The New York Times reported that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s’s lawyer Aaron Siri has repeatedly sued to block vaccines and mandates. Siri is now advising Kennedy as he selects high-level personnel for the Department of Heslth and Human Services. Kennedy’s reliance on Siri demonstrates that his opposition to vaccines has not waned and will animate his actions should he be confirmed.
The story begins:
The lawyer helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pick federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration has petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine, which for decades has protected millions of people from a virus that can cause paralysis or death.
That campaign is just one front in the war that the lawyer, Aaron Siri, is waging against vaccines of all kinds.
Mr. Siri has also filed a petition seeking to pause the distribution of 13 other vaccines; challenged, and in some cases quashed, Covid vaccine mandates around the country; sued federal agencies for the disclosure of records related to vaccine approvals; and subjected prominent vaccine scientists to grueling videotaped depositions….
At the Trump transition headquarters in Florida, Mr. Siri has joined Mr. Kennedy in questioning and choosing candidates for top health positions, according to someone who observed the interactions but insisted on anonymity to disclose private conversations. They have asked candidates about their views of vaccines, the person said.
Are Kennedy and Siri determined to exclude those who understand the value of vaccines? No doubt.
“I love Aaron Siri,” Mr. Kennedy said in a clip played on a recent episode of a podcast hosted by Del Bigtree, who is Mr. Kennedy’s former campaign communications director and the founder of the Informed Consent Action Network, which describes itself as a “medical freedom” nonprofit. “There’s nobody who’s been a greater asset to the medical freedom movement than him.”
Like Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Siri insists he does not want to take vaccines away from anyone who wants them. “You want to get the vaccine — it’s America, a free country.” he told Arizona legislators last year after laying out his concerns about the vaccines for polio and other illnesses.
The Times notes that Siri has petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to withdraw approval of the polio vaccine as well as the vaccine for Hepatitis B.
Let me reiterate: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a dangerous crackpot. His beliefs kill.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I cannot help but think we’ll see voucher/charter schools advertising “no vaccines required” if this madness comes to pass.
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More pro-Trump coverage by the so-called “liberal” New York Times. Disgusting!
/s
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I sent this comment to the Times…So we’re really going to do this? I recall conversations with my dad, who was born in 1919, as he described the score of disease that struck fear in every parent when he was growing up and then with his fears as his children lived through the terror of polio. He would talk of friends who died from infection after popping a zit before antibiotics and those who suffered from other diseases. He survived malaria and scarlet fever that probably contributed to his coronary disease and death. This is insane! We do know the science and the miracles of 20th century medicine that put the minds of parents from boomers forward at ease. Now we have sociopaths inventing circumstances that would send us back 80 years. Ask Neil Young or even Mitch McConnell what it was like living with polio while their parents looked on helplessly hoping it would not take their children. This lunacy is criminal and would result in untold victims. I hope there are enough in Congress who understand the blood that would be on their hands.
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Mitch McConnell, as you note, survived polio. Will he vote to confirm this lunatic?
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Mitch seems to be in really bad shape.
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He might surprise everyone by voting against at least a few of Trump’s worse nominees.
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In my New Georgia Promise Act snags a third of Atlanta public schools. Why? I wrote: “… the Act is a foolishly stupid one, crafted by obviously morally and ethically challenged legislators.”
And I didn’t mean “stupid” as a pejorative putdown but rather as something substantive and real.
A reader responded by sharing a link to the four-minute video, The Real Threat: How Stupid Leaders Prove Cipolla’s Laws.
I just ordered a copy of economist Carlo Cipolla’s book, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (2021).
A reviewer of Cipolla’s book on amazon.com makes this well-received point: “[W]here exploitive people take value away from others to give it to themselves and their friends, stupid people take value away from others while making things worse for themselves, and thus lower the overall goodness circulating in human society.”
