For all the lunacy of RFK this somehow is actually a really good set of guidelines? Certainly better than the previous version. I didn't expect that to be honest.
I had a similar reaction. Although I can't help but notice that even in something like this it included the now obligatory combative culture war framing with "we are ending the war on protein".
That's not how it works, they're just inflating the importance of their work by elevating it to a battlefield, and they're the heroes.
You see it across all kinds of industries. Presumably each individual is just engaged in the solitary imaginary thought war. Surely they're not soldiers on multiple fronts. Superheroes?
There is a difference between inflating your work, and flat out lie. The previous guidelines weren’t against protein at all. The mentioned war didn’t exist at all in these. The protein target is about the same as 10 years ago. Back then the only recommendation regarding this was, that more seafood and nuts would be better for almost everybody, and for some people less meat. So generally, that we should consume more protein. So the “war” wasn’t there.
Those DEMOCRAT SOYBOYS are gonna hate this, but I'm gonna say it anyways. Today we're joining the WAR on protein- ON THE SIDE OF THE PROTEIN.
It's an idiocracy bit, the continual flanderization of the USA. It reminds me of carlin's act about how everything we do has to be contextualized into war: we can't just solve homelessness, we have to declare WAR on homelessness (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lncLOEqc9Rw).
Which ones? The guidelines this replaced were "half your plate should be fruits and vegetables, the other half protein and grains (at least half of which should be whole grains)." That's not way different from this.
There are differences: the previous guidelines are very down on saturated fat, for example. But I feel like a lot of people are imagining that this is replacing the old food pyramid with the huge grain section at the bottom bigger than everything else, when that's been gone for over a decade.
Realistically I don't think these guidelines really have much effect at all, except maybe things like school lunch programs that may be downstream of them.
The pyramid references in the link is from 1992, it even says so on the page. I think that going to war against the recommendations from 1992 feels a bit...dishonest?
How do we marry that "dishonesty" with the fact that the previous food pyramid was the dietary guidelines officially endorsed by the US government, represented in posters and taught in primary school classrooms?
The 90s food pyramid lasted until 2005, so decades is just about correct. Then it was some myolate something or the other.
But people used the 90s food pyramid everywhere and that was the only one popularly known. The myplate stuff, I guess it wasn’t advertised well by the government, who knows.
A stopped clock is right twice a day. A running clock set incorrectly is correct zero times a day. If you have an incorrect clock, the solution isn't to stop the clock, it's to set it correctly and fix the process
I disagree I think nutrition guidence is extremely important and in the precense of horrible examples nations get really unhealthy. The only country 1st world country not to have really obese people is Japan (~5% obese ~20% overweight). (~35% obsese ~70% overweight US) and I'd wager a large part of that is the fact that kids cook for themselves in school so they learn early what a reasonable meal is. They also learn how to cook not that they do that forever but setting reasonable food expectations is extremely important.
Being obese as a kid is almost causal for being obese later in life[1] as becoming obese screws up a lot of your bodies biology permenantly. You can of course change and become healthier but many lingering symptoms linger regardless of you losing weight. While still 70% obese adults were not obese as children 80% of obese children end up being obese.
Open to other ideas but school meals and peoples relationship with food is extremely important to maintaining weight in my experience.
> The only country 1st world country not to have really obese people is Japan (~5% obese ~20% overweight). (~35% obsese ~70% overweight US) and I'd wager a large part of that is the fact that kids cook for themselves in school so they learn early what a reasonable meal is.
There might also be a genetic factor, why japanese are less obese or overweight, because the difference for diabetes patients between US and japan is a lot smaller.
There is no genetic factor because when Japanese people move to the States they are as obese as america's within 2 generation. I want to find the study but I think they end up being physically lighter because of other factors but are just as obese or overweight as americas[1]. The reasoning from the paper is that Japanese 2nd generation adopted western cultures eating habits
That's clearly true, given people by and large know what's good and bad for them but their consumption choices need to factor in a much larger set of pressing constraints like price, availability, and readiness and more abstract constraints like "am I able to be at home with my child and cook for them or do I need to work a second job to make ends meet?" I will not trust a single word from RFK's mouth until he has something to say about food deserts and prices and a plan to do something about it. Until then, he's done the easiest part which bureaucrats specialize in, which is publishing an updated set of guidelines.
