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By Dr. Brandon Reines
I am not a fan of President Donald Trump. However, I did have great sympathy for the anti-elitists who brought him to power. In Trump1, he brought no advisers who really understood how elite institutions eat away at American democracy — so no real progress was made.
But somehow Robert F. Kennedy Jr. convinced Trump to let him run the health research and care system.
Democrats saw red. I totally got it. How could this croaking antivax conspiracy theorist be anything but a dangerous demagogue?
I had been trained as an immunologist at Dr. Anthony Fauci’s NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) from 2003 to 2009. Somehow, I missed the connections between vaccine skepticism and problems with government-sponsored “Official Science” that I had investigated in the 1980s and ’90s with biostatistician-epidemiologist Irwin Bross, Ph.D.
Events during the COVID-19 lockdowns and later, the vaccines, shocked me into awareness.
My older sister had always admired RFK Jr. and worked with Children’s Health Defense. But not until the lockdowns began tearing at the fabric of American society — and my own small family — did the whistleblowing by Ross and RFK Jr. seem obviously of a piece.
“Standard” medical practice was Bross’ target as it was RFK Jr.’s — the only difference being that Bross attempted to expose the hazards of medical X-rays, while RFK Jr. focused on vaccine side effects.
In the 1980s and ’90s, Bross blasted the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal agencies, accusing them of vast statistical fraud in top statistics journals like Biometrics.
In both cases, the main problem was that the primary organizing principle for federal health agencies had always been “Paternalistic Reassurance” — reassuring the public that vaccines, low-level pollution and medical X-rays “are perfectly safe and effective.”
This is statistical nonsense: Bross had articulated clearly that “proof of safety is much more difficult than proof of hazard,” and that since all technology has negative side effects for certain individuals, the main work of federal health research should be to “identify susceptible subgroups” and provide extra protection for them.
Most remarkably from my standpoint, since Bross had explained all this to me as far back as 1980, RFK Jr. has been attacked as a radical conspiracy theorist merely for claiming that:
- Infectious disease is no longer the main cause of death and disability.
- Chronic disease should now be the main focus of federal health agencies.
- Excess cholesterol/fat are not a significant cause of chronic disease.
- Viewed broadly, pollution is by far the most likely cause of cancer and chronic disease. (See my “Spinning Agent Orange Health Effects as a Black Swan” at Loosecannons.us.)
If chemical and radiological pollution had not been “officially discredited” as a cause of disease by the Reagan administration in 1981 — obscuring the leading lights in American chronic disease epidemiology like Bross — the possibility that chemical components in standard vaccines might harm a susceptible subgroup of children and cause chronic disease would not seem so far-fetched.
Frankly, I don’t know if vaccines cause autism or not, because no epidemiological study large enough to specifically determine if there is a susceptible subgroup of children has ever been undertaken.
Yet this was precisely the problem originally addressed by Bross and the Roswell Park group when they analyzed data from the Tri-State Leukemia Survey and found a subgroup of children with allergy, eczema and urticaria were several hundred percent more likely to acquire leukemia from X-ray exposure than “average” children. A Tri-State Autism Survey should be undertaken.
I am an NIAID-trained immunologist, mainly interested in disease pathogenesis and its once well-documented origins in specific external chemical exposures — whether the chemicals are components of America-manufactured cigarettes, or vaccines, or water pollutants.
From that standpoint, it is highly likely that many chemical components in vaccines cause tissue damage and chronic disease in certain susceptible individuals (numbering thousands or possibly hundreds of thousands).
Unfortunately, my “theory” has been proven beyond doubt by clinical experience with the COVID-19 vaccine, where the spike protein itself can cause myocarditis and death in young men. This highlights a general problem with viewing the “microbe” or “cigarette smoking” as the cause of disease, rather than certain of its specific chemical components.
From my perspective, although he may seem radical, RFK Jr.’s opinions and recommendations for broad changes in health science policy are not new at all. They are quite solidly based in statistical thinking, and have been part of internal debates in public health for many decades, and a century for infectious disease.
Even his insistence that no true control groups have ever been included in trials of new vaccines is not only correct, but cuts to the heart of American medicine’s inability to develop a true science-based ethical system — highlighted originally in Sinclair Lewis’ novel “Arrowsmith.”
Like its protagonist, Martin Arrowsmith, RFK Jr. is daring to suggest that we withhold our “faith” or “belief” that an intervention works, although it may seem to do so according to leading “expert opinion.”
In fact, paragraph 33 of the Helsinki Declaration has long been controversial because it states that true placebos should not be used if there is reasonable certainty in the safety and effectiveness of the medical intervention.
Although not often admitted by federal health officials, this kind of quasi-ethical decision-making, which is really rationalized faith, is at the root of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s strict avoidance of true controls in vaccine testing.
Beyond such narrow medical concerns, I think RFK Jr. is the right man for the times for a bigger reason: We the People need to become Deciders! We must dare raise the question of technological choice.
Instead of acting like children grateful to companies for the latest technological toys, we need to look at each new device and ask: Is this good for society? Is this good for my children?
I think these are the kinds of questions that someone as crazy as RFK Jr. is asking. Kudos to him!
Dr. Brandon Philip Reines has a Bachelor of Science (University of Massachusetts) and a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from Tufts University. He was a postgraduate fellow at NIAID, where he conducted research on the Immunology of Regeneration, demonstrating for the first time in medical history that adult mammals with complex adaptive immune systems actually DO have the capacity to regenerate complex tissues. He is currently director of the Theoretical Unit, Department of Pathology, John A. Burns School of Medicine, Honolulu, Hawaii.