The National Review doubles down on bogus and deadly settled science

And takes pleasure in attacking the ‘nonsense’ of ‘dangerous lunatic’ RFK, Jr.

In the mid-19th century, a public health predecessor to Anthony Fauci turned The River Thames into a “giant cesspool.” To fight cholera, this public health bureaucrat caused cholera. A National Review writer argues RFK, Jr. would make the same type blunders if he was confirmed as director of HHS.

A few positives came out of the last five years of society’s New Abnormal.

For example, far more real conservatives now know the National Review either sold out to Big Pharma or is staffed by obtuse writers and editors, giving millions of clear-thinking readers an excellent reason to keep this publication behind a “do-not- subscribe” wall.

A recent op-ed by NR contributor Christian Schneider illustrates this point. (Note: I’m having difficulties getting the link to work and will add it in the Reader Comments.)

The headline and sub-headline tell readers everything they need to know about a magazine that once defined brave and smart conservative thinking.

Headline: “America’s Dangerous Flirtation with RFK Jr.”

Sub-headline: “Having nobody in charge of public health might be better than emboldening someone who is dangerously wrong.”

A few excerpts convey the author’s theme (emphasis added).

“It now appears President Trump’s supporters have signed on to RFK Jr.’s dangerous nonsense as they try to push him through the nomination process …”

“… Throughout his career, RFK has been the exact type of delusional lefty Trump’s supporters abhor. For decades, conservatives condemned the loopy anti-vax positions of liberal celebrities like Jenny McCarthy and her ilk.

“And Kennedy has been on the left edge of the lunacy.

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. … is a long-time vaccine denier who has spent a lifetime cashing in on his name in service of notions that make people sicker …”

“… Kennedy would be a Chadwick-style disaster as the leader of public health in America. He has a long, distinguished history of scaring yoga moms into believing vaccines cause autism, amid increasing rates of measles, tuberculosis, mumps, and whooping cough. Even polio has also begun its return after Dr. Jonas Salk’s miraculous work in eradicating it.”

Okay, I’ve now put on my Everlast Rebuttal Gloves …

In his next paragraph, Mr. Schneider writes:

“Vaccines work.”

… Which is where I lost my patience and exclaimed, “stop right there, Mister … Your butt is getting ready to hear from yet another disgruntled former subscriber.”

“Vaccines work” is a blanket statement presented as fact.

However, note that Schneider doesn’t define “vaccines” or the word “work.”

“Vaccines,” as most people once understood the term, are actually supposed to prevent diseases and transmission of diseases.

If shots don’t do this, they, in fact, don’t meet the definition of “vaccines” and thus are something else (like a license to print money).

Surely Mr. Schneider knows and would acknowledge that the “Covid vaccines” didn’t stop transmission or prevent other vaccinated people from contracting Covid. These shots were, thus, NOT “vaccines.”

In the second word of this two-word sentence, the author then doubles down with his lies by telling readers the shots “work.”

My three-word response:

No they don’t.

Certainly the most important “vaccine” of our lifetimes, the “Covid vaccines,” don’t work. (Nor, FWIW, do the “flu vaccines” that 50 percent of Americans get every year … Americans who still keep getting the flu.)

Schneider then tries to “prove” his claim in his next paragraph …

“According to the Centers for Disease Control, the measles shot has prevented over 94 million deaths over the past 50 years. One study by the University of Colorado-Boulder found that more than 1.8 million more Americans would have died of Covid-19 without the vaccine and certain behavioral changes.”

Comment: Note Schneider’s source for this first claim is “the Centers for Disease Control” … the same CDC that says the Covid “vaccines work.”

The author doesn’t understand Kennedy’s main critique …

Schneider must be too obtuse to understand RFK, Jr.’s main critique of vaccines and the public health agencies’ response to this alleged “deadly pandemic.”

What Kennedy has said and written 10,000 times is that the CDC and other public health agencies are now captured and the allegedly “settled science” they spout should NOT necessarily be trusted.

Kennedy is basically saying “gold-standard science” is NOT being utilized.

