Vaccine Skeptic or Anti-vax?

Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trust and Distrust, Vaccines

 

R.F.K. Jr. has frequently denied that he is anti-vax despite the ample evidence to the contrary.  Dr. Paul A. Offit is another well-respected American pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases, vaccines, immunology, and virology. He is not a fan of R.F.K. Jr. In an interesting article in the New York Times he explained his view of Kennedy this way,

 

The news media labels Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a vaccine skeptic. He’s not. I’m an actual vaccine skeptic. In fact, everyone who serves with me on the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee is a vaccine skeptic. Pharmaceutical companies must prove to us that a vaccine is safe, that it’s effective. Then and only then will we recommend that it be authorized or licensed for use by Americans.

 

Mr. Kennedy, on the other hand, is a vaccine cynic, failing to accept studies that refute his beliefs. He claims that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism, despite more than a dozen studies performed in seven countries on three continents involving thousands of children showing that it doesn’t.

 

Even though childhood vaccines have prevented more than 1 million deaths and 32 million hospitalizations in the past 30 years Kennedy says no vaccine is safe and effective.  That sounds pretty good to me.

Kennedy also claims vaccines were not properly studied before use. This also sounds good, but as Dr. Offit said, “When Mr”. Kennedy says he wants vaccines to be better studied, what he really seems to be saying is he wants studies that confirm his fixed, immutable, science-resistant beliefs. That’s not skepticism.”

 

As I have said before skepticism is good and important. We need skeptics to constantly keep scientists on their toes and alert to potential problems. Complacency is dangerous. But we need   skepticism based on good science and careful analysis. Not blather like that of so many vaccine skeptics. We must always remain skeptical of the skeptics too. Otherwise, they can do serious harm.

 

Dr. Offit says he is a skeptic. He needs proof that vaccines are safe and effective. He pointed out that he was on the Food and Drug Administration advisory committee which voted in favor of the  authorisation of the bivalent Covid vaccine which targeted both the original strain of the virus and Omicron variant, but he voted against its authorization because he was not convinced that the updated vaccine was better than the original. He said he and his colleagues debated the pros and cons vigorously.  Rigorous debate is essential for good science.

 

As a result he and his colleagues constantly ask question and examine new data and when warranted make changes. Sometimes the public is annoyed at the changes, but that is how science works. Nothing is baked in. Nothing is sacred. Even after the clinical trials are done they continue their surveillance systems because not all problems are picked up in the clinical trials. That was how they discovered the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines caused the heart condition myocarditis in about 1 in 50,000 people. They also discovered that the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine caused dangerous blood clotting in about 1 in 250,000. With that data they evaluated these rare harms against the enormous benefits and decided the vaccines should be continued. The benefits out weighed the harms.

 

Despite all this hard and effective scientific work he was annoyed when “Mr. Kennedy, on the other hand, has claimed that the Covid-19 vaccines, which have saved the lives of at least three million Americans, are “deadliest vaccine ever made.”

 

He knows that all vaccines have side-effects. It is impossible to avoid them. But he responded this way: “Yes, vaccines can cause side effects, but forgoing vaccination is also a risk… there are no risk-free choices.”

 

In other words, if you choose not to take the vaccine you are probably taking a much bigger risk.  Skeptics like R.F.K. Jr. make things harder for parents to make the right decision for their children because according to Dr. Offit, he “he has cited and ignored data that doesn’t support his conclusions.”  And that creates mistrust of vaccines and the authorities in charge of them and that can be very dangerous for society.

 

Dr. Offit in his article ended with the expression of an ominous concern: “Given the lack of appropriate guardrails that would normally prevent an anti-vaccine activist, science denialist and conspiracy theorist from heading the country’s most important public health agency, it’s a dangerous time to be a child in the United States.”

 

I would add, that is also true of Canada.

 

And that’s not where we want to be.

Robert Kennedy After the Pandemic

Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trust and Distrust

 

After the pandemic, PBS Newshour had this to say about RFK Jr.:

 

“Post-pandemic, Kennedy has continued to criticize the recommended vaccine schedule for children that is put out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as adult COVID and flu vaccines.”

 

At the same time he vociferously denied he was anti-vax when he was trying to get approved by the Senate for the position of Secretary of Health, arguably the most important position in government in relation to public health.

