#325 — A Few Thoughts About RFK Jr.
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Summary
R.I.K. Jr. has been everywhere of late. He has been on the All In Podcast, and some of the hosts there are friends or friends of friends or former friends, except for Tucker Carlson, who is a well-established liar. But all of these people, to one degree or another, failed to understand the problem with platforming a person like Robert Kennedy Jr. And this term platforming is now stigmatized as somehow being at odds with a commitment to free speech, right? Only someone who doesn t support free speech or who doesn't understand that sunlight is the best disinfectant would worry about platforming someone like RFK, or anyone else. Why not just talk to anybody? What could go wrong? What are you afraid of? What do you fear of? And why should you even bother to talk to him if you can't be trusted to speak honestly about important topics? And so yes, it becomes irresponsible to platform such people? And I'll show you a example of this in a moment where it becomes dangerous to do so, and I'll make a case for why you shouldn't even be talking to someone like him at all, because he's not a scientist, and isn't a scientist. But he is a lawyer and an activist. And as a lawyer, he has for the last 20 years worked rather hard to create a mood of suspicion with respect to the scientific establishment. And he thinks that the relevant corporations and think tanks that don't have personal First Amendment protections should be prosecuted for reckless endangerment. And that would allow us to enjoy the privilege of enjoying three hotspot at COT at the Hague and a war with the other criminals. And those who spread wacky ideas of which do not have the right to make arguments out of their ideas. . Those are his words may turn out to be the fullness of a wacky rightness. - Sam Harris of which I have a different relationship to making arguments that he does not have a right to spread them out. If you don't believe me, then you're a crank. ... well, maybe you should listen to his words? - What's the problem is that he doesn't have a problem with climate change? - is he a crank who should be jailed for spreading ideas that don t trust the scientific consensus on climate change, and anyone who does is a crank? What's a crack who does not trust the science there?
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris.
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Okay, well, in the last housekeeping, I said I would say something about the RFK phenomenon.
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I'm not going to spend too much time on this. At the moment, I don't think it merits an especially
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deep treatment, but I think there's something that should be said, because RFK has been everywhere
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of late. And I declined to have him on this podcast. At one point, a mutual friend reached out
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offering to put us together, and I declined for the time being. You know, perhaps I will talk to
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him at some point, but I hope it doesn't come to that. But he's spoken to Rogan and Jordan Peterson
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and Barry Weiss and Bill Maher and Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, I think. He was on the All In
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Podcast and some of the hosts there through a fundraiser for him for his presidential campaign.
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All of these people are friends or friends of friends or former friends, except for Tucker Carlson,
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who, as I pointed out a few podcasts back, is just a well-established liar. I don't know how anyone
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is holding him up as an honest broker of information. But all these people, to one or
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another degree, failed to understand the problem with platforming a person like Robert Kennedy Jr.
00:01:53.980
And this term platforming is now stigmatized as somehow being at odds with a commitment to free
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speech, right? Only someone who doesn't support free speech or who doesn't understand that sunlight is
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the best disinfectant would worry about, quote, platforming a person like RFK or anyone else,
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right? Why not just talk to anybody? What could go wrong? What are you afraid of? Admittedly, this
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becomes somewhat understandable when a person is running for president and polling, at least according
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to one poll, higher than any other person in the Democratic Party. So yes, when someone is garnering that
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kind of public support or parent support, it is newsworthy and the argument for talking to them
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is easier to make. But then you have to do the hard work of real journalism, right? You can't just put a
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microphone in front of the guy for a few hours and hope that your bullshit detector is going to go off
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at the right time. And the truth is, even if you do your homework, you can't know in real time,
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you certainly can't establish in real time that someone is lying, right? And so with certain
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people, and I'm afraid to say that RFK appears to be one of these people, there's such a pattern
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of misrepresentation with respect to facts that you just have to decide in advance that a person can't
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be trusted to speak honestly about important topics. And so yes, it becomes irresponsible to platform
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such people. And I'll show you an example of this in a moment. But the general point to make here is
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that there's no good reason to talk to RFK about vaccines and vaccine safety and vaccine science,
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because he's not a scientist and he's not a doctor. He's a lawyer and an activist. And as a lawyer
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and an activist, he has for the last 20 years worked rather hard to create a mood of suspicion
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with respect to the scientific establishment. Although ironically, he's also an environmental
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activist. And as Michael Shermer has pointed out, he sings an entirely different tune with respect to
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established science on the topic of climate change. He goes on and on about trusting the scientific
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consensus there. And anyone who doesn't is a crank. In fact, worse, a crank who should be jailed.
