I've been wondering when we'd start hearing from RFK Jr. now that he's been confirmed, and it turns out today's the day.
First off, he's put a 90-day hold on a new oral COVID vaccine:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has paused a multimillion-dollar contract from the Biden administration to create a new COVID-19 vaccine, Fox News Digital has learned.
"While it is crucial that the Department [of] Health and Human Services (HHS) support pandemic preparedness, four years of the Biden administration’s failed oversight have made it necessary to review agreements for vaccine production, including Vaxart’s," Kennedy said in comments provided to Fox News Digital on Tuesday.
He's also paused final testing of a new avian flu vaccine:
The review is part of a government push to examine spending on messenger RNA-based vaccines.... “While it is crucial that the US Department and Health and Human Services support pandemic preparedness, four years of the Biden administration’s failed oversight have made it necessary to review agreements for vaccine production,” a spokesperson for HHS said in a written statement.
That statement from an HHS "spokesman" sure sounds similar to RFK Jr.'s statement about the new COVID vaccine. Blame Biden, change a word or two, and you're good to go.
In Texas, a measles outbreak has infected 124 people and produced the first measles death since 2015. RFK Jr. seemed unconcerned: "It’s not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year." Maybe so, but we know exactly where this one came from:
In Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the current outbreak, the vaccine exemption rate was nearly 18% for the 2023-2024 school year, according to health department data.
A successful CDC campaign called "Wild to Mild" has been canceled. It had helped persuade people to get a flu shot, but RFK Jr. wanted to spend the money instead on spots highlighting "informed consent"—i.e., that you don't have to get a flu shot. Very helpful.
Next up: every year in March a CDC committee meets to decide which flu strains to target with the upcoming season's flu shot. The March meeting is important because (a) flu strains change every year, and (b) manufacturers need plenty of lead time to ramp up production of more than 100 million doses. But RFK Jr. has called off the meeting indefinitely:
A meeting of a committee which advises the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on vaccine policy has been canceled, a committee member told Reuters, the second such disruption to a federal vaccine advisory panel since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the nation’s top health official earlier this month.... The committee had been set to discuss the selection of strains to be included in the influenza virus vaccines for the 2025-2026 flu season.
Finally, RFK Jr. has apparently broken his childhood vaccine promise to Sen. Bill Cassidy:
To earn the vote he needed to become the nation’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a special promise to a U.S. senator: He would not change the nation’s current vaccination schedule.
But on Tuesday, speaking for the first time to thousands of U.S. Health and Human Services agency employees, he vowed to investigate the childhood vaccine schedule that prevents measles, polio and other dangerous diseases. “Nothing is going to be off limits,” Kennedy said.
It's been a busy couple of days for RFK Jr. Good luck, America.
Rapidly headed toward third world country status.
I'm heartsick about our trajectory. RFK Jr. is a disaster.
I have no words. As someone who works in clinical trials, this is serious batshit upside-down bananas. We've been whistling past a major pandemic for decades and were quite frankly lucky we got Covid-19 and not Captain Trips. mRNA is not just our best defense, it is the most promising biotech in decades. These people deserve to die of H5N1 but they will take many of us with them. This is a four alarm dumpster fire, it will be like the Dallas Buyers Club where the Europeans and Mexicans will hopefully save us but who knows?
This is a sad comment on the magic that the name "Kennedy" still casts. I don't imagine someone as crazy as this would have gone so far in American politics without that name.
This may put the final nail in the coffin of the Kennedy legacy
God, I hope so.
Trump is hurting his base, especially with serious cuts to Medicaid. Wait till all those Trump voters in West Va and rural Texas realize they have lost their Medicaid coverage. Hopefully that wakes them up to the fact that Trump hates them.
I wouldn't assume that anybody who's a Trump fan in the first place could ever believe he's at fault on anything.
Was just reading about the droogies' mass cancellation of small contracts at the VA, also today.
This maladministration's malicious and casual destructiveness is breathtakingly bottomless. They have revealed themselves in just five weeks as the collective enemy of the American people. Of the whole people. And of the nation.
+15 on droogies. Sp appropriate, in so many ways.
there were plagues in the Bible, so they're good enough for me!!!
When asked for his response, Sen. Cassidy said, "Gol durn! I been hornswoggled! When I find the critter what done it, there be hell an' brimstone to pay. Cain't fool Buckaroo Billy more than a time or twelve!"
lol
The people voted for this. They deserve to get everything they voted for, including a return to pre WWII era disease death rates.