 Here is Kennedy’s exact statement which was shown on PBS News Hour:

 

Question:

 

Can you name any vaccines that you think are good?

 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Health and Human Services Secretary Nominee:

 

I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably solve — averting more problems than they’re causing. There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.

Kennedy has claimed he is not anti-vax but that seems about as clearly anti-vax as you can get. And Trump appointed him to be his Secretary of Health, nonetheless.

 

Dr. Michael Osterholm put it very clearly:

 

“Let’s be really clear about the fact he is an anti-vaccine messenger, and he has continued to be, and we have many, many examples of that.

 

The second thing is, is that, in this country, and, for that matter, throughout the world, when vaccines are licensed and approved, all the safety data that goes into licensing that vaccine is made public, nothing hidden in a vault somewhere that, if it were just opened up, the public would now have sunshine on a vaccine issue they didn’t have before.

 

Dr. Osterholm also warned that by appointing R.F.K. to such a prestigious position, it will inevitably weaken the vaccine policy of the government and limit uptake of vaccines across the country,

“by lending a veneer of legitimacy to his many disproven claims, allowing him to influence the licensing of new vaccines, and by firing many of the public health experts at HHS.”

 

And as we have seen by the Measles outbreaks in the US and Canada, this is exactly what happened. Unfortunately, Dr. Osterholm was proven right. He then ominously concluded,

 

“As we have more and more infections occur as a result of fewer and fewer people being vaccinated, within literally a few years, we could be back into a period not that dissimilar to what we had happening in the early 1900s, before vaccines. That’s hard for people to imagine.”

 

It may be hard to imagine, but that is precisely where we now are. Thanks to Trump and Kennedy and others, we have regressed more than 100 years.

 

Recently, Kennedy fired all 17 physicians on his Vaccine Advisory Panel. He didn’t like the advice he got from any of them!  Some of the physicians he has replaced them with have been far from conventional.  Does Kennedy know what he is doing? There is no evidence that he does.  Frankly, to me, the fact that he was appointed by Trump makes me think he does not. It would be an unusual Trump appointment if he did. I hope I am wrong. These positions are two important to get it wrong.

 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: the Lawyer who Thinks he is a physician

Conspiracy Theories, Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trust and Distrust

 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (R.F.K.Jr.) became famous early in life as an environmental lawyer. He was a pretty good one too.

Later he morphed into a conspiracy theorist and a maverick health advocate. How did that happen?  Perhaps it happened because his years of fighting corporations and the government he developed scepticism about everything the authorities told him.  That was likely a rational response to the situations he was in.

Sadly, after that promising start, RFK Jr. started to flounder. In a way he began to think that as a smart lawyer he knew everything and was virtually a physician. He is not a physician. I hate to say it, but lawyers have this uncomfortable tendency.

As a result, the scientific community has been strongly opposed to many of his views, which are in their opinion, not just maverick, but contrary to good science. We need good science, but we also need dissenters.  They keep us on our toes. They can show us how the comfortable majority can be wrong. We must always remember that we can be wrong. However, we must not let our scepticism poison us to good evidence, good science, and good reasoning.

Michael Thomas Osterholm is an American epidemiologist, and Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. He is also a vocal opponent of R.F.K. Jr.

This is what he said about R.F.K. Jr. on PBS Newshour: “He is a voice machine that continues to put out dis and mis-information in such a way that it sounds believable to the public.”

Frankly, Kennedy has a history of spreading misinformation. As William Brangham of PBS News Hour reported in December of 2024,

“In 2005, Kennedy wrote an article for “Rolling Stone” magazine and Salon that asserted a connection between autism and a mercury-containing vaccine additive called thimerosal. Thimerosal was removed from childhood vaccines in 2001 and it was never used in the MMR vaccine. After that piece ran, the two publications discovered multiple errors in his work and they retracted it. A decade later, Kennedy joined a group called the World Mercury Project, which a few years later became the Children’s Health Defense, which is a nonprofit that has been a principal promoter of misinformation about vaccines.”

 

According to Derek Beres, Co-Host of Conspirituality: “That’s when it seems that he really got embedded in the anti-vax world.” Beres, according to PBS Newshour, has long been tracking RFK. Jr. and his influence about the intersection of the wellness industry and online conspiracies.

