00:11:40.500So in his forties, he developed a condition called spasmodic dysphonia.
00:11:47.020There is a very interesting and telling excerpt from a very good NBC News article about him, which I am going to send to you.
00:11:57.900Quote, his voice is gravelly and strained. It's gotten progressively worse since the 90s when Kennedy was diagnosed with spasmodic dysphonia, a rare neurological disorder that causes his larynx to tighten uncontrollably and his voice to halt and tremor.
00:12:14.480The cause of spasmodic dysphonia isn't known. Researchers think it might be genetic or a
00:12:20.920leftover disability from a respiratory infection or even stress. Kennedy, though, suspects a flu
00:12:27.800vaccine may be to blame. Quote, I haven't been able to figure out any other cause, he told a
00:12:33.440podcaster in 2021. In a follow-up email, Kennedy said he wasn't sure of the connection, calling it
00:12:39.840quote, my own speculation. His press person sent links to fact sheets included in manufacturer
00:12:46.400packaging of more recent flu vaccines that list dysphonia among dozens of reported,
00:12:52.340quote unquote, adverse reactions. The adverse reactions in those package inserts, which are
00:12:58.440legal, not medical documents, are based on unverified observations and, as they make clear,
00:13:04.600don't suggest the vaccine necessarily caused the reaction yeah this is like lawyer don't get us
00:13:12.040sued paper that gets put in this is a pattern that we will see throughout this episode where
00:13:17.840it's like he makes this wildly overblown claim i got this from the flu vaccine and then someone
00:13:24.580is like sorry can you support this at all and he's like yes yes of course and then he sends a
00:13:28.860bunch of fucking gibberish yeah and then when you press him more he's like oh well i never really
00:13:33.100said it was vaccine i'm just speculating michael i just looked in the sidebar next to this clip0.98
00:13:38.580that we just watched my algorithm fully thinks i'm jenny mccarthy like quote unquote doing my
00:13:42.680own research no the one that really got me i was like woof is uh robert f kennedy jr on club random
00:13:52.180with bill maher yeah i know i watched that one too oh god buddy why is this happening to me
00:13:57.640although i also learned researching this episode that spotify allows you to play podcasts at up to0.87
00:14:02.8603.5 x speed which bless bless spotify fucking youtube 2x is not fast enough for me my brain0.99
00:14:12.000is so broken by watching these fucking clips i'm like speed it up man get me to the gay frogs0.98
00:14:18.200yeah so this like stipulated this dude is a full cuckoo bird yeah so thank you that was the reason0.99
00:14:25.320for all that thank you for pulling me back to my notes that this is the whole reason for that
00:14:28.460little section. So there's a couple of factors in his life that led him to become the conspiracy
00:14:34.200theorist that he is today. The first are his personal circumstances, like just everything
00:14:40.400that happened to him growing up. So this is from a very good Rebecca Traister article about him.
00:14:46.120Oh, I like Rebecca Traister. I know, right? She's good. She's good. She says,
00:14:49.320if he were your uncle, you would likely consider that he is fighting some serious
00:14:53.140psychological headwinds. His own uncle was assassinated when Bobby was nine. He was pulled
00:14:57.860from school at 14 and flown to the deathbed of his father, also assassinated. His cousin
00:15:02.940drove a plane into the sea on the way to Bobby's sister's wedding. One brother died
00:15:07.040in a skiing accident, another of a drug overdose. His wife died by suicide. All this in a family
00:15:12.280in which his grandfather's dictum was, there will be no crying in this house. When his
00:15:17.540father was killed, his mother was pregnant with her 11th child? They had always had a0.98
00:15:23.760tumultuous relationship he talks in his autobiography about begging to be sent off to
00:15:28.500boarding school just like to get out of the house because they were fighting so much and after rfk
00:15:34.340senior is killed it seems like his mom just kind of like gave up and like foisted him off onto
00:15:40.900the rest of the family onto family friends it's it's this really interesting upbringing where
00:15:47.060he's kind of like raised by a village he also talks in his autobiography about starting drugs
00:15:53.640very young. He is later diagnosed with ADHD. So he's kind of self-medicating. It starts with like
00:16:00.560weed and alcohol, and then it graduates to Coke and LSD and eventually heroin. He is eventually
00:16:09.380arrested for possession in 1983 in South Dakota. He continues to attend AA meetings to this day.
