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RFK Jr. Endangers the Lives of Children with His Extremist, Anti-Vax Views

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2025 //
9

Before he was named Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was best known for his extremist views about vaccines. He has said repeatedly that vaccines are unsafe, that the vaccines cause the disease they are supposed to prevent; and that vaccines cause autism.

His views are so extreme that he was asked at his confirmation hearings by Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, who is a doctor, whether he would change the vaccine policies of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Kennedy insisted that he would not.

Today, it became clear that he is trashing the vaccine policies that he said under oath he would not change.

RFK Jr..’s fired every member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replaced them with his allies.

Today, that hand-picked panel voted to stop recommending that all newborns receive a vaccine against Hepatitis B.

Senator Cassidy posted this reaction on Twitter:

As a liver doctor who has treated patients with hepatitis B for decades, this change to the vaccine schedule is a mistake. The hepatitis B vaccine is safe and effective. The birth dose is a recommendation, NOT a mandate.

Before the birth dose was recommended, 20,000 newborns a year were infected with hepatitis B. Now, it’s fewer than 20. Ending the recommendation for newborns makes it more likely the number of cases will begin to increase again. This makes America sicker.

Acting CDC Director O’Neill should not sign these new recommendations and instead retain the current, evidence-based approach.

Senator Kennedy’s outrage was echoed by numerous medical leaders and organizations. Children will die because of this decision.

The New York Times reported on the response to the ACIP decision by experts:

For many public health experts, the vote also marked the end of trust in the C.D.C. and its vaccine advisers.

“Today is a defining moment for our country,” Michael Osterholm, a public health expert at the University of Minnesota, said. “We can no longer trust federal health authorities when it comes to vaccines.”

In a statement, Dr. Richard Besser, president and chief executive of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a former acting director of the agency, said “policymakers, physicians, and families must turn to reputable medical and public health groups for guidance, and health insurers should do the same for informing what vaccines they will cover.” 

The votes on hepatitis B were originally scheduled for the September meeting but deferred twice because some members said there was insufficient data to make a decision. The committee attempted the vote again on Thursday, but postponed it after some panelists questioned whether a change was warranted.

Some panelists noted that the practice had helped to nearly eliminate cases among newborns in the United States, and that there was no evidence of harm from the shots at any age.

“We know it’s safe, and we know it’s very effective,” Dr. Cody Meissner, a professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine, said on Friday, and he warned that if the vote passed, “we will see more children and adolescents and adults infected with hepatitis B….”

RFK Jr. has used his power over the vast agency to fire or force out many well-respected scientists, who were replaced by people who share Kennedy’s extremist hatred of vaccines.

Vinay Prasad, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) and the chief medical and scientific officer at the US Food and Drug Administration, is strongly anti-vaxx, despite his sterling credentials. He recently stated that “at least” 10 children had died after taking the COVID vaccine shot, but he provided no evidence showing the causes of their deaths or how they were related to the vaccine.

Dr. Prasad said that the number of deaths might be more than 10.

Paul Offit, an infectious diseases physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said of the memo: “When you make that kind of sensational claim, I think it’s incumbent upon you to provide evidence that supports that claim. He didn’t supply any evidence.”

Dr. Offit was a member of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) at CDC but was removed earlier this year.

Nearly 24 million children between 6 months to age 17 received at least one shot of COVID vaccine, according to the CDC.

Categories Extremism, Health, Science

RFK Jr. Quietly Hires Anti-Vax Extremist as #2 at CDC

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2025 //
3

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. quietly installed an anti-vax extremist as #2 at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Ralph Lee Abraham is both a doctor and veterinarian. He served in Congress. In 2024, he was appointed Surgeon General of Louisiana. During the pandemic, he advocated hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin as cures for COVID, echoing Trump. Mainstream scientists found both to be ineffective. He opposed mass vaccinations.

Another blow against intelligence, science, medical knowledge and good health. Another strike against the nation’s premier public health institution. Look elsewhere for sound advice on medical issues.

Categories Health, Science, Trump

CDC Website Changed to Reflect RFK Jr. View of Vaccines and Autism

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2025 //
5

The New York Times reported that the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has changed to reflect the extremist views of The Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The takeover of the nation’s premier public health agency will encourage some parents to avoid life-saving vaccines. Children will die.

