Mister Measles and Chemtrails

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation. Among the most notorious peddlers of misinformation is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Joe Sommerlad at The Independent:

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has invited ridicule by announcing he is “looking at chemtrails” and their adverse impact on public health, reviving a long-debunked conspiracy theory.

RFK Jr was addressing the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense at an event in Washington, D.C., Thursday when he assured his audience “you have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House”. The health secretary, who chaired the organization from 2015 to 2023, also said he planned to bring “science transparency” to their concerns about inoculations.

Of the worst U.S. measles outbreak in 35 years, the RFK said: “We care about every child who dies from measles. They get headlines. I’d ask you to care about children who are dying or suffering or being injured by vaccine injuries.”

Then he added: “We’re also looking at chemtrails and the impact of emissions from aircraft, and those potential impacts on health.”

Kennedy was alluding to the chemical trails left behind by planes as they cross the sky, which are visible from the ground, resemble wisps of cirrhus cloud and evaporate harmlessly within minutes.

Make America Sick Again

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.The greatest spreader of vaccine misinformation is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Teddy Rosenbluth at NYT:

The United States has now recorded more cases of measles in 2026 than in any other year since the virus was declared eliminated in 2000, a grim sign that the country may be headed toward a new era in which the disease regularly sickens thousands every year.

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that there have been 2,318 confirmed cases of measles so far this year. The case count toppled the record set last year, when measles infected more than 2,200 Americans and killed two unvaccinated children. More measles cases have been reported in the United States in the last two years than in all the years from 2000 through 2024 combined.

Reversing course on measles would require a nationwide push to improve vaccination rates, a prospect that experts said seemed unlikely under the leadership of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He has halted funding for vaccine hesitancy research, downplayed the risks of measles and spearheaded a hunt for evidence that vaccines are unsafe.

In November, a panel of international experts will meet to determine whether the United States has lost its elimination status, which has long been viewed as one of the country’s crowning public health achievements.

Hafiz Rashid at TNR:

Americans now have to deal with a salmonella outbreak affecting eggs, on top of everything else.

Midwest Poultry Services is recalling close to 1.6 million white shell eggs and brown cage-free shell eggs produced in Texas, the Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday. The eggs in question have the potential to be contaminated with Salmonella enteritidis, and were being sold at Kroger stores in Texas and Louisiana, as well as Brookshire Grocery stores in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, and New Mexico.

The company has stopped distributing eggs produced on its Texas farms, according to the FDA. Salmonella enteritidis is a bacterium that can survive on the shell of an egg or inside it, and could cause symptoms including cramps, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, chills, ⁠fever, and headaches.

The salmonella scare comes after an explosive diarrhea outbreak hit the country from tainted lettuce produced by Taylor Farms. That produce contained cyclospora, a one-celled parasite, and has affected at least 41 states with over 12,000 possible cases. On top of that, the New World screwworm, a flesh-eating parasite, has infested cattle in Texas and spread to other states, causing an estimated $1 billion in damages.

The Trump administration has cut a lot of the programs that prevented these types of outbreaks in the past, and now the country seems to be dealing with one food crisis after another. Elon Musk’s DOGE cut a monitoring program for the screwworm and gutted the team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention responsible for responding to cyclospora outbreaks. Hopefully, the salmonella issue remains isolated, although the administration hasn’t inspired much confidence thus far.

RFK Jr said "We're going to give infectious disease a break for about 8 years"

Cyclospora, Ebola, Hantavirus, measles and salmonella outbreaks later, it's pretty obvious that infectious disease is not going to give *us* a break

And cutting funding for it was a foolish idea pic.twitter.com/mUcSmdK1WQ

— Neil Stone (@DrNeilStone) July 26, 2026

Disease Resurgence

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.The greatest spreader of vaccine misinformation is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Maggie Astor and Dani Blum at NYT:

Doctors around the country say they are seeing more cases of serious, sometimes life-threatening illnesses that vaccines have long kept at bay, including whooping cough and bacterial infections that can cause pneumonia or meningitis.

The concern among doctors comes on the heels of a resurgence of measles nationwide, fueled by distrust in vaccines that grew during the Covid-19 pandemic, and that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump have amplified. Public health experts have long seen measles as a harbinger: Because it is so exceptionally contagious, it can be the first disease to spike as vaccination rates broadly decline, and a sign of more to come.

For some of these diseases, national data show clear and substantial increases in recent years; for others, the increases are small, or there are anecdotal indications from doctors on the ground of increases that public statistics don’t currently confirm.

...