Also, instead of being “transparent,” these public health agencies are clearly working non-stop to conceal information that would debunk all or many of the narratives Schneider accepts as infallible truths.

True; there’s no doubt the public health establishment (and just about everyone else who matters) say “vaccines work.”

However, Kennedy, for decades, has essentially been saying: “Don’t trust the experts; they are liars and have been paid off to conceal the truth from the public.”

Since everyone’s now terrified of measles, let’s talk about this disease …

Regarding the CDC’s claim that the measles vaccine “has prevented over 94 million deaths,” Kennedy and other skeptics of the Vaccine Industrial Complex posit that measles deaths were already falling off a cliff by the time everyone started getting measles vaccines many decades ago.

In Kennedy’s contrarian view, much-better nutrition, refrigeration, improved transportation and food distribution networks, food that didn’t spoil, cleaner water and sanitation, as well as other real health improvements better explain why almost no one dies from measles today.

Basically, it was engineers and capitalist entrepreneurs who largely solved America’s “infectious disease” problems, not the vaccine makers.

The Covid Vax Whopper …

As to the claim that at least 1.8 million lives were saved by the “Covid vaccines,” doesn’t Schneider know that more people died (allegedly “from Covid”) in 2021 and early 2022 than died from the first terrible wave of Covid in late 2019 and 2020 … when no one had been vaccinated?

World-wide, 70 to 99 percent of citizens in most advanced countries dutifully got their non-vaccines … and the number of Covid deaths didn’t decrease at all. In fact, they increased.

Does Schneider really believe every one of those 1.8 million Covid victims was unvaccinated?

Even if they were unvaccinated, by 2021, hadn’t most of these people already been exposed to the virus and thus developed “natural immunity?”

Natural immunity works for the measles and chicken pox - and, even per Anthony Fauci, for the flu … but it doesn’t work with this new virus?

I’m using the Socratic Method here …

Another question that’s never been answered: Why was the virus so much more lethal in its second year - after mass inoculation - than in its first year?

What Schneider’s really saying is an extra 2 million people would be dead today if Operation Warp Speed had not been rolled out.

The only way to test this hypothesis is if nobody got vaccinated and we could see that the second (or third?) wave of Covid, for some odd reason, was far deadlier than the initial wave.

The statistic or claim that “1.8 million deaths were prevented” is about as believable or credible as CDC reports that say a given year’s flu vaccine “prevented 70,000 flu deaths.”

Some of us believe the CDC, using “models,” just picks a “scary” number out of thin air. Nobody can prove this figure isn’t true … because it’s impossible to test anything that didn’t occur.

It’s possible some people didn’t die from Covid because they got their latest jab(s), but it might be just as plausible they didn’t die because, say, they found a lucky rabbit foot they kept in their pockets.

Throngs of unvaccinated people didn’t die …

I know for a fact I didn’t die from Covid - nor did my two children - and we didn’t get one “vaccine.”

Tucker Carlson didn’t die. RFK, Jr., Novak Djokovic, Aaron Rodgers, Rand Paul, Ron Paul and my Substack college Mark Oshinskie and his wife also didn’t die - and none of us got our “vaccine.”

One might add that, as far as I am aware, no high school athletes died after the vaccines were rolled out, as well as no college or pro athlete - which sounds like a compelling testimonial that the vaccines “work.”

However, fairness would dictate that a journalist might also note that probably zero of these healthy athletes “died from Covid” in 2019-2020 … when none of these millions of potential victims had been vaccinated.

In fact, tens of millions of Americans who never got vaccinated … didn’t succumb to Covid. (I’ve still yet to find one story about an employee at the CDC or NIH who “died from Covid” - before the vaccines or after).

An obligatory ‘early spread’ aside …

Also, how many people does Schneider think had already been infected with this virus before March 2020?

The CDC - a bureaucracy he trusts with his life - tells us practically no American had been infected by early March 2020.

If he believes this, he must still believe blood-letting is the expert-endorsed cure for most diseases.