The story says:

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website that previously said that vaccines do not cause autism walked back that statement, contradicting the agency’s previous efforts to fight misinformation about a connection between the two.

The agency’s webpage on vaccines and autism, updated on Wednesday, now repeats the skepticism that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has voiced about the safety of vaccines, though dozens of scientific studies have failed to find evidence of a link.

A previous version of the webpage said that studies had shown “no link between receiving vaccines and developing autism spectrum disorder.” It cited a 2012 National Academy of Medicine review of scientific papers and a C.D.C. study from 2013.

On Thursday, the live version of the page stated: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”

Categories Extremism, Health, Science, Trump

Federal Judge Rules That Trump Regime Cannot Withhold $1.2 Billion from UCLA

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2025 //
2

Federal Judge Rita F. Lin ruled that the federal government cannot withhold $1.2 billion in funding for medical and scientific research as punishment for alleged anti-Senitism. This is an important victory for free speech, academic freedom, and the First Amendment. The Trump administration’s efforts to impose its views on the nation’s institutions of higher education—and U.S. research funding as leverage is unprecedented in American history.

The Los Angeles Times reported the decision.

A federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration from imposing a $1.2-billion fine on UCLA along with stipulations for deep campus changes in exchange for being eligible for federal grants.

The decision is a major win for universities that have struggled to resist President Trump’s attempt to discipline “very bad” universities that he claims have mistreated Jewish students, forcing them to pay exorbitant fines and agree to adhere to conservative standards.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The preliminary injunction, issued by U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District of California, rendered moot — for now — nearly every aspect of a more than 7,000-word settlement offer the federal government sent to the University of California in August after suspending $584 million in medical, science and energy research grants to the Los Angeles campus.

The government said it froze the funds after finding UCLA broke the law by using race as a factor in admissions, recognizing transgender people’s gender identities, and not taking antisemitism complaints seriously during pro-Palestinian protests in 2024 — claims that UC has denied.

The settlement proposal outlined extensive changes to push UCLA — and by extension all of UC — ideologically rightward by calling for an end to diversity-related scholarships, restrictions on foreign student enrollment, a declaration that transgender people do not exist, an end to gender-affirming healthcare for minors, the imposition of free speech limits and more.

“The administration and its executive agencies are engaged in a concerted campaign to purge ‘woke,’ ‘left,’ and ‘socialist’ viewpoints from our country’s leading universities,” Lin wrote in her opinion. “Agency officials, as well as the president and vice president, have repeatedly and publicly announced a playbook of initiating civil rights investigations of preeminent universities to justify cutting off federal funding, with the goal of bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune.

Universities are then presented with agreements to restore federal funding under which they must change what they teach, restrict student anonymity in protests, and endorse the administration’s view of gender, among other things. Defendants submit nothing to refute this….”

Universities including Columbia, Brown and Cornell agreed to pay the government hundreds of millions to atone for alleged violations similar to the ones facing UCLA. The University of Pennsylvania and University of Virginia also reached agreements with the Trump administration that were focused, respectively, on ending recognition of transgender people and halting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

Friday’s decision, for the time being, spares the UC from having to proceed with negotiations that it reluctantly entered with the federal government to avoid further grant cuts and restrictions across the system, which receives $17.5 billion in federal funding each year. UC President James B. Milliken has said that the $1.2-billion fine would “completely devastate” UC and that the system, under fire from the Trump administration, faces “one of the gravest threats in UC’s 157-year history.”

This is not the first time a judge rebuked Trump for his higher education campaign.

Massachusetts-based U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs in September ordered the government to reverse billions in cuts to Harvard. But that case did not wade directly into settlement negotiations.

Those talks have proceeded slowly. In a court hearing last week, a Department of Justice lawyer said “there’s no evidence that any type of deal with the United States is going to be happening in the immediate future.” The lawyer argued that the settlement offer was only an idea that had not received UC approval.
Because of that, he said, a lawsuit was inappropriate. Lin disagreed.

“Plaintiffs’ harm is already very real. With every day that passes, UCLA continues to be denied the chance to win new grants, ratcheting up defendants’ pressure campaign,” she wrote. “And numerous UC faculty and staff have submitted declarations describing how defendants’ actions have already chilled speech throughout the UC system.”

The case was brought by more a dozen faculty and staff unions and associations from across UC’s 10 campuses, who said the federal government was violating their 1st Amendment rights and constitutional right to due process.