It's a good observation, and one I don't think is widely enough appreciated among modern post-COVID, pro-censorship liberals.
Trust primarily by virtue of authority is a bad quality to inculcate in a populace.
Yes, any alternative epistemological basis means you have to deal with Aunt Glenda or Uncle Roy who didn't graduate high school being convinced they're smarter than 'those scientists'.
But we're sliding dangerously close to outsourcing common sense, and the solution isn't encouraging more prostration to expert authority.
It's developing more widespread reasoning from first principles (coupled with curiosity and self-awareness of ones own intellectual limitations).
I think it says that industries have a lot of power over governments in the US, especially when they are critical to people's survival. The food industry has enormous power, maybe more than any other industry in the US. Few other industries mint their own laws that fly in the face of the constitution as well as the food industry. Ag Gag laws are crazy. People talk about people being labelled terrorists for activities that are obviously not terrorism. Animal Rights activists who go to extremes have been familiar with that for a while now.
What does it say about the current administration that appointed a science-denying halfwit to run HHS and knowingly kill children with his anti-vaxx bullsh*t?
And 52 GOP coward senators that approved the idiot. The only stand out was Mitch McConnell because he was almost paralyzed by polio as a child and knows first hand the damage RFK is doing.
I'm amazed the new guidelines don't recommend a daily portion of roadkill, preferably raw.
from what i can tell, most of this is existing stuff that advocates have been trying to push for a while now.
i think it's a perfect example of why advocates for any policy should have specific, achievable, and well-documented goals - you never know who might be an ally. politicians don't want to do this sort of detailed work, they're looking for preexisting policy they can champion, and if you're standing there ready to hand it to them when they're looking for it you get get good stuff done.
Even before RFK Jr rubbed his metaphorical nutsack all over our healthcare system, doctors pretty much always told me to eat better. They told me to avoid processed foods, avoid sugar, and focus on fiber and protein.
I don't know why RFK Jr. is getting credit for telling people to eat healthy, especially since some of his recommendations (e.g. telling people to eat french fries if they're fried in beef tallow) are actively bad and will likely lead to people becoming more overweight and less healthy.
Because nobody else changed the food pyramid to be somewhat not-garbage until him. Who else would you congratulate for this specific action? Your own personal doctor??
Michelle Obama provided very similar guidance in around 2011 and every conservatively collectively lost their shit over it.
The food pyramid wasn't really used in recent years by the US government, and changed to "MyPlate" in 2011, and if you actually read its guidelines nothing on there is terribly offensive.
I have not seen the pyramid with bread, cereal, rice and pasta at the base pushed for at least ~20 years. Maybe it was 25-30 years ago when I saw it pushed seriously in school and even then I did not see people taking it seriously outside of those lessons, as in people actively calling it questionable.
Where in the world was this old pyramid still being pushed?
It's a pretty straight-forward question - you can just say "Michelle Obama" or whoever you're referring to instead. I never understand the desire to actively present yourself as someone throwing a tantrum.
If that's not who you're referring to, please correct me.
You made a claim about how RFK Jr. was the only person to fix the food pyramid.
It is unlikely that if you are old enough to vote that you do not remember that Michelle Obama tried to make a more healthy food criteria, and as such it’s very easy to assume that you are acting in bad faith when you say something about RFK Jr that is objectively not true.
It’s a pretty bad assumption. You should pay a lot more attention to Hanlon’s Razor.
I don’t know much at all about Michelle’s actions. Similarly, I don’t know much about Melania’s actions. You say she tried to - so… she didn’t do it? If not, I don’t see how this makes my comment “objectively untrue”?
Sure he may be a meathead moron who can only advocate that the military should get jacked, but if the military really DOES need to get in better shape and his brainiac predecessors weren’t actually doing anything about that, he’s actually functionally smarter than them.
