Is RFK, Jr. now pro-vaccine? Has MAHA capitulated to the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex?

“I am pro-vaccine, I’m going to support the vaccine program.” - Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on Jan. 30, 2025

Thousands of Americans who watched last week’s confirmation hearings for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services came away confused.

Why did Kennedy say he supports vaccines?

Why did he say he supports the measles vaccine and the polio vaccine?

Why did he say he’s not anti-vaccine and that he will support the CDC schedule of recommended childhood vaccinations?

For the same reason that Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, wrote a book called “I’m not Anti-Business. I’m Anti-Idiot.”

Scott Adams is not anti-business. He’s pro-business. He has no problem with businesses per se, with corporations or with capitalism.

But he is anti-idiot. He used comedy in his comic strips to ridicule the idiots because they were bad for business. They hurt businesses. He was actually more pro-business than they were because they were hurting the thing they claimed to champion.

Another way of looking at it:

Most Americans would say that they are pro-business while also being opposed to a business like Enron. There’s no contradiction. When we say we’re pro-business, we don’t have to qualify this by saying we’re against businesses that commit fraud, that lie to investors, that hide money from accountants by creating more than 100 entities and rapidly shifting money among them so that no one can tell how much money they really have, or buy an auditor’s approval by hiring the same firm as consultants (bribery, essentially).

It’s just understood. When we say we’re “pro-business” what we’re saying is that we support the ability of people to sell goods or services to other people, and to make a profit by doing it. This is normal business.

Enron was not a business. It called itself a business. But it was in fact a criminal enterprise, or at least that’s what it had turned into, because it was selling something that didn’t exist or it couldn’t provide and lying to investors about how much money it was really making and had in its accounts.

We can all say that we are pro-vaccine.

How could you be against something called a vaccine that prevents you from getting a deadly disease that you might otherwise get while not having any real negative impacts?

No one would be.

No one is against this popular idea of a vaccine, the common understanding of what a vaccine is, the kind of vaccine that Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions [HELP], is talking about when he talks about vaccines.

This is what Kennedy is saying when he says he supports vaccines.

Yes, he supports them. He supports vaccines in principle. Vaccines the way they’re supposed to work. Vaccines that have been found to be truly safe and effective.

On the measles vaccine: Who wouldn’t support a measles vaccine that would mean you could never get measles and there were no side effects other than maybe a slight fever?

But the question from the senator wasn’t about the MMR vaccine — the combination vaccine for Measles, Mumps, Rubella that is in fact the only vaccine for measles in use in the United States. It’s the MMR vaccine that was the subject of controversy related to Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s study and the CDC study that followed it that actually confirmed what Wakefield had only suggested: that the vaccine DOES in fact cause autism in 18-month-old boys.

Kennedy’s answer that he supports the measles vaccine means that he could very well push for a measles vaccine to be given as a separate vaccine (as Japan does) and for the MMR vaccine to come off the market. Japan, concerned about the rate of SIDS deaths, which had been dramatically increasing, took the MMR vaccine off the market in 1993 and the rate of SIDS deaths – unexplained and sudden deaths of infants in their cribs – fell from .44 per 1,000 births to now less than .1 per 1,000 births.

On the topic of the polio vaccine: Who wouldn’t support a polio vaccine that worked as people believed it works, as the media tells them it works? Who wouldn’t take a polio vaccine that caused no ill effects and that meant you could never get infected with the polio virus and couldn’t spread the polio virus?

That’s not what the polio vaccine now on the market in the U.S. does.

IPOL, the tradename for the polio vaccine administered to children in the United States, does not prevent infection with the polio virus and it doesn’t prevent the spread of the virus from one person to another. It’s not designed to do either of these things and the CDC does not claim it does.

In fact, Kennedy was clear in fielding questions from senators about what he intends to do as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

“I’m coming in here to get rid of the conflicts of interest with the agency and make sure that we have gold-standard, evidence-based science,” he said in response to a round of questioning by Democrat Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut.

The Democrat senators didn’t seem to understand. They didn’t catch what he’d said. But MAHA moms should have.

When conflicts of interest are eliminated, and “gold-standard, evidence-based science” replaces the junk science now used by the CDC, the vaccines will fall.

It won’t be because Kennedy isn’t pro-vaccine. What he says or thinks won’t matter. It will be the science speaking and it will be what the public demands once they know the truth that most if not all of the vaccines on the CDC schedule are not safe, and several of them aren’t even very effective in preventing infection or the spread of disease.