UC, which has avoided directly challenging the government in court, was not party to the suit.
“This is not only a historic lawsuit — brought by every labor union and faculty union in the UC — but also an incredible win,” said Veena Dubal, a UC Irvine law professor and general counsel for one of the plaintiffs, the American Assn. of University Professors, which has members across UC campuses.

Dubal called the decision “a turning point in the fight to save free speech and research in the finest public school system in the world.”
Asked about Friday’s outcome, a spokesperson said UC “remains focused on our vital work to drive innovation, advance medical breakthroughs and strengthen the nation’s long-term competitiveness. UC remains committed to protecting the mission, governance, and academic freedom of the university.”

Categories Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Higher Education, Medicine, Research, Science

Watch PBS’s “The Rise of RFK Jr.” Learn Who He Is.

By dianeravitch
November 9, 2025 //
2

Last night I watched a PBS Frontline documentary: The Rise of RFK Jr.

This documentary is fascinating. It shows young Bobby’s idyllic childhood at the family’s sprawling, luxurious compound in Virginia. He grew up in a world of joy, fun, and privilege.

You can see how deeply he was scarred by the murder of his father, with whom he was very close. This was an experience no child should endure.

He is sent away to a boarding school, where he is soon kicked out. Then another, then Harvard, which was a given, in light of his name. At Harvard, he becomes addicted to drugs and a drug dealer. Pot, cocaine, heroin.

He goes to law school, flunks the bar exam, but eventually passes. He marries an eligible young woman, has children, divorces her. Still a drug addict. Meets a beautiful Catholic girl, marries her, has four children. He begins to find his niche as an environmental lawyer. Life is looking up. But he’s a sex addict and he keeps a record of his conquests–at least 37. His wife finds the record and hangs herself.

He believes he is destined for greatness. He is a Kennedy so he keeps looking for the vehicle that will catapult him to fame. He discovers angry mothers who are looking for the cause of their children’s autism. He latches on to the issue and becomes their champion. He also becomes a prominent anti-Vaxxer and conspiracy theorist.

He briefly runs for president in 2024 but soon realizes that his prospects are nil. Trump offers a big job if he joins his campaign. Bobby accepts his offer, to the dismay of his family.

Bobby speaks to large, adoring crowds. He loves it.

Trump appoints him to lead the government’s public health agency–Health and Human Services. His family is appalled. They know he is unqualified. They know he has no respect for science. He promises the Senate committee that he won’t stop vaccines, despite his long history as a critic of them. He wins approval.

He begins to fire prominent scientists and thousands of experienced employees. He throws the agency into turmoil.

So here we are.

Categories Accountability, Character, Cruelty, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Health, Safety, Science, Shame, Trump

When Science Is Stranger Than Fiction

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2025 //
3

Here’s a question I never thought about: where did the oceans come from?

Scientists have wondered and this is what they think, according to Science Advisor.

Billions of years ago, asteroids bombarded Earth, bringing with them bits of water that coalesced into the ocean and helped make our planet habitable. But the details of how so much water could arrive in such small packages have been fuzzy.

In 2018, Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 visited Ryugu, a near-Earth asteroid studied to show us what materials could have been brought to Earth from other bodies in the solar system. The samples the craft returned from Ryugu’s surface were tiny: only a few grams in total. But when researchers analyzed two key isotopes used as geological clocks within them, lutetium-176 and hafnium-176, they noticed far higher levels than expected. This indicated that fluid, likely water, was washing out the isotopes from the rocks’ interior.

The researchers hypothesize that Ryugu’s larger asteroid parent was in a space collision, triggering buried ice to melt and seep into its outer layers, chunks of which later broke off, like Ryugu. While researchers believed watery asteroids only occurred in the very young solar system, this theory would suggest they retained ice for a billion years. That in turn suggests that when asteroids like Ryugu’s parent crashed into Earth, they were carrying two to three times more water than we gave them credit for.

“Suddenly we have evidence that these [asteroids] were wetter than we previously thought, which meant that they can more reasonably explain the origin of the Earth’s oceans when they hit the early planet,” astronomer Jonti Horner, who was not involved in the work, told New Scientist.