The onslaught of preventable illness and other health risks can feel overwhelming, doctors said. So can navigating the medical misinformation some patients recite.

“It just feels like you’re a tiny little boat with a giant tidal wave coming at you,” said Dr. Erin Charles, a regional pediatric hospitalist at Seattle Children’s Hospital. “And you might convince one family here and there.”

Many parents continue to refuse vaccines even after their child has been hospitalized with a vaccine-preventable illness, doctors said. Dr. Kirk said she had never had a parent in that situation tell her they had changed their mind and would have their child vaccinated on the standard schedule. Dr. Hofto said she could sometimes persuade families, but often not.

An episode of The Pitt takes on the antivax loonies.

Ebola

 Many posts have discussed COVID and pandemic preparedness.

Helen Regan at CNN:

An international effort is underway to contain an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Uganda that has infected hundreds of people and caused dozens of suspected deaths, as the United States looks to relocate a “small number” of its citizens affected.

On Sunday, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Ebola epidemic a “public health emergency of international concern.” The latest outbreak does not yet meet the criteria of a “pandemic emergency,” but WHO warned the high positivity rate and increasing number of cases and deaths across health zones point toward “a potentially much larger outbreak than what is currently being detected and reported.”

More than 100 suspected deaths have been linked to the outbreak in the DRC, the director-general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), Jean Kaseya, told CNN on Monday.

Trump withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization. 

A little more than a year ago, Emily Mullin reported at Wired:

A research facility within the US National Institutes of Health that is tasked with studying Ebola and other deadly infectious diseases has been instructed by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to stop research activities.

According to an email viewed by WIRED, the Integrated Research Facility in Frederick, Maryland, was told to stop all experimental work by April 29 at 5 pm. The facility is part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and is located at the US Army base Fort Detrick. It conducts research on the treatment and prevention of infectious diseases that are deemed “high consequence”—those that pose significant risks to public health. It has 168 employees, including federal workers and contractors.

RFK Stacks Vaccine Panel: Judge Smacks Him Down

Judge Brian E. Murphy: ORDER entered. MEMORANDUM AND ORDER on Plaintiffs' Motion for Preliminary Injunction. Plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary relief is GRANTED in part.(i) The Court STAYS the January 2026 Memo revising the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 705. (ii) The Court STAYS the appointments of the thirteen ACIP members appointed on June 11, 2025, September 11, 2025, and January 13, 2026. (iii) The Court further STAYS all votes taken by the now-stayed ACIP.(MBM) (Entered: 03/16/2026)

Federal District Judge Brian Murphy:

“Science,” like law, “is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge.”  Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark 29 (1997).  History is littered with once-universal truths that have since come under scrutiny.  Nevertheless, science is still “the best we have.”  Id.1   

“Procedure is to law what scientific method is to science.”  In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1, 21 (1967) (cleaned up).  Although sometimes seemingly tedious, “the procedural rules which have been fashioned from the generality of due process are our best instruments for the distillation and evaluation of essential facts from the conflicting welter of data that life and our adversary methods present.”  Id. 

For our public health, Congress and the Executive have built—over decades—an apparatus that marries the rigors of science with the execution and force of the United States government. One extraordinary product of that apparatus has been the eradication and reduction of certain communicable diseases through the development and use of vaccines.  In the words of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”), “[v]accines are one of the greatest achievements of biomedical science and public health.”2  Since the rise of vaccine development and usage in the early- to mid-1900s, “[t]he United States of America [has been] one of the pioneering nations to conceptualize and implement a robust immunization system that helped the nation tackle major epidemics.”3 

Since its founding in 1964, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (“ACIP”) has aided this endeavor by providing expert guidance on the clinical use of vaccines.4  The Department of Health and Humans Services (“HHS”), which indirectly oversees ACIP, formalized ACIP’s non-partisan, science-backed nature through ACIP’s governance documents.5  And Congress has, in turn, recognized the importance and value of having such independent experts involved in setting our national public health agenda by cementing ACIP’s role in the CDC’s issuance of immunization schedules, which—among other things—determines which vaccines are available to patients through insurers and government healthcare programs.6  This is all to say that there is a method to how these decisions historically have been made—a method scientific in nature and codified into law through procedural requirements. 

Unfortunately, the Government has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions.  First, the Government bypassed ACIP to change the immunization schedules, which is both a technical, procedural failure itself and a strong indication of something more fundamentally problematic: an abandonment of the technical knowledge and expertise embodied by that committee.  Second, the Government removed all duly appointed members of ACIP and summarily replaced them without undertaking any of the rigorous screening that had been the hallmark of ACIP member selection for decades. Again, this procedural failure highlights the very reasons why procedures exist and raises a substantial likelihood that the newly appointed ACIP fails to comport with governing law. 

