RFK Jr. and the Failure of the Academic Intellectual Complex

Note to Readers:

The following article is unlike anything I have written before on the pages of this magazine or any other publication. It is very long (close to 10,000 words) and consists mainly of arranged quotes from two of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s books.  My comments appear at the beginning and very end of the essay.

Anouar Majid

On December 9th, 2024, 77 Nobel Laureates in Medicine, Chemistry, Physics, and Economics wrote the following letter to Members of the United States Senate:

“We, the undersigned Nobel Laureates, are writing to ask you to oppose the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). The proposal to place Mr. Kennedy in charge of the federal agencies responsible for protecting the health of American citizens and for conducting the medical research that benefits our country and the rest of humanity has been widely criticized on multiple grounds. In addition to his lack of credentials or relevant experience in medicine, science, public health, or administration, Mr. Kennedy has been an opponent of many health-protecting and life-saving vaccines, such as those that prevent measles and polio; a critic of the well-established positive effects of fluoridation of drinking water; a promoter of conspiracy theories about remarkably successful treatments for AIDS and other diseases; and a belligerent critic of respected agencies (especially the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health). The leader of DHHS should continue to nurture and improve— not threaten—these important and highly respected institutions and their employees.

In view of his record, placing Mr. Kennedy in charge of DHHS would put the public’s health in jeopardy and undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences, in both the public and commercial sectors.

We strongly urge you to vote against the confirmation of his appointment as Secretary of the DHHS.”

The New York Times reported that “the letter marks the first time in recent memory that Nobel laureates have banded together against a Cabinet choice, according to Richard Roberts, winner of the 1993 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine, who helped draft the letter.” Without a hint of self-irony, one signatory, Dr. Harold Varmus, commented that “Science is dependent on the political structures of this country,” which is why it is crucial to take action against the appointment of RFK Jr. That many of the 77 Nobel Laureates had already publicly endorsed Kamala Harris in an open letter the previous October didn’t seem to give them pause. This motley crew of researchers, joining physicists to economists, were unaware that, a week before they published their letter, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Committee on Oversight and Accountability at the U.S. House of Representatives had released its investigative report in a 520-page document titled After Action Review of the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward. As we shall see later in this article, the Congressional Committee confirmed RFK Jr.’s statements and analyses in the work I will present below. However, we are supposed to believe that the 77 Nobel Laureates were only interested in science-based outcomes, just like many others who had denounced RFK Jr., including Michael Bloomberg, the businessman billionaire who wrote an opinion piece not long after Trump’s election titled “RFK Jr. Is Too Dangerous for Government.”

When I read the monotonously familiar denunciations and dismissals of RFK Jr. by academics and members of the mainstream media, especially in the wake of COVID, I often wonder whether any of these high-minded critics have even bothered to read Kennedy’s The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, published in November 2021 by Skyhorse, a press committed to giving a voice to the censored. The author had already been shunned by liberals and Democrats despite his family’s immaculate credentials as the patron saints of the Democratic Party and the very embodiment of liberal America.

The Real Anthony Fauci was read avidly by the people who are dismissed by liberal America as deplorables or their travel companions and utterly ignored by the mainstream media and bon pensant academics even though the book remained stubbornly ranked as the number one bestseller on Amazon for weeks on end. As I write this  on December 14th, 2024 (more than three years after its publication), the hardcover edition ranks #945 in all books and #1 in Immunology, Vaccinations, and  Virology. Yet I don’t know a single professor or intellectual in my circles who read the book. Trying to persuade people to do so was a Sisyphean battle that puzzled family and friends. When RFK Jr. ran for president, I tried to listen to or watch every interview he gave, especially since his liberal education and political pedigree contrasted him dramatically with his leading contenders in the race.

My interest in RFK Jr. followed my previous interest in Donald Trump as president, candidate, and candidate again for the presidency he won last month (November 2024). This magazine published several articles related to the ascendancy of the Trump phenomenon, which I followed intensely from my home in the liberal city of Portland, Maine. I must have watched every single rally leading to the elections of November 2020 on YouTube. Trump’s early, clumsy moves to the music of the Village People’s iconic song YMCA are now a popular meme on social media, expressing moments of hope, joyfulness, and triumph. I also tried to explain Trump as a different kind of phenomenon, a blunt-speaking New York real estate businessman, a fervent patriot who believes in equitable exchanges among nations and espouses social justice ideals as they can only be imagined in the American realm. When I tired of explaining Trump to his endless chorus of vilifiers, I just resorted to the line I still give today: “If you want to understand Trump, listen to [Steve] Bannon.”

As someone who has been shaped by Marxist analysis, I knew that Trump’s anti-establishment instincts are a far better alternative to the oppressive status quo that has reigned over America for decades. I looked hard to see if there were any Marxists who saw something promising in his brand of MAGA populism, but I didn’t come across any. After Trump’s victory in 2024, sophisticated liberal opinion sank into the genteel self-recriminations that consisted of what the hapless candidate for the Democratic Party, Kamala Harris, didn’t do well. A whole parade of liberal pundits dared to be honest about the failings of their semblables, but they lacked the courage to question their prejudices.  (Ideology would be too strong a word for their vacuous feel-good worldview.) Finally, a little more than a month after the defeat of Harris and the victory of Trump, the New York Times published an article explaining why young men who supported the Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders switched to the MAGA Republican Trump. Even Joe Rogan, the influential podcaster who supported Sanders in 2020, finally endorsed Trump.

The political union of Trump and RFK is a marriage made in American heaven. For the average media pundit like the Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel, such a union makes no sense. Appealing to “Republican senators, activists and influencers” to prevail on Trump to revoke his nomination of RFK Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, and seemingly unaware of the House Select Subcommittee’s report, she wondered whether RFK Jr.’s bona fides make him a reliable MAGA leader and Trump supporter. Trump, she reminded her readers, once labeled RFK Jr. a “Democrat Plant” and “a bigger threat to the country than Joe Biden.” During his political campaign against RFK Jr., Trump had described his opponent as a “Radical Left Liberal” who is “totally Anti-Gun, an Extreme Environmentalist who makes the Green New Scammers look Conservative, a Big Time Taxer and Open Border Advocate, and Anti-Military/Vet.” Searching online, Strassel found “pages of stories of Mr. Kennedy’s efforts to cripple farmers, ranchers, loggers and oil workers. Others outline his disdain for markets, core freedoms and limited government.” A fact sheet the Republican National Committee had put out in 2023 exposed RFK Jr.’s belief that “the National Rifle Association is a ‘terror group’; his support of affirmative action to stop ‘self perpetuating’ ‘racist policies’; his opposition to fracking and the Keystone Pipeline and his view that oil companies and ‘climate deniers’ should be jailed or given ‘the death penalty’; [and] his Hillary Clinton endorsements.” Strassel even quotes Kennedy saying in 2016 that “the real difference between Mr. Trump and Hitler was that Hitler had ‘a plan,’ whereas Mr. Trump was ‘non compos mentis.’”

