Maintenance Phase - RFK Jr. and The Mainstreaming Of The Anti-Vaxx Movement

00:00:00.000 Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that only has 46 pages

00:00:16.360 of notes today.

00:00:17.780 Oh, you're doxing me.

00:00:19.540 You're calling me out.

00:00:20.520 I'm outing you.

00:00:21.620 I was like, I'm sorry we recorded for three and a half hours last time.

00:00:24.920 I'm going to try to keep it shorter.

00:00:26.360 i only have 46 pages which is pretty good for me that is pretty good for you we were talking about

00:00:31.780 our different notes thresholds mine is 40 pages so i'm already i'm already exceeding it and we're 0.73

00:00:37.460 doing a third part of this fucking episode so i don't know if my restraint can really be admired 0.88

00:00:43.260 at this point restraint is for tourists i'm aubrey gordon i'm michael hobbs if you would 0.88

00:00:50.660 like to support the show you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase you can

00:00:55.420 also subscribe on Apple Podcasts subscriptions. It's the same audio content. And today, Michael

00:01:02.380 Mabry, we are continuing our journey with RFK Jr., no? Yes, we didn't put part one in the title of

00:01:10.960 the last episode because nobody downloads them if they say part one, but that was a part one.

00:01:14.780 We're manipulating the algorithm. We're clickbaiting you into downloading part one of a

00:01:20.240 Now three part episode. God damn it. I think your idea of clickbait and the rest of the 0.99

00:01:26.380 internet's idea of clickbait are different because you're like, we clickbaited you into

00:01:30.040 the Brian Wansink story. And I'm like, one of the best, most interesting stories we've told.

00:01:35.040 So Aubrey, why don't you recap us? What did we learn about RFK Jr. and anti-vaxxers last time?

00:01:41.500 We learned about sort of the rise of the anti-vax movement starting pretty much as

00:01:48.000 soon as there were vaccines. We learned that those arguments have not substantively changed.

00:01:54.360 We learned that RFK Jr. started out working on really consequential stuff like climate change

00:02:01.240 and doing really good work and then just kind of gradually slid into weird anti-vax world.

00:02:09.580 Yeah. And we learned about sort of the source code for a lot of contemporary American anti-vax

00:02:17.640 stuff which is a paper written by a researcher named andrew wakefield that is like one of the

00:02:24.780 shoddiest pieces of research we have discussed on this show which is really huge for us to reach

00:02:29.700 new depths of bad methodologies the show that talked to you about celery juice and the future

00:02:36.280 ghost is like no this one's really bad yeah we're like that's 0.5 of a wakefield we're now measuring

00:02:44.000 this in Wakefield. Yes, this is where we're basically starting this episode. It is 1998.

00:02:50.120 The paper by Wakefield making the link between the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine and autism

00:02:56.660 has been released to great fanfare and a lot of consternation. And we get this whole fucking 0.98

00:03:02.440 machine going into overdrive where the media is like, there's questions. There's a tricky debate 0.99

00:03:07.740 about vaccines in 2002 we get a bbc special called mmr every parent's choice that's clickbait

00:03:15.460 yeah there's your clickbait you're already defending us from from charges of clickbait

00:03:21.120 like no no we're we're doing the okay kind of clickbait we're tricking you into learning about

00:03:25.640 anti-vaxxers no i just mean like that is actually like pretty deceptive coverage of like there's a

00:03:33.000 debate happening. And there's without situating that in like, this is a very small number of

00:03:39.780 people making a very fringe argument on very flimsy data. So alongside all of this, like

00:03:45.480 question begging news coverage, there's of course, one side of the debate becoming increasingly

00:03:50.060 radicalized and increasingly drifting further and further from reality. Right. And as this is

00:03:57.020 happening sort of in the culture at large, it is also happening to RFK Jr. So as we discussed last

00:04:03.600 episode, in 1994, his son Connor is born and has very severe allergies. He says that he has 29 ER

00:04:10.540 visits in his first three years of life. So this is obviously causing a huge amount of anxiety.

00:04:16.300 RFK Jr. in 1998 founds this like food allergy initiative thing, which is basically trying to

00:04:23.340 make the link between childhood vaccines and allergies he also has an episode that i i think

00:04:31.260 also contributes to his radicalization we we actually talked about this last episode but we

00:04:35.880 cut it out for space so pretend that i'm telling you this for the first time that this is new uh

00:04:40.640 just say mike that's new information oh michael i've never heard anything like this before new

00:04:45.000 stuff so the reason we cut this out is because we we talked for like 45 minutes because this is like 0.95

00:04:49.140 such fucking typical NGO drama. So as we mentioned last episode, he gets pulled into this water 0.80

00:04:54.960 cleanup NGO that sues governments over like following EPA regulations in the 1980s. He

00:05:00.540 eventually moves his way up the ranks. And in 2000, he forces out the guy who brought him into

00:05:08.260 the organization in the first place. He has this weird idea to sell branded bottled water from this

00:05:17.280 like river keeper organization, like NGO approved water. What are we doing? You can just say that's

00:05:22.440 new information. That's new information. I've never heard anything like it before. Thank you.

00:05:27.260 Incredible stuff. So this causes a lot of consternation among the board and the people

00:05:31.360 who actually work at the NGO. Like, I don't know if we want to become like a private company

00:05:34.540 selling bottles of water. You said it's typical. It's so damn typical. Like the number of

00:05:40.420 organizations where like an executive director will get an idea into their head where they're

00:05:44.660 like we'll make t-shirts and then we'll sell the t-shirts and you're like i don't know man at one

00:05:51.140 of the ngos i used to work at our high up director guy got obsessed with the idea of jk rowling

00:05:57.720 writing the introduction to our annual report boy that's an idea that did not age well not age well

00:06:03.880 this was before her whole thing but it's like sure i'll spend weeks like trying to get this like 0.99

00:06:09.420 massive billionaire author to write the introduction to our like unbelievably boring pdf that like

00:06:13.880 four people are gonna read beyonce definitely will play at our gala yeah exactly my god this

00:06:18.920 eventually culminates in like him sort of taking over the organization he also hires some guy who

00:06:26.100 was like had been arrested for selling rare birds what a weird specific kind of shady criminal so

00:06:35.480 basically in like the most NGO drama way possible, everyone kind of agrees that he's wrong on the

00:06:44.100 merits, but they keep him around because his last name is Kennedy and he's really good at

00:06:47.600 fundraising. I think a lot of successful fundraising from large dollar donors is just

00:06:52.220 knowing how to be around rich people. Oh, yeah. Like there is just like a great deal of like,

00:06:57.360 it's fine. Yeah, it's fine. Keep them. So there's a New York Times article about the drama in 2000,

00:07:03.340 where employees of the NGO are quoted. One guy talking about R.F.K. Jr. says,

00:07:11.460 I think he separates himself from good science at times in order to aggressively pursue an issue

00:07:17.820 and win. Boy, this is really Chekhov's Times quote. I think that was my joke last time.

00:07:23.480 I think you did my joke from last time. Was it? God damn it. Really?

00:07:25.300 No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Oh, God.

00:07:27.500 And then the other quote is he had a nasty tendency to deride or insult anybody he thought was not on his side.

00:07:35.820 So we're already seeing this kind of black and white thinking and this like weird crusader mentality where he just becomes completely immune to facts.

00:07:47.160 And it seems this is also when he starts falling down the conspiracy rabbit hole.

00:07:52.700 Shortly after the 2004 election, he becomes convinced that it was rigged in favor of George W. Bush.

00:08:00.820 Do you remember this?

00:08:01.980 Yeah, I mean, like, people still sort of grouse about that today.

00:08:05.600 It appears he got the idea from Larry David.

00:08:09.200 What?

00:08:10.120 Which is a very weird cameo.

00:08:11.920 So he and Larry David, the guy who is the co-creator of Seinfeld and the creator and star of Curb Your Enthusiasm,

00:08:18.460 invited him to like Aspen or something. This is also where he met his current wife, Cheryl Hines.

00:08:26.020 So this was my question is like, is this pre or post Cheryl Hines?

00:08:31.100 I think this is Cheryl Hines. Like this is mid Cheryl Hines. Like that's, that's how he met her.

00:08:36.100 And there's a New York Times article where they describe Larry David, like urging RFK Jr. to read

00:08:41.960 some crank book on like how the election was stolen in 2004. And there's a pretty good follow

00:08:48.280 up New York Times story now that like RFK Jr. is much more sort of like out as like an anti-vax

00:08:53.180 crank where they look into the question of like, what does Larry David like actually think about

00:08:57.380 this stuff? And so they talk about how RFK Jr. basically says like, oh yeah, he supports me,

00:09:02.380 like all my friends support me in my endeavors. And then they reach out to Larry David and the

00:09:08.020 article says, this might lead you to believe that Larry David is backing Kennedy's candidacy,

00:09:12.580 but the curb creator would like to disabuse people of that notion. In a text to the New York

00:09:17.860 Times, he wrote, yes, love and support, but I'm not supporting him. And supporting is in quotes.

00:09:24.000 This is the relationship that I imagine exists between Laura Dern and Marianne Williamson at

00:09:29.420 this point. It's also making me very grateful that none of my former roommates are running

00:09:34.940 for president. This is like when we hang out, how we avoid talking about tar. Our greatest,

00:09:40.200 our greatest disagreement, the greatest issue of tension between us.