Today, faced with Plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary relief, the Court concludes that Plaintiffs are likely to succeed in showing that the reconstitution of ACIP and the January 2026 changes to the childhood immunization schedule violate the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”).  For the reasons stated below, the Court will grant Plaintiffs’ motion in part.  

Vaccines: Information Gaps and Disinformation

 Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.The greatest spreader of vaccine misinformation is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Lauren Weber, Caitlin Gilbert, Dylan Moriarty and Joshua Lott at WP:

The share of U.S. counties where 95 percent or more of kindergartners were vaccinated against measles — the number doctors say is needed to achieve overall protection for the class, known as “herd immunity” — has dropped from 50 percent before the pandemic to 28 percent, according to The Post’s examination of the public records from 44 states and the District of Columbia.

Most of the counties that previously lacked herd immunity for kindergarten classrooms got worse, according to the Post analysis, which in most cases compared the academic years 2018-2019 and 2024-2025.

 ...

Data collection efforts by states are uneven. Public health authorities in some places are flying blind, without adequate data to guide policy decisions, The Post found, because vaccination records have not been uniformly collected. Many school districts are unable to keep track of which kids have received shots.

In Kentucky, state data shows that the measles vaccine rate in Jefferson County, which includes Louisville, was below 60 percent for kindergartners.

Data collection efforts by states are uneven. Public health authorities in some places are flying blind, without adequate data to guide policy decisions, The Post found, because vaccination records have not been uniformly collected. Many school districts are unable to keep track of which kids have received shots.

In Kentucky, state data shows that the measles vaccine rate in Jefferson County, which includes Louisville, was below 60 percent for kindergartners.

“It leaves parents very confused about who they should trust and what information they should rely on,” she said. “And ultimately, often families are choosing not to vaccinate because that feels safer, or it’s easier to not do something out of fear than it is to choose to make a decision.”

The federal vaccine advisory committee Kennedy remade with his appointments voted in December to eliminate a long-standing recommendation for every newborn to receive a hepatitis B shot, which the CDC approved. And more changes could be ahead for the vaccine schedule.

The number of parents questioning vaccine safety in Anita Chandra-Puri’s Chicago pediatric practice has doubled in the last few years, she said. Many of them are highly educated, but they keep coming across misleading information on social media, she said.

Across schools in Chicago, the measles vaccination rate has dropped 6 percent on average since the pandemic.

“They have access to every resource, and they think that they can become the expert at something because they’ve seen it multiple times” on social media, Chandra-Puri said.

 

Malevolence and Incompetence at HHS

Many posts have discussed the chaos at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Apoorva Mandavilli and Sheryl Gay Stolberg at NYT:

The Trump administration on Saturday raced to rescind layoffs of hundreds of scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who were mistakenly fired on Friday night in what appeared to be a substantial procedural lapse.

Among those wrongly dismissed were the top two leaders of the federal measles response team, those working to contain Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, members of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, and the team that assembles the C.D.C.’s vaunted scientific journal, The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

After The New York Times reported the dismissals, two federal health officials said on Saturday that many of those workers were being brought back. The officials spoke anonymously in order to disclose internal discussions.

The mistakes rocked an agency already in tumult, and which has been a particular target of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The C.D.C. lost about a third of its staff in April; many were rehired weeks later.

AP FightsVaccine Misinformation

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.The greatest spreader of vaccine misinformation is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

From AP:

In response to perplexing White House declarations on autism, a collaborative AP team delivered essential, comprehensive reporting that pushed back on misinformation. Weeks of careful planning, including prep work on precise wording for all formats, ensured facts remained at the core. A powerful collaboration between Washington teams, Health and Science, and Standards editors enabled rapid yet accurate coverage.

The team aggressively, yet sensitively, covered the breaking news, highlighting that Trump’s statements ignored established science. A smart lineup of follow-up stories addressed the aftershocks: a fact-focused piece, a feature on pregnant women’s confusion, a political analysis of the impact on RFK Jr.’s movement, and an exclusive interview with the maker of a drug Trump touted. This unmatched speed and scope resulted in stories dominating APNews.com with 464,000 page views and a YouTube livestream garnering nearly 500,000 views, showcasing the power of thorough, fact-based journalism.