Strassel is mistaking campaign rhetoric with Trump’s core instincts about American fairness, which is why Sanders supporters see in him the second-best alternative. It proves that Trump is the only major politician in my lifetime who is standing up to Big Pharma and what journalist John Lauritsen calls “the Medical Industrial Complex.” As always, Trump sees past faux elite posturing to put his finger on what matters most to the well-being of Americans. When it comes to health, he couldn’t have found a better ally than Kennedy, especially after what RFK Jr. wrote in his magnum opus and letter to liberals that followed. Trump is undoubtedly sensitive to how Americans have become the laughing stock of the rest of the world when it comes to matters of health. Empowering RFK Jr. to protect the health of U.S. citizens is part of making America great again.

I know that presenting RFK Jr. takes work since established interests have successfully caricatured Kennedy’s ideas and arguments beyond recognition in the public consciousness. To mischaracterize the man as “anti-vaccine, anti-science” and “a baby killer” without taking the time to read his work is an abdication of academic and intellectual responsibility. To do justice to RFK Jr. and my readers, I will let RFK Jr. speak in his own words, albeit in a heavily circumscribed way.  I will use ellipses ( . . . ) to join the gist of his arguments, separated by phrases, sentences, paragraphs, or even chapters. The Case Against Anthony Fauci alone runs for 492 pages and covers the entire tenure of Anthony Fauci in government, including the emergence of AIDS, but I will limit myself to broad themes and the most recent case of COVID and its implications. The book presents information that is largely unknown to educated readers and cultural elites who, for some yet unanalyzed reason, insist on the benign nature of their bureaucratic state. I hope my quotes will give a sense of the book, the picture it paints of Fauci and the empire he has ruled for decades, and the threat the “medical-industrial complex” poses to democracy and free speech. RFK Jr. has dedicated his life to fighting the pollution of our natural resources by major industrial corporations and the sickening of our bodies by Big Pharma. He is now doing so with the blessing of the most disruptive president in modern American history.

The keyword to remember from The Real Anthony Fauci is “regulatory capture,” meaning “the process by which the regulator becomes beholden to the industry it’s meant to regulate.” Having “spent four decades suing the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).” Kennedy is uniquely positioned to know how public interest and protections are subverted through the corruption of government agencies and officials.

When RFK Jr. reluctantly entered “the vaccine debate in 2005” he discovered an even worse case of “regulatory capture.” “I was astonished to realize that the pervasive web of deep financial entanglements between Pharma and the government health agencies had put regulatory capture on steroids.” Those agencies [HHS, CDC, FDA, and NIH] had become “subsidiaries of Big Pharma.” As an example, “the FDA receives 45 percent of its budget from the pharmaceutical industry, through what [is] euphemistically called “user fees.” Not only that, “the CDC, for example, owns 57 vaccine patents and spends $4.9 of its $12.0 billion-dollar annual budget (as of 2019) buying and distributing vaccines. NIH owns hundreds of vaccine patents and often profits from the sale of products it supposedly regulates. High-level officials, including Dr. Fauci, receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help develop and then usher through the approval process.”

Dr. Fauci played a historic role as the leading architect of “agency capture”—the corporate seizure of America’s public health agencies by the pharmaceutical industry . . . All of these government agencies [HHS, CDC, FDA, and NIH] were ultimately overseen by Dr. Anthony Fauci who ‘spent half a century as America’s reigning health commissar.’  “His $417,608 annual salary [made] him the highest paid of all four million federal employees, including the President.”

“From his perch at NIAID [the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases], Dr. Fauci has used his $6 billion annual budget to achieve dominance and control over a long list of agencies and governing bodies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration ( FDA ), Health and Human Services (HHS ) agencies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Pentagon, the White House, the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations (UN)  organizations, and into the deep pockets of the Clinton and Gates Foundations, and Britain’s The Wellcome Trust. A leviathan yearly grant budget gives Dr. Fauci power to make and break careers, enrich—or punish—university research centers, manipulate scientific journals, and to dictate not just the subject matter and study protocols, but also the outcome of scientific research across the globe. Since 2005, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has funneled an additional $1.7 billion into Dr. Fauci’s annual discretionary budget to launder sketchy funding for biological weapons research, often of dubious legality. This Pentagon funding brings the annual total of grants that Dr. Fauci dispenses to an astonishing $7.7 billion—almost twice the annual donations of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”

“Under his watch, drug companies engineered the opioid crisis and made American citizens the globe’s most over-medicated population. During his half-century as America’s Health Czar, Dr. Fauci has played a central role in crafting a world where Americans pay the highest prices for medicine and suffer worse health outcomes compared to other wealthy countries.  Adverse drug reactions are among the nation’s top four leading causes of death, after cancer and heart attacks. Dr. Fauci’s impressive longevity at NIAID is largely due to his enthusiasm for promoting this Pharma-centric agenda.” On top of that, “eight US patents list Dr. Anthony Fauci as an inventor.”

“Today Dr. Fauci’s NIAID alone controls $7.[7] billion in annual discretionary expenditures that he distributes mainly to PIs around the globe . . . They use their seats on medical boards and chairmanships of university departments to propagate dogma and root out heresy . . . They control the medical journals and peer-review journal literature to fortify Pharma’s agenda. They teach on medical school faculties, populate journal editorial boards, and chair university departments. They supervise hospitals and chair hospital departments. They act as expert witnesses for pharmaceutical companies in civil court and the federal vaccine court. They present awards to one another.”

“As with the sultans, khans, czars, monarchs, and emperors of yore, Dr. Fauci’s power derives from his capacity to fund, arm, pay, maintain, and effectively deploy a large and sprawling standing army. NIH alone controls an annual $42 billion budget mainly distributed in over 50,000 grants supporting over 300,000 positions globally in medical research.”

In his “50-year saga, Dr. Fauci’s remedies are often more lethal than the diseases they pretend to treat.” During COVID, he “seems to have not considered that his unprecedented quarantine of the healthy would kill far more people than COVID, obliterate the global economy, plunge millions into poverty and bankruptcy, and grievously wound constitutional democracy globally.”

