On the coming vaccine wars, and what they reveal about the crackup in medicine

No one trusts experts anymore. Why would they, after the mRNA failure, the lab leak coverup, the trans fiasco, the lies about Biden's dementia, the opioid crisis... shall I go on?

(PART 2 of 2. For part one, about the decades-long fetishization of vaccines, click HERE.)

For a month, the New York Times has led a jihad against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., claiming he wants to limit access to vaccines — if not ban them entirely.

This is no exaggeration. Headlines include: “It's Code Red for Vaccines in America,” “How Kennedy’s Purge of Advisers Could Disrupt U.S. Vaccinations,” and “F.D.A. Poised to Restrict Access to Covid Vaccines.”

What exactly has Kennedy done to cause this hysteria?

Well, last month the Food and Drug Administration said it wouldn’t approve more Covid shots for healthy adults and kids¹ without proof they actually work. Then last week Kennedy said he was picking new members for the board that advises the Centers for Disease Control what vaccines to recommend for Americans. And then —

Oh, wait. That’s it. That’s everything so far.² The horror!

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Even compared to other wealthy countries, the United States has an aggressive attitude towards vaccination.

This gap became obvious with the mRNA Covid shots. The CDC pressed them on healthy children and adults years after most other developed countries had stopped. Even now, the CDC is openly defying Kennedy and refusing to say healthy kids should not receive the shots. Instead, it says children may get them “based on shared clinical decision making.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the federal Cabinet department that includes the CDC. In other words, the Centers for Disease Control is so desperate to push mRNA on kids it will ignore its own boss to do so.

Talk about commitment!

The American vaccination push goes past Covid shots. Unlike most other countries, the United States now pushes children to receive shots against RSV — respiratory syncytial virus, which is rarely dangerous to healthy kids — and Hepatitis A. It also recommends annual flu shots for children and teens, despite their uselessness.

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(The American children’s vaccine schedule, explained…)

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The interventionist American attitude toward vaccines and fast adoption of new shots shouldn’t surprise anyone.

It exactly mirrors how the United States approaches medicine generally and drugs in particular: newer and more expensive is always better.

Direct-to-consumer advertising means that pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies can hype new therapies that deliver marginal benefits (and sometimes unexpected risks) at massive cost. The money Big Pharma pours into the system corrupts both academic research and individual physicians’ decisions.

None of this is a secret. A former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine wrote a book called “The Truth About the Drug Companies” in 2004. Yet no one seems to be able to fix the problem — or even slow the growth of drug spending.

Worst of all, the extra money now seems to be doing harm. European and Asian nations spend much less on healthcare but have significantly longer life expectancies than the the United States, and the gap is growing.

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But the vaccine issue is about much more than money. Vaccines aren’t a big part of American medical spending, but they have become a fulcrum of opposition to the medical establishment.

There are any number of reasons why.

• Most jabs are given to children, and many people will research, scrutinize, and question treatments for their kids far more than they will their own care. They’ve seen for themselves that the flu and Covid vaccines don’t work well, and those failures have led them to question all shots.

• The medical bodies pushing vaccines hardest — notably the American Academy of Pediatrics — are demonstrably woke, captured, and out of step with average parents, as their advocacy for trans surgeries has made obvious.

• The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 provided vaccine makers with complete immunity for jab-caused injuries. Even at the time, the act was controversial. But drug companies insisted it was necessary because vaccines were low-margin, inexpensive products and even a few large verdicts would devastate the industry.

  But the immunity the act provides has, perversely, led companies to begin selling vaccines that are less effective and potentially riskier than those that existed before 1986. Why wouldn’t they? The risk of multi-billion-dollar class-action lawsuits is gone. As a result, parents of vaccine-injured children feel they have no recourse. Even if they can win money from the federal government, they will not get the chance for justice that only a lawsuit and discovery can provide.

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(Cheaper than a lawsuit… and more fun to read.)

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Public health bureaucrats would be wise to understand this rising public frustration with vaccines and where it fits in overall anger at healthcare. They’d be even wiser to accept meaningful compromises.

One possible move would be dropping the flu jab push for kids. Another would be pushing for for large new clinical trials for mRNA Covid shots for older adults, since the risk of the shots is higher than was initially understood.

Instead, the health bureaucrats have their backs up, as the CDC’s refusal to bend to Kennedy even on the issue of Covid shots for kids shows. They’re working with the media to demonize Kennedy, and pretending that this year’s measles outbreak was anything other than minor by historical standards.

Americans aren’t fools. Childhood vaccine rates remain consistently high for measles and other old-style inactivated or attenuated virus shots. (To be clear, I have all my kids vaccinated on the standard schedule — though not against Covid and flu — and I have no regrets about doing so.)

But the Covid clown show and the trans magic act have done enormous damage to trust in the media and medicine since 2020. And if reporters and health bureaucrats won’t bend, sooner or later parents are going to start tuning them out entirely, not just about the Covid shots.

(SECOND OF TWO PARTS)

1. With “healthy adults” defined very narrowly.

2. Actually, there was one other thing, Kennedy canceled the Biden Administration’s absurd $776 million contract to Moderna for its bird flu mRNA shot. Yes, the old regime had doled out almost a billion dollars on a technology that doesn’t work against a virus that’s never meaningfully threatened humans. Kennedy correctly viewed this as absurd government waste and put a stop to it.

With a straight face, the media collectively proclaimed this decision, too, as a crime against humanity. THE BIRD FLU IS COMING AND BECAUSE OF MEAN OL’ BOBBY WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!