Submission Links

• https://apnews.com/article/tylenol-cause-autism-trump-kennedy-0847ee76eedecbd5e9baa6888b567d66
• https://apnews.com/article/trump-doctor-vaccines-autism-tylenol-covid-disinfectants-22f5bcfe2fd3c18fdd412419941541f8
• https://apnews.com/article/autism-tylenol-pregnancy-mothers-trump-fact-check-6e03fb199acf0c5ce313536c53424788
• https://apnews.com/article/maha-activists-trump-autism-vaccines-tylenol-medical-6fca8bb1b436bb76d1a223adc0f56112
• https://apnews.com/article/trump-tylenol-vaccines-pregnancy-8c8c44e40657a2338533c59ebefaa83a
• https://apnews.com/article/autism-trump-pregnancy-tylenol-65e9c04d05014345364212ecaec4ee3e
• https://apnews.com/article/trump-tough-it-out-pregnancy-women-pain-acetaminophen-dc48caddabef2f086a50b48c5b86a3ca
• https://www.youtube.com/watch

RFK v. Pasteur

 Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.The greatest spreader of vaccine misinformation is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Sara Ashley O’Brien at WSJ:

Why do people get sick? Ask Robert F. Kennedy Jr., America’s highest-ranking public-health official, and he may chalk it up to their terrain.

For centuries, doctors and scientists have agreed that germs are the underlying cause of infectious diseases. Someone coughs on you, you get a cold. Drink raw milk, and you might end up with E. coli or listeria. This widely accepted truth is the basis of pasteurization, vaccines and antibiotics.


But Kennedy has long embraced ideas rooted in theories that run counter to germ theory and help explain his deep mistrust of vaccines and his efforts to remake the U.S. public-health system. Those efforts came to a head last week as the Trump administration fired the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other top officials quit their jobs in the midst of disagreements with Kennedy vaccine policy. On Thursday, Kennedy testified before a heated Senate panel about the administration’s health agenda and the recent staffing shake-ups.

“Secretary Kennedy is committed to building the healthiest generation in American history,” said Andrew G. Nixon, director of communications at the Department of Health and Human Services in a statement. “He is working to end the chronic disease epidemic and restoring trust in public health through transparency, gold-standard science, and evidence-based medicine.”

As chemist Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of disease was gaining traction in the 1800s, his rival Antoine Béchamp raised an alternative explanation: Disease, he said, was caused by the state of the body, which he referred to as the “terrain.” In his view, a strong inner environment, bolstered by nutritional food and a healthy lifestyle, could fend off illness.

Most doctors and scientists rejected Béchamp’s view, and the science of germ theory, bolstered by a German doctor named Robert Koch who identified bacteria that caused specific diseases like anthrax and tuberculosis, became a foundational piece of modern public health. Today scientists recognize that even healthy people can get sick when a virus infects them. But Béchamp retained a fringe following, one that has spread in the internet era. Kennedy’s critiques of germ theory reflect the persistent support of that sentiment.

Pandemic Preparedness

Many posts have discussed COVID and pandemic preparedness.

Britt Lampert and Anemone Franz at  The Hill:

The White House’s pandemic preparedness team has quietly withered to a single part-time employee.

Last month, Dr. Gerald Parker, the top White House pandemic preparedness official, resigned as senior director for the National Security Council’s Biosecurity and Pandemic Response directorate. His exit drew needed, though still scant, attention to a troubling reality: the biosecurity office now has no full-time staff, and the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR), which some headlines mistakenly claimed Parker led, has sat empty since late June.

This collapse comes as pandemic preparedness and public health programs are being dismantled, measles outbreaks in undervaccinated communities reach a 33-year high, and H5N1 bird flu spreads through U.S. farms. The White House offices responsible for coordinating the U.S. government’s response to biological threats have effectively vanished.

Congress established OPPR in 2022 with broad bipartisan support to coordinate and strengthen domestic pandemic preparedness and response. It worked alongside the National Security Council’s Global Health Security and Biodefense directorate (renamed Biosecurity and Pandemic Response, or BPR, in 2025), which focused on global threats to national security.

As OPPR’s first (and so far only) director, Maj. Gen. Paul Friedrichs told Congress the office was meant to build on “the foundation laid by multiple administrations over the past twenty years which have recognized that biological threats are increasing in frequency and impact.

 Jennifer Calfas, Josh Dawsey and  Sabrina Siddiqui at WSJ:

As President Trump sat with top donors at his New Jersey golf club this month, he made a private admission: He believed the coronavirus vaccine was one of the biggest accomplishments of his presidency, but he couldn’t bask in it.