So to answer your question, if RFK is doing the thing that needs to be done, he should get the credit.
I don’t know enough about the military to say for sure if Pete Hegseth’s stuff is stupid or reductive. I suspect it is, I am pretty sure that the military has had pretty aggressive physical training for decades and he contributed literally nothing to this conversation (like basically everything the Trump admin does that isn’t actively destructive), but maybe I am wrong.
The food pyramid was removed in 2011 and replaced with MyPlate, which was much more reasonable than the food pyramid. Of course, it was heavily criticized by conservatives because they claimed it was a “nanny state”.
But of course, like everyone in Trump’s circle, RFK Jr. rebrands someone else’s work, pretends he is the first person to ever suggest eating healthy, and then every stupid Trump voter with the apparent memory retention of a goldfish acts like he was the first person to ever suggest eating healthy.
It actually behaves surprisingly well when you just scroll with the spacebar, as I always do[1].
[1] note: using this method (spacebar to jump one screenful, and shift-spacebar to go back up) on sites that insist on doing the "sTiCkY hEaDeR" idiocy results in losing a line or two on every page, so, I guess, don't get too used to it as it's hard to use today.
There's absolutely no need for the average American to eat more protein, we are eating more protein than ever and health outcomes are not improving. Likewise, the dairy intake recommendation is not backed by any science whatsoever.
When I went as a kid with my parents to the US, there was this 'milk, it does a body good' commercial playing all the time. While in my country there was already talk that it really doesn't do a body good. Not sure what it ended up with, but we definitely never had the kind of gallons of milk in the fridge and grabbing cartons when you want something to drink.
The problem in my eyes is that it's performative. They're making this announcement as if they're doing something revolutionary (they're switching the food pyramid diagram around) while at the same time doing so much to damage the health of Americans: dramatically cutting healthcare access, bringing vaccine denialism to the mainstream, holding press conferences in which they wildly assert that nobody should ever take Tylenol, elevating discourse around quackerism like Methylene blue. The list goes on. And they're making this announcement after spending the entirity of the Obama administration vilifying Flotus for trying to raise awareness of healthy eating.
Its the same thing with eliminating red40 dye. its a crumb. At the very least they should end corn syrup subsidies. Its telling how people often bring up people buying candy with food stamps, but never trace the source of the problem back to how we subsidize bad food. America has a huge blindspot for corporate welfare
Better than which one? I don't think it's really an improvement over either the exercise slice pyramid nor the "choose my plate" recommendation. It is better than the popular one from the 90s though, sure.
There remains concerns about saturated fat, especially for those with high cholesterol levels. I recognize that mistakes have been made in the past (low fat diets, fear of salt, etc), but it seems like RFK et al are driven by ideology rather than science.
That’s what he’s famous for, huh? Nobody knew who he was until he burst onto the national stage because of his brain worm. And please show a source that he was “proud” of the affliction.
You don't think that's in part because of economics, education, healthcare, or other factors? The framing of this site is that it is purely a "you're eating wrong" problem.
A large part of the world population is poor, and they do not have the same level of health problems, nor are they similarly obese. Not purely diet related, but a huge part of it for sure.
It would be great to see some comparisons. I'm not claiming that "poor" is the singular indicator so it's obviously going to come down to which countries you're referring to. I'm also not claiming that diet isn't a part of it, not even close.
State a problem. Propose a "solution" without doing anything to establish that it is actually a solution. Make it about "real", ignore the real issue of what one gets from the calories consumed. It's not the processing that makes food bad, it's that ultraprocessed foods are optimized for enjoyable eating, messing up our body's regulatory system. We eat too many calories too fast and get little from them other than calories.
Especially objectionable to me is whole milk. It's so easy to drink so many calories.
This has been the running theme so far: Big talk to energize the base and make a splash, followed by actual policy implementations that are much more down to earth.
Remember all the talk about banning COVID vaccines? In the end they just changed the wording of the federal recommendations and included things like "having a sedentary lifestyle" as one of the vague reasons to get a COVID vaccine. In some states you had to get a doctor to write a prescription, annoyingly, but the overall picture is that it's still much easier to get a COVID vaccine in the US than under something like the NHS.
