#1,047: Painfully, Angrifyingly Ironic

Every Monday and Thursday morning I go online, connect with an internet provider called CIRBI (Center for IRB Intelligence), and spend several intellectually challenging hours working with a wonderful group of medical specialists, research scientists and ethicists. Our task is rather clearcut and simple: vetting and improving on new, modified or continuing medical protocols and clinical trials . . . all with the purpose of making as sure as possible that the investigative drugs, devices or medical procedures before us are safe, show promise of success, and won’t cause undo harm to those men, women and children who volunteer to participate in medical trials. For every hour we are online, we spend on average at least 2 hours studying medical documents provided by pharmaceutical companies, university med schools, or independent laboratories. Out of all the many fields I engage in during any given week, this . . . belonging to and participating in an Investigational Review Board (IRB) . . . is, by far, the most intellectually stimulating and rewarding of them all. During any given teleconference, you might find us engaging in the study of anything between new chemotherapeutic drugs, advances in treating multiple sclerosis or Duchenne muscular dystrophy, or the development of new flu or COVID vaccines for next year. Working alongside all these brilliant, deeply humane folks over the past dozen years has been . . . and continues to be . . . a deeply rewarding and humbling experience.

One of the clinical trials we were vetting just this past Thursday involved a phase 2a, randomized, observer-blind study to evaluate the immunogenicity and safety of a mRNA-based multivalent seasonal influenza vaccine in adult candidates 18 years of age and older. If you don’t understand what all this means, don’t worry; it won’t be on your final exam! What you do need to know and understand is that every flu or COVID “season,” requires a different vaccine. Why? Because viruses change (mutate) from season to season. This change is called antigenic drift, which consists of small changes in the genes of influenza (or COVID) viruses. In other words, this season’s anti-flu virus will simply be out of “style” next season; hence, a new vaccine is required.

In all the years I have served on various IRBs, rarely – if ever - have we engaged in political conversation. Heretofore, politicians and bureaucrats provided the tools to make research possible, while the medical community provided the science. I regret to say that this inviolable separation has again and again been seriously breached.

Today, we are increasingly seeing medical dictates being handed down from on high by people who have neither a scintilla of medical training nor knowledge. What these people do have is a political agenda. Case in point: our discussion on the new mRNA-based multivalent seasonal influenza vaccine. Just 2 days before this meeting, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced his plan to cancel $550 million in funding mRNA vaccines being developed to counter viruses that cause the flu and COVID-19. You had better believe that as we discussed this new anti-flu virus, there was an air of frustration, anger and disbelief at the irony and stupidity of it all.

From where I sit, Secretary Kennedy knows as much about science, medicine, infectious diseases and virology as I do about Periplaneta americana (Linneaus) . . . namely, cockroaches. (Oh, and by the way, one of the most widespread fears in the world is called Katsaridaphobia": namely, the fear of cockroaches.)

In his statement announcing the drastic cut in virus research, Kennedy said his team had “reviewed the science, listened to the experts and acted. [T]he data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVIS and flu.” Precisely who these “experts” he consulted with is anybody’s guess. Last June RFK fired all 17 members of a committee that issues official government recommendations on immunizations, replacing them with people who have criticized the safety and efficacy of various vaccines. Kennedy also said his department was shifting the funding toward “safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate.” What in the world this means is anyone’s guess. He also claimed that mRNA vaccines can help “encourage new mutations and can actually prolong pandemics as the virus constantly mutates to escape the protective effect of the vaccine.” I gotta tell ya: from all I have read and learned over the years, viruses mutate regardless of whether or not vaccines exist for them.

In matter of plan fact, the development of mRNA vaccines to target COVID-19 was critical to helping slow down the pandemic and saving millions upon millions of lives. Peter Lurie, a former US food and Drug Administration (FDA) official told the BBC that Kennedy’s latest gambit would essentially force the US medical community to be in the position of “. . . turning its back on one of the most promising tools to fight the next pandemic.”