Categories Science

RFK Jr. Has a Problem with Jews

By dianeravitch
October 14, 2025 //
13

It’s hard to know which member of Trump’s Cabinet is the most unhinged. Some might say it is Kristi Noem, who has a cruelty streak that she showed when she shot her dog in the head and when she glories in sending ICE to beat up immigrants and citizens and to tear families apart. Or it could be Pete Hegseth, who takes pleasure in firing military officers who rank and service far exceed his. Or it could be the Energy Secretary what’s-his-name who prefers fossil fuels and shares Trump’s antipathy to clean energy, wind or solar.

But I nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who embarrasses himself almost every time he speaks.

There are many reasons to question his judgment, including his hostility to science.

He seems to have a particular contempt for Jews. His latest outrage was to convince Trump that there is a well-established link between circumcision and autism. Even in his telling, it’s not clear whether autism is “caused” by circumcision or by the Tylenol that doctors prescribe for pain.

If he were right, a striking proportion of Jewish males would be afflicted with autism. Virtually all Jewish males are circumcised.

Should Jewish families stop circumcising their male children or stop giving them Tylenol? It’s not clear.

Scientific American says that RFK Jr. and Trump are wrong about the connections among circumcision, Tylenol, and autism. The two studies upon which he relies are fundamentally flawed, they say.

Helen Tager-Flusberg, an autism researcher and a professor emerita at Boston University, calls the methods used in those studies “appalling.” Tager-Flusberg leads the Coalition of Autism Scientists, a group that advocates for high-quality autism research.

Neither study shows a causal link between circumcision—or the pain relief medications that are often prescribed along with the procedure—and higher rates of autism. In the decade-plus since each was published, autism researchers have heavily criticized these studies. And after reviewing both studies, scientists last year found no evidence supporting the claim that circumcision leads to autism or any other adverse psychological effects.

But that’s not all.

In 2022, at an anti-vaccine rally, RFK Jr. said that people forced to take vaccines were worse off than Anne Frank or other victims of the Holocaust. He subsequently apologized for his appalling remarks.

Politico reported:

Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., apologized Tuesday for suggesting things are worse for people today than they were for Anne Frank, the teenager who died in a Nazi concentration camp after hiding with her family in a secret annex in an Amsterdam house for two years.

Kennedy’s comments, made at a Washington rally on Sunday put on by his anti-vaccine nonprofit group, were widely condemned as offensive, outrageous and historically ignorant. It’s the second time since 2015 that Kennedy has apologized for referencing the Holocaust during his work sowing doubt and distrust about vaccines…

“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” he told the crowd.

An investigation by The Associated Press last month found that Kennedy has invoked the specter of Nazis and the Holocaust when talking about public health measures meant to save lives during the pandemic, such as requiring masks or vaccine mandates.

In July 2023, while campaigning for President, RFK Jr. attacked the COVID vaccines and said they were designed to target Caucasians and blacks.

Politico reported:

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denied allegations of racism and anti-Semitism Saturday after he reportedly suggested Covid-19 could have been genetically engineered to reduce risks to Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.

Kennedy — a longtime vaccine skeptic who is running a longshot primary campaign against President Joe Biden — said during a Tuesday night press event that Covid-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people.” He went on to say that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

Kennedy believed that his comments were not anti-Semitic. But he insisted they were true.

Asked about his comments from July in which he said Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, Kennedy acknowledged that some people could be “disturbed” by the comments. But he said he believed “they certainly weren’t antisemitic.”

“I wish I hadn’t said them, you know. What I said was true,” he said. “The only reason I wouldn’t talk publicly about this … is that I know that there’s people out there who are antisemitic and can misuse any information.”

He never offered any evidence that the COVID vaccine was designed to spare Jews and Chinese. Was it a hunch?

RFK Jr. has a problem with Jews.

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Extremism, Health, Science, Stupid, Trump

Paul Offit: RFK Jr.’s Obsessions Threaten the Lives of Children

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2025 //
1

Dr. Paul Offit is a medical doctor who specializes in children’s infectious diseases. He is appalled by the actions and policies of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., because they endanger the health of our nation, especially children.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a disgrace to his family name. He should not have been put in charge of public health. Not only is he totally unqualified, but his beliefs about medicine are dangerous.