Trump told donors at a dinner—who were paying $1 million to be there—that he wished he could talk more about Operation Warp Speed, the government program he initiated that helped expedite the development of the vaccine, attendees said. The guests included Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla, whose company developed one of the first Covid-19 vaccines.

Trump’s private comments illuminate the fraught politics around vaccines that the White House is confronting, which reached a boiling point Wednesday after the administration fired the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other top officials quit their jobs in the midst of disagreements with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccine policy.

The agency is now facing a crisis. Longtime officials there said Kennedy is ignoring scientific findings to pursue an antivaccine agenda, threatening public health as the calendar gets closer to winter and seasonal outbreaks of Covid and other viruses.

How Not to Write a Government Report

Robert Kennedy's MAHA initiative issued a report full of bogus citations and AI-generated content.

As Jeffrey A. Singer, Terence Kealey, and Bautista Vivanco explain at Cato, it also makes a lot of foolish mistakes.

The second sentence of the introduction reads: “Today’s children are the sickest generation in American history in terms of chronic disease, and these preventable trends continue to worsen each year, posing a threat to our nation’s health, economy, and military readiness.” Yet death rates among children up to age five continue to fall, so they can’t be that sick. Could it be that more illnesses are being diagnosed today than in the past?

Sentences 3 and 4 simply repeat the message of sentences 1 and 2, while sentence 5 is nonsense: “Over the past century, U.S. GDP has grown over 30,000%.” Two of us may only be MDs, but we’re better at math than the MAHA Commission. In 1925, real GDP (2017 dollars) was about $977 billion. Real GDP (2017 dollars) in 2023 was about $22.7 trillion (according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis). The final figures for 2025 are not available yet, but 2023 serves as a useful benchmark. It’s easy to calculate that GDP has grown by 2,223 percent.

Page nine of the report claims over 40 percent of US children have a chronic health condition, citing the 2018–2019 National Survey of Children’s Health. But the survey doesn’t measure chronic conditions—it tracks current or lifelong conditions from a list that includes issues like “current anxiety problems,” “current conduct problems,” “current substance use disorder,” and “current concussion or head injury.” Many of these are temporary, and the combined prevalence reported in the survey is lower than the 40 percent figure used in the report.

Page 12 claims autism affected 1 to 4 in 10,000 children in the 1980s. But the 2007 source it cites warns that such estimates may understate prevalence due to factors like shifting criteria, increased awareness, and changing services.

On page 13, the report warns of the rise in childhood cancer rates but fails to mention that from 2001 to 2021, the cancer death rate for youth ages 0–19 years in the United States declined 24 percent, from 2.75 to 2.10 per 100,000.

The report claims on page 15 that “between 1997 and 2018, childhood food-allergy prevalence rose 88%,” based on survey data in which a parent or adult answered whether the child had a food or digestive allergy in the past year. But increased awareness over the past two decades likely led to more frequent recognition and reporting of symptoms that might have previously been overlooked or misattributed.

Even if we take the survey results at face value, the report selectively highlights only the alarming trend. It ignores the same survey’s findings that asthma attacks fell by 16.7 percent, hay fever and respiratory allergies dropped by 16 percent, and ear infections declined by 38 percent. Instead of reporting the absolute change—from 3.4 percent in 1997 to 6.4 percent in 2018—the report opts for the more dramatic “88% increase.”

Also on page 15, Footnote 43 is supposed to link the reader to an article titled “Prevalence of pediatric inflammatory bowel disease in the United States”; instead, the link directs us to a different piece titled “Model of Urgency for Liver Transplantation in Hepatocellular Carcinoma.”

Yet again on that page, the report claims celiac disease in children has increased fivefold since the 1980s but ignores that improved diagnostics and awareness likely contributed. One of its own cited studies states this clearly in the abstract.

On page 16, the commission claims that chemical exposure may be driving higher rates of chronic childhood disease, citing three sources. But none provides strong evidence to support that conclusion.

One is a literature review that clearly notes the lack of conclusive research on the effects of low-dose chemical mixtures. Another is an observational study focused on children with cancer in Nebraska, which offers no generalizable findings. The third is an editorial centered on animal and cell studies, not human children.

These are just a few inaccuracies we readily identified in the first 16 pages of the 72-page report. When a report is rushed and driven more by preconceived conclusions than by careful analysis, this is precisely the kind of quality one should expect.

Measles and Misinformation

 Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.  The greatest spreader of vaccine misinformation is the secretary of Health and Human Services.

 Jonathan Corum and Teddy Rosenbluth at NYT:

Measles continues to spread in West Texas and New Mexico, with more than 250 people infected — many unvaccinated school-age children. Two cases in Oklahoma, for which state officials have not provided a location, have also been linked to these outbreaks. Eleven other states have reported isolated measles cases, typically linked to international travel.