Too late to edit, but I see I'm getting downvoted.
To clarify, I'm not in support of the actions or the administration. I'm just pointing out that this is becoming a trend where they say one thing but do something milder.
I'm surprised that governments didn't take this problem more seriously. Obesity is a huge problem, people have been ignoring it only because improvements in medicine have been offsetting the general health decline. Without the medical improvements that save the life of obese people, life expectancy would have decreased. I don't expect the Trump administration to make the best decisions but at least they are taking it somewhat more seriosly.
I don't believe the creators of this propaganda take this problem seriously at all. Their actions speak far louder than their words, even words on a page that scrolls weird like it's 2015.
Republicans were actively angry at past attempts to fight obesity or limit sugar.
There is another side to the nutrition recommendations beyond pure nutrition and that's economics. Pro business Republicans were loathe to anger big food producers.
On the flip side, this new food guide is now advocating a diet that is far more expensive for average consumers at a time when food inflation is already hurting so many households.
Most of it seems fine, although eating even more meat than we already do is a bit perplexing.
The new "guidelines" for alcohol are pretty laughable though. I say that as someone who enjoys his fair share of beers. “The implication is don’t have it for breakfast," <- direct quote from celebrity Dr Oz during the press conference.
The problem is the massive emphasis on eating as a part of health. As if eating right is the only thing you need to do to avoid all disease. That putting other substances (e.g. vaccines) in your body will make you unhealthy.
Well, it's... what we've been told to do (at least in the rest of the world) for more than a century? Packaged as some "app-like" / "tech-like" website?
I don't think there was guidance to avoid ultra processed foods 100 years ago anywhere in the world. I don't believe that concept even existed, let alone was promulgated by health authorities. But I'd lkvd to be proven wrong.
If the old wisdom is correct then there is no issue in regurgitating it in a format suitable for a modern audience. We departed from it for a very long time, especially in regards to fat and processed foods. America has been been on a sharp decline in diet-related health.
The deeper problem is that you can feed a family with a few bucks at a fast food joint. Eating correctly costs money, money that Americans don't have.
> deeper problem is that you can feed a family with a few bucks at a fast food joint. Eating correctly costs money, money that Americans don't have
A fast-food meal is an expensive meal by global standards. The problem is partly cost. And party education and time. But it’s almost certainly not income.
> The deeper problem is that you can feed a family with a few bucks at a fast food joint. Eating correctly costs money, money that Americans don't have.
No you can't, in reality. It only seems so because the fast-food industry is heavily subsidized by taxpayer dollars.
Organic food would be much more affordable otherwise
The man is stark raving bonkers mad in that head-in-the-sand, if-I-ignore-science-then-it-can't-hurt-me way but (and OMG I think I'm going to throw up a little in my mouth even coming close to agreeing with anything that come out of his mouth) isn't that basically what we've been doing with dietary guidelines since the 80s?
Like, don't get me wrong, RFK will kill N*10^5, N*10^6 people with his outlook on diseases, but....how many people have had their lives wrecked by "fat makes you fat", "ketchup is a vegetable", and "eat a balanced diet composed entirely of sausage, flour, and sugar"? As a GenXer I've been dealing with the echoes of this for a long time.
"Isn't that basically what we've been doing with dietary guidelines since the 80s?"
If by this you mean to ask if the new guidelines are the same as previous ones from the 80s, then no. The new pyramid is different, makes different recommendations (more meat, for instance, and less wheat and grains). The website linked to explicitly shows how it is different from the previous "food pyramid" guidelines.
No, what I meant was "haven't we been basically ignoring science on nutrition since the 80s?" I think we have.
For those who don't believe me - go find some old family photos of your parents or grandparents, whichever generation would have been young adults in the 1960s or 1970s. Compare them to people of the same age born any time after, say, 1990. Nothing come of one sample, but people from the previous generation just weren't fat in their 20s like we are.
Yes, there's more to it than that. But food is a big part of it.