Dr. Offit writes:

On April 15, 2025, Dr. Fiona Havers, an epidemiologist at the CDC, presented data on the impact of COVID-19 on children the previous year. She found that COVID-19 had caused thousands of children to be hospitalized; 20 percent of whom were admitted to the intensive care unit. Virtually all were unvaccinated, half were previously healthy, and 152 had died, most less than 4 years of age. The conclusion was clear; young children in the United States who had never been vaccinated will still benefit from a COVID-19 vaccine. Although the pandemic was over, the virus wasn’t.

Six weeks later, on May 27, 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), in a video posted on X, said that COVID-19 vaccines would no longer be recommended for young, healthy children. When asked to provide evidence for this unilateral, behind-closed-doors decision, he couldn’t.
This week, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) released its own recommendations. Consistent with the CDC’s findings—and in direct contrast to Kennedy’s edict—the AAP stated, “Infants and children 6 to 23 months of age are at high risk for severe COVID-19…All infants and children in this age group [should] receive the 2025-2026 COVID-19 vaccine…Those who are previously unvaccinated should receive an initial series.”

Hours after the AAP released its statement, Kennedy fired back, posting on X that the AAP was engaging in a “pay-to-play scheme to promote commercial ambitions of AAP’s Big Pharma benefactors.” Kennedy linked to a page showing that the AAP’s Friends of Children Fund, a charity that focuses on adolescent mental health and suicide prevention, had received donations from several vaccine makers. Kennedy also claimed that the medical journal that published the AAP’s recommendations, Pediatrics, was part of this same “pay-to-play scheme.” Kennedy’s actions were a tiresome rerun of his many accusations over the past 20 years. Whenever scientists, doctors, public health officials, academic institutions, scientific journals, or medical or professional societies claim that a vaccine is safe, effective, or valuable, he says that they are all in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry. No one is to be trusted, except him.

Kennedy’s conflict-of-interest gambit is a misdirection game. If he can get the press and the public to talk about conflicts-of-interest, he can distract from his decision to recommend against COVID-19 vaccines for children that wasn’t supported by the evidence.

Then Kennedy made a veiled threat, posting on X that the “AAP should be candid with doctors and hospitals that recommendations that diverge from the CDC’s official list are not shielded from liability under the 1986 Vaccine Injury Act.” Defy me, argued Kennedy, and I will make sure that doctors and hospitals that recommend COVID-19 vaccines for young children could be sued. It was an empty threat. Doctors and hospitals are protected from liability related to COVID-19 vaccines by the PREP Act. Kennedy’s threat was yet another mean-spirited attempt at misdirection.

Pediatricians, parents, and public health officials are confused by these conflicting recommendations. Epidemiological evidence says one thing, Kennedy another. This confusion will likely result in some young children failing to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. It is also likely that some of these children will be admitted to the hospital, or intensive care unit, or die as a result. And when that happens, we won’t have to look any further than the man who for the past 20 years has been an anti-vaccine propagandist, science denialist, and conspiracy theorist to understand why.

W.H. Auden, a British American poet, wrote, “When all the mass and majesty of this world, when all that carried weight and always weighed the same, lay in the hands of others. They were small and could not hope for help and no help came.” How many children will have to suffer needlessly at the hands of RFK Jr. before someone, anyone steps up to save them?

I’m reminded that protestors against the war in Vietnam used to chant,

“Hey, hey, LBJ,

How many kids did you kill today?”

When will they say that about RFK?

Categories Childhood, Health, Ignorance, Medicine, Science

Jack Hassard: What Happens When You Can’t Trust Government Data?

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2025 //
9

What happens when government data are politicized? What happens when a President fires the professionals who report the data and replace them with his loyalists?

Jack Hassard, a retired professor of science education at Georgia State University, knows what happens. Hassard followed Trump’s behavior in his first term and wrote a book called The Trump Files.

The problem with Trump has accelerated now that he is surrounded by a well-organized cabal of far-right extremists who are turning him into a dictator.

Dear Jack,1

I was eight the last time the numbers were real.

Every Friday, my mother would check the Bureau of Labor Statistics dashboard. She did this the way some families checked the weather. She was quiet and anxious, with a hand on the mouse and a furrow in her brow. The numbers told her how many people had lost work that week. They showed how fast prices were rising. The data revealed whether the rent hikes were outpacing wages again. It was her way of listening for distant thunder. Today, nevertheless, the BLS dashboard is not updating information because of the Republican led government shutdown.