00:09:45.220 Yeah. I, I, listen, I take my Blanchett very seriously. You know this about me.

00:09:50.280 I do know this about you.

00:09:55.500 So last episode, we talked about the things that conspiracy theorists do, right? They lie,

00:10:01.720 They remove context. Today, we are going to talk about how the anti-vax movement kind of came to

00:10:07.520 America and how RFK Jr. himself helped to spread it, like added a ton of fuel to the fire. He is

00:10:14.040 like in this episode a lot more than the last RFK Jr. episode we did. But the tendency of

00:10:20.900 conspiracy theorists that all of this demonstrates, and I really want to like

00:10:24.980 tediously hammer home in this episode is how conspiracy theorists constantly move the goal

00:10:31.920 posts. So in this moment in 1998, post Wakefield, right, if you look at the history of everything

00:10:37.940 the anti-vax movement has been through so far, in the 1980s, we had this documentary about the

00:10:43.440 pertussis vaccine, right, where they were saying, oh, the pertussis vaccine causes basically

00:10:48.020 everything, right? It was like kids with seizures. They showed footage of kids with Down syndrome.

00:10:51.860 It was just kind of all over the place, but it was all linked to the pertussis vaccine, right?

00:10:56.200 In the early 1990s, they then move over to food allergies, right?

00:11:00.960 Vaccines cause food allergies, sure.

00:11:03.420 Then in 1998, they shift to the measles vaccine causes stomach problems, and the stomach problems cause autism.

00:11:13.680 So in 2005, RFK Jr.'s conspiracy mindset thing culminates with the publication of an article called Deadly Immunity.

00:11:25.880 It's like a major feature story.

00:11:28.040 He describes it as a cover story in Salon, but Salon was a website, so I don't know how it could be a cover story.

00:11:34.040 But it's published on Salon and in the print edition of Rolling Stone.

00:11:37.940 And this article marks the mainstreaming of the anti-vax movement.

00:11:44.300 So I am going to send you a JPEG of what this looks like on salon.com.

00:11:50.740 Wow, I forgot how hideous websites in this era were.

00:11:56.020 It looks like Craigslist.

00:11:57.180 You know what it looks like?

00:11:57.860 It looks like it should have those blinky GIFs of text.

00:12:01.960 Or like the dancing hamsters GIFs.

00:12:04.920 This is the kind of layout of a website now.

00:12:07.440 if a restaurant has it you know the food is good this is ugly enough people are not going there for

00:12:13.400 the aesthetics so this is listed in the news and politics section as a salon slash rolling stone

00:12:21.060 joint investigation there is a picture of a kid facing a window with their hands behind their

00:12:29.300 back and the title is deadly immunity when a study revealed that mercury and childhood vaccines may

00:12:36.700 have caused autism in thousands of kids, the government rushed to conceal the data and to

00:12:43.140 prevent parents from suing drug companies for their role in the epidemic. Note the moving of

00:12:48.820 the goalposts again. Right now we're on to Mercury. Yeah, totally. But then, okay, so I am going to

00:12:54.380 send you a very long excerpt. This is like the first sort of six paragraphs of the story. We are

00:13:00.280 going to read this and then we are going to circle back to it once we learn a little bit more about

00:13:07.820 the background and context. Uh-oh. Are we doing like a close text debunking? Yeah, we're going

00:13:14.880 to read this like seven times. We're just going to keep going over and over again. We're going

00:13:17.700 to do it sentence by sentence eventually. But for now, we're going to learn about the evil

00:13:22.640 dastardly deeds of the CDC. Okay. In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health

00:13:29.680 officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood Conference Center in Norcross,

00:13:35.720 Georgia. Convened by the CDC, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center to ensure

00:13:42.040 complete secrecy. So we've got a secret meeting by the CDC. Federal officials and industry

00:13:47.300 representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming

00:13:52.680 questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and

00:13:58.920 young children. A CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraten had analyzed the agency's massive

00:14:05.980 database containing the medical records of 100,000 children. He found that a mercury-based

00:14:12.480 preservative in the vaccines, thimerizal, appeared to be responsible for a dramatic

00:14:18.000 increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children.

00:14:22.800 i will say i'm just this is commentary time hello commentary it is a real red flag if someone is

00:14:32.700 saying hey we took an existing giant data set and looked at it and we found an association

00:14:39.360 and we've decided that that means it's a causal relationship oh aubrey you're gonna love you're

00:14:44.300 gonna love the debunking of this so much you're gonna be like there was no data set no i'm no

00:14:49.240 spoilies, but we're going to add some context. Pretty much. A little bit of extra context to

00:14:53.340 this. Okay. Quote, I was actually stunned by what I saw for straight and told those assembled at

00:14:59.640 Simpsonwood citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between

00:15:05.200 thimerizal and speech delays, attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. But instead

00:15:12.540 of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerizal,

00:15:17.580 the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover

00:15:23.540 up the damaging data. How to cover it up? According to transcripts obtained under the

00:15:29.080 Freedom of Information Act, many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging revelations

00:15:35.240 about thimerizal would affect the vaccine industry's bottom line. Big pharma. Dr. John

00:15:41.720 Clements, vaccines advisor at the World Health Organization, declared flatly that the study,

00:15:47.100 quote should not have been done at all and warned that the results quote will be taken by others and

00:15:53.420 will be used in ways beyond the control of this group the research results have to be handled

00:15:58.720 worrying stuff i mean worrying stuff he's framing this in a way to make it sound sinister that's

00:16:04.720 like we won't have complete control anymore but like a more neutral way of saying that thing in

00:16:10.960 different framing is essentially like look a bunch of people without any training are going to get a

00:16:16.580 hold of these numbers and are going to take that as proof positive that they shouldn't vaccinate

00:16:21.420 their kids. And that's like exactly what happened. I should have known that you would immediately

00:16:25.020 spoil the rest of this episode. I wanted I wanted you to read this and be like, damn, Mike, there 0.98

00:16:29.620 was a secret meeting of the CDC and they were going to cover things up. And I was like, well, 0.98

00:16:33.920 actually, Aubrey, we're going to rewind. I'm so sorry that I have listened to our show.

00:16:38.300 This is what's so savvy about what he's doing here. Right. He says like, oh, there's a transcript

00:16:43.540 and we had to do a FOIA request to get this secret transcript of this secret meeting, right?

00:16:48.820 But then the actual quote from this guy at the World Health Organization, he's saying,

00:16:53.900 the results will be taken by others and used in ways beyond the control of this group. 0.96

00:16:58.740 I mean, that's just fucking true. 0.99

00:17:00.060 Sometimes you publish things and bad faith actors are going to do fucked up shit with them. 0.99

00:17:04.560 And like, we should talk about that before we publish them. 0.93

00:17:06.520 It's also like a real misunderstanding of FOIA requests.

00:17:09.860 the implication here is that if you have to foia something that it must be part of a cover-up

00:17:16.200 yeah but like people like all day long in like state and municipal and federal government get

00:17:24.400 like all of their emails foiaed on a particular topic or whatever that's not the same as like

00:17:31.740 someone is facing charges we've built the case and we know also what's what's wild about foiaing

00:17:37.920 the transcript of this is that if it's so fucking secret, why did the CDC keep a transcript? Why

00:17:43.840 did they invite a transcriber? Number one rule in the cover up, create a paper trail. So it's like

00:17:49.400 he's doing something that we see in conspiratorial media a lot where it's like, I found these secret

00:17:53.520 documents. But it's like, well, were they really meaningfully secret? Was anyone really trying to

00:17:58.880 cover this up? Or was it just a hassle for you to get this? There's actually a huge difference

00:18:03.280 between those two things yeah so the thing is like we're sort of joking around because like both of

00:18:08.240 our brains are completely fucking broken by hosting the show but what this article is alleging and i

00:18:12.960 think quite effectively if you sort of zoom out is basically that like there's mercury in the 0.98

00:18:18.200 vaccines right which is like really freaky to people right we're inject we're literally injecting

00:18:22.080 kids with mercury and the cdc knew about it there's all these studies showing that mercury

00:18:27.740 is really toxic to kids like of course it is everybody's like that's the one thing we all

00:18:30.800 know about mercury is that it's fucking poisonous right yeah yeah and the cdc has like a secret 0.99

00:18:34.980 fucking meeting to be like make sure we don't tell anybody about this like let's let's massage 0.96

00:18:39.400 this a little bit like for people at the time that did not host health and wellness podcasts 0.99

00:18:44.680 a lot of people looked at this and were like jesus fucking christ this is like really worrying well

00:18:49.340 and the like tacit endorsement of publishing this in salon and rolling stone totally man 0.90

00:18:55.460 rolling stone has some stuff to answer for dude i know this and taibi i know i think they also gave

00:19:01.980 like led zeppelin for like a negative review wow i'm mostly mad about their lists canceled so we

00:19:07.160 are now going to rewind and we're going to learn a little bit more context and later we will read

00:19:11.460 the same excerpt and we will we will understand more about it with with more layers the first

00:19:16.480 thing that we need to talk about is is there mercury in the vaccines so that's another thing