You went on a bit of a rant there - lol. I like the new guidelines they explicitly disavow processed food. As for vaccines, not everyone complaining about specific vaccines is anti vax.
A lot of vaccines are also region specific. Eg HK does TB vax for kids because Nannie’s from Indonesia carry TB. No one does the TB vax in the US.
A lot of vaccines are tailored towards the mother going back to work. They could be tailored for a later schedule if there is concern about secondary effects like autism and the child is being cared for at home.
Again I’m not anti vax but I also don’t think the protocol designers are providing alternative options which they should.
My kids are all vaccinated according to schedule. Calling me an anti vaxxer is cheap trolling.
And yes - if kids have had serious impacts to vaccines parents should be told and providers should encourage reporting into vaers
I put autism there because it’s the most commonly used anecdote when discussing this. I’m not saying take the vax away. Eg if mmrv is the big bad vax for autism - change its schedule to be given after 2 yrs after autism tests.
Talking about "concern for secondary effects like autism" legitimizes the theory, whether you wanted to or not; that's why the person you responded to got annoyed.
> How long did humanity survive without vaccines for _everything_? Oh that's right.
Is this a trick question? Humanity survived by having enough people with enough other useful traits (like thinking, including the ability to reason about disease and how to prevent it) to overcome the numbers lost to disease. Humans died to disease in enormous numbers.
> nor that they're all good for _me_ as an individual.
Herd immunity presents a real challenge to idea that people should generally be allowed to make their own choices. One's choice here affects everyone else, in a minuscule way that nonetheless adds up to many thousands of lives saved. I'm not sure what the answer is for this, but generally I come down on the side of: if a democratic process creates rules requiring us all to be immunized for the common good, that's okay with me.
You still owe me a court trial if you want to act on that in a way that reduces my rights. Prove that my individual choices are affecting anyone.
> if a democratic process creates rules requiring us all to be immunized for the common good, that's okay with me.
Drinking is universally a harm. We should ban alcohol. It's for the common good, obviously, and there are zero arguments against this. Why do we allow drinking? At the very least we should ban _public_ drinking. There's no sense in socially allowing this to occur.
> Drinking is universally a harm. We should ban alcohol.
The actions that cause possible bad societal harms from drinking alcohol are indeed banned or heavily penalized. Drinking and Driving. Public Intoxication. Domestic Abuse. Child Endangerment and more.
It destroys your liver. Which one of those actions prevents that? Where is drinking to excess prevented? Why do people still die in vehicle accidents caused by alcohol?
Really. We should just stop selling it. It's insane that you think you can write a set of rules that somehow prevents harm. It merely manages the consequences of the harms. Your court cases cannot bring back the dead.
Why do we tolerate this yet take a hard line stance on far less important issues?
I can't tell if you're interested or not. I simply disagree with you. If you'd like to probe those differences I'm happy to oblige. If your only effort is to be dismissive then I find that rather rude.
How did Prohibition work out? Is it still going? /Why not?/
"Prohibition failed because it created a massive illegal market, fueling organized crime, widespread corruption, and disrespect for the law, while failing to stop drinking, leading to dangerous bootleg alcohol and lost tax revenue, ultimately causing public support to collapse and leading to its repeal in 1933."
> After receiving and understanding this information, the patient can then make a fully informed decision to either consent or refuse treatment.
You are overly simplifying vaccines as if they do not affect individuals individually. They absolutely do, for so many reasons, like allergies. But even if that wasn't the case, _all_ vaccines carry some risk/benefit tradeoff, and each individual is entirely in their right to weigh this for themselves.
How long did INDIVIDUAL humans survive without vaccines and modern medicine? It was very uneven - crazy high infant mortality, suffering for many through multiple preventable diseases, etc.
My mom had measles as a kid in the 40s and as a result, had frequent ear infections for a few years afterwards. That's a bunch of real pain and suffering that could have been prevented. It wouldn't have affected the "will humans survive" question at all - she's still alive in her 80s. But her life could have had less misery and pain. I have a friend who has a twisted leg and a limp because polio vaccines were not available in Czechoslovakia when he was a kid in the 70s.