00:16:18.000It's something he talks about like fairly movingly, honestly. Being in recovery is still
00:16:21.800a really big part of his life. Addiction makes sense as a reasonable coping mechanism to deal
00:16:27.020with all of this. You are losing both of your parents in some fashion. Exactly. And so the
00:16:33.900other way that he comes to these conspiratorial views, and I think this is actually very important,
00:16:38.660is that he starts from genuinely being correct. So in the 1980s, after he is arrested for heroin
00:16:46.860in possession he has to do 800 hours of community service he is scooped up by this guy who works for
00:16:52.840the natural resources defense council which is like a legal clinic that basically sues governments
00:16:58.520for polluting the environment he starts working at this organization and eventually it's like
00:17:02.400rises up through the ranks he is one of the people generally credited with cleaning up the
00:17:07.360hudson river this becomes like a big deal in his life he's like a big nature enthusiast he starts
00:17:12.340doing falconry oh when he's a little kid which is like such a rich people habit but like whatever
00:17:17.000it's like a nature thing he loves being outside fishing hunting all this kind of stuff sure
00:17:21.020falconry dressage hunting poor people for sport uh like he's really on the side of justice he's
00:17:28.100like a big like climate change guy the earliest interviews you can find of him on the internet
00:17:34.320are like him talking about like the fossil fuel industry and how they're you know they've captured
00:17:39.340the epa and like a lot of stuff is fucking true and i think that kind of crusader personality type
00:17:45.840combined with all of the other stuff that he's been through just makes him more susceptible0.81
00:17:50.040to to this kind of you know anti-establishment everything is a conspiracy type of thinking
00:17:56.080that makes sense to me and also it sounds like this is not a story of someone who
00:18:02.700is revealing themselves to be a cuckoo bird right this isn't like a scooby-doo villain
00:18:08.900peeling off their mask and being like ha ha it was me all along this sounds like a case of genuine
00:18:14.940like an unstable core sort of issue yeah this is a guy who has not had a steady environment
00:18:20.540yeah and has not had relationships that stick around regardless and has not you know what i
00:18:25.320mean like has just like had a tough road to hoe and also there's there's various reports from
00:18:30.520friends some of which are sort of rumors so i don't know how seriously to take this but0.68
00:18:33.680people say that he's always been kind of insecure about his intellect and insecure about being like
00:18:39.600one of the lesser Kennedys. The shadow that his father cast is so large. And I think he's always
00:18:45.280been aware of like the need to live up to that and a little bit insecure about like his ability
00:18:50.940to do so. And I also understand why that would give you a little bit of a chip on your shoulder
00:18:55.720when like people are criticizing you or saying like, I don't know about the science on that.
00:19:00.040you're like oh are you are you saying i'm not good enough yeah not that i'm expressing like a0.84
00:19:04.400huge amount of sympathy with nepo babies but like there there is the thing of like you're kind of0.99
00:19:09.520aware of the fact that yes you've gotten this push into these upper echelons and i think there's like0.96
00:19:15.640an insecurity that comes along with that yeah absolutely i mean i think like if you think about
00:19:20.180sort of like what are the life choices for someone with like very notable or exceptional or well-known
00:19:27.700parents, their options are go into that same line of work as your parents and get compared to them
00:19:35.420for forever, go into a different line of work. That's like a little bit more normie and have
00:19:41.020people roll their eyes at you doing some kind of tourism or not really having the same experience
00:19:46.880as everyone else or what have you. So I'm just like, I do actually have empathy for that. That
00:19:51.940seems like a tough position to be in. And it makes sense that people would act out in weird ways
00:19:57.040if it feels like all of their choices are going to be that heavily judged based on someone else's
00:20:02.500actions. I'm like, I get that. I had a thing a couple of years ago where my dad asked me to
00:20:07.260make him a mixtape. I put a bunch of Amy Winehouse songs on there because I thought my dad would like
00:20:12.360her. And my dad was like, this woman has like this beautiful voice. Like what's, what's her
00:20:16.220story? He had never heard of her. I told him like, you know, her struggles with addiction and sort of
00:20:20.260how her life ended and everything else. And my dad, who's like the kindest guy, he's like, Mike,
00:20:26.140i'm so glad you never had any like big talents because it makes it so hard when you're really
00:20:32.540talented i'm like dad there's probably another way you could have said that i know what you mean
00:20:36.300let's let's workshop the phrasing of that dad famously talentless michael hams look as as a
00:20:44.100member of the mediocre white guy community i am glad for my lack of privilege you were not a tag
