfortunate history with measles. Kennedy and his organization, Children’s Health Fund, contributed to a disaster in American Samoa where a measles outbreak killed over 80 people in 2019. After 16 people were already dead, Kennedy sent a letter to the prime minister claiming that a measles vaccine actually helped spread the disease. Instead, Kennedy saw the outbreak as a chance to test his theories about keeping children unvaccinated.
In an op-ed for the New York Times, journalist Brian Deer explained how vaccine critics like Kennedy contributes to measles epidemics.
I was in Samoa during that outbreak as part of my more than 16 years of reporting on the anti-vaccine movement. The cause of the outbreak was not the vaccine, but most likely an infected traveler who brought the virus from New Zealand, which that year had had the biggest measles outbreaks in decades, especially among that country’s Indigenous and Pacific Islander communities. Migration and poverty were likely factors in a sudden spread of measles in Samoa and New Zealand. But, as an editorial in The New Zealand Medical Journal reported, so too was a factor that Mr. Kennedy specializes in: “increasing circulation of misinformation leading to distrust and reduced vaccination uptake.” Samoa’s vaccination rates had fallen to fewer than a third of eligible 1-year-olds.
NBC News reported how the deaths of two children from a drug mix-up when they were vaccinated was exploited by Kennedy and his allies to prevent children in Samoa from getting vaccinated:
Within a week, Del Bigtree, director of the Texas-based Informed Consent Action Network, a partner group to Kennedy’s nonprofit, had turned the babies’ deaths into social media content. His group created a two-minute video backed by a somber piano track that linked the Samoa tragedy to false claims about the measles vaccines and promoted the Children’s Health Defense film, “Vaxxed.”
“That video is up to 174,000 views and climbing,” Bigtree said on the July 12, 2018, episode of his internet show, The Highwire. “Share it with everyone you know. This is how we are changing the world.”
Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense posted about the deaths on its Facebook page, too, suggesting they were proof the vaccines were unsafe.
In an interview with libertarian John Stossel, Kennedy said nobody died from the measles on Samoa. They died from bad vaccines imported from Australia.
Curing Diseases Causes Diseases
Kennedy believes vaccine research led to the creation of the HIV virus.
“The medical research on these diseases and vaccine research has actually created some of the worst plagues in our history,” Rolling Stone reported Kennedy saying on a panel program he hosted on Rumble. “Anybody who reads ‘The River’ will come away pretty much convinced that HIV also came from a vaccine program, there’s plenty of evidence on that as well.”
“We can go down the whole list of diseases,” Kennedy also said. “There’s even good evidence that even Spanish flu came from vaccine research.”
Just in case you missed the point, Kennedy added, “I do not believe that infectious disease is an enormous threat to human health.”
In his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy attacks what he calls, “germ theory aficionados,” saying a healthy body cannot be affected by microbes, a theory he calls “miasma.”
Germ theory aficionados, in contrast, blame disease on microscopic pathogens. Their approach to health is to identify the culpable germ and tailor a poison to kill it. Miasmists complain that those patented poisons may themselves further weaken the immune system, or simply open damaged terrain to a competitive germ or cause chronic disease…When a starving African child succumbs to measles, the miasmist attributes the death to malnutrition; germ theory proponents (a.k.a. virologists) blame the virus.
More On HIV
Dr. Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health, wrote an op-ed about his experience in South Africa when the government there denied HIV was the cause of AIDS.
In the mid-2000s, I lived in South Africa, then governed by President Thabo Mbeki, who was also no stranger to the ideas of AIDS denialists. Amid an explosive AIDS epidemic in the late 1990s, Mr. Mbeki stumbled, most likely in late-night surfing of the internet, onto the fringe view that H.I.V. doesn’t cause AIDS and that the antiretroviral drugs used to keep it in check — the same type of drugs I take every morning and have for almost 30 years — were poison.
Mr. Mbeki, in thrall to these ideas, many of which came from America, refused to allow antiretroviral therapy to be used in the country’s health system. His health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, recommended healthy eating, with lots of beets, ginger and garlic, to ward off sickness.
A Harvard study later found that at least 330,000 people died, and over 35,000 children were born with H.I.V. as a result of Mr. Mbeki’s reign of error on AIDS treatment policy.