In the end, the general outcome of vaccines is to raise the quality of life of ALMOST the entire group significantly. And yes, the odd one has a bad reaction - but even then, it's most likely LESS than if they actually got the real disease.
That all makes sense but I don't think it gives anyone the right to make health care decisions for me. Nor does it give anyone the right to invent senseless and cruel policies designed to harm people who refuse to accept the common advice for what are possibly their own good medical reasons.
Your same logic could be applied to food. Hungry people are suffering. Why don't we apply the same "overly motivated interference" to this issue that we did to COVID?
Humanity survived - but a lot of individual died that wouldn't today. As a parent I don't want to see most of my children die before they reach 5. I've been to more funerals of children in my life than I want to. The vast majority of the children I've ever met will see their 65th birthday: because of vaccines and modern drugs.
My wife would also hate having to give birth a dozen times just to get enough children (that much unprotected sex is fine with me). I don't want my wife to die in childbirth which was fairly common before modern drugs as well.
There IS scrutiny on vaccines, by the scientific and medical community - your "scrutiny" (as presumably neither a PhD in a relevant field or MD) is not valuable or relevant. There is decades of research that says that currently recommended vaccines are safe and effective.
And the anti-vax crowd was a minority fringe until recently (they still pretty much are but they have some new vocal proponents now). The politicization, lies, and misinformation about the COVID vaccine in particular really damaged decades of trust that had been built.
How many years faster would we have gotten through the black death if some people had been vaccinated against it? Was losing over 30% of Europe's population better than... not doing that?
Vaccines and antibiotics are central to child life expectancy increase. But yes - if patients are concerned about certain vaccines they should be allowed to take them on a delayed schedule
How many millions died or were crippled by diseases which are now preventable?
Smallpox, polio, measles, etc
Sure, 50% to 70% of people who got smallpox survived, which also means that without vaccines you are condemning 30% to 50% of the population to die.
Same with the millions of people, specially in poorer countries, who died or were paralyzed by polio.
Vaccines have make those horrors a thing of the past, yet people today are concerned about "hat doesn't mean I think it's a good idea to take _all_ of them without scrutiny, nor that they're all good for _me_ as an individual."
Time has diminished the horrors of something that was fairly common a 100 years ago.
Are you seriously saying that because there are some viruses and diseases we _should_ vaccinate against (which I agree with), therefore people have to accept _all_ recommended vaccines regardless of risks and benefits?
If so that’s ideological insanity and probably exactly why anti-vax is a rising problem: Your zealousness creates it.
They have been scrutinized by many tests by multiple governments over decades. The do your own research crowd needs to take their own medicine on vaccines.
Listening to him talk about the Spanish Flu, and clearly not understand why secondary bacterial infections killed more people than the flu itself, was my personal point of "wow, this guy is an idiot".
In his book "The Real Anthony Fauci" he spends a whole chapter claiming that HIV does not cause AIDS and it was actually caused by recreational drug use.
He believes germ theory is a creation of Big Pharma to push "patented pills, powders, pricks, potions, and poisons and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology"
He believes in the miasma theory and just maintaining a healthy immune is enough to keep you from getting sick.
Just read his book, "The Real Anthony Fauci" and you'll realize that this man shouldn't be trusted to run a kindergarten nurses office.
Antivax, avocated against pasteurization, thinks fries are healthy when fried in beef tallow, swam in sewers with his grandkids to prove the human body is naturally immune to diseases and vaccines are unnecessary, tried to ban paracetamol based on bad research linking it to autism, and much more if you care to dig a little.
He's never been anti-vax, though he has advocated for better data about vaccines with good reason--it's abominable. He's advocated against requiring milk to be pasteurized. One of the few reasonable datasets suggesting it doesn't help is the amish. The other ones sound weird so I will indeed dig a little.
> One of the few reasonable datasets suggesting it doesn't help is the amish
When you literally live on the farm where the cow is milked, there is less benefit to pasteurization, yes. Unless you want us to live like the Amish, then let's keep our pasteurized milk, OK?
