The US is a laughing stock currently - however much/little this chap is involved is irrelevant.
The US economy/way of life really only still stands because the world kinda believes in your ethos and credibility (eg usd as a global currency).
You keep going this way, and everyone is going to flee your influence and leave you a bankrupt mess.
You HAVE a technology moat, but that's rapidly eroding. I'd be surprised if it really survives this last term. The ongoing sanctions with your tech have driven other countries to make their own and be independent. You don't want others to be independent...
> A discredited anti-vaccine advocate who has no medical background and who has been disciplined for practicing medicine without a license will reportedly lead a questionable federal study on vaccines and autism
> Late Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that David Geier has been hired as a "data analyst" by the Department of Health and Human Services
So are they leading the federal study or are they a data analyst?
The purpose of this study is to allow the administration to say "Official CDC Study Concludes Vaccines Cause Autism". Then, the rebuttal to that statement will be not "No, there's no such study", but instead "yes it does, but the study was run by a discredited crank", which is a huge win because the target audience will stop reading after "yes".
The study doesn't need credibility for this purpose, it just needs to exist. I think it technically doesn't even need a body, just a title page and maybe an abstract to quote from.
So they put someone who is vehemently anti-vaccine at the head of a study, and when this individual finally concludes with data in hand that they're safe, what is the ultimate message and who does it affect, and how?
Just a reminder for the younger generation: Andrew Wakefield cooked up this whole mess in 1998 with study on a claimed link between MMR vaccination and autism. The study proved to be fraudulent and was retracted by the Lancet in 2010 and he was struck off the medical register. Nota bene: He wasn't against vaccination in general but suggested that the MMR should be split up into three separate jabs and he actually had a patent on separate jabs. Wikipedia is a good starting point to read up on the whole topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_and_autism
This is ultimately the downfall of all fascist regimes: a charismatic leader who values loyalty above all else will end up surrounded by sycophantic morons.
It’s really just a question of how much damage gets done in the meantime.
For anyone who voted for Trump because of anti-woke backlash or whatever is this also acceptable? We're tearing any credibility we have left as a nation to shreds in that name of what exactly?
Liberals are too aggressive and disrespectful pushing for vaccines, it is their fault. Conservatives are too independent minded to accept vaccines in that situation.
I literally read that last week about unvaccinated Texans.
I know this has been pointed out many times, but it's really hard not to when it's so un-ignorable: The size of the gap in standards between liberals and conservatives regarding "disrespectful" behavior, especially taking context into account, is really, truly amazing.
That expectations on liberals are typically much much higher. First, people will blame liberals for not being super perfectly uber polite. Then they turn around and accept atrocious behavior on the conservative side with a word of complaint.
Second, while liberal politicians share blame for every online asshole who is liberal, conservative online assholes are excused and their politicians never share blame for that. Even when actual conservative representatives act rudely, someone will point out both are the same, because some liberal online troll something.
Third, very consistently, bad or stupid behavior on the republican side is claimed to be fault of liberals who made them do it. It is always backslash and conservatives are not to blame for their own behavior. I never seen reversed claim. If an SJW feminist do something wrong, it is never "backslash" to misogyny or bad behavior on the conservative side.
I was not sarcastic. I really read that. It was in a normal serious journal when I googled about measles. I do not recall which one exactly it was, but the claims stayed with me. Both the knee jerk blame the liberals for what conservatives do and knee jerked "Texas conservatives are independently minded" as soft defense. There was about zero independent thinking involved (anti-vaccers just follow what their chosen authorities tell them) and it was the only mention of liberals in the article.
I find the claim absurd, but it was made in all seriousness.
Can we please stop calling "bigoted views against anyone not WASP, and a refusal to acknowledge current and historical oppression of anyone not WASP" "anti-woke"?
It's like "PC" ("I hate the gays and/or blacks and/or jews and I'm annoyed I can't just be open about that without someone calling me a bigot"), "pro-life" ("I refuse to allow a woman to make decisions about her own body and insist on trying to legislate my extremist religious views"), and so on.
I always thought "PC" was a funny term given the people using it are the most likely to be trying to tell everyone else what can/can't be taught in schools, what people can/can't publish, what people can/can't read in their library, etc.
Pretty much if an action can even so much as be perceived as helping someone, somewhere, with something in a way that they do not "deserve", then it is woke.
Clean air? Woke! Better consumer protections? Woke! Not having lead in our pipes? Believe it or not, woke!
The state and medical establishment already shredded their own credibility when they sent cops after people for going to the beach alone, and then sent out a proclamation that BLM protests were more important than the pandemic. Nevermind the intentional suppression of the lab leak theory and the smearing of anyone who supported it as a conspiracy theorist, including pressuring tech giants to silence and censor anyone who voiced skepticism or dissent.
These are the hills the state and medical establishment chose to murder their own credibility on, they've been dead for years now.
Right now, Texans in affected areas are having prioritization for measles vaccines. There are attempts to educate and the state opened vaccination centers in affected areas.
Locals are white and they are not taking much interest, but state is still putting more effort into it then into vaccinations in some black area with low cases.
If that's what the Biden had pushed for with the vaccine rollout that would have been absolutely fine. The problem is that they explicitly acknowledged that by prioritizing blacks there would be more total deaths than by prioritizing age and other vulnerable groups.
Yeah, no, these are pure excuses and rationalizations. And you know it. If you actually was preoccupied over covid, your only complain would not be anti racists protests - it would be overall excess deaths in read states.
When the only situation in which covid matter is the one where you can use it as a shield for anti-anti-racist stance while you are against vaccinations (which stopped the whole covid issue) and against any measure that cant be used for your favorite political cause ... then you are just making excuses.
Who the fuck ever said I was against vaccinations? I'm simply arguing that the governments and all of the health institutions of the western world burned their own credibility to ash in one glorious bonfire that they started themselves.
The original claim was that thimerosal did this, but it was removed from vaccines for kids in 2001 and the rates of autism diagnoses have not decreased as a result.
There is also no actual evidence that adjuvants have caused autism as far as I know, and the entire idea that vaccines cause autism was based on a fraudulent paper by someone who was trying to sell his own competing vaccine.
It’s specifically about the aluminium used as adjuvant which is considered as a culprit. They found more aluminium in the brains of autistic people[0] and I was reading something about how the aluminium adjuvants crossed the brain blood barrier quite quick.
There is for example the concept of aspiration when applying vaccines to not accidentally inject into the blood stream. A mistake here on a small human is literally injecting aluminium into his bloodstream which goes to his brain and deposits there.
Anyway more studies on something crucial as vaccine damage should always be welcomed, but the choice of personnel, yea doesn’t look convincing to say the least. On the other hand we have enough big pharma studies showing how great their products are and if the study is build up well I’ll take it.
I’m skeptical of this. It sounds a lot like the widely debunked thimerosal panic. I’ve heard of no credible studies on such cases. Could you provide a link to something detailing these cases?
https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/03/rfk-jr-hires-anti-vac...