00:19:21.320 that sort of bumped me about this little passage was the opening says mercury in childhood vaccines

00:19:30.580 and then down a little ways into the piece he says something about oh mercury based preservative

00:19:39.280 and i was like does that mean that it has mercury in it does that mean that mercury is used in the

00:19:43.920 processing of it like what's happening i'm about to tell you what's happening tell me what's

00:19:48.160 happening, Michael. I'm going to tell you everything what's happening. I'm confused. Tell me what's

00:19:51.000 happening. So this, just as a thing to start out with, I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say

00:19:58.760 that mercury is in literally everything because mercury is in the earth's crust. And when water

00:20:06.420 like bubbles up to the surface of the earth and we drink it, it has a couple of particles of

00:20:12.360 mercury in it. It has a couple particles of everything. They can test water and find

00:20:17.240 micrograms, which are one millionth of a gram of all kinds of shit. And this is not because like 0.99

00:20:24.520 DuPont is pouring chemicals in the water or like industrial revolution, whatever. Like you can take

00:20:29.740 a teaspoon of the freshest, cleanest spring water from like the Swiss fucking Alps. And you will 0.99

00:20:36.440 find trace elements of, I found a list of like various publications that I read. It will have

00:20:41.800 lead, iron, arsenic, radium, radon, lithium, chromium, uranium, zinc, copper, silicone,

00:20:49.560 phosphorus, and mercury. We live on Earth. This is the Earth. I mean, but listen, as you were

00:20:54.160 talking about that, I was thinking about how much that sounds like I was an anxious kid.

00:20:58.960 And if you made a dessert like bananas foster or something, something with alcohol in it,

00:21:05.300 like a brandy fruit cake or something, I would get worried about getting drunk.

00:21:10.840 off the alcohol in the dessert. And I feel like this is a like, am I going to get drunk off the

00:21:16.580 alcohol in the dessert? Yeah. Sort of level of analysis here. This is something that like we've

00:21:21.740 said on the show before, but we should probably say like at the top of every show and like at

00:21:25.380 the beginning of every conversation with every human being for all time is that the dose makes

00:21:30.640 the poison. Yes. There are very few substances that are poisonous regardless of how much of it

00:21:37.180 or in what form of it you are ingesting.

00:21:39.560 The obvious one is water, right?

00:21:41.220 If you don't drink enough water, you die.

00:21:42.780 But then also if you drink too much water, you die.

00:21:44.600 You can like drown from the inside out.

00:21:46.280 There's all kinds of other compounds

00:21:47.820 that are totally fine

00:21:49.900 in like a couple of millionths of a gram a day.

00:21:53.700 You know, there's all of this sort of like ambient freak out

00:21:57.320 about like chemicals in the water.

00:21:59.960 I would say a couple of things.

00:22:01.520 One, water is chemical.

00:22:04.040 You know what I mean?

00:22:04.920 Like inherently already chemical.

00:22:07.180 sorry. Tell them, tell them, tell them not Aubrey telling you about chemicals, but also a partner

00:22:14.840 of my, one of my good friends, uh, used to work for a like water treatment here in Portland.

00:22:22.560 And she would always just be like, people are always talking about like, we don't want chemicals

00:22:26.920 in the water. And she was like, I guess you don't want us purifying water because I don't know what

00:22:32.000 you think that process is. If you've got an open air reservoir, that means at some point an

00:22:36.940 animal is going to poop in that reservoir and you're going to have to do something chemical

00:22:40.840 to like counteract the poop or get the poop out of there or whatever. Just because you're adding

00:22:46.720 chemicals, quote unquote, right? Like adding baking soda to your cake, that creates a chemical

00:22:53.760 reaction. That doesn't mean that it's sinister. It's really weird to me.

00:22:57.840 It's also a very weird argument to make about mercury specifically, because not only is mercury

00:23:02.340 in like all of the water, but mercury is also in the air because mercury comes out of volcanoes.

00:23:06.940 So the air that we breathe will also contain a few micrograms of mercury.

00:23:11.560 So the average baby ingests around 360 millionths of a gram of mercury in the first six months of its life.

00:23:19.920 So the average vaccine dose does, in fact, contain about 25 micrograms of mercury.

00:23:28.880 So 25 millionths of a gram.

00:23:31.520 However, not only is that a really, really, really small dose of mercury, but it's not

00:23:37.720 mercury as we think of mercury.

00:23:40.760 When ordinary people talk about mercury, what they actually mean is methylmercury, which

00:23:45.720 is like a naturally occurring kind of mercury.

00:23:47.680 They're sort of elemental mercury, and then it interacts with bacteria, and then it becomes

00:23:51.420 like the metal liquid T-1000 thing that we're all used to.

00:23:54.020 You're right.

00:23:54.360 I do love this debunking.

00:23:55.980 Isn't it fun?

00:23:56.780 It's so fun.

00:23:58.060 T-1000, let's go.

00:23:59.600 So mercury is not like iron.

00:24:00.620 and there's no like minimum recommended amount of mercury that you're supposed to get. Methyl

00:24:03.620 mercury is like really nasty stuff. But one of the principles of mercury is that it's actually

00:24:07.220 a very good antiseptic. So before we knew how poisonous it was, there was a thing that you

00:24:12.060 would put on your wounds called mercurochrome, which would prevent them from getting infected,

00:24:16.800 like this bright orange thing. So like, it's actually a very good antiseptic. It's just not

00:24:22.600 worth it, because it's also really poisonous. I love this idea of like, thinking about

00:24:28.600 potentially harmful substances as like, is it worth it? I love the bitter almond flavor that

00:24:35.480 comes with arsenic, but the side effects are a real pair. So in the 1920s, the Eli Lilly Company

00:24:43.120 comes up with something called ethyl mercury, which is different from methyl mercury. It's a

00:24:49.080 substance that has the same antiseptic properties as the bad kind of mercury, but it clears your 0.98

00:24:55.620 body much quicker okay so the problem with like mercury mercury like the type in tuna and shit

00:25:00.900 is that it builds up in your system you don't clear it it stays inside of you so you have like 0.71

00:25:05.040 this little ball of metal that is just like accumulating for years inside of your body

00:25:10.040 which is really bad for you but ethyl mercury doesn't do that it only has a half-life of three

00:25:14.560 to seven days and you clear it quite quickly okay so like things can be chemically very similar

00:25:19.460 and have very different properties interesting and so in the 1920s the eli lily company after

00:25:24.540 they invent this inorganic form of mercury. They mix it with something called thiosalicylate

00:25:30.520 and that becomes thimerosal, which is what is up for debate here. This is the thing that RFK

00:25:36.860 Jr. is talking about. There's thimerosal in the vaccines, right? Yep. So the way that they ship

00:25:42.140 out vaccines, still now but much more than, is they would ship vaccines in 10-dose vials. So on

00:25:49.460 TV when you see that thing of like a nurse holds up a vial and she puts in a syringe and like sucks

00:25:53.360 a little bit out. She does that 10 times. Yeah, exactly. I mean, with different needles,

00:25:56.600 but like, yes. That's typically the way that they do this to make it easier because shipping a bunch

00:26:00.800 of glass vials for every single dose is just like wildly expensive. And it's much easier to do this

00:26:05.300 with 10 doses. But in the 19-teens and 1920s, there's a couple of cases where the vaccines

00:26:12.320 get bacteria in. Like somehow a needle got put in twice. It only takes a little bit of bacteria to

00:26:17.840 get in that bottle because it often sits on the shelf for a long time. So vaccines can get

00:26:22.520 infected. So there's a case where they basically inject a bunch of kids with like the staphylococcus

00:26:27.480 bacteria and like kids fucking die. It's awful. So like this is a real danger. You have to have 0.99

00:26:33.240 some sort of preservative in the vaccine, something that will kill bacteria in case

00:26:37.480 a couple of little tiny particles of bacteria get into the vaccines because it will grow and spread

00:26:42.160 and you won't know that it's in there until it's too late. Gotcha. So in the 1920s, they realized

00:26:46.220 that this thimerosal thing is a very effective antiseptic. You put a tiny little bit into one

00:26:51.900 of these 10-dose vials. And no matter what, it can't get infected. Another thing that RFK Jr.

00:26:57.100 doesn't like to admit is that there was actually like a lot of safety testing of thimerosal before

00:27:02.440 they started putting it into the vaccines. There's these animal studies where they inject

00:27:06.620 2,000 micrograms into rabbits. They do this. There's no effect of it. There's a meningitis

00:27:14.340 outbreak in the late 1920s. And there's a time when they think thimerosal could be like a

00:27:21.420 antibiotic. This is before the invention of penicillin. They're like, oh my God, maybe this

00:27:25.100 will help cure meningitis. So there's like a whole hospital ward of people with meningitis.