00:20:49.580kid i would assume you were a tag kid oh uh is that like a pro we didn't have that oh talented0.80
00:20:54.480and gifted oh no i was not i was and am neither just ask my dad when i was reading about rfk jr
00:21:04.940and about like the rise of the anti-vax movement i was like okay we can do a whole episode just
00:21:08.460dunking on this guy and like this is what he says that's wrong that's what he says it's wrong
00:21:11.660that's not gonna be very interesting for us it's not gonna be very interesting for other people
00:21:15.280and so i want to talk about the tactics of conspiracy theorists and like how to recognize
00:21:22.200conspiracy thinking structurally so the first thing that conspiracy theorists do and i think0.95
00:21:31.300it's very important to start with this is that they fucking lie so i'm sending you another clip0.90
00:21:38.660from now on i'm speeding up the clips slightly just because i had to watch so many hours of this man0.93
00:21:46.040and i feel like the least i can do is speed through the clips that we have so this is at
00:21:51.340one and a half speed. I think most people don't know what my stance is on vaccines. I've never
00:21:56.780been anti-vaccine. Using that pejorative to describe me is a way of silencing or marginalizing
00:22:01.460me. Virtually every American would agree with my stance on vaccines, which is that vaccines should
00:22:06.900be tested like other medicines. They should be safety tested. And unfortunately, vaccines are
00:22:12.200not safety tested. They're not. Of the 72 vaccine doses now mandated, essentially mandated,
00:22:18.680They're recommended, but they're really mandated.
00:22:20.880American children, none of them, not one,
00:22:22.920has ever been subject to a pre-licensing,
00:22:46.160can you show us one test from any vaccine?
00:22:48.580pre-licensing safety test. And he said, I'll send it to you. I can't find one now. He never did.
00:22:54.760So we sued him. We sued Aaron Sirian. I sued HHS. And after a year of litigation and stonewalling,
00:23:01.020they said that they could not provide a single safety study for any vaccine that is on the
00:23:06.620childhood schedule, pre-licensing safety study. So anybody who wants to read that can go to my
00:23:11.980to the Children's Health Defense website and you can read HHS's admission that not a single one
00:23:17.020has ever been safety tested pre-licensing boy oh boy i just think we should safety test the
00:23:23.400vaccines it's really amazing as we're going through all of this how much the sort of style
00:23:29.640of talking here reminds me of watching so much of the montana state legislature this year oh really
00:23:35.740yeah that's like there was a um a guy who sponsored their drag ban and his whole thing
00:23:44.240was like just google it they're sexualizing our children just google it yeah here's a 200 page
00:23:48.720pdf that you can read that may or may not confirm my views but like we all know you're not gonna0.88
00:23:54.400fucking do that right either it does confirm my views and it's from a totally uncredited source0.88
00:24:00.760slash i just personally wrote it or it's not going to confirm my views and i'm just counting on you0.96
00:24:07.420not reading it to not know yeah that it counters my views and also the thing of like i i talked to
00:24:12.180dr fauci and he never got back to me yeah does that actually mean anything significantly like
00:24:17.000there's probably many people that fauci talks to and doesn't email back i called beyonce and she
00:24:22.340never called me back so if you watch a lot of interviews with him you find that he just plays
00:24:27.200the same tapes over and over again so this is like a spiel that he goes on almost word for word the
00:24:31.420same the claim is that the vaccines that we have now have not been tested against placebos so i
00:24:38.440started looking into the history of the anti-vax movement. And what you find is that the minute
00:24:46.680that we had vaccines, we had anti-vaxxers. So the first vaccine for smallpox is invented or like
00:24:56.480they're sort of testing out early versions of it in 1721. And the doctor who's working on this in
00:25:03.240boston has to stop the work because he's getting so many threats wow what we eventually in the
00:25:09.2201800s get like good vaccines for smallpox because this guy edward jenner has the extremely
00:25:17.000disgusting idea of injecting people with pus from sores of milkmaids that had cowpox you know it's
00:25:25.720like this milder form of smallpox but he's like why aren't the milkmaids getting smallpox that's
00:25:29.900weird it's because they got this cowpox thing which is like not that bad but also provides0.99
00:25:34.320inoculation oh boy to be fair to the early anti-vaxxers vaccines were fucking disgusting0.97
00:25:38.680yeah i was gonna say content note for pus injections i guess i know you have no idea0.98
00:25:44.500the stuff that i had to read and watch for this it's so fucking gross but anyway the the first
00:25:49.400vaccine mandate in the united states was in 1853 and there's a huge anti-vax movement there's a0.85
00:25:57.120very good Behind the Bastards podcast on this. There's a book called Pox about this. And then
