https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/health/rfk-addiction-farm...
Trump really did cause the left to lose their minds.
Our current approach isn't working.
The public, thus far, is generally ok with this. They’d be even more okay shipping them to underfunded camps where they are even more out of sight out of mind.
If you want to see the establishment's viewpoints, read the NY Times (the news articles, and analysis, but not the op-eds).
dismantling the Dept of Education, reducing spending across all areas, reducing government involvement in healthcare -- take a look at the Fortune 100 list and see how many healthcare companies are in the top ranks -- have been top priorities for decades.
they're just saying the quiet part loud now, and acting on it.
At least that's what this forum has taught me.
Without the effects known for months, it sounds a lot like gambling to me.
Whoops, gave away my political leanings.
I can't find anything about this being related to a flu vaccine.
They may even go one step deeper and believe the vaccines aren't proven properly to know whether they work well enough.
If this meeting is cancelled, we would expect the vaccine to be less effective and would see greater impact (simply because it wasn't tailored to the be the most likely effective vaccine), but due to all the variables I mentioned it could even appear that "things got better after we did this" (post hoc ergo propter hoc).
There is no steel man here, RFK just wants to demonstrate that his beliefs about viruses are true. We may or may not get enough unambiguous data to make conclusions about his beliefs in a year or two, but given the concomitant reduction in the effectiveness of the CDC due to Trump policies, and the sycophantic nature of the people being placed into leadership roles, we may simply never know because the data would not be collected, or the research not funded, or the publications retracted.
Or RFK could somehow be right and we see a huge magic increase in public health across the country (not seen in other countries that keep vaccination). I am not aware of very many scientists who believe this will happen.
There is an alternative here - a population left to fight an outbreak through natural immunity will be stronger in the end. That's definitely not a popular opinion, and it may not be worth the cost, but it does align with large drops in death rates of past outbreaks which generally happened before a vaccine was even available.
> There is no steel man here
That's not how steel manning an argument works. The whole point is to make the most generous version of the argument, usually assuming the best intent. There is always a most generous explanation that would lead to the argument made, you just may not like it or may not think its likely.
> Or RFK could somehow be right and we see a huge magic increase in public health across the country (not seen in other countries that keep vaccination). I am not aware of very many scientists who believe this will happen
I don't know RFK's stance particularly well, but I would guess that he wouldn't expect a noticeable increase in health over a short timeline and without improving peoples' health in general. I'm pretty sure I've seen him argue for removing toxins from our food and water, reducing dependence on pharmaceuticals, etc. All of those are important factors and it isn't realistic to assume that removing only one factor would magically fix everything.
Most people get the flu already multiple times during their lives already. When is this natural immunity supposed to kick in and stop the elderly and infirm from dying from it?
> When is this natural immunity supposed to kick in and stop the elderly and infirm from dying from it?
That's a whole different ball game. You're talking about immunocompromised individuals, their immune system isn't well prepared to respond to natural infection PR vaccination. Vaccines can still help, though they're usually less effective and more likely to cause symptoms similar to the original disease you're vaccinating against.
A vaccine isn't a magic bullet for preventing death. Vaccines still depend on the immune system doing its job effectively.
This story is similar for most infections we now vaccinate for, death rates were dropping dramatically years before vaccines were introduced.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-inf... [2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Measles+mort...
So to be clear you’re arguing let’s kill a whole bunch of people to “increase” the population’s strength, although you express some mild concern about the “cost” of doing that? Is that the argument here?
I'm not arguing that we kill anyone. You're implying that choosing not to intervene with vaccines is murder, which I would disagree with, but even then I left open the door for that cost to not be worth it.
My argument here was simply that if vaccines aren't used, as happened for effectively all of natural history, the population remaining (assuming some remain) is stronger for it.
That doesn't meant we should choose not to administer vaccines if we have them and they are proven safe and effective. That also does not mean that we should actively kill anyone, eugenics is a pretty messed up idea.
You've missed a significant strength of vaccines by focusing on individuals rather than on populations.
Vaccines slow the transmission rate through a population and reduce the severity of infection.
In a population with a high vaccination rates those few with weak immune systems have less exposure to infection.
It's similar to back burning and fuel reduction in combating wildfires.
Early on in the Covid pandemic response claims of herd immunity were being thrown around and Fauci was claiming a threshold of 60-65% vaccine rate for it to work. As time went on that number kept going up, eventually he admitted that they used a low number to start with only because they didn't think people would comply if the required vaccine rate seemed unrealistically high.
Herd immunity is almost certainly a thing at a certain immunity rate, the question that goes unanswered is what that rate actually is. For there to even be a case for vaccine mandates, of even just the arguments that people ought to get vaccinated due to herd immunity, we have to know the % of immunized population and the risk of vaccine side effects.
My understanding is that we don't have a solid understanding of the exact tipping point for herd immunity, and that at least during the covid pandemic response we didn't have a solid understanding of the true risks of adverse side effects to the vaccines either.
What you're proposing here is simply murder. We know what would happen, many more people would die.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-inf... [2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Measles+mort...
I wouldn't propose that people should be stopped from taking a vaccine if they want it.
I'm a strong supporter of informed consent. In this context that simply means that people need to know the pros and cons of a vaccine, what isn't known or scientifically studied yet, and they can make their own mind up.
And herd immunity protects those that can't be protected by vaccines, your "experiment" would put them at risk as well.
We don't keep up any relevant research to prove that out. Vaccine studies don't use placebo controls, meaning we only know how they compare against what is usually the last approved vaccine. If you tell people that we know for certain that more people would die today without a particular vaccine you're lying, we simply can't know that without testing it.
> And herd immunity protects those that can't be protected by vaccines, your "experiment" would put them at risk as well.
How can we know herd immunity works as we predict it should without testing it? Its an untested hypothesis, and that's totally fine if we're not willing to risk testing it. We can't act as though it is scientific fact at that point though, its a hypothesis that a large majority agree with but that has yet to be tested in any significant way.
They may even go further still and claim that the shot causes the flu—like RFK recently did with measles:
> Kennedy claimed the outbreak was likely caused by vaccines — contrary to evidence that showed low vaccination rates as the culprit. The false theory seems to stem from a misreading of a California Department of Public Health report that mentioned cases of a vaccine-induced rash, not vaccine-induced measles.
* https://www.nbcnews.com/news/texas-measles-outbreak-anti-vac...
Measles used to not be a thing:
> The US declared that measles had been "eliminated" in 2000, but the country has seen outbreaks in recent years amid a rise in anti-vaccine sentiment. The last US measles death was in 2015, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
If by "the flu" you're referring to the disease rather than a specific pathogen, a vaccine can cause the flu. Its common for vaccines to cause symptoms similar to the pathogen, though those symptoms are usually more mild.
Think about it for a second. A vaccine is meant to induce an immune response to allow the body to learn the pathogen before a natural infection. Symptoms are little more than the physical effects of your immune system doing its job and responding to a pathogen. Why wouldn't a good vaccine induce similar, though likely less severe, symptoms?
Disease is just a named collection of symptoms, that it. A vaccine absolutely can cause those symptoms, and when they occur together it would meet the definition of the disease. That obviously doesn't mean the vaccine caused an influence infection.
Few disease definitions actually take into account severity of symptoms. There are some examples where we have two named diseases where one is distinguished only by being more severe, but unless I'm missing something the flu doesn't fit into that category.
This isn't entirely cynical, I do assume there are some pragmatists who might think this way.