“The biggest winners were the robber barons—the very companies that were cheerleading Dr. Fauci’s lockdown and censoring his critics: Big Technology, Big Data, Big Telecom, Big Finance, Big Media behemoths (Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, and Disney), and Silicon Valley Internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Jack Dorsey.” Vaccines “transfer billions of dollars from taxpayers to pharmaceutical executives and shareholders”

Under Dr. Fauci’s reign, “our children [were] drowning in a toxic soup of pesticide residues, corn syrup, and processed foods, while also serving as pincushions for 69 mandated vaccine doses by age 18—none of them properly safety tested.” The “allergic, autoimmune, and chronic illnesses which Congress specifically charged NIAID to investigate and prevent, have mushroomed to afflict 54 percent of children, up from 12.8 percent when he took over NIAID in 1984.”

“What is causing this cataclysm?” Kennedy asks. “Since genes don’t cause epidemics, it must be environmental toxins. Many of these illnesses became epidemic in the late 1980s, after vaccine manufacturers were granted government protection from liability, and consequently accelerated their introduction of new vaccines . . . The manufacturer’s inserts of the 69 vaccine doses list each of the now-common illnesses—some 170 in total—as vaccine side effects.” Dr. Fauci’s “two-decade strategy of promoting false pandemics as a scheme for promoting novel vaccines, drugs and Pharma profits” contributed to this tragedy. After all, “Tony Fauci does not do public health; he is a businessman, who has used his office to enrich his pharmaceutical partners and expand the reach of influence that has made him the most powerful—and despotic—doctor in human history.”

Labeling RFK Jr. a “conspiracy theorist” or an anti-vaxxer, like calling Trump and his supporters populists, is often the chosen tactic to discredit critical feedback. The takedowns presume that a mob of ignoramuses is pitted against rational experts who are unaffected by prejudice or interest. The truth is quite different. “Nearly every lawsuit I have ever litigated,” Kennedy writes, “pitted highly credentialed experts from opposite sides against each other, with all of them swearing under oath to diametrically antithetical positions based on the same facts. Telling people to ‘trust the experts’ is either naive or manipulative—or both.”

Equally dispiriting (and unsurprisingly revealing) was the silence of universities during COVID. Kennedy quotes Dr. Peter A. McCullough, another physician tarred with spreading misinformation during COVID, saying “We didn’t have a single academic institution come up with a single protocol . . . They didn’t even try. Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Duke, you name it. Not a single medical center set up even a tent to try to treat patients and prevent hospitalization and death. There wasn’t an ounce of original research coming out of America available to fight COVID—other than vaccines.”  Kennedy adds: “All of these universities are deeply dependent on billions of dollars that they receive from NIH.”

“Dr. Fauci has invested $6 billion in taxpayer lucre in the Moderna vaccine alone. His agency is co-owner of the patent and stands to collect a fortune in royalties. At least four of Fauci’s hand-picked deputies are in line to collect royalties of $150,000/year based on Moderna’s success, and that’s on top of the salaries already paid by the American public.”

Dr. Fauci’s “medical-industrial complex” unhesitatingly waged war on unprofitable non-vaccine solutions, especially hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) “is a 65-year-old formula that regulators around the globe long ago approved as both safe and effective against a variety of illnesses . . . For decades, World Health Organization (WHO) has listed HCQ as an ‘essential medicine,’ proven effective against a long list of ailments . . . Most African countries authorize HCQ as an over-the-counter medication. Africans call the drug ‘Sunday-Sunday’ because millions of them take it religiously, once a week, as a malaria prophylaxis. It’s probably not a coincidence that these nations enjoyed some of the world’s lowest mortality rates from COVID . . . In the United States, the FDA has approved HCQ without limitation for 65 years, meaning that physicians can prescribe it for any off-label use . . . Many people in Africa and India take it for a lifetime. Since its recommended protocol as a remedy for COVID requires only one week’s use, Dr. Fauci’s sudden revelation that the drug is dangerous was specious at best.”

HCQ is “safe and effective against Coronavirus, especially when taken prophylactically or when taken in the initial stages of illness along with zinc and Zithromax.” Ironically, on March 24, 2020, Dr. Fauci “answered a question from a journalist by admitting that, if he became ill with COVID, he would take hydroxychloroquine as his remedy. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Fauci launched his aggressive campaign to deny HCQ—and all early treatments—to the rest of humanity.”

“In 2004, Belgian researchers found that chloroquine was effective at viral killing at doses equivalent to those used to treat malaria, i.e., doses that are safe . . .  A CDC study published in 2005 in the Virology Journal, ‘Chloroquine is a Potent Inhibitor of SARS Coronavirus Infection and Spread’ concluded: ‘We report . . . that chloroquine has strong antiviral effects on SARS-Coronavirus infection of primate cells . . . [both] before or after exposure to the virus, suggesting both prophylactic and therapeutic advantage’. . . A NIAID study and a Dutch paper, both in 2014, confirmed chloroquine was effective against MERS—still another coronavirus.”

“Multiple scholarly contributions to the literature quickly confirmed the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and hydroxychloroquine-based combination treatment when administered within days of COVID symptoms . . . In May 2020, Dr. Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D. published the most comprehensive study, to date, on HCQ’s efficacy against COVID. Risch is Yale University’s super-eminent Professor of Epidemiology, an illustrious world authority on the analysis of aggregate clinical data. Dr. Risch concluded that evidence is unequivocal for early and safe use of the HCQ cocktail.”

“So, against all that I’ve shared here, Dr. Fauci offered up one answer: hydroxychloroquine should not be used because we don’t understand the mechanism it uses to defeat COVID[,] another shibboleth transparently invoked to defeat common sense.”

“It remains an enduring mystery just which powerful figure(s) caused the world’s two most prestigious scientific journals, The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), to publish overtly fraudulent studies from a nonexistent database owned by a previously unknown company. Anthony Fauci and the vaccine cartel celebrated The Lancet and NEJM papers on May 22, 2020 as the final nail in hydroxychloroquine’s coffin . . .  Both The Lancet and NEJM finally withdrew their studies in shame . . . To date, neither the authors nor the journals have explained who induced them to coauthor and publish the most momentous fraud in the history of scientific publishing.”

“It is no longer controversial to acknowledge that drug makers rigorously control medical publishing and that The Lancet, NEJM, and JAMA are utterly corrupted instruments of Pharma. The Lancet editor, Richard Horton, confirms, ‘Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.’”