00:26:01.680I also read a book called Anti-Vaxxers, How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement by Jonathan
00:26:06.980Berman. Terrible title. Very good book. Oh, good. So he talks about the earliest,
00:26:13.480like the first anti-vaxxers in the United States. Actually, this is long. Why don't I send it to
00:26:19.380you? Great. Much of the prevalent anti-vaccine sentiment of the era was laid out in 1854 when
00:26:26.680john gibbs published the booklet our medical liberties or the personal rights of the subject
00:26:33.380as infringed by recent and proposed legislation compromising observations on the compulsory
00:26:39.660vaccination act the medical registration and reform bills and the main laws end of title
00:26:46.160gibbs attacked the vaccination act of 1853 on several fronts complaining that it was an intrusion
00:26:53.000on personal rights, that it was written to benefit the medical trade, that it treated the populace as0.90
00:26:58.880too stupid to make their own health decisions, that it mandated a practice that was not universally0.86
00:27:04.760accepted among physicians, and that it had failed in some individual cases. I want to point out here1.00
00:27:10.700the arguments of anti-vaxxers have not changed for 170 years. This is exactly what we have now,
00:27:19.580right? What about my rights? It's benefiting big pharma. People should make their own decisions.
00:27:26.140There's a debate within medicine about whether they work. And look at this anecdote of something
00:27:31.840bad that happened to somebody who got a vaccine. The same shit forever. His complaint that1.00
00:27:36.640vaccination benefited the medical trade may have been related to his own occupation in hydrotherapy,
00:27:42.520a kind of quack medicine that involved treatment by bathing in, drinking, or injecting water.
00:27:48.460what giver of life and applying it to various parts of the body given the hygiene practices
00:27:54.500of the era promoting bathing was perhaps not the worst idea that he had but it was not an
00:28:00.060effective means of preventing smallpox infection i bet so uh we have someone who is making these
00:28:06.720like high level philosophical objections to vaccines like oh isn't it about my personal0.99
00:28:12.980liberties when it turns out they're just a fucking grifter who wants to sell you some1.00
00:28:16.600bullshit. And like, that's, that's the actual heart of their complaint. Last time we're going1.00
00:28:20.260to see this in the anti-vax story. I just wanted to put it here because it's the only time this
00:28:23.040has ever happened. Yep. Totally. It never will happen again. Got it. Check. And so what we have
00:28:26.820over the course of the next hundred years, as more vaccines develop is this, this cycle emerges
00:28:32.160where there's compulsory vaccination, a ton of people get vaccinated, the disease disappears.
00:28:38.220And then after it disappears for a while, people kind of forget how bad it was.
00:28:41.960Then you get the rise of these anti-vax orgs of like, it's about my rights, blah, blah, blah.0.98
00:28:46.100vaccination rates fall and then an outbreak happens it's like oh fuck we have smallpox again0.96
00:28:50.880look how terrible this is my god we forgot how bad it is then you get people getting vaccinated0.82
00:28:56.180again this is the cycle that we're in now like just to spoil the ending like this is what we're
00:29:00.960seeing now with measles yeah yeah yeah absolutely so this cycle continues until the emergence of0.65
00:29:07.340polio in the early 1900s polio is a poop spreading disease is one of the poop diseases oh congratulations0.63
00:29:15.380i know i had to look into poop again you keep picking topics i know that lead you back i thought
00:29:20.800it was airborne but it turns out it's poop and i had to read about poop forever polio and another
00:29:25.620thing that has kind of been memory hold about polio is that like the vaccine rollout for polio
00:29:31.120was a huge fucking disaster really so in the 1940s and 1950s there's a bunch of outbreaks of polio we
00:29:36.620had 58,000 cases in 1955 in the early 1950s they start testing a polio vaccine so the way the0.98
00:29:46.320vaccines work is they have virus material and then they blast the virus with formaldehyde which
00:29:52.880kills the virus so it's not live virus anymore but it is still like virus material and basically
00:29:59.020your body recognizes it enough so that next time it knocks on the door your immune system is like0.97
00:30:04.720i know you fuck off yeah right but yeah what happens in 1955 as they're rolling out this0.98
00:30:10.740mass polio vaccination is one of the batches they forgot to add formaldehyde what so a hundred0.99
00:30:17.960thousand batches of vaccine were just straight up like injecting kids with polio god so then this0.54
00:30:25.120just becomes proof positive for anti-vax people right that was like you were right all along
00:30:31.900Exactly. There's also, I mean, not to give the anti-vax people very much credit, but also people just in general are kind of weirded out by vaccines. I think because, you know, you're sticking a needle sometimes in an infant. I think a lot of people are like scared of needles in a way that they don't necessarily like realize or admit to. And most people don't know how vaccines work, right?