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RFK has actually said that anyone who spreads misinformation about climate change should be
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jailed. In particular, the Koch brothers. On his account, they should be prosecuted for reckless
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endangerment. Now, RFK is a lawyer and he's well aware that we have a First Amendment that protects
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people espousing their bad ideas. But he thinks that the relevant corporations and think tanks that don't
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have personal First Amendment protections should be prosecuted and destroyed. Right? This is Exxon and Koch
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Industries and the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute and the American
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Enterprise Institute. All of these organizations should be destroyed on his account. And anyone who's playing the
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same just asking questions routine he's playing with respect to vaccines, but doing it on the topic of climate
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change, he wishes we had a law that would allow us to prosecute these people. Because on his account, they should
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be enjoying three hots and a cot at the Hague with the other war criminals. Right? Those are his words. Right? So all you
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free speech absolutists who insist upon the wisdom of platforming the sky at every opportunity might want to reflect on
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his commitment to free speech. Again, this man is an activist and a lawyer. Right? And lawyers have very
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different relationships to making arguments than scientists do. So on each of these podcasts, he has spread
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a host of wacky ideas. Right? Some of which may in the fullness of time turn out to be true, but most of which
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certainly won't. Right? He blames SSRIs for mass shootings. He thinks that cell phones cause brain
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cancer. I think he has also said that Wi-Fi causes brain cancer, but it seems that he's most concerned
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about cell phones. He thinks they damage the blood-brain barrier and damage mitochondria. And he also claims
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to be sitting on groundbreaking evidence for all this. He, in the past, has sounded skeptical that the HIV
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virus causes AIDS. Right? He's just asking questions there. He has said that the pandemic restrictions
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during COVID were part of a CIA plot to exert totalitarian control over our society. Incidentally,
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he is absolutely sure that the CIA killed his uncle, JFK, and he's pretty sure the CIA killed his father,
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RFK. But above all, he thinks that childhood vaccines, in particular the MMR vaccine, causes autism. And I'll talk
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about that in a moment. But the problem is that he is tapping into something that is real, and which he, I think,
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has appropriately diagnosed. If you listen to him talk about the pervasive distrust of institutions at this moment
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in American history, and in particular, how the institutions earned this distrust in recent years,
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he's right about all that. And this is something that I've talked about a lot on the podcast. So he's
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messaging into an environment where there is a massive appetite for contrarian takes on more or less
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than just everything. This has been an absolute boon to the misinformation cult that he has been at the center of
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for two decades. Right? And this is the cult of vaccine fear. And again, the truth here is complicated, because
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some vaccines have been recalled. Vaccine injury is a real thing. Some vaccines don't work as well as advertised.
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Some people can't get vaccinated because they have real allergic reactions. Those people, incidentally,
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rely on the rest of us to get vaccinated so they can be protected by herd immunity. The COVID vaccines
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don't work as well as we hoped. The herd immunity argument goes out the window there because they don't
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prevent transmission. With any medical intervention, you can always find horror stories. I mean, literally,
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you can find people who have died from aspirin. And when you're talking about medical interventions
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on healthy people, especially healthy kids that can sometimes go wrong, this understandably triggers
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everyone's deepest fears. I let them stick a needle in my child and he died. Every parent's worst nightmare.