00:27:29.380 They inject them with 2 million micrograms of thimerosal, hoping that it will cure the

00:27:34.980 meningitis. It does not cure the meningitis, but they find out that it doesn't have any safety

00:27:39.920 effects. They don't, you know, they don't puke, they don't pass out, they don't have any health

00:27:44.580 effects of the actual vaccine itself. So people are like, okay, well, this doesn't like cure

00:27:49.860 diseases on its own. But it's also not like dangerous to give people. So I feel like what

00:27:55.580 I'm hearing from you is that there are different forms that mercury can take. And only some of

00:28:02.060 those forms will cause harmful health effects in a big way. And others will just sort of pass

00:28:08.720 through you. They're like vaccine olestra. Pass right through. So in the 1930s, they start adding

00:28:16.360 it to vaccines. This is completely non-controversial, boring, like nobody notices this stuff

00:28:24.100 until the late 1990s. So in 1997, there's kind of an ongoing thing where people are concerned

00:28:31.140 about mercury in fish. Like mercury is just getting more of a profile as like something

00:28:36.680 that we should be worried about. And so in the 1997 FDA Modernization Act, a senator includes

00:28:43.640 like a little amendment to just be like, hey, let's make sure we're being transparent about

00:28:47.600 where Americans are being exposed to mercury. This is like the bad mercury. It's a study bill.

00:28:51.860 Yeah. Yeah. They're just like, let's give us a kind of baseline. Yeah. And so as a result of

00:28:55.540 this transparency bill, people at the FDA look around and they're like, well, there is ethyl

00:29:01.060 mercury in the vaccines. So like we should sort of publish that. Like we should, we should tell

00:29:05.360 people if there's ethyl mercury in the vaccines. So they, they look at the whole vaccine schedule,

00:29:09.320 the amounts of ethyl mercury and all the different vaccine doses. And they show that there are 187

00:29:17.100 micrograms of ethyl mercury for children in their first, I believe it's one year of life,

00:29:22.840 which is very small. I mean, keep in mind, just being alive, you get 360 micrograms.

00:29:29.800 The next chapter of the story is extremely bizarre. This comes from Paul Offit's book,

00:29:34.740 Autism's False Profits, which is extremely good, there's basically one guy named Neil Halsey,

00:29:41.380 who's a pediatrician at Johns Hopkins, and he's sort of on the committees, like the vaccine 0.67

00:29:48.080 committees. Paul Offit describes him as a vaccine insider. And so in 1999, Neil Halsey sees the

00:29:54.600 reports that kids are getting 187 micrograms of ethyl mercury, and he starts to get concerned.

00:30:00.900 he was one of the people who wanted to expand the vaccine schedule for kids he's somebody who's

00:30:06.060 always been pushing for like kids you get all the vaccines that are available to them i i do think

00:30:11.300 that like because there's so much fucking bad faith like question asking around this issue it

00:30:15.920 is important to say that like he's not an anti-vaxxer he's not doing this in bad faith this 0.77

00:30:20.300 is a guy who's like genuinely concerned about children and like genuinely supportive of vaccine

00:30:26.580 safety, but he feels misled. He's like, we've been expanding the vaccine schedule for years now,

00:30:33.560 and I'm only just finding out that there's 187 micrograms of ethylmercury in all of the vaccines

00:30:40.860 that kids are getting. He starts looking around. He's like, well, what are the limits? What's the

00:30:46.540 daily maximum for ethylmercury? And he goes to all of the different agencies, and no one really

00:30:53.660 has one. Like the EPA has one, but that's like, you know, living near water, kind of prolonged

00:30:59.640 exposure. The FDA has a limit for mercury, but that's in like food, like food that you're eating

00:31:04.640 regularly. Nothing is set up for these like very deliberate injections of vaccines. And there's

00:31:10.800 really no data on ethyl mercury. All of the limits are about methyl mercury, which is like

00:31:15.520 the bad kind. So this basically becomes a crusade for this one guy to be like, hey,

00:31:22.360 we should actually like do way more studies on this and like we might want to take thimerosal

00:31:27.880 out of the vaccines and there's like an optics part of this as well right which is like people

00:31:34.080 are gonna freak out about this and i would like to be able to tell them with certainty that their

00:31:40.300 kid is completely safe and they have nothing to worry about and we know this for a fact there's

00:31:45.100 also something really interesting here too about the weird circularity of once the anti-vax movement

00:31:50.580 is as empowered as it is in the late 1990s, people keep trying to come up with ways of

00:31:57.120 like placating the anti-vax movement. So part of the argument for making such a big deal about

00:32:02.000 mercury in the vaccines is like, well, these anti-vaxxers are going to yell at us if they

00:32:05.720 find out about this. And they're inevitably going to find out about this. So like this becomes the

00:32:10.440 debate behind the scenes. And this is very weird. So it all happens in two weeks. This one guy,

00:32:17.980 Neil Halsey starts pushing, we got to do something about this. We got to do something about this.

00:32:21.880 It's like summer. A lot of people are on vacation, but there's the annual meeting of the American

00:32:26.680 Academy of Pediatrics coming up. And he's like, before this meeting, we need to know what the

00:32:32.020 deal is with mercury. Like we can't have this meeting without having a clear statement on this

00:32:37.980 and like knowing what our policy is going forward. So he starts like holding all these teleconferences

00:32:43.140 with all the various agencies that, you know, there's all these like safety committees of

00:32:46.420 vaccines, basically this one guy just keeps like pushing and pushing and pushing. Apparently

00:32:50.340 everyone else in the entire like vaccine safety sector is like, Neil, there's no reason to be

00:32:57.260 worried. There's literally no evidence that this is dangerous. And we're talking about 187

00:33:02.900 micrograms, which is like way fucking less than like the environmental exposure to mercury. 0.99

00:33:08.300 People like you get mercury in like apples and bananas and shit. Yes, this is an issue. Yes, 0.99

00:33:12.400 we should study it further, but I really don't understand the urgency to move on this, right?

00:33:16.960 This has been in the vaccines for 60 years. And according to Paul Offit's book, Neil Halsey

00:33:22.700 sort of sees other people stonewalling and he threatens to go to the press.

00:33:27.040 Wow.

00:33:27.300 He's like, if you guys don't do something on this, I am going to release a press statement saying

00:33:31.740 I'm concerned about the amount of ethyl mercury in the vaccines. And so again, everything gets

00:33:38.060 so much fucking harder when there's these conspiracy movements around, right? Because

00:33:42.060 everyone's like, imagine what the anti-vaxxers would do with this, right? Someone within the

00:33:46.900 vaccine safety system is like, I'm worried about this trace element in the vaccines.

00:33:52.280 So basically, as a way of appeasing him and trying to get to like the least bad option,

00:33:58.060 they agree to put out a statement saying that thimerosal will be removed from the vaccines.

00:34:05.420 So on July 9th, 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Public Health Service

00:34:11.380 issue a statement saying, from now on, we're going to be removing the thimerosal from all

00:34:17.000 of the vaccines. It's going to take like a year or two to sort of work its way out because a lot

00:34:20.360 of the vaccines have already been produced. But like, from now on, we're not going to have it

00:34:24.760 in the vaccines anymore. And there's no evidence that it's unsafe. There's really nothing to worry

00:34:29.980 about. This shouldn't affect your decision to vaccinate your kids at all. But out of an

00:34:34.640 abundance, like an absurd abundance of caution, we're going to do this to make, you know, to go

00:34:40.580 from like 99.999% safe to 100% safe. Uh-huh. This is a fucking huge mistake. Like a historical

00:34:49.260 blunder, right? Because of course, when this statement comes out, every single person in

00:34:56.360 America is like, holy fuck, there's, there's mercury in the vaccines. Yeah. I'm going to 1.00

00:34:59.460 fix the name of my fucking kid. What? I didn't know there was mercury in the vaccines. This is 1.00

00:35:03.120 Streisand effect times a hundred. It's this totally fascinating thing to me because of course,

00:35:08.600 RFK Jr. has made this, like, mercury in the vaccines thing his mission for the next 20 years

00:35:14.840 after this announcement. But, like, this announcement comes from the scientific

00:35:21.100 establishment being, like, too overzealous in protecting children, right? Everything that he

00:35:27.160 says in this article, everything that he says throughout all of his public statements is kind

00:35:31.520 of like, oh, the scientific establishment, they don't care that this is harming kids.

00:35:34.960 But actually, this is the entire system being like too hardcore about ensuring that vaccines

00:35:41.960 are safe.

00:35:42.600 We used to do polling around this stuff and you'd ask people like, hey, do you support

00:35:46.200 an increase in taxes?

00:35:48.120 And people would be like, no.

00:35:49.780 And they'll be like, change the question to do you support an increase in education funding,

00:35:55.060 senior services and health care?

00:35:57.120 And like the ratios flip, right?

00:35:59.700 Yeah.

00:36:00.140 Based on like how you ask the question really, really matters.

00:36:03.340 And this seems like a core case of, like, folks asking the question in a way that, like, raised people's hackles more than it calmed them down.

00:36:11.880 And so what's wild is this announcement that safe vaccines are about to become even safer ends up emboldening another wave of anti-vax organizing.

00:36:24.460 And this is really the arrival of the anti-vax movement to the United States.