According to William Brangham from PBS Newshour,

“Months before the COVID pandemic began, Kennedy met with anti-vaccine advocates on the island nation of Samoa, which had seen a huge drop in its vaccine rates after a medical mistake killed two children. In late 2019, there was a Measles outbreak there; 83 people died, many of them young children.”

 

Kennedy later called the outbreak — quote — “mild” and denied playing any role in it. When COVID-19 arrived in the U.S., many Americans became frustrated with the evolving and sometimes conflicting guidance on wearing masks and the protections provided by vaccines, as well as the many stay-at-home orders, which impacted schools, churches, and businesses across the nation. That frustration became highly politicized, and donations surged to Kennedy’s non-profit, which went on to finance the documentary series called “Plandemic,” which alleged that a shadowy group was using the coronavirus and vaccines to get rich and powerful.

 Would you call 83 deaths on a small island a “mild” outbreak?

 That documentary series has had an enormous effect on Americans and Canadians, including the Reeve of the R.M. of Labroquerie Louis Weiss, a few miles from my house,  when he quoted misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic here in Manitoba that got him into trouble and helped to make this area here, for awhile at least, the hotbed of Canadian anti-vax hysteria.

This is what Beres told PBS about that documentary series supported by R.F.K. Jr.:

“I cannot think of anything more consequential for the anti-vax movement than “Plandemic.” It struck an emotional chord at a time when everyone was locked inside and really confused about their own lives and about existence in general. And it’s understandable that you would be confused by what’s happening if you have never experienced it, but that doesn’t give people the right to spread misinformation to the level that “Plandemic” did. And I think we’re going to be feeling the consequences of that propaganda film for generations.”

 

People began to believe that bad actors had planned the pandemic. This led to a spate of wild conspiracy theories. That is the fruit of Kennedy’s work. And now, thanks to Trump, he is the US Secretary of Health.

 

Vaccine Success Story

Critical thinking, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trust and Distrust

 

I first heard about Robert F. Kennedy many years ago when he was a well-respected environmental lawyer. But that was then. This is now.

 

Now many people consider him an extremist on matters of health and the environment. They think he has gone over the top. Yet Donald Trump appointed him as Secretary of Health. Then things got crazy. As Trump himself, “I told him to go wild with health.” He seemed to some to a radical but good choice. Others have gone apoplectic in opposition. Where does the truth lie?

 

This past winter Christiane and I spent 2 months living on Vancouver Island.  My hiking companion, let’s call him Bob, was an enthusiast for health and was an iconoclast who greatly admired Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  He was a little younger and a lot more fit than I was. We had a friendly argument on our way home after a marvelous hike in the local rain forest. In the end we agreed to disagree on friendly terms.  But I decided I should do a little more research on my own as my friend Bob had done.  I wanted my research which would be conducted on line to include only reliable sources such as internationally respected infectious disease specialists I knew about from my experiences listening to speakers on TV during the Covid-19 pandemics about whom some of them are.

 

One of those was Dr. Michael Osterholm who directs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. I had heard him many times and he was frequently consulted by many others. I decided I would respect his opinion.  Fortunately, he had recently been interviewed by PBS News Hour, another trusted source in my opinion.

 

On that television show I heard that

 

“More than 75 Nobel laureates [in December of 2024] signed a letter asking the U.S. Senate not to confirm health and human services secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., citing his opposition to vaccines among their concerns.”

 

William Brangham, the PBS interviewer began by citing what I had always believed:

 

Vaccines are easily one of modern medicine’s most successful interventions. Over the past two centuries, they virtually eradicated diseases like smallpox, polio, measles, and many others that once regularly disfigured, disabled, and killed hundreds of millions of people around the world, many of them children.

 

 

Yet millions of Americans and Canadians, including people I know personally, believed that vaccines were dangerous, poorly studied, and promulgated by an anxious  government of whom we should be suspicious.

 

Dr. Michael Osterholm made this opening statement:

 

…the bottom line is, for every two days we have lived in the last century, we have gained a day of life expectancy. That’s incredible. And it’s because of these tools, notably vaccines, that that’s happened.

 

Vaccines have truly been a remarkable success. Some have said they might be the greatest medical achievement of the 20th century. We should not reject them out of hand unless we had good reasons for doing so.