All of us are going to experience this, no matter who we voted for.
The people voted for this.
Less than 30% of eligible US voters voted for Trump.
And even among those who actually voted, a majority chose Harris or a third party. The electors—312 of them, to be precise—are who inflicted this monstrosity on us.
And the 40% who didn't vote, but presumably are qualified to.
"The electors—312 of them, to be precise—are who inflicted this monstrosity on us."
Yep, we should have put forth sets of "alternate" electors and had the VP legitimize them on 1/6/2025.
i agree. hate to sound callous but people will have to suffer/die before they maybe realize they've made a huge fucking mistake.
Maybe not even then. I seem to remeber an anti mask MAGAt who died from covid. At his funeral all his friends and family purposely didn't wear a mask in his memory. We are talking about breathtakingly stupid people.
Bingo
And nothing by way of explanation beyond "Let's Go Brandon."
Hey, nothing to worry about, as long as you have a Healthy Immune System, amirite? Something something power food something genetic something healthy living something. Nobody really NEEDS those Outside Chemicals being FORCED into their bodies -- they mostly do more harm than good!
They're probably gonna be marketing Energy Crystals soon -- on official Medicare and Medicaid websites.
Have I mentioned, thanks again, Republicans! (And btw, where HAVE all our resident Republican commentators gone?)
The trump/RFK jr legacy-- a public health apparatus fit for 1820.
They're down with the flu/Covid/bird flu/monkeypox. You name it. They don't need no stinking vaccines, or medicine or whatever.
Plainly, all we need do is drink raw milk, eat a nutritious diet of roadkill, and workout in jeans and then we can all have the robust physique and raspy voice of a dead-eyed man with a brain worm and the healthy glow reminiscent of a catcher's mitt.
What, no HGH? (natural source only, of course)
Darn shame if RFK Jr and his entire family developed Shingles.
Shingles isn't fatal.
I want the s.o.b. intubated.
On both ends.
😬😬
Leave the rest of the Kennedys alone. They've been renouncing RFKJr since he launched his "presidential" bid, maybe even earlier.
The country is being run by abysmally stupid people. There’s just no upside here; there won’t be banner headlines celebrating “No pandemic today”. But if we get a particularly lethal flu strain, or H5N1 learns to transmit efficiently among humans, we’re screwed and we’ll know who to blame. Apparently these idiots forgot that Covid cost TFM re-election in 2020. So nobody’s going to hedge against the possibility that RFK, Jr. might just be wrong. (Spoiler: he’s totally full of shit)
It's the stupidity, but it's also the malice. We should never forget the malice.
Definitely, malevolence on the part of Musk, TFM, Stephen Miller, Patel and many others.
Oh, and ABC News is reporting the meeting is canceled, not just delayed. https://abcnews.go.com/US/fda-cancels-pivotal-advisory-meeting-seasons-flu-vaccine/story?id=119234794
Make America Sick Again! Yeeehaw!
On the day of the first US measles death in ten years.
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/02/26/nx-s1-5309800/texas-measles-child-death-vaccination
First of many.
Unfortunately
Curtis Yarvin and the billionaire caste he represents wants many less people around.
Murdering the government and allowing millions of the underclass to die without the guilt of shooting them or setting them on fire are substantive steps towards the Network States our billionaire overlords want. You could call it Neofeudalism but that sounds less Silicon Valley than Network States.
Senator Bill Cassidy, the most recent recipient of the Neville Chamberlain Award for Conspicuous Credulity.
Good one!
Popular history has been less kind to Chamberlain than is justified. He genuinely feared what Hitler would do, but was also aware that Britain & France were not ready for war.
Military conventional wisdom & intelligence believed that the Germans had a large fleet of bombers capable of bombarding London & Southern England, and that fighter interception would not work. They also massively overestimated the civilian casualties from bombing. They had taken the figures for small drops of bombs on cities and scaled up linearly. Ignoring the "fratricide" effect that bombs fall in sticks and so a lot of the explosive force is wasted blowing up something that is already blown up.
And that basic protective measures (the Andersen shelters) would reduce civilian casualties in all but a direct hit. An air raid had to "get lucky" to do what they did at that East End school-- killing over 100 people in 1 bomb (the BBC had a gripping documentary: 4 parts, each focusing on one bomb and the effects it had on families down to the present day - people finding out why their Grans & Grandads never, ever spoke of the War).