Teddy Rosenbluth at NYT:

In a sweeping interview, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, outlined a strategy for containing the measles outbreak in West Texas that strayed far from mainstream science, relying heavily on fringe theories about prevention and treatments.

He issued a muffled call for vaccinations in the affected community, but said the choice was a personal one. He suggested that measles vaccine injuries were more common than known, contrary to extensive research.

He asserted that natural immunity to measles, gained through infection, somehow also protected against cancer and heart disease, a claim not supported by research.

He cheered on questionable treatments like cod liver oil, and said that local doctors had achieved “almost miraculous and instantaneous” recoveries with steroids or antibiotics.

Tommy Christopher at Mediaite:

A viral clip of that exchange was hit with a “Community Note” on X/Twitter that read “According to the CDC, MMR vaccinations are an effective and safe way to prevent measl

In fact, RFK Jr.’s carefully-worded claim about measles deaths is wildly misleading — there have actually been zero deaths from the vaccine among healthy people — and the deaths that have occurred have been in people for whom vaccination is already not recommended:

There have been no deaths shown to be related to the MMR vaccine in healthy people. There have been rare cases of deaths from vaccine side effects among children who are immune compromised, which is why it is recommended that they don’t get the vaccine.

The Tuesday night clip was the second of a two-part Hannity interview from a Florida Steak ‘N Shake.

Warren Commission Seance?

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna  (R-FL) is heading a congressional task force on the JFK assassination. Michael Luciano at Mediate:

“What sort of witnesses will you expect to have at your hearings, at least the first ones in March that be department heads, former employees of various agents?” a reporter asked.

Luna responded by saying the task force would seek to consult with some of the doctors who examined Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy from a book depository window. She also suggested bringing in members of the Warren Commission, which President Lyndon Johnson formed via executive order:

Based on what we’re actually looking to do with the JFK investigation, I’m looking to actually bring in some of the attending physicians at the initial assassination. Then also people that had been on the various commissions looking into it, like the Warren Commission looking into the initial assassination. There’s been conflicting evidence. And I think that even the FBI at the time reported some anomalies in the initial autopsy at Bethesda, Maryland. All of those seem to have been rinsed and repeated in the media to push a certain narrative that we don’t agree with.

The Warren Commission had seven members, all of whom are dead, as are the majority of counsels who worked on it. Also deceased are the doctors at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas – Charles Baxter, Robert McClelland, and Malcolm Perry – who examined Kennedy when he was brought in after being mortally wounded. Later that day, an autopsy was performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital by Drs. James Humes and Thornton Boswell, who are also dead.

The commission found no credible evidence to suggest there were multiple shooters, as some have claimed.

LBJ on the Assassination of RFK

Lyndon B. Johnson, Address to the Nation Following the Attack on Senator Kennedy, June 5, 1968 Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/237145

Tonight this Nation faces once again the consequences of lawlessness, hatred, and unreason in its midst. It would be wrong, it would be self-deceptive, to ignore the connection between that lawlessness and hatred and this act of violence. It would be just as wrong, and just as self-deceptive, to conclude from this act that our country itself is sick, that it has lost its balance, that it has lost its sense of direction, even its common decency.

Two hundred million Americans did not strike down Robert Kennedy last night any more than they struck down President John F. Kennedy in 1963 or Dr. Martin Luther King in April of this year.

But those awful events give us ample warning that in a climate of extremism, of disrespect for law, of contempt for the rights of others, violence may bring down the very best among us. A Nation that tolerates violence in any form cannot expect to be able to confine it to just minor outbursts.

My fellow citizens, we cannot, we just must not, tolerate the sway of violent men among us. We must not permit men who are filled with hatred, and careless of innocent lives, to dominate our streets and fill our homes with fear.

We cannot sanction the appeal to violence, no matter what its cause, no matter what the grievance from which it springs.

There is never—and I say never—any justification for the violence that tears at the fabric of our national life; that inspires such fear in peaceful citizens that they arm themselves with deadly weapons; that sets citizen against citizen or group against group.

A great nation can guarantee freedom for its people and the hope of progressive change only under the rule of law. So let us, for God's sake, resolve to live under the law.

Let us put an end to violence and to the preaching of violence.