Some of us do want to live near where our food comes from and eat it fresh. I haven't seen anyone advocating that pasteurization should be banned, just that raw milk should be un-banned.
You were never forced to, don't change the subject. Issue is with the secretary of health spreading obvious lies about pasteurization, a process that saved countless lives over the course of more than a century.
Acetaminophen, honestly, shouldn't be recommended so frequently, especially for kids, and if he's against it, I view that as a big point in his favor. The distance between the therapeutic and liver toxic doses is too small for kids, less than 2.5x the max recommended dose, and it's based on kid's weight, so very young kids can't really be given the amount shown on the box. For example, a hepatotoxic dose for my 5 year old based on their weight is just 3/4 of the adult daily max recommended dose. That's a pointy-ass UX failure.
Growing up, my mom, a pediatrician, never let tylenol in the house because she saw too many kids come through the pediatric ER with liver failure because of it in her hospital shifts. It's the leading cause of acute liver toxicity in the US.
We don’t need good vaccines anymore even though infectious diseases are on the rise. Other global medical experts seem to be going against many of his plans.
> There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective. [interviewer pushes back, brings up polio vaccine] So if you say to me, “The polio vaccine, was it effective against polio?” I’m going to say, “Yes.” And if say to me, “Did it cause more death than avert?” I would say, “I don’t know, because we don’t have the data on that.”
> The most popular vaccine in the world is the DTP vaccine. [...] That vaccine caused so many injuries that Wyeth, which was the manufacturer, said to the Reagan administration, “We are now paying $20 in downstream liabilities for every dollar that we’re making in profits, and we are getting out of the business unless you give us permanent immunity from liability.” And by the way, Reagan said at that time, “Why don’t you just make the vaccine safe?” And why is that? Because vaccines are inherently unsafe. They said, “Unavoidably unsafe, you cannot make them safe.”
Not going quote the whole thing because it's long, but he repeatedly drives home his point that all vaccines are inherently unsafe, and the injuries and deaths they cause always outweigh their effectiveness against disease.
> I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’ And he heard that from me. If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it, you know, maybe he will save that child.
> If you’re one of 10 people that goes up to a guy, a man or a woman, who’s carrying a baby, and says, ‘Don’t vaccinate that baby,’ when they hear that from 10 people, it’ll make an impression on ‘em, you know. And we all kept our mouth shut. Don’t keep your mouth shut anymore. Confront everybody on it.
This one is interesting because the interviewer prompts him with something like "we aren't anti-vaccine, we just want to make sure they're safe" and he does not agree, he repeatedly says, with no qualification, "tell everyone not to vaccinate their children".
I don't believe he has ever voluntarily made a positive public comment about any vaccine. He did during his confirmation hearing, but he was obviously heavily incentivized to do so. During that hearing he did not say his opinion had changed, he simply lied about all past comments and claimed they never happened.
The end result of his vax push has been to reduce the set of government required vaccines down to the same set used by Europe already. Additional vaccination is still available should an individual elect.
Are you of the opinion that the European recommendation is insufficient? Would you petition European healthcare industry that they are requiring too few vaccines? If so, I would expect Europeans to be chronically far more diseased than Americans, do we see that in the data?
They are based on denmark's guidelines, which as you know is a very cold country.
One of the vaccines made strictly optional was for dengue, which is not really a thing in denmark since I think they don't have that many mosquitos due to weather.
However, in the US, mosquitos and tropical weather are common for a large part of the population.
Point being, a huge country with a huge variety of climates and diseases shouldn't follow the lead of a small country with a fairly homogenous weather and disease pattern.
The only outlier is Hepatitis A, which is still recommended in some European countries. On the reverse side, the meningococcal vaccine is commonly scheduled in Europe but not in the US.
Once those additional vaccines are off the "routine" schedule, they'll be pulled by the suppliers, because it eliminates exemption from lawsuits. If you "choose" a non-routine vaccination, people can then sue pharma for ANY harm, and you can be sure there'll be a bunch of crackpot right-wingers trying to prove each one is "bad" and they'll disappear sooner or later. RFK's fans (Del Bigtree) have admitted that this is their plan. And if they're NOT routine, they'll probably not be covered by insurance, so you'll have to pay hundreds or thousands to get one. I would still do that, but not many others will.