“Once the FDA approves a prescription medication, federal laws allow any US physician to prescribe the duly approved drug for any reason. Twenty-one percent of all prescriptions written by American doctors, exercising their medical judgment, are for off-label uses . . . Many countries with underdeveloped health care systems were using HCQ early and achieving far lower mortalities than in the United States . . .  On July 23, Yale virologist Dr. Harvey Risch persisted, this time with a Newsweek article titled ‘The key to defeating COVID-19 already exists. We need to start using it.’ with hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and azithromycin.”

“WHO includes [ivermectin] IVM (along with HCQ) on its inventory of ‘essential medicines’—its list of remedies so necessary, safe, efficacious, and affordable that WHO deems easy access to them as essential “ to satisfy the priority health care needs of the population . . . Ivermectin’s package insert suggests that it is at least as safe as the most popular over-the-counter medications, including Tylenol and aspirin . . . An April 3, 2020 article entitled ‘Lab experiments show anti-parasitic drug, ivermectin, eliminates SARS-CoV-2 in cells in 48 hours,’ by Australian researchers at Monash and Melbourne Universities and the Royal Melbourne Hospital, first won IVM global attention as a potential treatment for COVID. ‘We found that even a single dose could essentially remove all viral RNA by 48 hours and that even at 24 hours, there was a really significant reduction in it,’ said lead researcher Dr. Kylie Wagstaff . . .  The Annals of Dermatology and Venereology reported that in a French nursing home, all 69 residents—average age 90—and 52 staff survived a COVID-19 outbreak.  As it turns out, they had all taken ivermectin for a scabies infestation . . . After giving out 3rd booster doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, but still seeing high rates of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths, Israel started using ivermectin officially in September 2021, with the health insurance companies distributing ivermectin to high-risk citizens. El Salvador distributes IVM for free to all of its citizens.”

“‘The suppression of HCQ and IVM is one of the greatest tragedies and crimes of the modern era,’ Dr. Peter Breggin told me. Dr. Breggin, who has been called ‘The Conscience of Psychiatry,’ by author Candace Pert, is the author of Talking Back to Prozac and COVID-19 and the Global Predators.”

“Ivermectin, therefore, is thousands of times safer than remdesivir and COVID vaccines. The science also indicates that it is far more effective than either.” Yet, “one of the drugs, besides vaccines, Dr. Fauci and his establishment were invested in promoting was remdesivir,” even though remdesivir “has no clinical efficacy against COVID, according to every legitimate study. Worse, it is deadly poisonous, and expensive poison at $3,000 for treatment. In fact, remdesivir’s wholesale cost is roughly 1,000x more costly than hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin . . . The British Medical Journal pointed out, ‘None of the randomized controlled trials published so far, however, have shown that remdesivir saves significantly more lives than standard medical care’ . . . By November 9, 2021, the publication date of [The Case Against Anthony Fauci], CDC’s website lists only two drugs approved for treating COVID-19, remdesivir and the corticosteroid dexamethasone.”

“On October 7, 2021, Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the mRNA vaccine, complained in a tweet that America’s people were almost utterly blind to the floods of adverse vaccine events that were killing and debilitating their countrymen: ‘The real problem here is the damn press and the internet giants. The press and these tech players act to manufacture and reinforce ‘consensus’ around selected and approved narratives. And then this is being weaponized to attack dissenters, including highly qualified physicians.’”

“The good news for Pharma was that all of humanity would be permanently dependent on biannual or even triannual booster shots. Dr. Peter McCullough warned that mass vaccination with a leaky vaccine during a pandemic ‘would put the world on a never-ending booster treadmill’ . . . Dr. Fauci, [who] allowed CDC to discourage autopsies in deaths following vaccination . . . continued to insist that fully vaccinating the entire population was the only path to ending the pandemic. This assertion ignored the fact that COVID vaccines prevent neither transmission nor infection, nor reductions in viral loads.”

“Between December 14, 2020 and October 1, 2021, American doctors and bereaved families have reported more than 16,000 deaths and a total of 778,685 injuries to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) following COVID vaccination . . . The Europeans’ surveillance sites tallied 40,000 deaths and 2.2 million adverse reactions. Due to chronic undercounting by VAERS and its European sister system, those numbers are almost certainly only a fraction of the true injuries . . . On August 1, 2021, the director of Israel’s Public Health Services, Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, announced half of all COVID-19 infections were among the fully vaccinated. . . A September 2021 Israeli study demonstrate[ed] that natural immunity provides 27x better protection against COVID than the Pfizer vaccine.”

“I am proud that my uncle, Senator Edward Kennedy, played a key role in ending the government’s forty-year Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (begun in 1932), another notorious medical research assault on a vulnerable population, when he learned about it in 1972 from a CDC whistleblower.”

“In 2014, another CDC whistleblower, the agency’s senior vaccine safety scientist, Dr. William Thompson, disclosed that top CDC officials had forced him and four other senior researchers to lie to the public and destroy data that showed disproportionate vaccine injuries—including a 340 percent elevated risk for autism—in Black male infants who received the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccine on schedule.”

“On my birthday in January 1961 . . . President Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell address, warned our country about the emergence of a Military Industrial Complex that would obliterate our democracy. In that speech, Eisenhower made an equally urgent—although less celebrated—warning against the emergence of a federal bureaucracy, which, he believed, posed an equally dire threat to America’s Constitution and her values.”

“[The] three vaccine mountebanks—Redfield, Birx, and Fauci—led the White House coronavirus task force and steered America’s COVID response during the first year of the pandemic. The trio—none of whom ever treated a COVID patient—adopted controversial strategies to confine the nation under house arrest, shut down the global economy, deny the public access to early treatment and lifesaving therapeutics like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, excite persistent public terror through the broadcasts of deliberately exaggerated death and case counts, and repeatedly tell the world that the only path back to normal is a miraculous vaccine.”

A bit of historical background:

“The Rockefeller Foundation’s 1910 Flexner Report recommended centralizing America’s medical schooling, abolishing miasma theory [which includes “fortifying the immune system through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition”], and reorienting these institutions according to ‘germ theory’ . . . John D. Rockefeller’s crusade caused the closure of more than half of American medical schools; fostered public and press scorn for homeopathy, osteopathy, chiropractic, nutritional, holistic, functional, integrative, and natural medicines; and led to the incarceration of many practicing physicians . . . The foundation’s philosophy of “a pill for an ill” shaped how Americans came to view health care . . . In 1913, the patriarch [America’s first billionaire] founded the American Cancer Society and incorporated the Rockefeller Foundation.”