00:30:52.360It's like this weird, clear liquid that's magical, and you inject it in me, and like,
00:30:56.180maybe I feel kind of crappy for like a day, but then I'm immune to this disease that like
00:31:00.780maybe I haven't even really heard of, right?
00:33:41.380So this is another clip from RFK Jr.'s appearance on Joe Rogan.
00:33:49.160They passed the Vaccine Act in 1986, and the Vaccine Act gave immunity from liability to all vaccine companies for any injury, for negligence.
00:33:56.840no matter how negligent you are, no matter how reckless your conduct, no matter how toxic the
00:34:01.220ingredient, how shoddily tested or manufactured the product, no matter how grievous your injury,
00:34:05.580you, your vaccine company, you cannot be sued. So this was a huge gift for this industry because
00:34:10.660the biggest cost for every medical product is downstream liabilities. And all of a sudden,
00:34:16.840those have disappeared. So you're not only taking away that cost, but you're also incentivizing
00:34:21.500the production of many new vaccines. You're removing the incentive to make them safe because
00:34:25.920No matter how dangerous they are, they don't care because they can't be sued.
00:34:30.800I can't fathom that this is in any way accurate.
00:34:34.000Well, you don't think it's true that no one cares?
00:34:36.200We're just injecting just pure mercury into children.
00:39:21.100So another very good book that I read for this is The Panic Virus by Seth Mnookin.
00:39:28.020He talks about how this, just this documentary, results in like another increase in the size of the organized anti-vax movement.
00:39:38.740A bunch of parents start getting together in these organized groups.
00:39:42.340you know, they start doing newsletters and much more sort of political lobbying. And eventually
00:39:47.720they get together a bunch of lawsuits. So in 1978, there were two lawsuits against vaccine
00:39:54.820manufacturers. In 1986, four years after this documentary, there were 250 lawsuits.
00:40:00.260And they were totaling $3 billion in damages. And some of these cases won.
00:40:05.380Vaccines are not particularly profitable, right? They're mostly being bought in like
00:40:08.760very large quantities by like municipal governments and stuff. The drug makers are
00:40:12.960basically like, this is not worth it for us. What starts happening in the 1980s is the number of
00:40:19.540companies that make vaccines goes from over 20 to less than four because they're like,
00:40:25.780we can't afford the litigation. So in 1986, Congress passes a law with a name that will like
00:40:34.100ring in the fucking ears of the anti-vax people. The anti-vax people love the fucking name of this0.99
00:40:39.680law. It's called the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. Okay. Which makes it sound like,0.99
00:40:46.440oh, kids are being injured by the vaccines. Yeah, absolutely. And the minute you talk about this,
00:40:51.560they'll be like, well, then why is it called the Injury Act then? Oh, God. Basically what this does
00:40:55.780is it sets up this compensation scheme that RFK Jr. mentioned obliquely in his clip. There is
00:41:02.120actually a mechanism now that if you believe your child is harmed by a vaccine you can take your
00:41:07.860case to this compensation scheme it will be heard by a sort of panel of judges and it may or may not
00:41:13.980pay out awards so this does actually happen like in the same way that like did you get uh side
00:41:19.460effects from the covid vaccine not really like my arm kind of ate how about you i mean i have
00:41:24.440had a bunch of them by now but like in general i had like one or two days of feeling fluy
00:41:28.580but again with the scale it's like there are side effects of vaccines right and if you think about
00:41:34.780you know this is being given to tens of millions of people in the bell curve of side effects of
00:41:39.840vaccines some people really are going to be at like the far tail end so like there there are
00:41:44.340cases of kids fainting after they get vaccines kids vomit after they get vaccines like vaccines
00:41:49.180have side effects and like risks they're very small and they're they're extremely small compared
00:41:53.240to the risk of not getting vaccinated i.e getting measles or whatever else but like people really
00:41:58.440do have side effects. So when RFK Jr. says that there is this compensation scheme that protects
00:42:05.860big pharma from some liability for vaccines, he is telling the truth. However, he is also leaving out
00:42:13.660three critical pieces of context. First of all, he's ignoring all of the history that we just
00:42:19.620went over. The precipitating incident of this injury act was that there was only one producer
00:42:26.100of the pertussis vaccine left. And it's easy to forget this now, but like before we had a vaccine
00:42:31.320against whooping cough, it killed 9,000 kids a year. So Congress was looking at a context in
00:42:38.120which the options were either have no pertussis vaccine or set up this injury compensation scheme.