00:36:28.120 I mean, the Wakefield stuff was kind of centered in the UK, but this then sparks a wave of media

00:36:34.400 coverage around like, oh, there's a debate about the safety of vaccine. Did you hear about this

00:36:37.140 Mercury thing? Right. This is like if you got a notification, if there was a big announcement

00:36:41.980 from NASA that was like, hey, everybody, not to worry. There's a 99% chance that we're not

00:36:49.200 about to be destroyed by an asteroid. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. This is also the period when

00:36:54.400 the anti-vax moms find rfk jr he has been working on mercury that's getting dumped from coal plants 0.95

00:37:02.860 as part of his like cleaning up waterways work these like moms start showing up at his talks

00:37:08.220 and they're like well if you're really concerned about mercury wait till you hear about the 0.99

00:37:11.880 vaccines anti-vax moms going around politicizing kennedys in a destructive direction is like

00:37:20.000 bizarro world p flag yeah it's like what if p flag was he was evil what if i was an ally but

00:37:26.800 for misinformation ally for lying an ally for weirdos i love my disinformation son okay so

00:37:34.720 this finally brings us to the secret cdc meeting so just after this happens in early 2000 the this

00:37:46.120 is really funny the head of the cdc's like immunization program was on vacation when all

00:37:53.040 this like stuff was going on and this was before like zoom and shit so i guess he just like comes

00:37:58.940 back from vacation and he's like wait we announced what he's got like the flip-flop tan line 0.62

00:38:03.880 he's got his back of macadamia nuts he's like hey man i'm still on island time yeah

00:38:11.940 Yeah, yeah, yeah. He comes back and he's like, what the Mars roving fuck did we just do? 0.99

00:38:17.060 We just made this like pretty big decision and put out this big statement, but we still don't 0.97

00:38:20.680 actually have any information, right? There is no evidence that thimerosal is bad. And all evidence

00:38:26.900 indicates that it's not, and that it has nothing to do with any of these things that people are

00:38:31.020 linking it to. So like, we have to actually understand this, right? So he assigns Tom

00:38:36.660 Firstraton, who's a researcher at the CDC, to look through their database. They have a database of

00:38:41.680 like children's health records, couple hundred thousand kids, you know, separate the kids into,

00:38:46.320 you know, vaccinated kids, unvaccinated kids, and just try to figure out, like, is there anything to

00:38:51.360 this? Is there any condition that is linked to thimerosal in the vaccines? And so Tom Verstraten

00:38:57.820 looks through the database and he finds that children who received vaccines are more likely

00:39:05.220 to have attention deficit disorder, more likely to have speech and language delays, and more likely

00:39:10.600 do have tics, these sort of twitches that are sometimes a symptom of autism, sometimes not.

00:39:15.880 Importantly, he does not find an association with autism. So this head of the immunology

00:39:22.100 of the CDC, the guy crunching on macadamia nuts, does something that like you and me are constantly 0.92

00:39:28.460 saying that we wish scientific institutions would do and which basically like Phil fucking Lancet

00:39:33.680 should have done in 1998. They're like, look, we have this like really incendiary finding.

00:39:38.600 before we publish this into what we know is the social and political environment around this issue.

00:39:45.060 Let's stress test it a little bit. Let's talk about it. Let's make sure that it's correct

00:39:49.100 before we put it into the public bloodstream. This is classic big if true territory. Exactly.

00:39:54.960 And it's your job to make sure that it's true. And so they gather together. It's roughly 50 people.

00:40:00.960 It's people from different fields of epidemiology. It's people from various departments of the CDC.

00:40:06.860 it's different agencies. I think there's like FDA people there. It's like, let's get everybody

00:40:11.040 together and just like talk about this. So they do, in fact, rent space at this like Methodist

00:40:16.460 retreat center thing outside of Atlanta. They all meet. And Tom Verstraten, you can read the

00:40:22.420 transcript. Tom Verstraten presents the data to everybody. He's like, here's what we did. Here's

00:40:26.740 the methodology. Here's what we found. After he presents his data, people point out the massive

00:40:32.580 flaws in the data. So the first is the thing that you pointed out earlier, that this is all

00:40:38.400 completely correlational. And the problem with this vaccinated versus unvaccinated grouping is

00:40:44.700 that vaccinated kids and unvaccinated kids are not identical in other ways. There's numerous

00:40:51.260 vaccines that you have to get in the first two years of life. If you're getting all those

00:40:54.820 vaccines, well, that basically means that you're going to the fucking doctor a lot, right? You're 0.99

00:40:58.840 go to the doctor 15, 20 times, which means you're way more likely to get diagnosed with things like

00:41:05.160 speech and learning delays, with things like tics, with all kinds of other things that when you're

00:41:09.780 at the doctor, the doctor, oh, is there anything else? Oh, you know, my son, he's not he's not

00:41:14.320 talking as much as other kids his age. Yeah. And in the US, that's also going to be correlated with

00:41:19.320 like access to care, period. Exactly. So it pulls in social factors. It pulls in like all kinds of

00:41:26.680 other influences that are really complex and that you would need to account for in some way

00:41:33.440 in doing this kind of research. The other thing that people point out is that a huge amount of

00:41:39.020 their data is just garbage. So a lot of what they think of as like, this kid was diagnosed with this

00:41:45.240 or like, this kid has like speech and learning delays. A lot of that is just stuff that like

00:41:49.820 people might mention in a doctor's visit and gets written down on their chart, but isn't like a

00:41:55.060 formal diagnosis so oftentimes parents will come in and they'll be like oh yeah his like language

00:41:59.700 is like a little bit delayed it's you know it's not where we think it should be but then he comes

00:42:03.760 in a month later and they're like oh yeah it's totally fine he caught up yeah i mean like listen

00:42:07.320 this is one of the core lessons of early childhood brain development it's like kids move at different

00:42:14.600 rates they're just all over the place yeah this is like of course he would flag these little things

00:42:18.920 along the way. Those are snapshots of moments. They're not necessarily like a holistic sort of

00:42:26.020 like we've evaluated this whole situation and here's what we think is going on.

00:42:29.780 Well, this is why I think this kind of process is so important and ultimately

00:42:33.560 why this meeting is really good that it happened. We found this data. There's some incendiary

00:42:39.300 findings. Let's talk about it with people who are experts in other fields and people who have

00:42:43.820 more familiarity with this data. This to me is like science working as intended. And so people

00:42:50.320 at this meeting are like, you might want to actually go back and like, I know it's boring,

00:42:53.540 but you have to actually cross check the kids' medical charts with formal diagnoses and figure

00:42:58.980 out whether that's their actual condition because like the data is just kind of noisy like that.

00:43:02.980 RFK Jr. describes this as some sort of like secret meeting where like scientists put pharma profits

00:43:08.620 over the health of children. And actually what really happened is just like a bunch of scientists

00:43:13.200 sat in a room like i've also read the fucking transcripts of this meeting they're unbelievably 0.96

00:43:17.360 boring it's like really technical methodological stuff think about how boring your meetings are 0.98

00:43:24.040 if you go to meetings regularly and then imagine reading transcripts of someone else's two-day

00:43:30.460 meeting again it's like it's so funny that he casts this in rolling stone it's like so nefarious

00:43:35.160 when like what actually happens is after this meeting tom frustrates like these are really

00:43:38.880 useful comments. He goes back, they rerun the numbers and they find ways of like controlling

00:43:44.000 for health access so they can actually compare vaccinated and unvaccinated kids. And they

00:43:49.120 eventually in 2003 publish the data. And so there are some differences in health conditions between

00:43:53.980 vaccinated and unvaccinated kids, but like autism is not on there. And the magnitudes are so small.

00:44:00.740 It says in the conclusion of the paper, they're like, we don't really think this means anything.

00:44:04.020 like ticks for example these like twitches was actually more common among vaccinated kids and

00:44:09.640 unvaccinated kids but like it doesn't make sense that a symptom of autism would be more common but

00:44:14.760 autism itself is not more common we think this is probably just like some kind of weird coincidence

00:44:19.620 random thing yeah so you know he he alleges this huge cover-up but like the data was published

00:44:25.620 yeah but you can go read the paper two full years before this article came out no yeah yeah exactly

00:44:31.040 So this this paper had been published for two years by the time he writes his Rolling

00:44:33.820 Stone article.

00:44:34.480 Yeah.

00:44:34.700 Speaking of which, we are now going to reread the section of the Rolling Stone article that

00:44:39.760 we read earlier. 0.99

00:44:40.680 We're returning to the scene of the article of the nonsense bullshit. 1.00

00:44:45.500 Yes. 0.98

00:44:46.580 In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting

00:44:52.060 at the isolated Simpsonwood Conference Center in Norcross, Georgia, convened by the Centers

00:44:58.360 for Disease Control and Prevention,

00:45:00.860 the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center

00:45:03.400 to ensure complete secrecy.

00:45:05.580 It's very funny that he keeps like mentioning

00:45:08.580 the secrecy of this.

00:45:09.940 The reason it was held at this Methodist retreat center

00:45:13.560 is because it was June

00:45:15.080 and they were planning the meeting at short notice, right?