"No Surprises" Letters

 

I'm really glad that vice presidential candidate, Nicole Shanahan, tweeted this because it gives me a chance to talk about how reporting is done. This is called a "no surprises" letter and was my final attempt (after a half dozen interview requests and questions to the RFK… https://t.co/eHED1LYGHq

— Brandy Zadrozny (@BrandyZadrozny) May 24, 2024

Historical Figures Who Outlived JFK

Today is the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It is fascinating to consider some of the historical figures who outlived him.  The point here is not to satisfy a morbid curiosity, but to make a point about history.  "The past is never dead," William Faulkner wrote, "It's not even past."  Memories of the past shape current events, and people who took part in historic events often live long enough to reshape those memories.

Just hours before he died, Kennedy called former vice president John Nance Garner (who served under Franklin Roosevelt from 1933 to 1941) to wish him a happy 95th birthday.  Here are other major figures who were still alive on the fateful day:

• Winston Churchill (d. 1965)
• Charles deGaulle (d. 1970)
• Herbert Hoover  (d. 1964)
• Harry Truman  (d. 1972)
• Dwight Eisenhower (d. 1969)
• Douglas MacArthur (d. 1964)
• Gen. Bernard Montgomery (d. 1976)
• Adm. Chester Nimitz (d. 1966)
• Hellen Keller (d. 1968)
• Margaret Sanger (d. 1966)
• Upton Sinclair (d. 1968)
• Norman Thomas (d. 1968)
• John Steinbeck (d. 1968)
• Bernard Baruch (d. 1965)
• Joseph P. Kennedy (d. 1969)chu

Oswald Acted Alone

Today is the 60th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.

Oswald acted alone.  The more education you have, the more likely you are to know that. Gallup:

The latest poll, conducted Oct. 2-23, finds majorities of most key demographic groups believing that more than one person was involved in Kennedy’s assassination. Americans with postgraduate education are the exception, with more who say a lone gunman (50%) rather than multiple people (44%) killed the president. This was not the case when this question was last asked in 2013.

The views of college graduates (those without any postgraduate education) are closer to those of Americans with at least some postgraduate education compared with those without a college degree. Still, 57% of college graduates think there was a conspiracy among multiple parties, while 41% say Oswald acted alone.

Although majorities of all party groups believe Kennedy’s assassination involved a conspiracy, that view is less prevalent among Democrats (55%) than Republicans (71%) and independents (68%). Conversely, Democrats (39%) are more likely than Republicans (25%) and independents (25%) to support the idea of a lone gunman.

Paul Roderick Gregory at WSJ last year:

Less than a year after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Warren Commission released its findings to the public: JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, who acted alone. The new tranche of files the National Archives released last week contains nothing that calls that conclusion into question. But many Americans do anyway.

When the Warren report came out in September 1964, some 80% agreed with its finding that Oswald acted alone. Today more than 60% don’t believe Oswald acted alone. The persistent belief in a conspiracy has been fueled by the 400 books published on the Kennedys, most on the multitude of conspiracy theories revolving around Cuba, the Soviet Union, the Mafia, Texas oil interests, Lyndon B. Johnson and so on. One of the most amusing, in an effort to shift the blame from the leftist Oswald, lists my father and me as part of a White Russian conspiracy.


We did have a connection with Oswald. My father, a native Russian speaker, taught the language at a public library in Fort Worth, Texas. Oswald wanted a certificate of fluency in Russian and invited my father and me to his brother’s house. There we met Lee’s wife, Marina, for whom my father translated after the assassination. Moscow and some American leftists accused him of mistranslating her to shift the blame to Lee. Lee’s brother identified me as Lee and Marina’s only friend during their stay in Forth Worth.

I never doubted that Lee did it, or that he did it alone, when I saw his image on the TV screen as he was brought into Dallas police headquarters. As I told the Secret Service the next day, the Lee Harvey Oswald I knew would be the last person I would recruit for a conspiracy. He was genetically incapable of being either a leader or a follower.

The Warren report itself is a masterpiece in careful investigation. Its agents interviewed almost everyone who crossed paths with the Oswalds, down to fellow passengers on Lee’s bus to Mexico City and a landlord who once knocked on their door. The explanation of the sustained rejection of its findings rests with incredulity that history-changing events can happen by chance, especially through the actions of a nobody like Lee Harvey Oswald—a paranoid, delusional high-school dropout who expected his Historic Diary to make him an intellectual figure of the left.

I have a quite different picture as I remember waving goodbye to Lee and Marina as they boarded the night bus from Fort Worth to Dallas on Nov. 22, 1962, exactly one year before the assassination. Lee had all the attributes for a “low-tech” assassination: motive, resources, persistence, street smarts and the soul of a killer. He also needed a string of the coincidences that formed the brew for the conspiracy theories that seem to have won the day.