00:42:44.860Yeah. The second piece of context that he's leaving out is that these kinds of injury
00:42:48.600compensation schemes are like really standard throughout the developed world. Vaccines aren't
00:42:53.500like running shoes or something where if you buy it and it sucks or it harms you, you sue the
00:42:58.400manufacturer. Vaccines are mandated by federal and state governments. So around the world,
00:43:05.140what governments have done is basically said, look, we are making kids take this. So it makes
00:43:10.400sense that we would take on the liability. And the third and by far the most important piece of
00:43:16.340context that he's leaving out is that this injury compensation scheme, which we've now had for a
00:43:21.420couple decades has lower standards than legal standards. This actually makes it easier for
00:43:28.480parents to get compensation when their kids are harmed by vaccines in these rare cases.
00:43:33.400People have, in fact, gone to this compensation scheme and gotten payouts for harms of vaccines
00:43:39.740that are basically biologically implausible. Scientists look at this and they're like,
00:43:43.000there's really no way that a vaccine could have done this, but we can't really prove that a vaccine
00:43:47.820didn't cause this disability or this harm. And so we're going to pay this person out.
00:43:53.340That's something that would never happen if these parents were forced to come together as a group,
00:43:59.780file a class action lawsuit, go through this whole years long process, finally get an award,
00:44:04.400there's then an appeal, et cetera, et cetera. This is actually a better process if you believe
00:44:10.120that your children were harmed by vaccines. Man, I'm hearing you say all of this and I'm also
00:44:15.400staring at this screen of youtube and the very first comment is i am by no means a scientist
00:44:24.080but the second i saw they didn't have any liability i knew i wouldn't be taking it there you go
00:44:29.4001 000 likes yeah this whole episode is just an exercise in like how much longer it takes to0.92
00:44:35.840debunk this bullshit than it does to say it even this like his his interview with joe rogan was0.82
00:44:41.100three hours long we're gonna do a fucking two-part episode we've already been recording for like two1.00
00:44:45.580and a half hours we will get to like five percent of the bullshit that he said oh my god oh my god0.99
00:44:52.340just the flood the fire hose of nonsense at a certain point you just need to be like this is0.99
00:44:59.260not a person who is connected with reality and like everything that he says you should assume
00:45:03.260that it is false yeah unless somebody else like somebody credible somebody with a podcast
00:45:06.580says that it is true somebody with the pot you know look at a podcast credibility factory that
00:45:12.780is having a usb mic all right we have one more section the third thing that conspiracy theorists
00:45:21.660do they are obsessed with being silenced by the scientific establishment oh my god so the image
00:45:29.260that just popped into my mind when you said that was uh marjorie taylor green speaking on the floor
00:45:37.600of congress with a mask on that said censored oh yeah yeah jesus christ you're a sitting congress0.99
00:45:45.020person speaking in congress who's censoring you thank you and fuck you for bringing that back0.99
00:45:50.880into my brain sorry you're welcome but actually this clip does not deal with marjorie taylor0.99
00:45:57.900green. This deals with Nicki Minaj being silenced. Oh no, it's about her cousin's testicles. We're
00:46:03.280mostly reading this because I think it's funny, but I'm going to bring it back to the theme,
00:46:07.360don't worry. So this is from his Anthony Fauci book. By September of 2021, Dr. Fauci's power
00:46:14.840to muzzle his critics had achieved a mastery over free expression unprecedented in human history.