00:45:18.300 Because they didn't know this was going to happen 0.98

00:45:19.380 and it's fucking Atlanta in the summer 0.99

00:45:21.200 and all the hotels are booked. 0.98

00:45:22.900 So it's not like we need to be out in the woods, you guys. 0.99

00:45:26.000 Like, God damn it. 0.99

00:45:26.980 this is so silly it's also funny to me because like you can have secret meetings in atlanta 0.99

00:45:32.440 he's like oh it has to be at the method retreat center it's like you just go to the marriott and 0.72

00:45:35.800 have a secret meeting this is like big bahamian grove energy yeah exactly where you're like no

00:45:41.500 no no no no right here is the next couple paragraphs the federal officials and industry

00:45:48.620 representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming

00:45:53.900 questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and

00:46:00.240 young children. A CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraten had analyzed the agency's massive

00:46:07.140 database containing the medical records of 100,000 children. He found that a mercury-based

00:46:13.660 preservative in the vaccines, thimerizal, appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in

00:46:19.980 autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children. Remember, autism wasn't on there.

00:46:26.320 This is a straightforward lie. The data, even the preliminary data, did not show an increase in

00:46:31.060 autism. Quote, I was actually stunned by what I saw, Verstraten told those assembled at Simpsonwood,

00:46:37.240 citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerizal and

00:46:42.580 speech delays, attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity, and autism. The other lie here

00:46:47.880 is that there's no staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link.

00:46:52.220 This was the whole controversy over whether or not to remove

00:46:55.680 thimerizal from the vaccines. 0.96

00:46:57.900 There's no fucking evidence that thimerizal has any link to anything. 0.96

00:47:02.380 Except the tens of thousands of studies, Michael. 0.98

00:47:06.880 I remember some things from last time.

00:47:10.140 It's also, there's also a very conspiratorial thing here too,

00:47:13.680 because he's saying that there's a staggering number of studies showing that thimerizal is 0.98

00:47:17.800 poisonous right but then why the fuck are the scientists moving to cover it up yeah like this 0.96

00:47:24.300 is what always just like doesn't compute in my brain of like if it's so fucking obvious 0.98

00:47:29.800 that the vaccines are bad for kids why would hundreds and thousands of scientists not give a 0.97

00:47:37.200 shit man come on dude people are writing it down like i just don't i'm getting to the point of 0.99

00:47:44.480 exasperation. I know we're only like halfway done, Aubrey. Save your, save your ulcer, 0.98

00:47:48.040 get an ulcer. I love that you're like, we're not going to record for three and a half hours

00:47:51.740 today. I know we are one hour and 45 minutes in, which is exactly half of three and a half hours,

00:47:57.800 but I'm going to pack as much stress into that. All right, here is the next one.

00:48:05.860 But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerizal,

00:48:11.580 the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover

00:48:18.140 up the damaging data. According to transcripts obtained under the Freedom of Information Act,

00:48:24.180 many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging revelations about thimerizal

00:48:28.920 would affect the vaccine industry's bottom line. So what's amazing about this passage

00:48:35.240 is he doesn't mention that thimerizal had actually been removed from the vaccines at this point. 0.99

00:48:41.580 These same fucking people decided to remove it. 0.97

00:48:44.060 Also, did anybody say anything about profits for vaccine makers? 0.99

00:48:50.240 Did that come up in the transcripts at all?

00:48:52.040 This is a missing context thing because when you remove thimerizal, which they now have,

00:48:57.200 you have to ship all of the vaccines in single dose vials, which is much more expensive than

00:49:02.220 shipping them 10 doses at a time.

00:49:04.480 So one way to put that is, oh, they're worried about Big Pharma's bottom line.

00:49:09.200 And another way to put that is we want to get vaccines to people as cheaply as possible.

00:49:14.760 Yeah, that's a that's a real conversation to have.

00:49:16.840 That's not some like conspiracy thing.

00:49:19.180 It's like if you're operating in good faith for the safety of kids, you would you would

00:49:24.260 talk about like, well, what's the most cost effective way of doing this?

00:49:26.640 Yeah.

00:49:26.900 And listen, they're a government agency.

00:49:29.280 That means that their budgets are a matter of public record.

00:49:32.860 That means that they're going to have to ask for allocations and have an externally

00:49:36.980 defensible answer and they've got to think about how to move people who may not be in that room

00:49:42.340 yeah there are mechanics that they need to mind and some of those mechanics are around cost and

00:49:48.340 also also note the phrase here is that he says they spent two days discussing how to cover up

00:49:53.580 the damaging data that's not what happened no one was talking about how to cover it up everyone was

00:49:58.460 operating under the assumption that this would be published and it was yeah they were trying to make 0.70

00:50:01.740 sure it's fucking true yeah and then here's the last paragraph that we read dr john clements

00:50:07.320 vaccine advisor at the world health organization declared flatly that the study quote should not 0.86

00:50:13.100 have been done at all and warned that the results quote will be taken by others and will be used in

00:50:19.260 ways beyond the control of this group the research results have to be handled so we've kind of already

00:50:24.840 covered this but it's like yeah he's just straightforwardly right yeah they do have to

00:50:30.260 be handled. But we are going to read his quote in full from the transcript. This is what he

00:50:36.520 actually said. Interesting that they didn't put the entire quote in. Yeah, it's interesting how

00:50:41.500 it goes kind of in and out of quotes and it's like paraphrasing in between. Just a couple

00:50:45.880 quoting a couple words at a time. Quote, I'm really concerned that we have taken off like

00:50:50.200 a boat going down one arm of the mangrove swamp at high speed when in fact there was not enough

00:50:56.040 discussion really early on about which way the boat should go at all. And I really don't want

00:51:01.720 to risk offending everyone in the room by saying that perhaps this study should not have been done

00:51:06.200 at all, because the outcome of it could have, to some extent, been predicted. We've all reached

00:51:12.080 this point now where we are left hanging, even though I hear the majority of the consultants

00:51:17.360 say to the board that they are not convinced there is a direct link between thimerizal and

00:51:22.820 neurological outcomes. Jesus, that's a different quote. So yeah, this is part of a much longer

00:51:28.520 kind of monologue that he gives about this. But when he's saying this shouldn't have been done,

00:51:34.460 he's not saying like the truth cannot reach the American people. That's not what he's saying at

00:51:38.740 all. What he's saying is something that we say on this show all the fucking time. It's like, 0.99

00:51:42.800 if you comb through data, looking for associations, hundreds of associations,

00:51:48.500 right? This Tom Verstraten guy was looking through this data, looking for anything that

00:51:52.360 was biologically plausible that could be linked to vaccines. You're going to find something,

00:51:57.380 right? This is the way these big correlational cohorts work. You're going to find something.

00:52:02.320 And when you publish it, the anti-vaxxers are going to latch onto it with their little talons

00:52:07.060 and they're never going to let it go. He's not saying the data should be suppressed because

00:52:11.460 it's true. He's saying it's probably not true. It's probably just random chance.

00:52:15.700 Not only does he think it's not true, but he's saying, I hear the majority of the consultants

00:52:22.420 say to the board that they are not convinced that there is a direct link, right?

00:52:27.240 Like, not only do I not think this is true, most people here don't seem to think this

00:52:32.500 is true.

00:52:33.080 This is another thing that I cannot believe this was not mentioned in his entire 5,000

00:52:38.780 word article in Rolling Stone.

00:52:40.820 Thimerazole was removed from vaccines in Sweden, Canada, and Denmark in 1992,

00:52:47.960 eight years before. It had no effect on autism rates or ADHD or tics or anything else.

00:52:55.580 If it was causing autism, we should see a huge reduction in autism in Canada, Sweden,

00:53:02.380 and Denmark since 1992. We don't see that. We still see the same rises that we do here.

00:53:07.460 it's the trajectory of autism and these other conditions is still happening perfectly in

00:53:13.320 parallel, regardless of whether they have thimerizal in the vaccines or not. So like,

00:53:18.080 there's no biologically plausible mechanism by which ethyl mercury would be causing these

00:53:23.300 disorders because there's now millions of children who didn't get thimerizal.

00:53:27.520 There's 10 years of real world data. Yeah. Being like, no, it's fine. It would be like if,

00:53:34.220 you know five years ago or so you tried to trot out the old argument that was used in like mostly

00:53:41.860 massachusetts around like same gender marriage yeah if you tried to make that claim today

00:53:48.480 there would be many many many many many parts of the country that you could point to i'd be like

00:53:52.980 hey yeah we have it look what didn't happen although the funny thing is they did actually

00:53:56.480 make those arguments in the 1990s even though like the netherlands and denmark had already had

00:54:00.220 gay marriage for like two decades by that point but it doesn't matter because other countries are

00:54:04.200 not real other countries are not real yeah again not talking about facts and information talking 0.98

00:54:08.620 about feelings we could go through the whole fucking article it's like you can't go a paragraph 0.98

00:54:11.900 through this article without like losing your fucking mind i'm sure it's like the entire 0.98

00:54:16.500 the entire article there's the the most egregious one is he's talking about like the dangers of 0.98

00:54:21.720 thimerizal and he's like people in the 1920s like this ward full of people with meningitis

00:54:26.820 were given injections of thimerizal and they all died and it's like right because they had 0.99

00:54:32.420 terminal meningitis they died of meningitis right right yeah they didn't die of the fucking shot 0.99

00:54:38.040 what the fuck are you talking about their terminal you just said that they're terminal man this is 1.00

00:54:41.340 the brain rot of like cancer doesn't really exist it's the chemo that's doing it and you're like 0.99

00:54:46.640 completely okay the whole fucking thing so this whole episode the fact that this article was

00:54:52.260 published at all is like so embarrassing it's not totally clear to me how this article even got 0.96

00:54:58.920 published, but you and I have both been through formal fact checking processes. Yes. I have no

00:55:04.180 direct evidence of this, but it is very obvious to me that this did not go through a formal fact

00:55:09.060 checking process. A good fact checking process, like a really thorough one, makes you so mad at

00:55:16.420 the fact checker. Oh my God. It's like, it's an insufferable process and it is essential, right?