Gonsalves worries what happened in South Africa could also happen here:
In his book “The Real Anthony Fauci,” Mr. Kennedy revives debunked canards about H.I.V. — like the idea that it is a “harmless passenger virus” and that gay men’s promiscuity and use of recreational drugs, and even antiretroviral drugs like AZT were the real causes of AIDS — while using the “I’m just asking questions” strategy to allow him to deny that he’s an AIDS denialist himself.
Blame the Jews
When people turn away from science, they find scapegoats to blame. Kennedy turned to that old favorite, anti-Semitism.
“There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” he said, according to The New York Post. “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Cucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
“We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact,” he added.
Bird Flu
We all know the price of eggs is skyrocketing because of the spread of bird flu. The Milwaukee County Zoo closed its aviary to protect their birds from the spread of the disease.
Kennedy is a bird-flu conspiracy theorist, a point he made clear in a post on Twitter (X) last year while he was still running for president.
On the one hand, FDA authorities say there is little risk to humans now, but on the other hand they say they are ready to pull the trigger on vaccines if there is evidence of human-to-human spread. Not only are they ready, but FDA has already licensed 3 different bird flu vaccines for humans, stored in the National Strategic Stockpile.
The problem is that there is no evidence these vaccines will work, and they appear to be dangerous. More people died in the vaccinated groups than in the groups that received placebos for two of these vaccines, Audenz and the Sanofi vaccine.
We already know our public health agencies are out of control. We have to stop the runaway gain-of-function experiments and the highly lucrative pandemic vaccine experiments right now.
So far, according to the CDC only one person has died from the Bird Flu and there have been no reported cases of human-to-human transmission yet. But the virus, like other influenza viruses, could mutate into something far more dangerous if it is not contained. When it does, will Kennedy set aside his weird conspiracy theories or will he see this as an opportunity to prove that vaccines aren’t needed?
Raw Milk
Kennedy’s ignorance even extends to Wisconsin’s favorite industry, the dairy industry. Kennedy is a proponent of drinking raw milk, or unpasteurized milk.
The Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association explained in 2023 why the sale of raw milk is a terrible idea:
Raw milk can carry Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, E. coli, Listeria, Brucella, and Salmonella – all harmful and sometimes lethal pathogens. People who get sick from raw milk may experience the unpleasantness of gastro-intestinal distress, but others – more likely young children, senior citizens, the immuno-compromised, and pregnant women – can experience severe complications, including Guillain-Barré syndrome, which can cause paralysis, and hemolytic uremic syndrome, which can result in kidney failure, stroke, or death.
From 2013 through 2018, 75 outbreaks voluntarily reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were linked to raw milk. Outbreaks during those years sickened 2,645 people and caused 228 hospitalizations and three deaths.
More recent reports reveal a continued pattern. Last month, four people were hospitalized and another 20 made sick by consumption of raw milk in California and Utah. In September, five people in Wyoming were infected with Campylobacter and E. coli bacteria, landing two children in the hospital. In July 2023, the Minnesota Department of Health reported one child hospitalized and seven people sickened with cryptosporidiosis and E. coli after drinking raw milk. There have been outbreaks in Wisconsin, too, notably a 2014 incident in which 38 people who consumed raw milk suffered Campylobacter infections, with ten hospitalized.
One problem with raw milk is that by sight and smell it is indistinguishable from milk that has been pasteurized. If there is more raw milk available in the marketplace, there is more of possibility of a milk-related illness being blamed on dairy products generally rather than raw milk.
Bird flu has already spread to dairy cows and even veterinarians who treat them. While nobody has been reported catching the bird flu yet from drinking raw milk, samples of raw milk have been discovered containing the influenza virus.
From a story at the PBS NewsHour:
As the H5N1 avian flu virus continues to spread in poultry flocks and dairy cattle, consumers may worry about whether the U.S. milk supply is safe to drink. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the answer is yes, as long as the milk is pasteurized.
In late November 2024, however, California regulators recalled two batches of raw, unpasteurized milk from a Fresno dairy farm after bird flu virus was detected in the milk. The dairy subsequently recalled all of its raw milk and cream products from stores due to possible bird flu contamination. State regulators placed the farm under quarantine, suspending any new distribution of its raw milk, cream, kefir, butter and cheese products produced on or after Nov. 27.
Combatting bird flu in the dairy industry may require vaccinating everyone that comes in contact with the dairy herds. Instead, when dairy herds are killed off and milk prices rise faster than the price of eggs, Kennedy will still be swilling raw milk like its Dom Perignon.