Electing to get all ZERO optional vaccines actually available to you because of "reasons" isn't much of a choice.
"Once those additional vaccines are off the "routine" schedule, they'll be pulled by the suppliers, because it eliminates exemption from lawsuits"
Why is this bad? From one of the threads - "There IS scrutiny on vaccines, by the scientific and medical community - your "scrutiny" (as presumably neither a PhD in a relevant field or MD) is not valuable or relevant. There is decades of research that says that currently recommended vaccines are safe and effective."
OK, then there won't be grounds for lawsuits or lawsuits will be easily dismissed.
"you can be sure there'll be a bunch of crackpot right-wingers trying to prove each one is "bad" and they'll disappear sooner or later" - This logic can be applied to literally any product, be it a medicine, a vaccine, or any consumer good. Somehow pharma companies are able to sell any other drug without going into bankruptcy.
Anti-vaccine, anti-tylenol, stating that circumcision causes autism, stating wireless 5G damages DNA, stating that vaccines are part of a anti-black conspiracy, hiv/aids denialism, believing that contrails are actually chemtrails, etc etc etc.
I chose that source intentionally to underscore that nobody on any part of the political spectrum is actually contesting he said or believes these things. Regardless of how they choose to view them.
But he didn't say that. He cited the studies that said increased Paracetamol during pregnancy correlates with higher rates of autism, and people should know that and be careful.
Whenever we discover a link between two things, it's important to share that in a responsible way. It takes years or a decade of research to prove causation, but we should issue warnings once a link is established. A lot of people can be harmed if the government does not publish when it finds harm that correlates with a substance.
With serious studies showing the opposite. You also seem to ignore that fever is a major, and well-proven cause of birth defects and these kinds of fake announcements based on no solid proof could lead part of the population to simply not take any fever-reducing medication by not being knowledgeable on which medicines are NSAID or not.
All of this because of a promise that in the first 6 months of the mandate RFK would find "the great cause of autism", this was not because of a new study suddenly discovered.
I am uncertain if space aliens will abduct me as I sleep, but it would be insane to factor that into my daily decision making.
This is where it would help if the government would do the responsible thing and quantify the probability and talk about the risks of not taking medicine if you're pregnant and have a high fever. The fact that they aren't is a clear sign that this is absurd propaganda.
> He cited the studies that said increased Paracetamol during pregnancy correlates with higher rates of autism, and people should know that and be careful.
Don't mealy mouth it. He didn't say anything so nuanced as "be informed and careful".
He actually said it should be "minimized or avoided". Point blank. And then he said it should be "avoided entirely during pregnancy". It was only over a month later, when the WHO was clarifying that there was no conclusive evidence, and that acetaminophen is the safest pain relief to use during pregnancy, that he started suggesting "working with your physician".
Don't present RFK Jr's takes as reasonable. They're not.
> He cited the studies
He cited one fringe study that was discredited because it didn't consider confounding factors.
Not to support this particular but most doctors would advise "minimized or avoided" use of any medication during pregnancy, including OTC meds. Not that there aren't good reasons to sometimes use them, but you probably should not think it's OK to chug Nyquil every time you get a runny nose if you're pregnant.
I personally avoid all meds that aren't prescribed. I haven't taken a Tylenol or Advil or Sudafed or anything like that in years. I take some vitamin supplements and occasionally (but rarely) will use aspirin for a headache.
If you believe there might a real issue there, you've been misled. That's the danger of having people like RFK in a position of authority: it makes people who don't understand the issues much more likely to listen to them. Which is bad for everyone.
I mean he literally said this, without any citation(!): "There's two studies that show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism. It's highly likely because they are given Tylenol" [1]
He is continuously spouting non-sense not including aggresive anti-vaccine stance, hydrochloroquine curing COVID-19 and that pesticides makes kids go transgender [2]. Yes, you definitely should know all of that and be careful, because the secretary of health has said so.