The dashboard went dark the spring Trump returned to power. At first we thought it was just another funding fight, like the ones that had knocked websites offline before. But weeks passed, and the updates never came back. My mother kept refreshing the page for months, like a ritual for a ghost.

By the end of that summer, more pages were vanishing. Climate dashboards froze mid-storm season. Food insecurity surveys were “postponed indefinitely.” Vaccine data disappeared without explanation. By winter, it was as if the country had decided to stop looking at itself in the mirror.

They called it austerity. They said it was about cutting “red tape” and “freeing the agencies from bloated bureaucracy.” But everyone could feel the chill. It wasn’t just numbers that were being cut. It was the nerves that told us where the pain was.

We didn’t realize it at the time. This was how the silence began. It began not with censorship in the usual sense but with a subtraction of knowledge.

When the data stopped, arguments stopped making sense. People clung to whatever numbers their preferred networks fed them, like castaways grabbing driftwood. One station would say unemployment was rising; another insisted we were in a “golden age.” Both cited “official sources,” but the sources were gone, hollowed out or replaced by Trump’s loyalists.

At school, the teachers tried to explain inflation, but the charts they used were months out of date. Some parents started printing memes as evidence. Others stopped trusting the schools entirely.

Looking back, it’s astonishing how quickly civic discourse disintegrated once the shared factual floor cracked. We had thought democracy died in coups or riots. Instead, it died in data voids—quiet gaps that widened into abysses.

My father used to call it “the silence before the storm.” Storms were his touchstone for everything. He said the scariest part wasn’t the wind or the rain. It was the moment the air went unnaturally still. You realized the warning systems had failed.

That silence descended over our public life. When pollution monitoring sites shut down, a chemical spill in Savannah went undetected for weeks. By the time the numbers surfaced through a university backchannel, children were already sick. When the food insecurity survey was cut, hunger surged invisibly. Relief programs couldn’t track where the need was worst.

And when climate data went dark, the storms didn’t stop. They just stopped being predictable. The year the NOAA dashboards froze was the year the Atlantic hurricanes changed course mid-season. Thousands died inland, where no one expected them.

The silence didn’t come from ignorance. It came from a deliberate decision to turn off the lights.

I know you study this era, Jack, so you know the official explanations: budget cuts, “efficiency reforms,” sovereignty rhetoric. But those were just alibis. Trump understood something that too many defenders of democracy underestimated: data is power. Whoever controls the ability to measure reality controls the terms of debate.

His war on data wasn’t chaotic—it was methodical. Fire the agency heads who produce inconvenient statistics. Defund the surveys that expose inequality. Gut the climate monitors that contradict your conspiracies. Let loyal media amplify your alternate “facts.” Over time, the shared reality collapses, and the strongman narrative becomes the only stable frame left.

Categories Data, Democracy, Disruption, Environment, Evil, Extremism, Health, History, Lies, Science, Trump

Paul Offit: Is RFK Jr. an Alien?

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2025 //
6

Paul Offit, MD., is a doctor, a real one. His blog is titled “Beyond the Noise.” Its author is a pediatric infectious diseases physician, author, FDA advisor, grandfather, and co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine.

“‘To Serve Man” was my favorite Twight Zone episode.

He writes:

The best explanation for the current public health nightmare is that we are reliving a Twilight Zone episode from March 2, 1962.

I’ve been trying to understand the recent inexplicable actions of our Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Now, I’m pretty sure I’ve figured it out. We are being forced to relive a Twilight Zone episode that originally aired on March 2, 1962. It was called “To Serve Man.”

In “To Serve Man”, 9-foot-tall aliens come to earth and address congressional delegates and journalists. The aliens promise to solve the world’s food shortages with better agricultural techniques. They promise a cleaner environment, free from harmful chemicals. They promise a world free from war. These promises strangely mimic those made by today’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. Led by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., MAHA has promised to connect public health to the environment, to modernize standards for the use of chemicals, to eliminate pesticides and artificial dyes and ultra-processed foods. By embracing the central tenets of MAHA, we can live longer, better lives.

The aliens kept their promises. Wars ended. Food was plentiful. Humans thrived. There was, however, one grotesque catch. “To Serve Man” wasn’t a treatise on better health, it was a cookbook on how to prepare and serve humans—as food. It was about fattening us up for when invaders transported us back to their planet.