“From 1913 to 1951, the Rockefeller Foundation’s health division operated in more than eighty countries.” It provided “almost half of the budget for the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO) . . . The [Rockefeller Foundation] imbued the League with its philosophy, structure, values, precepts, and ideologies, all of which its successor body, the WHO, inherited at its inauguration in 1948.”

“For better or worse, the champions of germ theory, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, proved victorious in their fierce decades-long battle with their miasmist rival Antoine Béchamp. As Dr. Claus Köhnlein and Torsten Engelbrecht observe in Virus Mania, ‘The idea that certain microbes—above all fungi, bacteria, and viruses—are our great opponents in battle, causing certain diseases that must be fought with special chemical bombs, has buried itself deep into the collective conscience’. . . On his deathbed, the victorious Pasteur is said to have recanted, ‘Béchamp was right,’ declaring, ‘the microbe is nothing. The terrain is everything.’”

RFK Jr.’s view on the matter is anything but extreme: “It seems to me that a mutually respectful science -based, evidence-based marriage incorporating the best of these two clashing dogmas would best serve public health and humankind.”

However, “the arcane conflict between germ and miasma theorists has important resonance for public health policy in the developing world, where many policy advocates fiercely protest that a dollar spent on food and clean water is far more effective than a dollar spent on vaccines . . . A congressional investigation described the foundation as a self-serving artifice posing ‘a menace to the future political and economic welfare of the nation’ . . . To reassure public, politicians, and press of its benign purposes, the Rockefeller Foundation declared its ambition to eliminate hookworm, malaria, and yellow fever.”

Bill Gates is a worthy successor to John D. Rockefeller. “Magical vaccines are [his] preeminent cookie-cutter solution for the ills of poverty, famine, drought, and disease.” His $1 billion of “cumulative total contributions” make him “the unofficial top sponsor of the WHO . . .  Those $1 billion tax-deductible donations give Gates leverage and control over WHO’s $5.6 billion budget and over international health policy, which he largely directs to serve the profit interest of his pharma partners . . . Over half of WHO’s total budget now goes to vaccines . . . By 2017, Gates’s power [through ‘his charitable model of philanthrocapitalism’] was so complete that he handpicked his deputy, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, as the WHO’s new director general despite complaints that Tedros would be the first director general to the WHO without a medical degree and despite Tedros’s dubious background. . . Today, Pharma still regards Africa as the beau ideal to test immunizations, and as a lucrative receptacle for dumping expired and defective stocks.”

“By 2006, the tsunami of advertising revenues from pharmaceutical firms—about $4.8 billion annually—had already drowned out most of the voices of vaccine dissent in mainstream media. By 2020, those expenditures grew to $9.53 billion.”

“In March 2017, I met with Dr. Fauci, Francis Collins, and a White House referee (and separately with Peter Marks from CBER at FDA) to complain that HHS was, by then, mandating 69 doses of sixteen vaccines for America’s children, none of which had ever been tested for safety against placebos prior to licensing.”

“In 1906, infectious disease caused a third of all annual deaths in the United States, and 800–1000 of every 100,000 Americans died of infectious disease. By 1976, fewer than fifty Americans per hundred thousand died of infectious diseases, and CDC and NIAID were under extreme pressure to justify their budgets. Hyping pandemics became an institutional strategy in both agencies.”

“NIH’s influenza and flu vaccine expert senior bacteriologist and virologist Dr. John Anthony Morris informed his HHS bosses that the flu scare was a farce and that NIAID’s campaign was a boondoggle to promote a dangerous and ineffective flu vaccine for a greedy industry . . . HHS fired Morris for insubordination, citing a long list of drummed-up charges, including failure to return library books on time . . .  Up until his death in July 2014, Dr. Morris remained an outspoken critic of CDC’s annual flu shot program. In 1979, Dr. Morris told the Washington Post, ‘It’s a medical rip-off . . . I believe the public should have truthful information on the basis of which they can determine whether or not to take the vaccine . . .  I believe that given full information, they won’t take the vaccine.’ Dr. Morris’s 2014 New York Times obituary reported his statement, ‘The producers of these [influenza] vaccines know they are worthless, but they go on selling them anyway.’”

“The . . . weapons . . . NIH used to silence Dr. Morris—enforced isolation, disgrace, prohibiting him from publishing papers, presenting at conferences, or talking to the press, changing his laboratory locks to prevent further research” were “first unsheathed . . .  in the 1950s to destroy the career of its award-winning virologist, Dr. Bernice Eddy, the discoverer of the poliomyelitis virus—who later found a cancer-causing monkey virus in the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines.”

 “The 1976 swine flu event was the first time that the federal government agreed to serve as pharma’s insurer. The episode taught the public an important lesson: tort immunity incentivizes dangerous and ineffective vaccines . . . In 1986 they made swine flu vaccine template the model for the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which shielded all mandated vaccines from liability.”

“In 1995, [The Wellcome Trust] sold its stock to Burroughs Wellcome’s chief competitor, GlaxoSmithKline, to facilitate the merger of England’s two pharmaceutical giants. Wellcome Trust’s $30 billion endowment makes it the world’s fourth-largest foundation and the globe’s most prodigious financier of biomedical research. Like the Gates Foundation, Wellcome targets its donations to promote the interests of the pharmaceutical industry . . . In 2020, [Jeremy Farrar, who later rose to both knighthood and to command of the powerful Wellcome Trust] would partner with Bill Gates to fund modeler Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist who produced the wildly exaggerated COVID-19 death forecasts that helped ratchet up the COVID-19 fear campaign and rationalize draconian lockdowns . . . Gates is one of the largest funders for the Imperial College London’s modeling center. . . In 2020, Ferguson . . . [who also sat on the Wellcome Trust staff with Jeremy Farrar] famously predicted up to 2.2 million COVID-19 deaths in the United States in 2020 alone . . . Gates is one of the largest funders for the Imperial College London’s modeling center. . . Historian Dr. Russell Blaylock writes ‘nothing sells vaccines like panic.’”