00:55:22.900 You're Googling like how to murder someone through Zoom. Like you're so fucking mad. 0.99

00:55:27.140 not because they're calling you out on stuff you don't want to be called out on not because 0.96

00:55:34.580 they're telling you you're wrong but because they're like uh you know you go oh this new 0.98

00:55:41.660 toy markets for you know like sells for $19.99 and they'll be like source oh my fuck I was just 0.86

00:55:48.160 about to say that you're like oh the sky is blue they're like how do you know can we prove how do 0.84

00:55:51.340 you know can we prove it yeah the the thing I kept thinking of throughout this article I mean

00:55:55.980 we only covered the first, whatever, 6% of it or something, but like the staggering number of

00:56:01.580 studies finding a link between fimerosal and autism, there's no fucking way that would have

00:56:07.840 gone through a formal fact-checking process. None. Zero is a staggering number. Yeah, exactly. 0.94

00:56:15.040 Define staggering, Robert. Whoa, not one? Not even one?

00:56:20.100 so i i do not know how this article got published i do know that rfk jr and jan winner the publisher

00:56:28.980 of rolling stone are close personal friends and like go hunting together they go hang out with

00:56:33.620 larry david yeah exactly like in aspen and shit so like what i think happened is like jan winner

00:56:40.140 and rfk jr were like chatting like at davos or some shit and he's like hey you should write

00:56:46.020 about this for us. And then he wrote about it and Jan Wenner like pushed it through the fact

00:56:50.240 checking process. And so, I mean, in the same way, the Lancet really did not cover themselves in

00:56:55.980 glory with the Wakefield stuff. Both Salon and Rolling Stone did not retract this article until

00:57:01.940 2011. Wow. So it took six years and they appended a couple of corrections, but the corrections are

00:57:07.700 all like dumb corrections. It's like, oh, this guy's like job title was wrong. And you're like,

00:57:12.360 sorry the the basic factual error like they didn't find a link with autism you're not gonna fucking 0.53

00:57:16.540 add that part of what i find so frustrating about this is this is what this is what many editors 0.84

00:57:23.100 have thought that i was trying to do oh i feel like i get the fact checking that jfk jr should

00:57:29.320 be getting yeah right like i absolutely remember like an extended conversation with a fact checker

00:57:33.780 at one point where i had written at one point that there were no fewer fat children after x y

00:57:39.980 policy interventions and the fact checker wrote back and was like well the rates did plateau for

00:57:47.680 a little bit so it didn't increase and i was like yeah there are no fewer facts like i don't think

00:57:54.660 that's an inaccurate thing to say right but like right boy i'm getting the rates plateaued a little

00:58:01.080 bit and they're like yeah yeah secret meeting total government cover-up seems fine but so one

00:58:06.760 thing i didn't know until i started researching this episode was how this article and rfk jr

00:58:13.320 in general kicked off like a real glory day period for the anti-vax movement immediately

00:58:19.660 after this article comes out he's on the daily show he is on oprah in 2007 she doesn't actually

00:58:26.520 ask him about the vaccine stuff which is interesting and i feel like they probably just

00:58:29.640 cut it out of the broadcast but like she's still adding to the idea that this is like a prominent

00:58:35.240 figure worth listening to right she does this like very softball interview with him he goes on don

00:58:40.040 imus a bunch don imus has an autistic kid and really like went for it boy it's actually really

00:58:46.160 bleak the guest list on don imus he had joe lieberman chris dodd and john carrey all on to

00:58:52.800 talk about vaccines causing autism it's really bad joe lieberman is like from a cursed non-partisan

00:59:00.620 underworld or something these are people who have been trying to forget and this book made me

00:59:04.660 remember and i'm really mad about it these are all the names of people who are like referenced

00:59:09.880 in 30 rock episodes yeah the reason your kids don't get 30 rock yeah too many scooter libby

00:59:17.520 jokes and then you know by by 2010 one in four parents thought that vaccines cause autism one

00:59:24.500 in four it's bad this this this period was not a time of huge pushback that is bleak as hell

00:59:33.800 Since 2010, the pendulum has kind of swung back a little bit. So I got very interested in this

00:59:40.180 because I think the sort of we must ask questions about vaccines kind of wave has ebbed, thank God.

00:59:46.880 And it's much more like stigmatized to be an anti-vaxxer now. Like I think the establishment

00:59:52.120 institutions are much more comfortable just being like, fuck off with this stuff now. 0.99

00:59:56.380 The beginning of it was there were a bunch of measles outbreaks starting in 2008. And then 0.99

01:00:01.640 in 2010, we get Andrew Wakefield losing his medical license. And then fascinatingly in 2010

01:00:10.480 or between 2009 and 2011, we get a bunch of court cases where parents tried to get compensation

01:00:18.240 from this vaccine injury compensation board for their kids having autism. So we talked last time

01:00:26.500 about how there's this vaccine injury process where if you believe that your kids were harmed

01:00:31.320 by a vaccine. You can take their case to this board and you can get compensation. We also talked

01:00:36.360 about how the standards of evidence are way lower. You don't have to prove it beyond a reasonable

01:00:42.080 doubt. All you have to prove is that it's more likely than not that a vaccine caused the injury,

01:00:47.040 which is actually a really low standard when you think about it. And even under this lower standard,

01:00:53.240 people cannot prove that vaccines cause autism. All of these court decisions are public.

01:00:58.460 Like, it was so cathartic to read the decisions, Aubrey, because it's like the court cases force the anti-vaxxers to, like, sit down and present evidence and, like, respond to criticisms, right?

01:01:10.640 They can't change the subject. 0.98

01:01:12.440 They can't, like, do the conspiracy gish gallop, just flood you with bullshit thing. 0.98

01:01:18.280 In a court process, it's like, okay, evidence piece one, evidence piece two, right? 0.96

01:01:22.920 And then the other side can actually challenge that evidence.

01:01:25.840 In 2010, there's a trial where the parents of a girl named Michelle Cedillo try to get compensation for their daughter having autism.

01:01:35.160 And, like, you can see how much the goalposts have moved over the decades where they have this bizarre theory where mercury in the vaccines harmed her immune system, which gave her measles, and then measles gave her tummy stuff, and then the tummy stuff gave her autism.

01:01:55.840 Basically, the other side in this trial, like, dismantle every single step along the way.

01:02:03.060 There's no evidence that mercury affects immune systems.

01:02:06.840 Like, that's not, that's, like, mercury has many very bad effects, but it doesn't actually weaken your immune system.

01:02:12.900 There's no evidence that this girl has measles or had measles.

01:02:16.760 And there's no evidence that measles causes stomach stuff.

01:02:20.540 And there's no evidence that stomach stuff causes autism.

01:02:23.060 Like, this whole thing is just complete nonsense.

01:02:25.840 and rfk jr still references these trials now he's like we we presented 700 studies showing how bad

01:02:32.760 the mercury is in the vaccines and like that is true that they presented a ton of evidence

01:02:36.600 but all of the evidence was just about how bad mercury is so it's like there was this mercury

01:02:42.060 spill and then like a bunch of kids had these horrible symptoms and it's like yeah yes correct

01:02:46.460 agree yeah a different substance is harmful exactly and in very very high doses at one point

01:02:52.580 They talk about a situation where kids were exposed to 500,000 micrograms of methylmercury.

01:02:59.740 And the judge is like, oh, we're talking about children being exposed to two micrograms of

01:03:04.440 ethylmercury. So that just isn't relevant to this case.

01:03:08.140 This all feels like the same kind of class of health misinformation and sort of misleading

01:03:13.440 health information that is like this, you know, supplement includes heavy metals.

01:03:20.120 and you find out that they're just talking about iron yeah no but we need that that's like an

01:03:26.360 important one but then the other thing that these court processes do is they reveal to what extent

01:03:31.800 there's there's just no biologically plausible mechanism for this anymore so one of the things

01:03:38.100 that comes up in the cedillo trial quite a bit is that you know mercury poisoning is a real thing

01:03:43.560 and mercury poisoning has real like measurable effects right like kids typically lose their

01:03:49.240 appearing. They have growth impairments. They oftentimes have like a small head compared to

01:03:54.200 their body. Like it results in uneven growth. One of the things that the anti-vaxxers are doing is

01:03:59.260 they're just sort of like shouting like mercury and vaccines. But like people who actually know

01:04:03.720 this stuff are like, no, we can measure mercury in kids. We can take their blood and measure how

01:04:08.840 much mercury they have. And we can measure their hair and their urine to see how much mercury

01:04:13.760 they're excreting. So if there was a problem with mercury exposure for these kids through vaccines,

01:04:20.100 we would find it. And like they've done tests where they've taken kids' blood the day after

01:04:24.600 they get vaccinated. And like, is there a shitload of mercury in their blood? No. And so it's just

01:04:29.840 like, no, if there was large scale mercury poisoning of the population, that would have

01:04:35.280 specific effects. It wouldn't just be like, oh, there's more kids with ADHD now. And like a bunch

01:04:41.760 of other random shit. Hmm. So the final chapter of this story is about where the anti-vax movement 0.99

01:04:48.440 is now. And to talk about that, we are going to watch a clip of RFK Jr. on a morning show.