00:46:21.720Unprecedented. That month, with a single phrase, Dr. Fauci silenced pop icon Nicki Minaj after she questioned whether COVID vaccines might be causing problems involving testicular swelling. When CNN's Jake Tapper asked him about Minaj's claim, Dr. Fauci simply declared, the answer to that, Jake, is a resounding no. As usual, he cited no study to support this assertion.
00:46:47.780Where's the study showing it doesn't expand balls?
00:46:53.160Who cites literally tens of thousands of studies.
00:46:58.340I also love that he's saying that Dr. Fauci is like silencing her when all that happened was he went on CNN and they're like, is she right?
00:51:48.480And they start working on a legal case. So the standards are very different in the UK. It's much harder to sue companies, but they are convinced that, you know, this technological product produced by a pharmaceutical manufacturer harmed their children.
00:52:02.860So they are very enthusiastic about getting together a legal case and doing some sort of the equivalent of a class action suit against one of these vaccine manufacturers.
00:52:11.380In 1995, they hire a lawyer named Richard Barr who is going to organize this.
00:52:18.140There's like a lot of technical criteria.
00:52:20.220He's going to sue under this like weird EU law and he has to meet all of these criteria for actually getting the case to go forward.
00:52:28.780The problem that he has is that there's no actual proof of this.
00:52:32.020Like he has to gin up some actual evidence that these people were harmed from the vaccines
00:52:36.080rather than just like, oh, they say that they were harmed by the vaccines, right?
00:52:38.920So he finds a researcher named Andrew Wakefield.
01:03:12.180There are vaccination programs worldwide.0.93
01:03:13.960Why would thousands of researchers in Pakistan be willing to lie about the symptoms of vaccines so that American companies can get rich?0.76
01:03:23.240If vaccines are obviously harmful, we're talking about a conspiracy that involves easily 100,000 researchers.0.78
01:03:31.080And like all of these like the public health ministry of like Bangladesh has to be in on it.0.98
01:03:35.800Why the fuck would they care what big pharma does?
01:03:38.000Like, it doesn't make any sense the minute you get into, like, the specifics of how, like, the global vaccination distribution system works.0.98
01:03:51.540So, okay, there's all kinds of problems with the paper itself.
01:03:55.340It basically never should have been published.
01:03:57.700Six years later, in 2004, a journalist named Brian Deer, who wrote a very good book about this entire thing, starts looking into the background of this study.
01:04:07.980Nobody knows any of this stuff at the time about like the parents are specifically being
01:04:12.740recruited because they're already anti-vaxxers, right?
01:05:00.700These kids were brought in to the clinic.
01:05:03.340specifically one kid was flown there from the bay area of the united states what a lot of these kids
01:05:09.060have conditions that make it very difficult for them to be taken out of like comfortable
01:05:13.900environments it's like really stressful on these kids to travel right much less go into a clinic0.97
01:05:20.160where a bunch of tests are going to be done on them so this is super fucked up but like the kids0.59
01:05:25.320are given spinal taps which are like very painful a lot of the kids have to be held down by like0.96
01:05:30.420three people to get just to draw blood. There's never an ethics board that looks at this. There's
01:05:36.540eventually a trial. It's like a medical licensing board trial. It's the longest trial of this
01:05:41.400nature of its type in the UK ever. It goes on for more than two years, I believe. And eventually
01:05:46.900Wakefield is stripped of his medical license. Oh, wow. The reason why I wanted to talk about
01:05:52.940this thing of like the scientific establishment is trying to silence me is that the story of
01:05:58.500Andrew Wakefield is not a story of the scientific establishment being too mean to somebody. This is
01:06:03.480a story of the scientific establishment being too nice. Yeah, totally. One of the things that
01:06:07.840Brian Deer mentions numerous times in his book is how long it took him to get other scientists
01:06:14.000to admit that Wakefield was acting in bad faith. And this was a fraudulent paper. Everybody's like,
01:06:19.680no, no, no, no, no. He really believes this. He's doing his best. He may have just like kind of
01:06:24.020stepped over the line in a couple places and deer is like dude he's lying to you about his finances
01:06:29.680he's lying about the basic chronology of these kids he's lying about where they're based it takes
01:06:36.56012 years for the lancet to retract this paper what brian deer figures out all this funding all0.93
01:06:43.640this recruitment of the parents and shit in 2004 they don't retract the paper until 2010 oh my god0.98
01:06:51.380Also, keep in mind, not only was this extremely jank balls paper published in the first place, but it was published with a fucking press conference by his employer.0.99
01:06:59.920The scientific establishment was coddling this fucking guy and was like accepting just on its face shoddy work.0.99
01:07:07.480I mean, it was a shoddy paper to begin with.0.99
01:07:10.500What we see in the story over and over again is the scientific establishment not being mean enough to anti-vaxxers and fucking taking them at their word and taking them in good faith over and over again, even long after they have ceased deserving any assumption of good faith.