“At 2:47 in the early morning of February 1, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci fired a carefully worded email to [Robert] Kadlec . . .  intensely worried that the Chinese experiments that may have created this striation in the novel coronavirus would bear his fingerprints. . . . In 1998, Kadlec [had] created an internal strategy paper for the Pentagon, promoting the development of pandemic pathogens as a stealth weapon that the Pentagon could deploy against its enemies without leaving fingerprints: Biological weapons under the cover of an endemic or natural disease occurrence provides an attacker the potential for plausible denial. Biological warfare’s potential to create significant economic losses and consequent political instability, coupled with plausible deniability, exceeds the possibilities of any other human weapon.”

“During June 22 and 23, 2001, less than three months before the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon launched a war game code-named Operation Dark Winter at Andrews Air Force Base that emphasized the military’s earnest commitment to bioweapon vaccines. Robert Kadlec, the lead organizer of this pandemic simulation, also coined its code name . . . Dark Winter participants explored strategies for imposing coercive quarantines; censorship; mandatory masking, lockdowns, and vaccination; and expanded police powers as the only rational responses to the pandemic . . . Less than four months after the Dark Winter simulation and three weeks after 9/11, a mysterious spate of letters containing fine white anthrax spores arrived by mail at several news media outlets and the Capitol Hill offices of two senators, Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. Those two senators had been the most vocal in condemning the post-9/11 infringements on civil liberties pushed by the PNAC crowd.”

The 9/11 attack and the War on Terror rekindled the “US government interest in germ warfare . . . The US biodefense budget went from $137 million in 1997 to $ 14.5 billion for 2001–2004 . . . US Vice President Cheney [helped] transfer this research from the Department of Defense to the National Institutes of Health, specifically to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). By about 2004, this transfer was complete, and NIAID had been transformed into an arm of the defense sector.”

“Dark Winter, Atlantic Storm, and Global Mercury were only three of over a dozen Germ Games staged by military, medical, and intelligence planners leading up to COVID-19. Each of these Kafkaesque exercises became uncanny predictors of a dystopian age that pandemic planners dubbed the ‘New Normal.’ The consistent feature is an affinity among their simulation designers for militarizing medicine and introducing centralized autocratic governance. Each rehearsal ends with the same grim punchline: the global pandemic is an excuse to justify the imposition of tyranny and coerced vaccination.”

“DARPA is the Pentagon’s angel investor and venture fund. In addition to creating the Internet, DARPA developed GPS, stealth bombers, weather satellites, pilotless drones, and the M16 rifle. DARPA was, perhaps, the largest funder of gain-of-function research, outstripping even Dr. Fauci’s NIH in some years . . . Beginning in 2013, DARPA also financed the key technologies for the Moderna vaccine . . . In 2002, DARPA set off a firestorm among human rights advocates from the Left and Right by creating a comprehensive data mining system under President Reagan’s National Security Advisor, Admiral John Poindexter. Public protests forced DARPA to scuttle that project, but critics have accused the agency of using the technology to help launch Facebook. By remarkable coincidence, DARPA shut down its Facebook-like project LifeLog, a venture that involved MIT contractors, the very same month—February 2004—that Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook just a thirty-minute walk up the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the campus of Harvard University . . . In 2010, DARPA’s visionary director, Dr. Regina Dugan, moved to Google as an executive, and in 2016, she transferred to Google’s competitor, Facebook, running a mysterious project called Building 8.”

“In February 2017, Gates told the Munich Security Conference . . . the world needs to ‘prepare for epidemics the way the military prepares for war.’ In May, the health ministries for the world’s wealthiest twenty (G20) nations assembled for the first time, gathering in Berlin to participate in a Joint Exercise Scenario with an imagined China responding to a contagion dubbed MARS, for ‘Mountain Associated Respiratory Virus.’ (Mars is also the Roman god of war.) . . . MARS, a novel respiratory virus, spread from busy markets in a mountainous border region of an unnamed but China-like country—to nations around the globe.”

“Five months later, in October 2017, Gates convened yet another tabletop pandemic at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the global biosecurity command center . . . Building on the Pentagon’s anthrax simulation (1999) and the intelligence agency’s ‘Dark Winter’ (2001), Atlantic Storm (2003, 2005), Global Mercury (2003), Schwartz’s ‘Lockstep’ Scenario Document (2010), and MARS (2017), the Gates-funded SPARS scenario war-gamed a bioterrorist attack that precipitated a global coronavirus epidemic lasting from 2025 to 2028, culminating in coercive mass vaccination of the global population . And, as Gates had promised, the preparations were analogous to ‘preparing for war.’

“Under the code name ‘SPARS Pandemic,’. . .  the official eighty-nine-page summary is a miracle of fortune-telling—an uncannily precise month-by-month prediction of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic as it actually unfolded . . . It’s difficult not to interpret this stunningly prescient document as a planning, signaling, and training exercise for replacing democracy with a new regimen of militarized global medical tyranny.”

“Then, on May 15, 2018, inside the darkened ballroom of Washington’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel,” a daylong event hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for health Security, “dubbed Clade X, ‘simulate[d] the response to a fictitious bioengineered pathogen for which there is no vaccine’. . . In the exercise, schools closed, the demand for surgical masks and respirators far exceeded supply, and hospitals in the United States were quickly overwhelmed.’ Among the ‘difficult questions’: ‘An entry ban on flights from other countries?’ ‘Who should get the vaccines first?’. . . It’s noteworthy that none of the Hopkins simulations contemplate the efficacy of repurposed medications to mitigate or end the pandemic.”

“In September 2019, the Gates-funded John Hopkins Center for Health Security followed up on its Clade X event by issuing an eighty-four-page report, ‘Preparedness for A High-Impact Respiratory Pathogen Epidemic.’ . . . Pushing mRNA vaccine was the entire purpose of the exercise.”

“In October 2019, “Gates personally organized yet another training and signaling exercise for government biosecurity functionaries . . . Event 201 was a signaling exercise, but it was also, as we shall see, a training run for a ‘government in waiting’ . . . One of their central fixations was how to silence ‘rumors’ that the coronavirus was laboratory-generated . . . In July 2021, one year and four months into the misery of the global lockdown, the FAA had to divert air traffic over a section of the country stretching from the West Coast to Michigan to make room for the fleets of private jets converging on Sun Valley, Idaho, for the thirty-eighth annual meeting of the world’s most exclusive conclave, sometimes called the Summer Camp for Billionaires, or ‘Mogul Fest’. . . By that time, US billionaires were well on their way to increasing their collective wealth by $3.8 trillion in a single year, while obliterating the American middle class, which permanently lost about the same amount . . . The Bill of Rights was, by then, indefinitely suspended. The participants of that event had privatized the public square and then obstructed the free flow of information and open debate—the oxygen and sunlight of democracy. Their censorship allowed their allies in the technocracy to effect the most extraordinary curtailment of American constitutional rights in history . . . [It was] the ultimate coup d’état: some 250 years after America’s historic revolt against entrenched oligarchy and authoritarian rule, the American experiment with self-government was over. The oligarchy was restored, and these gentlemen and their spymasters had equipped the rising technocracy with new tools of control unimaginable to King George or to any other tyrant in history.”

