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Tag: aids
RFK Jr.

Kennedy Can't Resist The Adulation Of His True Political Base: Online Cranks

Robert F Kennedy, Jr. cannot help himself. In his quixotic bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, he initially sought to distance himself from the 15-year crusade against vaccines that has defined him as a public figure. But this week he reverted to form, making outrageous claims during a panel discussion that he convened with fellow antivaxers and advertised on his campaign channels.

“I do not believe that infectious disease is an enormous threat to human health,” Kennedy said on the livestream, a bold statement in the wake of more than a million excess deaths in the US in its first two years. Kennedy also pledged to target medical journals and defund epidemiology if elected, according to Rolling Stone.

And that was just the beginning.

He falsely claimed that vaccine research created HIV, the Spanish flu, and Lyme disease. He has previously insinuated that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, and that the only reason all reputable scientists think it does is because his nemesis, White House covid czar, Anthony Fauci nixed funding for research into alternative theories.

When Kennedy threw his hat into the ring, many observers were surprised that his campaign website was silent on the vaccine issue, as the candidate sought to rebrand himself as a normal Democrat who criticizes corporate power while reminding boomers of his dead relatives.

The reputational rehab was never going to be easy.

Kennedy made his name as an antivaxer by doggedly promoting the debunked link between vaccines and autism. The pandemic dramatically raised Kennedy’s profile as an opponent of public health measures and vaccine mandates. He published a bestselling book that spins an elaborate and baseless conspiracy theory about how Fauci knowingly denied Americans access to effective covid treatments because the vaccine couldn’t be authorized if treatments were available. In fact, Kennedy’s pet therapies were tested and found worthless and had there been an effective drug treatment for covid, it would have made no effect on the vaccine’s approval process.

Vanity Fair dubbed him “the antivax icon of America’s nightmares.” A well-earned moniker, given that Kennedy founded Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the most influential antivax group in the country. CHD stoked panic about the measles vaccine in Samoa and helped cause an outbreak that killed about 50 babies and toddlers.

During the pandemic, Kennedy became notorious for likening vaccine mandates to the Holocaust. Kennedy is also a prolific spreader of conspiracy theories, including the rumor that 5G networks are being used to “harvest our data and control our behavior.” What’s more, former Donald Trump advisor Steven Bannon keeps bragging about how he convinced Kennedy to run to spread the antivax gospel.

Despite his aspirations to court normie Democrats, Kennedy can’t resist the adulation of his real base – online cranks.

The pandemic made Kennedy a superstar on the right and he prefers the fawning attention of conspiracy-minded podcaster Joe Rogan to the slightly tougher questions of the beltway media. Kennedy’s antivax antics on the campaign trail ramped up sharply after his appearance on Rogan’s show. The candidate also got drawn into a bizarre harassment campaign of vaccine scientist Peter Hotez, who declined to debate Kennedy on Rogan’s show, on the grounds any debate with Kennedy would devolve into the Jerry Springer Show. Billionaires like Elon Musk rushed in to defend Kennedy and smear Hotez. Hotez was deluged with abuse online and antivax YouTubers even showed up at his home.

This week Kennedy got the band back together, convening a panel on public health featuring some of the antivax movement’s most notorious figures, which he promoted through official campaign channels. Kennedy’s guests included fellow members of the Disinformation Dozen, a rogues gallery that’s collectively responsible for the majority of online antivax content. One of his guests, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, testified before the Ohio state legislature that Covid vaccines make people magnetic and create “5G interfaces” to link our bodies to cellular networks.

"You can put a key on their forehead, it sticks,” Tenpenny told Ohio legislators in 2021, “You can put spoons and forks all over and they can stick because now we think there is a metal piece to that."

Perhaps Kennedy is returning to his antivax roots because the rest of his program is at odds with the Democratic base. He rejects common sense gun reform and instead blames school shootings on antidepressants; he dismisses US defense aid to Ukraine as a NATO proxy war against Russia; he refuses to criticize Donald Trump and says he’s proud the former president likes him.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

It Is Fauci's Accusers -- Not The Good Doctor -- Who Are Guilty

It Is Fauci's Accusers -- Not The Good Doctor -- Who Are Guilty

Good-bye, Dr. Fauci. You did your job while under attack from the worst sort of people.

You devoted more than 50 years to public health. As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, you led us through HIV/AIDS, Ebola, COVID, respiratory syncytial virus and, every year, seasonal flu.