If millions of people had been infected by March 2020, where was the spike in “excess deaths” before mid-March 2020? Why didn’t noticeable numbers of non-vaccinated corpses start overwhelming funeral homes and morgues in the weeks and months before lockdowns were imposed?

While interesting, Schneider’s main point reaches the completely-wrong lesson

Schneider’s hit job on Kennedy did make one fascinating point from epidemiological history. However, the “got-cha” point he’s trying to make would be better used in an essay singing the praises of Kennedy.

Schneider’s main point is that “public health” would be better off with some would-be totalitarian who did nothing in the face of a possible health epidemic than someone who had the power to make things worse.

(His main point is that Kennedy as Secretary of the HHS would make things much worse.)

*** (Thanks to everyone who shares my articles. I’m still trying to increase my “reach” and can’t do this by myself.) ***

A cholera case study that’s germane to our Covid times …

As Schneider informs readers, in mid-19th century London a man named Edwin Chadwick “pioneered the idea that the state should be directly involved in protecting citizens’ health and that significant investments in infrastructure could help people live longer.”

Steven Johnson notes in The Ghost Map, his history of the cholera epidemic, that, “for better or worse, Chadwick’s career can be seen as the very point of origin for the whole concept of ‘big government’ as we know it today.”

“Though Chadwick sought to improve sanitation — a sewage system that would dump waste into the Thames and an improved water-delivery system — his tenure ended up being a horror show.

“Obsessed with the ‘miasmatic’ theory of disease transmission, or the idea that all disease is transmitted through the air, he failed to understand that cholera was waterborne.

“He also failed to understand that the river, the city’s water supply, was now a giant cesspool. Thus the water being piped to Londoners courtesy of Chadwick was the exact thing carrying the deadly bacteria making them sick.

“It turns out the only thing worse than there being no one in charge of public health is a public health czar who is wrong, leading to deadly consequences.”

As Johnson notes, “a modern bio-terrorist couldn’t have come up with a more ingenious and far-reaching scheme.”

Mr. Johnson also added: “The first defining act of a modern, centralized public-health authority was to poison an entire urban population.”

Kennedy needs to educate this author. If he doesn’t, I will …

Apparently, per this analogy published by The National Review, RFK, Jr. would somehow kill or poison large swaths of the American population.

If Kennedy was speaking candidly, I suspect he’d tell this author this horrific example from history is exactly what happened in 2020-2025.

That is, in the last five years, it was the government response that poisoned and killed millions of people.

Instead of Edwin Chadwick being in charge of the public health response, it was people like Anthony Fauci who had the power to produce “deadly consequences” - with the lockdowns, killer medical protocols and then non-safe, non-effective non-vaccines.

“Yes, Mr. Schneider, you are right,” Kennedy might say, “the much-smarter response was to do absolutely nothing.”

Kennedy could even show off his Harvard education by citing Hippocrates, who famously told doctors “First, do no harm.”

Excuse my English here … but sometimes you have to use salty language to achieve maximum effect

Schneider doesn’t get it. The “leaders” of 19th-century London f****ed up royally by listening to the wrong expert(s).

Those authorities either didn’t know what “gold-standard science” really was and/or gave absolute power to dumb asses.

And, as they say, history repeats.

***

While it’s impossible to know, my bet is that if Kennedy was alive in this time period and had the ear of a few influential English Lords and Barrons, he would have been cautioning, “I don’t think this is very smart. This is going to make things worse and kill and harm a lot of innocent people.”

If Mr. Schneider was an influential journalist for The London Times in the mid 19th century, he no doubt would have supported the great science expert of the day, Mr. Chadwick, and would have been writing powerful opinion pieces telling the public works officials of the day to deposit all the British urine and feces into the Thames.

Furthermore, he would have probably been calling for dangerous contrarians like Kennedy to be shipped to Australia with the other convicts and scalawags of the Crown.

Anyway, as the Brits might say, it’s a tad off-putting that this many “conservative” writers want public health reformers who are trying to save lives to be banned from positions where they could achieve this noble goal.

***

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