01:07:27.700Yeah, I mean, we've gotten a number of emails as a podcast from researchers and from, you know, professors and folks who've sort of served as the peer research peer review part of the research world who have spoken very articulately and passionately about how deeply flawed the peer review system is currently, right?
01:07:51.520That it's like sort of on a volunteer basis and there's like a lot of bias that comes into play in reviewing different people's work and different subjects of work, right?
01:08:02.360It makes sense to me that a system that has that many things sort of fall through the cracks, including like findings that strain credulity and don't really even pass the sniff test, right?
01:08:14.560Like, it makes sense to me that, like, you know, to hold folks to account would require a great deal of time and energy and effort and, like, people power.
01:08:26.240That I'm guessing these journals just don't have.
01:08:29.360Yeah, I actually, one of the reasons I wanted to do this episode is the anti-vax story is a story where, like, science gets to be the good guy.
01:08:39.300despite like the rest of the episodes of the show i'm actually like a huge believer in science and a
01:08:46.220huge believer in like the mission of public health i think that this is this is something
01:08:49.780government has to do this is something that we do together i think it's extremely important
01:08:53.320one of the the the main blind spots in science that we saw back then and we still see now is
01:08:59.980they want science not to be released into a political and social context right it's something
01:09:07.200you hear all the time, climate change shouldn't be a political issue. Yeah, totally agree. I'd
01:09:11.180love it if it wasn't. But it is. Yeah, I mean, it's such a it's such a tough one, because it is
01:09:16.060like, there's one side that's grounded in science. And there's one side that's like, sort of spouting
01:09:21.880nonsense. And I would argue it's even bigger than that, right? Which is like, there are claims that
01:09:28.220are based in sort of scientific observance, right? And on the other side, there is like profound
01:09:34.860anxiety. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So it's not even someone's making good points and someone's making
01:09:40.740bad points. It's someone's having a conversation about information and someone else is having a
01:09:45.160conversation about feelings. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. So we're just like not ever gonna
01:09:49.560meet if that's the if that remains the case. I want to end by circling back to RFK Jr. So
01:09:58.460So it's now 1998. Things are starting to happen in the UK. There's this huge wave of like both
01:10:05.340sides media. It's like, well, there's a debate about whether the vaccines cause autism, which
01:10:09.600like there never really meaningfully was. But this is the message that people are getting.
01:10:13.680This also is a key moment in the radicalization of RFK Jr. So we've talked about some of the
01:10:21.180factors, kind of the larger biographical factors that made him susceptible to conspiracy theories.
01:10:26.880But in the early 1990s, he has a kid who has severe allergies, and this ends up being a major component of his radicalization.
01:10:38.860So I am going to send you an excerpt from the foreword to a book called The Peanut Allergy Epidemic, which is like this really weird crank conspiracy book.
01:10:50.080But they ask RFK Jr. to write the foreword to it in like the second edition or something, and I'm going to send this to you.
01:10:56.880Quote, my son Connor was born in 1994. He developed chronic asthma, food allergies,
01:11:03.720and anaphylaxis that required 29 emergency room visits before he was three years old.
01:11:10.080His brother Finn, born four years later, also developed anaphylaxis. What were the chances?
01:11:17.780In 1998, I was among a group of New York parents who co-founded the Food Allergy Initiative to
01:11:23.920research cures for food allergies. In my own research, I learned that a host of other childhood