“COVID-19 is not the problem; it is a problem . . . The problem is endemic corruption in the medical-industrial complex, currently supported at every turn by mass-media companies . . . Big pharmaceutical companies are the biggest advertisers on news and television outlets. Their $9.6 billion annual advertising budget buys more than commercials—it buys obeisance.”

“When Israel’s Director of Public Health addressed the FDA Advisory Panel . . . As of September 17th, 2021, she said: ‘Sixty percent of the people in severe and critical condition were, um, were immunized, doubly immunized, fully vaccinated. Forty-five percent of the people who died in this fourth wave were doubly vaccinated.’”

The year after The Real Anthony Fauci came out, RFK Jr. published a synopsis of his research and views in the form of A Letter to Liberals, subtitled Censorship and COVID: An Attack on Science and American Ideals. Here, he takes the so-called liberals (although I am not sure this is an accurate description of the power-holders who control access to public opinion and derail social justice for working-class Americans) to task for failing to engage in debate instead of relying on censorship.

“The majority of Democrats appear to believe that the Demos—the people—can no longer be trusted to govern themselves and that it is, therefore, permissible for elites to manipulate the public with propaganda, and even to censor information that might infect the population with dangerous thoughts . . . Unable to defend the scientific underpinnings of their ideology in debate, liberals rely on book bans and an arsenal of coercive muzzling strategies.”

“Why, “RFK Jr. asks, “were the lowest COVID death rates in countries and states that relied on therapeutic drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and in countries with the LOWEST vaccination rates?  . . . Haiti, for example, had one of the world’s lowest vaccination rates—only 1.4 percent of Haitians got the jab—and one of the world’s lowest death rates from COVID . . . Likewise, Nigeria . . . Nigeria provided ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to the vast majority of its people, while US government officials crusaded to block access to these proven prophylactics . . .  The US with its single-minded vaccination strategy also racked up the highest overall COVID body count; with only 4.25 percent of world population, the United States endured 16 percent of global COVID deaths . . . Other nations like Japan (233.19 deaths per million) and Singapore (234.09 deaths per million) all ended their pandemics after providing their citizens with ivermectin and/or hydroxychloroquine (or chloroquine).”

“Contrary to official promises, the vaccines did not prevent infection or transmission . . . If the vaccinated are equally likely to spread COVID as the unvaccinated—as Dr. Fauci now acknowledges—then on what basis do we justify the draconian mandates that denied unvaccinated workers their jobs, children their education, and encouraged the bullying and bigotry that made the unvaccinated reviled second-class citizens?. . . Don’t we as liberals have a special duty to independently investigate government claims that unvaccinated people are more likely to spread contagions?”

“In contrast to official claims that they are ‘safe and effective,’ COVID vaccines appear to show ‘negative efficacy’—making the vaccinated more susceptible to COVID  . . .  A large, peer-reviewed Swedish study published June 2022 in The Lancet . . . confirmed that vaccine efficacy drops into negative territory 7 to 9 months after vaccination. This means the vaccine is actively contributing to more infections.” It also “means that vaccinated individuals then become more likely to suffer from COVID infections, hospitalizations, and deaths than unvaccinated individuals.”

In fact, “high injury and death rates from COVID vaccines may cancel out even the most exaggerated claims of vaccine efficacy . . .  In June 2022, another devastating Lancet preprint concluded that mRNA vaccines are causing more serious injuries and hospitalizations than they are averting: ‘The excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest [from mRNA vaccines] surpassed the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group for both Pfizer and Moderna vaccines ’. . . Pfizer’s own data, therefore, suggests that for every COVID death that the vaccine averts, it will, over time, kill four additional people from cardiac arrest.”

“Pharma and CDC have hidden the damning injury and death data reports with cooperation from leading media outlets including the New York Times . . . Furthermore, both Pfizer and FDA petitioned a federal court to deny the public access to Pfizer’s clinical trial data for the next 75 years. So much for the promised transparency! These are the same data that FDA reviewed for only 108 days prior to giving Pfizer its license. Immediately afterward, two top vaccine regulators at FDA resigned.”

RFK Jr. asks again: “Should government technocrats be partnering with media and social media titans to censor and suppress the questioning of government policies?. . . The pharmaceutical industry is now the dominant advertiser on television, the funding source for over 75 percent of total advertising and an even greater percentage during news shows.”

At this point, Kennedy’s “early predictions have matured from ‘conspiracy theories’ to proven facts . . . As predicted, global lockdowns have cost a cataclysmic $16 trillion, according to the International Monetary Fund. An extensive meta-analysis of dozens of peer-reviewed studies by Johns Hopkins researchers has confirmed that while they devastated global economies, the Trump/ Biden lockdowns did practically nothing to reduce the spread of COVID. All they did was prolong the pandemic and amplify its pain. In March 2022, the most wide-ranging study on COVID restrictions to date found that the states with the most stringent lockdowns fared far worse (New York, California, New Jersey, and Illinois got F grades). In stark contrast, states that allowed their citizens more freedoms (Florida, Utah, Nebraska, Vermont, Montana) fared far better. Even Dr. Fauci has recently confessed that scientific evidence does not support the supposition that lockdowns were effective.”

“On March 10, 2022, CDC admitted, in response to a Freedom of Information request, that it has not a single record of a healthy child under age 15 dying from COVID. Comprehensive research from Germany and the UK, and separate studies of US children by Johns Hopkins, Nature, and The Lancet, had all previously reaffirmed that healthy children have statistically zero risk of dying from COVID. Meanwhile, the vaccines impose a high risk (1/2,700) of causing myocarditis in 12–17-year-old boys . . . Though you have not read about it, four Scandinavian countries have banned the Moderna vaccine in people below age 30 because myocarditis is killing more of them than COVID . . . The CDC now acknowledges that only 6 percent of COVID casualties are certain to have died from COVID. The remaining 94 percent suffered from an average of 3.8 potentially lethal comorbidities, any of which could have been the true cause of death.”