In “To Serve Man”, the aliens were easy to spot. They were 9-feet tall and had mechanical voices. Today, the aliens among us are much harder to spot. For example, the man who leads the MAHA movement looks and talks like us. He appears to be one of us. Nonetheless, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. offers several clues that he is not from this world. For example, he doesn’t believe in the germ theory—that bacteria or viruses cause specific diseases. He believes that no vaccine is beneficial, that HIV is not the cause of AIDS, that unpasteurized milk is safe, that he and his family can swim safely in bacteria-infested creeks, and that natural measles infection prevents cancer, heart disease, and autoimmune disease. Measles infections should be embraced, argues Kennedy, not feared. No one from this planet—or at least no one who has lived here within the past 150 years—could possibly believe these things to be true.

The price paid for the false promises made by aliens in “To Serve Man” was that people were taken to another planet and eaten. Today, on this planet, Robert F. Kennedy’s MAHA movement might help us to eat better and live longer. But, like the aliens in “To Serve Man,” there is a hideous catch. RFK Jr. is laser-focused on making vaccines less available, less affordable, and more feared. During the past year, for the first time in twenty years, two healthy children died from measles. Also, 266 children died from influenza, more than anything we’ve experienced since the 2009 swine flu pandemic. And ten children have died this year from pertussis; the previous year, two children died. This will only get worse.

In “To Serve Man,” Congress didn’t realize that we were dinner for aliens until it was too late. One can only hope that Congress will realize that Kennedy, the man behind the MAHA movement, is not one of us. The alien in “To Serve Man” was named Kanamit. Same first letter. Same number of letters and syllables. Do you see my point? It’s really the only explanation that makes sense.

I’ve been trying to understand the recent inexplicable actions of our Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Now, I’m pretty sure I’ve figured it out. We are being forced to relive a Twilight Zone episode that originally aired on March 2, 1962. It was called “To Serve Man.”

In “To Serve Man”, 9-foot-tall aliens come to earth and address congressional delegates and journalists. The aliens promise to solve the world’s food shortages with better agricultural techniques. They promise a cleaner environment, free from harmful chemicals. They promise a world free from war. These promises strangely mimic those made by today’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. Led by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., MAHA has promised to connect public health to the environment, to modernize standards for the use of chemicals, to eliminate pesticides and artificial dyes and ultra-processed foods. By embracing the central tenets of MAHA, we can live longer, better lives.

The aliens kept their promises. Wars ended. Food was plentiful. Humans thrived. There was, however, one grotesque catch. “To Serve Man” wasn’t a treatise on better health, it was a cookbook on how to prepare and serve humans—as food. It was about fattening us up for when invaders transported us back to their planet.

In “To Serve Man”, the aliens were easy to spot. They were 9-feet tall and had mechanical voices. Today, the aliens among us are much harder to spot. For example, the man who leads the MAHA movement looks and talks like us. He appears to be one of us. Nonetheless, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. offers several clues that he is not from this world. For example, he doesn’t believe in the germ theory—that bacteria or viruses cause specific diseases. He believes that no vaccine is beneficial, that HIV is not the cause of AIDS, that unpasteurized milk is safe, that he and his family can swim safely in bacteria-infested creeks, and that natural measles infection prevents cancer, heart disease, and autoimmune disease. Measles infections should be embraced, argues Kennedy, not feared. No one from this planet—or at least no one who has lived here within the past 150 years—could possibly believe these things to be true.

The price paid for the false promises made by aliens in “To Serve Man” was that people were taken to another planet and eaten. Today, on this planet, Robert F. Kennedy’s MAHA movement might help us to eat better and live longer. But, like the aliens in “To Serve Man,” there is a hideous catch. RFK Jr. is laser-focused on making vaccines less available, less affordable, and more feared. During the past year, for the first time in twenty years, two healthy children died from measles. Also, 266 children died from influenza, more than anything we’ve experienced since the 2009 swine flu pandemic. And ten children have died this year from pertussis; the previous year, two children died. This will only get worse.

In “To Serve Man,” Congress didn’t realize that we were dinner for aliens until it was too late. One can only hope that Congress will realize that Kennedy, the man behind the MAHA movement, is not one of us. The alien in “To Serve Man” was named Kanamit. Same first letter. Same number of letters and syllables. Do you see my point? It’s really the only explanation that makes sense.

Categories Health, Insane, Medicine, Science
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