Kennedy has also expressed doubts about childhood vaccines, including those against polio and measles, that have been the mainstay of childhood immunizations for decades. Believe it or not, he has described the COVID shot as “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”This is, of course, stuff and nonsense. According to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the first eight months of 2025 show the most cases of measles diagnosed since the disease was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, as well as being the diagnose cases in more than three decades. As of July 7, 2025, 1,281 cases of measles have been reported, more than the 1,274 cases reported in all of 2019. As for polio, which had all but been eliminated by the year 2000, it is once again on the rise in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to a report on NPR, “Global health officials say there's real concern that those numbers could balloon and that polio could reemerge in other countries as well in the wake of the dismantling of USAID” (United States Agency for International Development). It should be noted that since all-but dismantling USAID, the Regime has announced that it will burn nearly $10 million worth of contraception drugs and devices in Belgium. Are we to believe that this is the way patriotic politicians bring down the federal deficit? Or is it merely pandering to fundamentalists and holy rollers? It surely has nothing to do with science, humanness, or smart medical practice.

For years before becoming HHS secretary, RFK, Jr. spent much of his time championing the hairbrained (and overwhelmingly disproven) canard that vaccines - most notably MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) - cause autism as well as other disorders in children. There are various arguments that have been advanced about whether or not this is scientifically der emes (Yiddish for “the truth”). One of the most famous (and fatuous) arguments was advanced by the British gastroenterologist/fraudster Andrew Wakefield, back in 1998. In that year, he published an article in The Lancet (the British equivalent of JAMA), in which he claimed that through his own “exhaustive clinical research”, he had concluded that the MMR vaccine definitely caused autism. Six years after Wakefield’s article, a London Times reporter, Brian Deer, made some devastating allegations about Wakefield’s research to the editors of The Lancet. It turned out that Wakefield had been given $100,000 by a personal injury lawyer to write the article, in order that some the solicitor’s clients could sue the vaccine manufacturer in the British courts. When it was brought out at trial that five of the eight autistic children anonymized in Wakefield’s study were actually clients of Barr, the doc’s name was struck from the UK’s medical register, and The Lancet retracted the article. (In 2020, journalist Deer published an utterly fascinating narrative of the case entitled The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Science, Deception, and the War on Vaccines. His text begins with an epigraph taken from Walter Scott’s 1808 work Marmion: “O what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive . . . “

Could Sir Walter have had a premonition that one day, a deceiver by the name of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. would come along to weave his own tangled web?

There is, I write with a mixture of both pain and anger, a deadly serious contagion in our midst; a contagion that no vaccine can staunch: to wit, the distrust - if not outright fear - of science and expertise. It is being forced upon society by both the self-professed “very stable genius” and members of his administration. This distrust has burrowed its way into several areas of government, from health care to trade, the economy, climate change and international relations. Social scientists call it denialism: I call it anti-intellectualism.

While anti-intellectualism and populism are nothing new in American life, there has hardly been an administration as seemingly committed to these worldviews. Anti-intellectualism is a general distrust of experts and intellectuals, the rejection of scientific thinking, education and the pursuit of knowledge. It can be expressed by dismissing art, history, literature and science as impractical or politically motivated. Remember back to the pandemic: Rather than allowing an extremely competent leader (Dr. Fauci) to provide Americans with prudent advice regarding the spread of COVID, IT suppressed the truth about the virus and the importance of wearing masks to contain the spread. The anti-intellectual efforts contributed to mass confusion and inefficiency in addressing the problem. Then too, remember back to the earliest days of the first IT go-around: one of the very first things he did was to announce America’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. So far as he and his fellow puppets were told to believe, climate change was a conspiracy on the part of left-wing socialists and communists . . .

Historically, anti-intellectualism has been a tool of the right far more often than of the left. Historically, progressives have fought against big business, big banks, Wall Street and the Blue Bloods. Ironically, today, the elites (at least the billionaires amongst them) are in control, and a high percentage of the least educated are on their side . . . supporting policies and practices which are frequently far more harmful than beneficial.

Undoing all the angrifying, counterintuitive shots across the bow of America perpetrated in the name of MAGA cannot and will not be accomplished the day Pumpkin Punim is replaced by someone else. That will take a long, long time; perhaps a generation. Nonetheless, I do find a measure of solace in the knowledge that because he is such a raging narcissist, and it’s never dawned on him that he’s mortal, he hasn’t taken the time to groom a successor.

I urge all physicians, nurses, scientists, bio-and medical-ethicists as well as caretakers and caregivers to gather, clad in their scrubs, whites and wearing their stethoscopes in whatever cities, towns, or regions where they may work or reside, and let it be known that we are all bound by the same oath: “First, do no harm.”