You say your "proudest moment" was your work with President George W. Bush on the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. PEPFAR is credited with having saved 20 million lives. (START ITAL)Twenty million lives.

That doesn't include the lives saved from your work in the late '70s and early '80s developing treatments for inflammatory and autoimmune-related diseases. Several that would have previously been death sentences are now in high remission.

And there was, of course, your guidance on dealing with COVID-19. Many who followed your advice during the initial outbreak with hand-washing, mask-wearing and social distancing are alive because of it. Many who mocked you are not.

When the COVID vaccine came along, you never tired of urging Americans to obtain it. Over a million Americans died from COVID, but an estimated 234,000 of those deaths could have been prevented if everyone had gotten their shots.

We wonder how many people died because Donald Trump and assorted lowlifes downplayed the disease, peddled phony cures and cast doubts on the vaccine. They may have had fun owning the libs, but they were also killing many of their followers. Why was never clear.

The sickest abuse came from the senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, who perversely accused you of being responsible for millions of deaths. When you told a Senate hearing that this claim led to threats against you and your family, Paul looked back blankly.

Brooklyn tough, you never backed down. That you served seven presidents from both parties didn't impress the jerks. You let the barrage of boobery splatter all around you as you went about your mission.

But let's give a respectful hearing to the argument that your recommendations caused harm by hurting the economy. Certainly, the social isolation tied to the shutdowns created its own problems.

I, for one, thought that once a vaccine became widely available, many places stayed closed longer than necessary. Schools, especially, could have resumed in-person learning sooner than they did.

But these decisions were made mostly by state and local governments, not you. Meanwhile, fear of a disease that spread easily, clogged emergency rooms with dying patients and left many of those afflicted with long-time illness was itself enough to empty stores, theaters and libraries.

Your harshest critics clearly didn't share the value you place on life. You said your saddest period was back in the '80s when you were treating people with HIV/AIDS and there was no effective therapy.

"We were taking care of very sick, mostly young gay men who were healthy," you said in a recent interview. "You see every single one of them dying or going to die soon." All medicine could offer back then was comfort.

Approaching your 82nd birthday and about to leave public service, you still can't take your eyes off current and new threats.

"We can do things that are very important to mitigate against at least two of them," you said. That would be COVID and seasonal flu. As we know, there are vaccines for both of them.

We know your first name is Anthony, but you can't blame us for thinking it's "Doctor." And, by the way, you looked great on your farewell interviews.

When the documentaries, movies and operas are written about the COVID era, you will be portrayed as the hero and those who attacked you as creeps. Where should we put your monument?

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Fed Pick Moore ‘Joked’ About AIDS, Mangled Corpses, And Abused Wife

Fed Pick Moore ‘Joked’ About AIDS, Mangled Corpses, And Abused Wife

Stephen Moore, Trump’s recent choice for the Federal Reserve Board, is unbelievably unqualified. He’s also a repugnant person who makes light of AIDS, “jokes” about threatening his kids with pictures of mangled bodies, and more.

Vetting is not the strong suit of the Trump administration, but Moore is an especially bad candidate. The most recent skeletons in his closet weren’t even terribly well-hidden. Back in 2003 and 2004, Moore wrote what he clearly thought were humorous columns for National Review Online. They were anything but.

In his 2003 column, a mock family Christmas letter, he “joked” that he toilet-trained his son by putting a photograph of Hillary Clinton in the toilet, resulting in his son achieving “perfect accuracy.”

Regarding his older sons, he explained that his “ingenious child-rearing technique” for them included posting pictures of the mutilated bodies of Saddam Hussein’s sons and telling them “this is what happens to kids that grow up to be Democrats.” Hilarious.

In that same letter, he also managed to throw in a gratuitous insult against French men, saying that they all need a few extra doses of testosterone. This is what passed for conservative humor in the era of “Freedom Fries.”

The 2004 version of the family Christmas letter wasn’t any better. There, he said his family was “devastated” to learn his toddler, David, had low muscle tone, saying the doctor “might as well have told us that he has AIDS.”

Another thigh-slapper: a “joke” that another of his children wrote an essay proposing to “round up all blue state liberals, sterilize them, disenfranchise them, and place them into reeducation internment camps.”

These columns are entirely in keeping with Moore’s behavior elsewhere. He also makes racist “jokes” and kisses women without their permission. He’s a tax cheat, he doesn’t pay his child support, and he subjected his ex-wife to so much psychological abuse she fled their home.