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So it's into this schema that RFK has been spreading his lies, it seems, for 20 years. So while he can be
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quite compelling in describing the national mood of distrust, listening to him on that topic is like
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listening to an arsonist report from the scene of a fire which he helped start. He has been part of the
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problem all along. Okay, so in particular, he thinks that the MMR vaccine causes autism because it has
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mercury in it, or had mercury in it. And that is a claim that has been thoroughly debunked. It's based
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on what is now acknowledged to be a scientific fraud. Andrew Wakefield published a study in the Lancet in
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1998, which has since been retracted. And I believe 10 or 11 of his 12 co-authors supported the
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retraction. And the evidence for its fraudulence has been established in at least one book-length
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exposé. And in any case, thimerosal, the preservative with the traces of ethyl mercury, was removed from
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childhood vaccines 22 years ago, in 2001, to appease the concerns of parents. And the rate of autism has
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not decreased in the meantime. And also, kids who don't get vaccinated get autism. And it's also a
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fact that children absorb more methylmercury, which is the natural environmental form of mercury. They get
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more of that in their first months of life than they ever got ethyl mercury in the vaccines. And methylmercury
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has a half-life in the bloodstream that's 10 times that of ethyl mercury. So it's more likely to do
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harm. Anyway, Kennedy continues to spread fear about childhood vaccines and this spurious link to
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autism. And when he is pushed by any of these podcast hosts, he says he's just asking questions or he just
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wants the same scientific standards to apply to vaccines as get applied to everything else, right? But he's
00:10:58.300
not just asking questions. Again, he's spreading a mood of suspicion and fear. And he is claiming, in many
00:11:06.060
cases explicitly, but in every case at least tacitly, that the link between vaccines and autism has been
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established. And certainly, he's never admitting that it has been debunked as a fraud. But this fraud gave
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birth to the modern anti-vax movement. And this fraudulence appears to animate what RFK Jr. is doing
00:11:26.580
now. Because he is demonstrating a pattern of systematically misrepresenting the conclusions
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of the studies he cites. And he also just appears to make things up. And the important point here is
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that there's no way for a podcast host to know that he's doing that in real time. He makes claims about
00:11:47.920
the FDA and the CDC that just appear to be flat wrong. Now I'm going to read you something that Paul
00:11:54.140
Offit wrote in 2017 in Stat News, right? Paul Offit is a pediatrician and a vaccine expert. I believe
00:12:03.320
he's on the patent for the rotavirus vaccine. And Kennedy has made some crazy claims about this and
00:12:09.500
his relationship to it. Any case, Offit wrote the following in response to an interview that Kennedy
00:12:16.740
gave back in 2017. This is Offit. Kennedy also said that he wanted to ensure, quote,
00:12:24.040
that vaccines are subject to the same kind of safety scrutiny and safety testing that other drugs are
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subject to, end quote. In fact, vaccines are subjected to greater scrutiny than drugs, much greater.
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The CDC spends tens of millions of dollars every year on the Vaccine Safety Data Link, a system of
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linked computerized medical records from several major health maintenance organizations that represents
00:12:47.360
about 7 million Americans, 500,000 of whom are children. Nothing like this exists on the drug side.
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Frankly, if a drug safety data link existed, the problem with Vioxx as a cause of heart attacks
00:12:59.140
might have been picked up much sooner. Perhaps most outrageous was Kennedy's claim that, quote,
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the hepatitis B vaccines that are currently approved had fewer than five days of safety testing.
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That means that if the child had a seizure on the sixth day, it's never seen. If the child dies,
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it's never seen, end quote. Safety monitoring for the hepatitis B vaccine, like all vaccines tested
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before being licensed, involved determining the side effects in the vaccinated and unvaccinated group
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for weeks after each dose. Indeed, some subsets of vaccinated individuals have been monitored for 30
00:13:33.760
years after hepatitis B vaccination, end quote. Okay, so there is Offit doing some of the laborious and
00:13:44.140
boring work of putting out just one small fire that Kennedy created in an interview. Kennedy says that
00:13:53.840
these vaccines aren't tested by the standards of ordinary drugs, whereas the opposite has been the case.
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And then recently on the Rogan podcast, Kennedy attacked Paul Offit by name, claiming that he
00:14:06.080
had made $186 million with Merck based on his rotavirus vaccine. This is what Offit recently wrote in
00:14:13.880
response to that. RFK Jr.'s statement about my $186 million deal with Merck was a complete and utter lie,
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and it's resulted in hate mail, physical altercations with anti-vaccine activists, and three death
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threats. One caller threatened my children. By falsely labeling me as someone willing to line my
00:14:33.960
pockets at the expense of children's health, RFK Jr. put both me and my family at risk. Before our
00:14:40.740
rotavirus vaccine was recommended by both the CDC and the World Health Organization for all infants in 2006,
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rotavirus killed about 2,000 children every day in the world. Our vaccine is estimated to save hundreds
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of lives every day. It's the professional accomplishment of which I'm most proud. What
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exactly has Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accomplished? Using the platform of a famous name, he's chosen to lie
00:15:04.800
about vaccines and vaccine safety, no doubt putting children in harm's way. Now he's running for
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president of the United States, end quote. So again, that's the problem. He's messaging into this fever
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dream of distrust and frank fear, and all these other podcasters and people like Elon Musk are doing
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the same. What we desperately need at this point is a CDC and an FDA that we can trust. And insofar as
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the basis for trust has really eroded, we have to fix that. But what we do not need is someone like
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Elon Musk dunking on vaccine experts in front of 140 million people and putting their lives at risk,
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as he recently did with a different doctor, Peter Hotez. And we don't need people like Joe Rogan
00:16:03.340
giving another four hours to a just asking questions routine. Because again, people like RFK
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are not just asking questions. They make shit up. Here's an example. This is from Jordan Peterson's
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podcast. And if you haven't heard RFK before, he's got a vocal condition called spasmodic dysphonia,
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the effects of which you will certainly notice. Listen to the anecdote he tells here.
