RFK is not alone in undermining trust in medicine

Welcome to a new dark age of American medicine.

This week, Donald Trump gave credence to claims about the MMR vaccine that have been disproven by rigorous medical research. The US president claimed that jabs for measles, mumps and rubella ought to ‘be taken separately’ to avoid ‘problems’. Accompanied by US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump also added that pregnant women should ‘fight like hell’ not to take Tylenol, the US brand name for paracetamol. He implied that taking the widely used painkiller in pregnancy is linked to a ‘meteoric’ rise in autism diagnoses.

These claims have, understandably, been met with a backlash. Experts have tried to reassure the public that MMR and paracetamol are safe. But will anyone listen? Unfortunately, many of Trump and RFK’s fiercest critics undermined their own credibility long ago by promoting equally unscientific ideas – not least the notion that kids can be born in the wrong body.

Senator Elizabeth Warren is one such opponent. ‘You were lying’, she said of Kennedy’s Covid-vaccine stance during a senate hearing earlier this month. Warren was joined in her attack by other Democrat members, including Tina Smith and the left’s prince over the water, Bernie Sanders.

You would hardly have guessed that just two years ago, this same trio put their name to a motion demanding a ‘trans bill of rights’, which aimed to enshrine in law the most extreme version of the trans agenda. The bill would have rendered references to ‘biological sex’ in US discrimination laws meaningless. It would have prevented states from limiting ‘life-saving’ gender-affirming healthcare for children – including puberty blockers, which cause irreversible harm, such as sterilisation. It would also have forced schools, sports organisations and employers to disregard the needs of women and girls.

It wasn’t just politicians who were misusing science. The bill began by citing a list of medical organisations that supported its assumptions about sex and gender – effectively a who’s who of America’s clinical establishment, ranging from the College of Physicians and the Public Health Association to the American Medical Association. In other words, organisations representing the vast majority of America’s doctors were prepared to lend credence to claims about biological sex and ‘gender medicine’ that were scientifically nonsense. In truth, the existence of a sex binary has never been in doubt, while the trans lobby’s claims about puberty blockers and medical transitioning were comprehensively debunked by the Cass Review last year.

As RFK has often argued, the medical establishment also made mistakes during the Covid pandemic. We were indeed told various porkies about Covid vaccines, such as that they would stop us transmitting the disease. Side effects were also significantly downplayed. When reports first surfaced in April 2021 of blood clots caused by the AstraZeneca vaccine, the UK government dismissed them. A few months later, it quietly replaced the AstraZeneca shot with mRNA vaccines manufactured by Moderna and Pfizer. They did this without any admission of fault. Needless to say, none of this backs up any of Kennedy’s more outlandish claims about Covid, such as that the virus was a chemically engineered bioweapon meant to ‘ethnically target’ those who aren’t Jewish or Chinese. There is healthy scepticism of the medical authorities, and then there’s outright disinformation.

Covid-19 was far from Kennedy’s first rodeo. Though he claims not to oppose vaccines in general, past comments call this into question. In a 2019 podcast interview, Kennedy said it was untrue to say polio was conquered by vaccination and that smallpox had been eradicated by it. ‘I know it’s a mythology to say that it cured polio and smallpox and measles etc, but it’s just not true’, he claimed.

He repeated this claim in a debate with Alan Dershowitz in 2020, arguing: ‘The proposition and the theology that smallpox and polio were abolished due to vaccination is controversial. That is not a proposition that is universally accepted.’

There is, in reality, little more universally accepted in medicine than the fact that smallpox was eradicated by vaccination. The fact polio only exists in countries where medical infrastructure hasn’t been able to vaccinate everyone tells its own story. That the US health secretary refuses to acknowledge as much is concerning, to say the least.

Until his resignation two weeks ago, former US vaccines chief Demetre Daskalakis was leading the campaign against Kennedy from inside the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. According to Daskalakis, he stepped down due to fears that experts were no longer ‘going to be able to present science in a way free of ideology’.

This particular statement was surprising, seeing as Daskalakis had been mixing science and ideology for years. A self-described ‘queer health warrior’, in 2023, he participated in a roundtable discussion with trans activist Alejandra Caraballo on the gripping subject of ‘The Present and Future of LGBTQ+ Medicine’. Caraballo argued that anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists were the same sorts of people who were attacking ‘gender-affirming care’. Daskalakis unequivocally agreed with this medical falsehood.

Though often at odds, Daskalakis and Kennedy represent two sides of the same coin. Both have spread disinformation for their own ends. Both have misused science. Indeed, it is hard to believe RFK could have been given his role in the first place, were it not for ideologues like Daskalakis putting activism above medical accuracy.

If you spend years equating opposition to vaccines with opposing the sterilisation of children, you ought not to be surprised if support for vaccines diminishes.

Malcolm Clark was LGB Alliance’s head of research from 2019 to 2022. Visit his Substack, The Secret Gender Files, here.