Moore has no qualifications whatsoever that justify putting him on the Fed. He’s even admitted he doesn’t understand what the job entails. All he’s got is a cruel streak a mile wide.

No wonder Trump likes him so much.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

 

‘Patient Zero’ And Other Myths About HIV/AIDS

‘Patient Zero’ And Other Myths About HIV/AIDS

Gaetan Dugas was a victim of more than just the AIDS virus. He was also blamed, posthumously, for propagating the epidemic. He was even given the moniker “Patient Zero.”

Thanks to some scientific sleuthing, that rap has been laid to rest. Patient Zero never existed.

In fact, Dugas’ “zero” designation in popular culture was a solecism propagated in no small part by the author Randy Shilts in “And the Band Played On,” his book about the AIDS crisis. In fact, Dugas had been assigned the letter O, not a number, by a scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The letter denoted that Dugas was from “outside Southern California.” It meant nothing more, according to a report for the journal Nature.

Testing of old blood samples proves that Dugas, a Canadian flight attendant who died in early 1984, carried a strain of the virus that was already in New York several years before he ever traveled there.

Researchers now believe that around 1967, the HIV virus first moved from Zaire to Haiti. From there it was transferred to New York by 1971. By 1976, gay men in San Francisco were becoming infected.

Dugas’ vindication has been a long time coming. Yet the spread of AIDS in the United States remains a cautionary tale, not just about the injustice of demonizing victims but also about the consequences of public fear, misinformation, bias and government stalling. Americans died needlessly. They still are.

It’s easy to cast HIV and AIDS as a footnote of yesteryear, a horrific epidemic that raged and then was brought under control by antiretroviral drugs. There is some truth there. Advances have been made in treating the disease and blocking its transmission.

Yet here we are, 30 years later, and once again those being infected somehow don’t seem to merit public sympathy. They’re the wrong people, perhaps.

In the early days of the epidemic, it was gay men who suffered most. Society then largely reviled homosexuality. AIDS patients were ignored, even as they were reduced to walking skeletons. Then-President Ronald Reagan earned the disdain he still draws for his refusal to acknowledge the crisis, much less to agree that the government had a role in combating AIDS as a public health issue.

Today, high concentrations of the estimated 44,000 new cases of HIV/AIDS in the United States in 2014 were among African-Americans (44 percent) and Latinos (23 percent), many of them impoverished. Whites, although still a majority of the population, made up 27 percent of new cases. Young gay and bisexual men are particularly at risk.

The term epidemic is still being used but with the qualifier “concentrated,” as the infection rates are isolated among these groups. About 1.2 million people living in the U.S. are infected. About one in eight (13 percent) aren’t aware that they carry the virus, according to the CDC.

The AIDS crisis transformed the gay rights movement, and gay activist efforts transformed the way the public, the government and the medical profession confronted the epidemic. The actions of groups like ACT UP pushed for recognition of the suffering and forced the government and civil society to respond.

Broader public support came after the AIDS-related death of Rock Hudson, through the activism of stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson and outreach like the traveling AIDS quilt, each panel of which was dedicated to a victim of the virus.

Princess Diana was photographed shaking the hands of AIDS patients, ungloved, to convince people that the virus couldn’t spread by casual contact. And a young Indiana boy named Ryan White had to die before parents stopped yanking their children from schools if it was found that a student like Ryan, infected by a blood transfusion, attended.

Today, epidemiologists are concerned about rising rates of opiate addiction, as many people inject heroin and share needles. And despite greater public acceptance of gay men, many women still contract the virus through heterosexual sex with men who have been with other men. Studies show that many young gay men have a naive disregard for the dangers of the virus. They operate as if they are immune, or as if HIV is curable. It’s not.

Nearly 7,000 people in the U.S. died of AIDS-related illness in 2013. By comparison, some 1.2 million died in sub-Saharan Africa. Which brings us back to the problem of the “wrong” kind of people suffering and the consequent lack of sympathy.

We have to wonder, what is the future of AIDS prevention in the U.S. and the world? And what — or who — will it take to move people to care about this still-thriving epidemic?

Mary Sanchez: msanchez@kcstar.com, @msanchezcolumn

Photo: Volunteers of National Service Scheme (NSS) pose with HIV/AIDS awareness messages on their faces during a face painting competition ahead of the World AIDS Day in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh November 29, 2014. REUTERS/Ajay Verma