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I've seen again and again and again, you know, people like Jake Tapper, who did this,
00:16:35.280
who worked with me for three weeks doing this incredible documentary on an article that I
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published in 2005 about a secret meeting at DEC sponsored with 75 vaccine makers about how to hide
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from the American public the links between autism and vaccines. They, they, and I, I obtained the
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transcript for these from those meetings. I published them in Rolling Stone and Jake Tapper prior as the
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Rolling Stone publication data approach, he spent three weeks with me doing an exclusive for ABC,
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which he was then working for on my article, a companion piece. And the night before the piece was
00:17:16.820
supposed to run, he called me up and he said, the piece just got killed by corporate. And he said,
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in all my career, I have never had a piece killed by corporate. And I'm so mad. And then, uh, after
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that, I called him, I called him the next day and he went dark and I've never spoken to him again,
00:17:35.740
but he's become kind of this shill for pharma since then. So, um, and I've watched that happen to so
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many, uh, you know, uh, announcers on TV. Now, in response to this, Jake Tapper wrote an article
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on the CNN website titled RFK Jr.'s reign of error, correcting the record about yet another false
00:17:56.420
claim he just made. I'll just read what Tapper wrote here because only Tapper was in a position to
00:18:03.320
know that what Kennedy was telling Peterson on that podcast was a lie. This is Tapper. Now,
00:18:09.800
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Democratic candidate for the presidency, went on the Jordan B. Peterson
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podcast on June 5th and told a wild and false story about me from 2005 that I want to tell you
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about. RFK Jr. has made so many false and wild claims about any number of vital topics, most
00:18:27.480
dangerously about childhood vaccines, per his own siblings, that my interaction with him 18 years ago
00:18:32.960
is small potatoes. He told the story as, quote, evidence of TV news networks trying to censor the
00:18:39.520
truth when it came to vaccines. In it, he mangles the facts and wildly misrepresents what actually
00:18:45.060
happened. The truth about it is instructive because of how untethered he is to facts.
00:18:50.000
Flashback to 2005. Kennedy was co-publishing a piece on Salon.com and Rolling Stone with his
00:18:56.080
spurious, since-disproven claims about autism and vaccines. After amending the story with five
00:19:01.580
significant corrections, Salon.com ultimately took it down. Rolling Stone, too, removed the piece,
00:19:06.940
but with less transparency. As Seth Mnookin wrote for Scientific American in 2017, quote,
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Kennedy made his name in the anti-vaccine movement in 2005 when he published a story alleging a massive
00:19:19.620
conspiracy regarding thimerizal, a mercury-based preservative that had been removed from all
00:19:25.100
childhood vaccines except for some variations of the flu vaccine in 2001. In his piece, Kennedy
00:19:31.080
completely ignored an Institute of Medicine Immunization Safety Review on thimerizal, published
00:19:36.680
the previous year. He's also ignored the nine studies funded or conducted by the Centers for Disease
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Control and Prevention that have taken place since 2003. This is back to Tapper now. Among the many,
00:19:47.900
many errors, as CBS News reported, quote, Kennedy's Rolling Stone article originally said that the link
00:19:53.660
between thimerizal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real, but since the Lancet retracted
00:19:59.400
the original piece of research that made that link, and since the British Medical Journal then revealed
00:20:03.760
that the study wasn't merely a mistake but an outright fraud, the entire notion that vaccination
00:20:08.620
and autism are somehow linked has been thoroughly debunked. So back to 2005. I was a reporter with ABC News,
00:20:16.840
and Salon.com reached out to see if we were interested in doing a TV spot tied to the publication of the
00:20:22.180
Kennedy Jr. piece. I interviewed him via phone with a TV crew in his office and prepared a spot for World News
00:20:28.340
Tonight with Peter Jennings. In Kennedy's bizarre retelling a few days ago, and I just played you
00:20:33.660
that relevant clip, I worked with him, quote, for three weeks doing this incredible documentary,
00:20:39.920
end quote. No and no about his Rolling Stone story. Please note he makes zero mention of the article
00:20:46.460
having since been retracted and disappeared. And then, quote, the night before the piece was supposed
00:20:51.440
to run, he called me up and said, the piece just got killed by corporate, end quote. I didn't say that
00:20:57.540
in any way, and the piece wasn't killed. This is back to Kennedy's attribution to Tapper, quote, all my
00:21:03.900
career I've never had a piece killed by corporate, and I'm so mad, end quote. Back to Tapper here. I
00:21:09.900
hadn't. I had been at ABC News for two years. I had plenty of pieces killed. Not once did corporate
00:21:16.520
play a role in killing any of them. This is more Tapper here. RFK has been misrepresenting the
00:21:22.440
content of this call for years. I told him we were holding the story for a day. Now, in his retelling,
00:21:28.220
a two-minute piece was, quote, an incredible documentary. A few days of work was three weeks.