Again to be fair to Chamberlain, there was no Chain Home radar system over Britain in October 1938. And "the Dowding System" of fighter interception was totally untested. There were no operational Spitfire squadrons.
Chamberlain was playing for time. He may have believed Adolph Hitler would stop with Bohemia (in Czechoslovakia). But he knew the horrors of trench warfare - all men of that generation did. And he knew what the experts were telling the Cabinet about the destructive power of bombing, and that Britain was (relatively) defenceless.
The error was in overestimating German military power. But Hitler was the master of the bluff - only finally underestimating the military resource required to invade the USSR.
+50. About time that old cliche was replaced with some actual history.
In parallel, the USDA changed its strategy for tackling H5N1, focusing on vaccinating chickens and finding therapeutics for them, while more or less putting cows on the backburner. As such, USDA granted a conditional license to Zoetis' H5N2 vaccine, though it is not yet approved for use.
It's a curious choice because, while it may address egg prices by obviating large chicken culls, (1) RFK's probably going to rail on such birds and their eggs entering the food supply, and (2) now that H5N1 is considered endemic to cows, one would think that the key to stopping a human pandemic would be to resolve its endemicity in cows.
At any one time there are 1.5 chickens per human in the US, with a total of 9 billion each year... Meat chickens live for about 7 weeks.
...which is mind blowing. Are they going to vaccinate 9 billion chickens? How?
I believe some animal vaccines are administered in their food?
I'm not fully understanding their strategy, but it sounds like if there's an outbreak at a farm, they're going to inoculate that farm and the surrounding farms, then hope and pray that the vaccination works instantaneously.
Apparently, the chickens-for-eggs folks are ok with vaccinating their flocks, but the chickens-for-meat folks are dead-set against it, because of concerns that consumers won't buy vaccinated meat. So good luck with getting the birds vaxed.
All of which is too late, anyway, since H5N1 is widespread in wild bird populations and has jumped to mammals, meaning the natural reservoirs of it are now vast and ubiquitous. Attempts to ring-fence infected chicken populations aren't going to address those reservoirs, so we need to get working on human vaccines and get them deployed as fast as possible to people in contact with birds and maybe just wildlife generally.
Some crazy religious fanatics in Texas are the source of this outbreak. Mennonites. The kid who died was one of them. It's hard to pin that on Kennedy. They were nuts long before he came along.
But we have to be nice and tolerant of this group because calling them stupid is rude. Too bad, so sad.
I despise Kennedy and all of MAGA, but it's time to lay low. There is a dangerous disease spreading in America and there is no vaccine.
I despise Kennedy and all of MAGA, and it's time to speak up.
FIFY
Sure - agree we should vote in every election and yell at your senators and representatives, but otherwise, don't buy stuff you don't need, don't travel, don't support MAGA businesses like Amazon, twitter, Meta, etc.
You might even engage in a slow down at work if your company or co-workers are MAGA friendly.
on a day Russia announces a successful mRna trial against cancer we get derp spittle. Putin's laughter must be long and hearty when these puppets open their mouths.
This administration has become a caricature of itself. From Elon musk virtually in control of the Whitehouse to RFK doing his best to make sure children suffer needlessly from preventable diseases. And its not even March.
Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic while death bubbles over the railing, is clearly religious mania.
Angry, greedy, nasty, children. That's who we're ruled by. Why is there not a summit of US Governors from blue states? We need an organized response and the Congressional Dems are not up to the task.
At least the blue-state AGs were prepared to counter some of the Project 2025 plans by drafting responses ready for filing in courts once trump toolk over & the administration began its assault on many frontal.
Congressional Democrats can speak up, but not having a majority in either the House or Senate doesn't give them any real legislative options.
I like the idea of a summit of blue state governors. As head of states they can implement actions to stop Trump, at least in some cases. I predict a couple of purple state Rep governors may join by the end of summer. This is a real sh*t show.
They had one a couple months ago.
Okay. So now the official federal pandemic response program is simplified to just laying in a large supply of body bags.
And now RFK Jr. is railing against seed oils, claiming they're toxic or something. In response he wants fast food companies to start cooking their French fries in beef tallow instead. Goodbye to fries if you're a vegetarian. Sadly, at least one FFC, Steak & Shake, has already made the switch.
Why bother with Senate confirmation hearings at all? Seriously. It’s a charade.
Yeah, especially since the administration is letting DOGE dig through with or without the appointments. And the Pentagon officals were fired before the appointment was voted on!