01:04:58.820 He's got a new book. It's called Thimerosal. Let the Science Speak. Rosanna, keep going.

01:05:04.080 There's a mouthful here. It's a big, big title. Let the Science Speak. The evidence supporting

01:05:07.980 the immediate removal of mercury, a known neurotoxin from vaccines.

01:05:12.760 Robert Kennedy Jr., nice to have you here on Good Day New York.

01:05:16.380 So, obviously the book is out now, and you know that the critics are gunning for you

01:05:21.760 this morning, right?

01:05:22.660 I mean, they are really, they've really had a lot of terrible things to say about the

01:05:27.120 book and some of your research.

01:05:29.360 Well, nobody who's had anything to say about the book has actually read the book.

01:05:34.100 How do you know that?

01:05:35.100 Well, because there were 12 reviews of the book that came out before the book was published.

01:05:41.560 They attacked me for what they thought was going to be in the book,

01:05:45.700 which was basically a discussion of autism, which is not part of this book.

01:05:49.900 Well, tell us, do us a favor, set it up for us, thimerosal.

01:05:52.420 A lot of our viewers are not familiar with it. What is it?

01:05:54.800 Okay, thimerosal is a mercury-based preservative that is still in some vaccines.

01:05:59.600 It was removed by order of the FDA from all topical medicines after doing a lot of studies that demonstrated its toxicity.

01:06:09.780 CDC, at the same time, was recommending higher and higher doses of vaccines, and there was thimerosal in those vaccines.

01:06:16.960 And we started to see a giant rise in neurological disorders among our children.

01:06:21.780 Like autism?

01:06:22.380 Well, ADD, we don't discuss autism because it's such a radioactive issue.

01:06:27.760 So we just looked at the other neurological disorders,

01:06:30.860 ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay,

01:06:33.840 tics, misery, index, things that we didn't know as a kid,

01:06:37.660 but this generation, it's part of who they are.

01:06:40.160 I've got to go run this by from Time Magazine,

01:06:42.640 the editor at large here.

01:06:43.460 The problem is, Kennedy, he's wrong, utterly wrong.

01:06:46.640 So wrong, it's hard to even know

01:06:48.620 what the biggest piece of that wrongness is.

01:06:51.400 He says, as the levels of thimerosal have decreased,

01:06:55.040 we've seen this autism increase. So the cause and effect are not there. Thimerosal is going

01:07:00.840 away. Again, again, he's wrong on all of his science. First of all, the levels of thimerosal

01:07:07.600 are essentially equal to what they were before they removed it from pediatric vaccines. And

01:07:14.980 here's why. It was removed from pediatric vaccines in 2003, but that same year, CDC

01:07:22.100 recommended the flu vaccine for all americans and the flu vaccine contained very very high levels of

01:07:29.860 thimerosal i absolutely love when he's like yammering on the anchor going okay

01:07:39.140 all righty all right like i appreciate the anchors of good day new york for kind of holding

01:07:51.380 his feet to the fire in a way that like other media does not appear to do and like i hear him

01:07:58.200 about reviews before books you're on his side no i'm just like this is like a legit thing there's

01:08:05.260 been some press coverage recently about like oh yeah when my first book was released it had an

01:08:10.400 average of 1.1 stars yeah nice on goodreads i agree with him that people should not review a

01:08:16.960 book before they have read a book. But like, boy, oh boy, oh boy, that doesn't make him right.

01:08:23.000 The theme of this entire episode is the way that conspiracy theorists move the goalposts,

01:08:29.440 right? So we went from the Pertussis vaccine to the measles vaccine to mercury in the vaccines,

01:08:34.620 right? And we went from like, sort of every developmental issue to food allergies to autism.

01:08:41.180 And then what does he say in this clip twice? He's like, oh, we don't do autism anymore.

01:08:44.960 we're back to it causes everything and you'll also notice they mention it's sort of so fast

01:08:52.380 that you can't really like latch onto it but they're like uh in time magazine this guy says

01:08:58.780 that thimerizal was removed from the vaccines in 2001 so if it causes autism autism should be

01:09:05.940 falling and he's like no no no no it's in the flu vaccines well wait what wait a minute no i mean

01:09:11.580 it is, but most kids or like roughly 45% of kids do not get flu vaccines. And only around

01:09:18.820 somewhere between 10% to 30% of the flu vaccines have thimerosal because they're multi-dose bottles.

01:09:24.720 Most of them are single dose bottles, which don't have thimerosal anymore. The fucking balls of this 1.00

01:09:30.420 man to write a book in 2015 saying we demand the immediate removal of thimerosal when it was 1.00

01:09:38.720 removed in fucking 2001 his approach is like there's like an old mr show sketch where they're 0.89

01:09:44.940 sort of talking about two competing grocery stores and one of them is like a big store that moves in 0.98

01:09:51.220 from out of town and keeps running ads that are like unlike some stores we don't have any rats

01:09:58.200 oh yeah unlike this other store you'll enter with your kid and you'll leave with your kid your kid

01:10:04.820 won't get kidnapped in our store right like that's the level that he's operating at is sort of this

01:10:10.780 like continued assertion kind of level well that's that's what's so kind of striking to me about this

01:10:16.400 clip and about other interviews that i've seen with him it's like if you watch this clip you

01:10:19.840 can easily walk away from it thinking he like won the exchange yeah right like he seems very

01:10:24.680 confident he's like well they haven't even read the book which is like a pretty good argument

01:10:27.800 yeah the the the sort of the fundamental flaw in what he's saying isn't ever really pointed out to

01:10:33.780 with like the gravity that it needs to be this guy is telling us to remove something that hasn't

01:10:39.400 been in the vaccines for 20 years like that's like kind of a joke like it's a joke thing to

01:10:45.340 come on tv and fucking say that's a premise for a sketch but like i don't think the hosts kind of 0.97

01:10:50.880 know well enough to be like uh bro you're what are you even fucking doing with your career at 0.98

01:10:57.180 this point people people don't have like the sort of the context or like the confidence potentially 0.57

01:11:02.580 to just like point this out very clearly but like he seems very confident and he has this kind of

01:11:08.300 scoffing like well everything every single thing that he says is wrong and it's like that sort of

01:11:13.540 like rich guy legacy admission confidence that i think has carried him so far yeah what he needs

01:11:22.520 from like a media perspective is like he needs like jake tapper on a bad day yeah that guy will

01:11:29.760 sometimes get like a dog with a bone and be like, no, I asked you this. Yeah. Someone who has to be

01:11:35.160 willing to make it weird and uncomfortable. Or Katie Couric being like, sorry, what magazines

01:11:41.120 do you read? What newspaper? This is the fourth time. Name a newspaper. It's so fucking funny to

01:11:47.040 me that that's what did it with Sarah Palin. It's hilarious to me. It feels like it's the 0.98

01:11:54.200 Billy on the street approach to journalism. She just ran up to her and was like, name a woman.

01:11:59.760 so this marks the end of our journey into anti-vax bullshit i did not want to do this

01:12:08.320 but we're going to do another part of this specifically on covid stuff where we're

01:12:13.500 finally going to get to the vitamin d truthers and like the weird hydrosine i am so desperate

01:12:18.480 to know what the fuck that means still you can't you still can't google you still i'm not i'm not

01:12:23.700 gonna google but like i want to know but i want to end with a quote from jonathan berman's book 0.97

01:12:29.480 where he's talking about the anti-vax movement of the 1800s.

01:12:33.540 And this continues to be very useful today.

01:12:36.980 He says,

01:12:37.480 They started with a complex network of personal reasons for objecting to vaccination

01:12:42.180 and approached the science as a source of prestige that could be borrowed for their arguments.

01:12:47.160 From this viewpoint, no experiment can be well enough designed,

01:12:50.300 no controls adequate, and no evidence convincing.

01:12:53.260 Yeah.

01:12:53.720 And that is where we are with this, right?

01:12:55.260 They've literally had their day in court.

01:12:58.180 Yeah.

01:12:58.340 The entire scientific establishment has done everything they want and they refuse to take

01:13:04.220 yes for an answer.

01:13:05.680 I don't know, man.

01:13:06.820 This feels like a real, I'm trying to think of a, sorry.

01:13:11.320 You're trying to think of a joke to end with, but you don't have one because I bummed you

01:13:14.800 out too much.

01:13:15.580 That's right.

01:13:16.240 I'm just going to type in vitamin D.

01:13:20.760 Truth.

01:13:22.460 All right, all right, all right, all right.

01:13:23.940 Now you're holding me hostage.

01:13:25.220 All right.

01:13:25.880 Bye.

01:13:26.160 Bye.

01:13:26.500 Bye.

01:13:27.040 We'll end, we'll end, we'll end.

01:13:28.340 Thank you.

Maintenance Phase - August 01, 2023

RFK Jr. and The Mainstreaming Of The Anti-Vaxx Movement

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Transcript