from the crazy-pants dept
If you agree with me that what RFK Jr. has done at HHS — particularly when it comes to altering vaccine schedules, approvals, research, and access — is bad well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Kennedy road Trump’s coattails, building his own Make America Health Again (MAHA) movement on the back of the wider MAGA orgy of fascism Trump has constructed. The MAGA people are generally those who have followed Kennedy’s checkered career for years and not only act as his public ally for all the crazy shit he says and does, but also serve to push him even further than he’s already gone. And while not every idea coming out of the MAHA people is horrible, the majority certainly are.
So, back to vaccines. Kennedy has already done immense harm to vaccination policy and research in America, particularly when it comes to children. But the MAHA Institute, a D.C. think tank that pushes Kennedy’s wider agenda, would like to please just do away with all childhood vaccine schedules until each shot can “be proven” to be safe.
Leaders of the MAHA Institute, the Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-allied think tank pushing Make America Health Again movement policies, stated their position on vaccines unequivocally on Monday: “The childhood vaccination schedule needs to be eliminated,” the policy group’s president, Mark Gorton, said.
“All vaccines need to be removed from the market until they can be proven to be safe and effective,” Gorton told an audience of supporters gathered in the Willard Hotel’s Crystal Room for a panel discussion on the “Massive Epidemic of Vaccine Injury.”
Now, Kennedy didn’t attend the event. He doesn’t determine its agenda. He isn’t directly responsible for what is said by this group. But if you go through all the other nonsense these people are saying, you will recognize that much of it aligns directly with claims Kennedy has made over the years and into the present. And the history of MAHA Institute events and its guests certainly portrays a sense that the government listens to these people.
The event, just a block from the White House, comes at an interesting time for the MAHA movement in Washington. It is clear that the institute, and the movement it is part of, have the administration’s ear; attendees of past events have included senior HHS adviser Calley Means and Food and Drug Administration official Sara Brenner.
And that should be particularly terrifying, given that you can very easily get these same people to admit that they just make shit up when it suits them.
Gorton displayed slides with titles like “The Polio Fraud” and “The flu shot has given 1,900,000 Americans Alzheimer’s,” and, simply, “VACCINES ARE THE GREATEST SCAM IN MEDICAL HISTORY.”
At another moment, Gorton claimed that HHS had commissioned more than 100 studies into vaccine injuries. When asked by NOTUS where he got that number, he said Kennedy had previously stated his desire to further study vaccines.
“I don’t know much more than they’re commissioning a bunch of studies,” Gorton told NOTUS.
So what would eliminating approval for childhood vaccinations in a full sweep in America mean if it happens? Healthcare facilities would be entirely overrun. Hospitals would have to exponentially increase the size of their pediatric wards. Trillions of dollars would need to be spent to deal with the illnesses that would result. Real estate would have to be set aside to serve as graveyards filled with tiny little coffins.
This is from the CDC’s own website in 2023.
Among children born during 1994–2023, routine childhood vaccinations will have prevented approximately 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations, and 1,129,000 deaths, resulting in direct savings of $540 billion and societal savings of $2.7 trillion.
Gone are the days of any of us thinking that an idea or plan is just too crazy for this particular administration to enact. We simply can’t afford to bet on that sort of minimal sense-making occurring any longer.
So sit up and pay attention, because anything that remotely looks like the eradication of childhood vaccines in America would be no less than a childhood healthcare holocaust.
Filed Under: anti-vaxxers, cdc, childhood vaccines, disease, health, maha, mark gorton, measles, polio, rfk jr., vaccines
Companies: maha institute