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Ed,
Excellent points. Describes so many in MAGA other than musk and Trump
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Another point, mirrored in Ed Johnson’s note above, is that the idea of individual freedom, taken to the extreme, is a false idea of total independence (when in fact one is not and cannot be so independent, unless you weren’t born), and in the end is an unfinished existence . . . instead of circulating back to recognizing one’s right and good and authentic relationship with oneself and with others in the socio-cultural arena of one’s actual history and, might I say, one’s development towards maturity. CBK
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“…the idea of individual freedom, taken to the extreme, is a false idea of total independence…”
What individual freedom means has vexed those who consider political philosophy for a long time.
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“the idea of individual freedom”
Individuals may have their own freedom but the are no less interconnected to thousands of people at any given moment. I look around my kitchen and realize that, literally, tens of thousands of people have had a hand in what occupies this space.
It is impossible for the individual to not be interconnected to other humans. Those who proclaim the glory of unlimited freedom for themselves are deluding themselves, might be considered very narcissistic for not understanding that Homo Supposedly Sapiens is a social beast and not a solitary one.
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I don’t think a lot of people are aware of what huge risks they take by not having or allowing vaccinations. Some of the diseases that vaccines are needed for can cause death and others can cause lifelong disabilities.
For example, for a few years in the late 70s, I taught at a school that had been established specifically for children who were deaf-blind, meaning each child was BOTH deaf AND blind. For the majority of those kids, the cause had been exposure to rubella (German Measles) in utero.
The students, who ranged in age from birth to 21 years old, usually had other problems, too, including cognitive, social and physical impairments. In fact, only one child in the entire school had average intelligence and was able to learn a lot of signs and how to fingerspell at a high level. I got so excited one day when he came to tell me he was feeling sick and he spelled the word “temperature” in my hand! He was also physically disabled and couldn’t walk independently without braces and crutches.
The children lived at the school and only some of their parents ever came to visit or took them home. I really adored those kids and my work with them. However, if you saw what kind of restricted life they had to live, by virtue of their multiple disabilities, you wouldn’t wish that on anyone. No one aspires to having a child like that, especially knowing that it can be prevented by a vaccine such as the MMR.
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BTW, We had been warned that some of those kids could die at a young age and they were right, some did. Sadly, a couple were among the ones whose parents really loved them, regularly visited and took them home.
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John Stuart Mill came in his treatise “On Liberty,” to the same conclusion that the French Declaration had done a generation before: a person’s liberty extends to the point at which it begins to restrict the liberty of another. In our world of microbe and virus, we are severely challenged by these restrictions.
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Complete idiocy. They will engineer wildly inflated vaccine denialism and refusal through misinformation (e.g. advocating “herd immunity”) and offering “choice” (as opposed to government explicitly advocating and using science). And this is not even to mention COVID is still relatively new – 2020. I am fortunate not to ever have gotten it after full vaxes. A fellow teacher who has had it three times told me about his “long COVID” symptoms like struggling to find words and mental fog. What’s the effect in 20 or 30 years? Who knows? People (especially MAGAs) also forget that initially there was real fear because NOONE knew what the effect was going to be. Their tough-guy bravado and victim narrative only came after this initial highly cautious phase. Our vet died from COVID shortly before the vax was available. It was heartbreaking. He was a skilled caring doctor and long time friend. He would have lived if vaccinated and he would have immediately done so being a man of science. These lunatics will be hawking their vitamins and horse pills using the veneer of governmental and scientific legitimacy. They will debase the integrity of our government by abusing and misrepresenting it’s scientific research to grift. It’s appalling. In Russia, when the science doesn’t support what the state wants it’s the numbers that change not the state. And NOT changing the numbers gets the scientist tossed out the lab window.
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This situation is horrific. Are we all going to have to travel to Canada to get vaccinated? What about the children who will be susceptible to polio, measles, diphtheria, etc.?
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RFK says vaccines should be available to those who want them, but not mandated.
So half your class will be vaccinated and half will not be.
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