00:21:34.920
One remote interview was me working intensely with him, and a piece that got delayed one day so we
00:21:40.900
could interview some actual experts is a piece that got killed. For the record, the piece aired June
00:21:46.280
22nd, 2005. But the important point is, there's no way for Jordan Peterson or any other podcast host
00:21:54.640
to know this in advance. And this kind of thing just trips off Kennedy's tongue and, again, creates a
00:22:02.620
mood of suspicion. This anecdote is perfect for seeming to shine light on the bad incentives that
00:22:10.460
govern the behavior of the pharmaceutical industry, right? He's just exposing the corruption
00:22:15.480
and the conflicts of interest. Everybody's just trying to get rich. They're just trying to sell
00:22:21.060
you medicine. Dangerous, ineffective medicine. And, again, the problem is there is some truth to this
00:22:27.320
bad incentive story, which I've discussed previously on this podcast. But the further truth is the drug
00:22:33.920
approval story is quite mixed. Half the time it's a story not of dangerous and ineffective drugs being
00:22:41.560
rushed to market so that pharmaceutical companies can profit off the ignorance and vulnerability of a
00:22:46.840
trusting public. Again, there may be some of that. And wherever it exists, we should stamp it out. But
00:22:53.400
rather often, the opposite happens, right? There's a galling sluggishness in the drug approval process.
00:23:00.460
There are sick people who are desperate for new medications. You know, there are drugs that are
00:23:05.400
approved in Europe that are not approved in the U.S. And this is really frustrating. That is the opposite
00:23:11.620
problem. That is not people rushing to get rich. That is regulators being too cautious or seeming to
00:23:17.980
be too cautious. So, while Kennedy says many things that are demonstrably false about vaccines and science,
00:23:25.760
his account of why he's getting so much traction strikes me as absolutely correct. Again, he is speaking
00:23:32.560
to this pervasive mistrust of institutions and so-called elites. He is consciously pandering to
00:23:40.980
the cynicism that has taken hold in so much of this country. And he's raising real concerns about
00:23:46.660
things like wealth inequality. And the stuff he says about U.S. foreign policy is in a similar way
00:23:52.420
a very mixed story, right? There's no question he's capable of spouting Kremlin propaganda. But it is also
00:24:00.940
totally valid to criticize the last 20 years of U.S. foreign policy. And if I've changed my mind about
00:24:07.320
anything in this space, I have grown much more skeptical of the very idea of nation-building.
00:24:14.020
Many people have drawn the same lesson from our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere.
00:24:20.240
The fact that we spent trillions of dollars over there trying to change cultures that were powerfully
00:24:26.560
resistant to change. There's no question that that's worth rethinking. But again, he does not show
00:24:34.440
the kind of concern for facts that one wants when talking about this sort of thing or about anything
00:24:40.700
else. Anyway, that's all I have to say about RFK for the moment. Concern about platforming people
00:24:47.520
is, in my view, still totally valid. And there are certain people that one shouldn't talk to
00:24:55.640
unless one is going to do the work to fully calibrate one's bullshit detector in advance
00:25:01.420
and expose the pattern of sloppiness with the facts and even outright lying that has preceded
00:25:08.980
that interview. And if you're not going to do that work, you are being irresponsible. You're not just
00:25:14.660
exposing the reasons why many in your audience distrust science and the scientific establishment
00:25:22.560
and public health organizations. You've become part of the reasons why they distrust these sources
00:25:29.000
of information. And that is moving all of us in the wrong direction. Again, we need institutions that
00:25:35.300
work. And so far as they don't, we have to figure that out. Spreading obvious lies and misinformation
00:25:41.440
and fear is not a method of doing that. To move this to an entirely different topic for a moment.
00:25:47.920
Yes, racism is a real problem in society. And inequality is highly correlated with race
00:25:56.420
for obvious historical reasons in America. There are problems that really have to be sorted out
00:26:02.480
there. But spreading false information about racism, anti-racist lies, activist bullshit is not a method
00:26:12.980
of solving those problems, right? The Robin D'Angelo's of the world, the Ibram Kendi's of the world
00:26:18.100
are not helping. To platform them and have them bloviate about fake examples of racism doesn't help.