“The weight of the science suggests that COVID mRNA vaccines can indeed alter human DNA . . .  Swedish researchers at Lund University on February 25, 2022, published a study showing that messenger RNA (mRNA) from Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines rapidly enters human liver cells and reverse-transcribes into DNA” . . . In April 2022, CDC finally admitted that it had no data to support its claim that mRNA vaccines don’t alter DNA.”

“Instead of a public health response, Dr. Fauci’s militarized and monetized COVID policies proved to be a devastating war on the poor, children, and the working classes . . . Anthony Fauci’s quarantine was a prolonged pajama party for upper-crust Americans who could afford DoorDash food deliveries and Amazon shopping. Lockdowns provided a novel adventure in telecommuting for the laptop elites . . . The lockdowns created nearly five hundred new billionaires—who are now gorging on the bleached cadavers of America’s massacred middle-class—and engineered a $3.98 trillion shift in wealth from the poor and working Americans to a new oligarchy of Pharma billionaires, social and mainstream media titans, surveillance state robber barons, and military contractors . . . A Harvard study by David Cutler and Lawrence Summers estimates the cost of the pandemic to the US government at $16 trillion.”

‘The deprivation of rights and economic demotion of the Middle Class have spawned a rebellion. Its Ideology is fluid and up for grabs . . . The ‘essential workers’ were disproportionately people of color; the people who lost their jobs to the lockdowns were also disproportionately people of color; the people who lost their jobs due to noncompliance with mandates were mostly from the working classes; and the people who died of COVID, vaxxed or not, were disproportionately people of color.”

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, in December 2024, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic issued a report mostly vindicating RFK Jr.’s “conspiracy theories,” such as  COVID-19 most likely originated in a “gain-of-function” research facility in Wuhan, China; that the “‘6 feet apart’ social distancing recommendation—which shut down schools and small business across the country—was arbitrary and not based on science; that “there was no conclusive evidence that masks effectively protected Americans from COVID-19”; that “prolonged lockdowns caused immeasurable harm to not only the American economy, but also to the mental and physical health of Americans, with a particularly negative effect on younger citizens. Rather than prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable populations, federal and state government policies forced millions of Americans to forgo crucial elements of a healthy and financially sound life”; that “former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s March 25 Order—which forced nursing homes to accept COVID-19 positive patients—was medical malpractice”; that “contrary to what was promised, the COVID-19 vaccine did not stop the spread or transmission of the virus”; that “the FDA rushed approval of the COVID-19 vaccine”; that “vaccine mandates were not supported by science and caused more harm than good . . . that they “trampled individual freedoms, harmed military readiness, and disregarded medical freedom to force a novel vaccine on millions of Americans without sufficient evidence to support their policy decisions”; that “public health officials engaged in a coordinated effort to ignore natural immunity—which is acquired through previous COVID-19 infection—when developing vaccine guidance and mandates;” that “vaccine injury reporting systems created confusion, failed to properly inform the American public about vaccine injuries, and deteriorated public trust in vaccine safety during the COVID-19; that “the government is failing to efficiently, fairly, and transparently adjudicate claims for the COVID-19 vaccine injured; that “unemployment rates surged to levels not seen since the Great Depression,” disproportionately impacting low wage earners; that “the ‘science’ never justified prolonged school closures” and that “children were unlikely to contribute to the spread of COVID-19 or suffer severe illness or mortality. Instead, as a result of school closures, children experienced historic learning loss, higher rates of psychological distress, and decreased physical well-being.”

Like the Democrats’ evasive recriminations after the defeat of Kamala Harris, those who adhered blindly—primarily out of fear and the pressure of social conformity—to the CDC’s recommendations and who treated those who questioned them with suspicion and disdain are those who have turned out to be both un-American and anti-intellectual. Even if RFK Jr. wasn’t right on all counts, even if he was or is still biased or wrong on the facts, that is no excuse not to take his work seriously and not read the best-selling COVID book during the pandemic. Instead, the lawyer who fought major corporations to protect our rivers was conveniently dismissed as a charlatan and lunatic. Some found refuge in his past struggles with addiction, about which RFK Jr. is open and frank, while others resorted to chronicling the moral lapses of the Kennedys over the decades. But there were no rebuttals to RFK Jr.’s written arguments, as I outlined above. Expressions of shock, name-calling, and character assassination are not counter-arguments. Such attitudes would have been condemned as dangerously reactionary by traditional Marxists, whose insistence on the principled contestation of ideologies excluded attacks on authors or people.

On April 25, 2023, Tablet Magazine published a long essay/interview with RFK Jr. by the great journalist David Samuels titled “The RFK Jr. Tapes.” I won’t go through the details of RFK Jr.’s tragic life circumstances or repeat his open suspicions of government agencies. But a revealing moment came when Kennedy recalled a moment with his father, who, like his uncle, was assassinated while campaigning for the presidency.

“It happened just before he left for the campaign, so a few months before he died. He called me into his office and he gave me a copy of Camus’ book The Plague. He asked me to read it . . . The book is about a doctor in a quarantine city in North Africa, and there’s a plague attack in the city, and nobody can go in or out. They never tell you what the plague is, but they know it’s contagious. They’ve never seen it before, and they have no idea how to treat it. A lot of the book is the doctor’s conversations with himself, because he knows that if he leaves and goes out and starts ministering to the sick, he’s almost certain to die. In any case, there’s very little he will be able to do, because there’s no treatment known. He’s convincing himself to stay locked up where it’s safe. Ultimately, he makes a decision to leave and go do whatever help that he can, because that is his duty. That is the duty of all humanity, but particularly doctors. That’s the subject of the book.

“Camus was an existentialist, and one of my father’s favorite writers. The existentialists were the legatees of the Greek and Roman tradition of stoicism. The Stoics had that same philosophy, which is that you find meaning in your life. You bring order to a chaotic universe by doing your duty and not complaining about it. The iconic hero of Stoicism is Sisyphus, and Camus also wrote a book about Sisyphus.”

This spirit of abnegation, love, devotion, and sacrifice has been scrubbed from our lives by the cult of personal hygiene, which includes avoiding contact with other humans in a never-ending war on microbes. The biosecurity state can’t tolerate the human touch or dissent during pandemics, which is why we need sharp-eyed humanists like RFK Jr. to remind us not to engage in a Faustian bargain to save our lives. One may now appreciate why those 77 Nobel Laureates, Bloomberg, Strassel, and thousands of others sound like apologists for a status quo they are ill-equipped to grasp or comprehend the complex reality of healthcare in America.