The loss of national innocence begun with JFK’s assassination has only gotten worse—the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks, Russiagate, evidence of a partisan bureaucracy, and questioning of formerly revered institutions such as the Supreme Court and Federal Bureau of Investigation. Can public trust be regained after such damage?

Myths, Misinformation, and RFK Jr.

 Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.

Julia Shapero at The Hill:

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested Wednesday that Russia has been “acting in good faith” in various efforts to end the war in Ukraine and placed blame on the U.S. for the 16-monthlong conflict.

Kennedy said in an interview on SiriusXM’s “The Briefing with Steve Scully” that Russian President Vladimir Putin has “repeatedly said yes” to negotiations.

Joan Walsh at The Nation:

I’ve been doing my best to ignore the farcical presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His noxious views on vaccines, the origin of AIDS, the alleged dangers of wi-fi and other forms of junk science deserve no wide hearing. Polls showing he’s favored by 20 percent of likely Democratic voters over President Biden are almost as laughable as Kennedy’s views. It’s early; he’s got iconic American name recognition; and there’s almost always an appetite, among Democrats anyway, for anybody but the incumbent. His lies have been thoroughly debunked by Judd Legum at Popular Info, Michael Scherer in The Washington Post, Naomi Klein in The Guardian, and Brandy Zadrozny on NBC News.

But I’ve come to believe I have a responsibility to write about Kennedy because of my own shameful role in sending his toxic vaccine views into public discourse: I was the Salon editor, in partnership with Rolling Stone, who 18 years ago published his mendacious, error-ridden piece on how thimerosal in childhood vaccines supposedly led to a rise in autism, and how public health officials covered it up. From the day “Deadly Immunity” went up on Salon.com, we were besieged by scientists and advocates showing how Kennedy had misunderstood, incorrectly cited, and perhaps even falsified data. Some of his sources turned out to be known crackpots.

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But as subsequent articles and books continued to debunk Kennedy’s conspiracy theory, it felt irresponsible to leave it up. Six years later, in 2011, my successor as editor in chief, Kerry Lauerman, in consultation with me and others, decided we should take it down. Rolling Stone later did the same. (In the interests of transparency, we preserved the corrections page.)

Jake Tapper at CNN:

Go back to 2005. I was a reporter with ABC News and Salon.com reached out to see if we were interested in doing a TV spot tied to the publication of the Kennedy Jr. piece. I interviewed him via phone, with a TV crew in his office, and prepared a spot for “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.”

In Kennedy’s bizarre retelling a few days ago (the relevant part starts at 27:55 into the interview), I worked with him “for three weeks doing this incredible documentary” (no and no) about his Rolling Stone story – please note he makes zero mention of the article having since been retracted and disappeared – and then “the night before the piece was supposed to run, he called me up and said, ‘The piece just got killed by corporate.’” (I didn’t say that in any way and the piece wasn’t killed.) “All my career, I have never had a piece killed by corporate and I’m so mad,” he said I said. (I hadn’t. I had been at ABC News for two years. I had had plenty of pieces killed. Not once did “corporate” play a role in killing any of them.)

 

 

Cuban Missile Crisis Speech

 

JFK Calls Out Russian Lies

John F. Kennedy, Radio and Television Report to the American People on the Soviet Arms Buildup in Cuba Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/236392 

In this speech, John F. Kennedy revealed the Cuban Missile Crisis to the American public.

The size of this undertaking makes clear that it has been planned for some months. Yet only last month, after I had made clear the distinction between any introduction of ground-to-ground missiles and the existence of defensive antiaircraft missiles, the Soviet Government publicly stated on September 11 that, and I quote, "the armaments and military equipment sent to Cuba are designed exclusively for defensive purposes," that, and I quote the Soviet Government, "there is no need for the Soviet Government to shift its weapons . . . For a retaliatory blow to any other country, for instance Cuba," and that, and I quote their government, "the Soviet Union has so powerful rockets to carry these nuclear warheads that there is no need to search for sites for them beyond the boundaries of the Soviet Union." That statement was false.

Only last Thursday, as evidence of this rapid offensive buildup was already in my hand, Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko told me in my office that he was instructed to make it clear once again, as he said his government had already done, that Soviet assistance to Cuba, and I quote, "pursued solely the purpose of contributing to the defense capabilities of Cuba," that, and I quote him, "training by Soviet specialists of Cuban nationals in handling defensive armaments was by no means offensive, and if it were otherwise," Mr. Gromyko went on, "the Soviet Government would never become involved in rendering such assistance." That statement also was false.