As William Brangham, correctly pointed out:

 

That’s not to say there are no risks to them, including occasional allergic reactions, injuries, and, in rare cases, deaths. And public health experts like Osterholm say it is important to examine and continually monitor any adverse effects. But, on balance, those risks are far lower than those of the diseases they’re protecting against.

 

Dr. Michael Osterholm put this into graphic context so even a simple man like I could understand it:

 

If, today, I were in an automobile accident and I had my seat belt on, but somehow the seat belt jammed and I was unfortunately trapped in the car and the car caught on fire, this would be a horrible tragedy. Would anybody say, we’ve got to eliminate seat belts now? No, because, in fact, there have been many, many, many more lives saved because of seat belts as opposed to not.

 

Yet, we face a small but growing and very vocal minority of Americans and Canadians who have been rebelling against the scientific and medical orthodoxy.  These people, such as Bob and the real estate agent I met in Tempe Arizona, at the conference I mentioned in a previous post, as well as Christiane’s cousin have been refusing to accept the majority opinion about all kinds of vaccines. Over the past couple of decades, there has been a small, but growing vocal minority pushing back against vaccines because of what they have perceived to be substantial harms, including the widely debunked claim that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine causes autism. That was based on an article in a widely respected medical journal “The Lancet” published in England in the 1990s by a doctor Andrew Wakefield. I also learned that he had lost his medical license as a result of that scientific paper which the Lancet subsequently withdrew.

 

Since then, Robert F. Kennedy who was trained as an environmental lawyer became an important player in the anti-vax movement that followed the publication of the original paper, now withdrawn.

 

So where does the truth lie? I think it likely lies with science. We must look at science with a critical eye, but there really is no better source for good health information. Not even lawyers. Not Robert F. Kennedy. And not me either.

Why are Governments not Trusted?

Death of Truth, Decline of the west, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Neo-liberalism, Oligarchy, Social democracy, Social Democracy and Trust, Trust and Distrust

 

As I mentioned in my last post, a lot of hesitance to trust vaccines is a result of distrust of government. This is a shame, because particularly in troubling times such as pandemics, it is essential that people trust their government about the information they give about vaccines or other health measures.  Distrust in government is not a laughing matter.  Distrust in government is a very costly matter.

 

Figuring out why governments are not trusted is a tricky thing.  Nesrine Malik said this about citizens of her country of Sudan who believed the government could not be trusted in giving them good vaccines for free:

 

This sounds like completely irrational behaviour, but in fact it is the opposite. In countries such as Sudan, nothing good, and certainly nothing free, comes from the state. The government is an extractive body that exists not to serve citizens, but to rifle through their pockets and charge them for going about their daily business. Corruption is endemic – from bribing one’s way through traffic violations, to being forced to use private hospitals because government cronies have hoarded medical technology. The state is something that you thrive in spite of. The government’s communication reflects this uneasy relationship. Officials speak to the public either to scold them or spread propaganda, and dissent is banned; in Egypt, doctors who contradicted the government’s account of the pandemic were arrested, while oxygen tanks ran out in intensive care units in Cairo.

 

We tend to learn from experience. Our own experience. In Sudan the consistent experience of people with the government is that it will try to screw the citizens in favor of their cronies. They are naturally reluctant to believe that free vaccines are given to them for the welfare of the people. After all, their government has rarely considered the welfare of the people. This is called crony capitalism, or in extreme cases, oligarchy. Oligarchs won’t hesitate to use their power to screw us. That is what they do all around the world. And in Canada and the US the trajectory is in the direction of oligarchy.

 

In the US they are increasingly nearing oligarchy, if they are not there already. The rich in the US who have the ear of the government use that power to ensure that money is not “wasted” on public health. Many of the health insurance companies do all they can to maximize their profits even at the expense of their customers. Christiane and I have recently experienced a most bizarre version of this that I must blog about some day.

 

As Nesrine Malik said in her Guardian article: “Suspicion is easily sown, because political systems don’t need to be fully authoritarian to sustain exploitative and dishonest regimes that breed mistrust.” Americans know that pharmaceutical companies earn enormous profits. You might even say, as Malik did, “outrageous profits.”  In the UK during the Covid-19  pandemic people were reluctant to trust the government because journalists revealed how their government kept changing the rules while leaders refused to obey the rules themselves. We had that in Canada too. We have no vaccine against corruption. Or ignorance for that matter.  As Malik said, “State failure breeds paranoia. And when trust in government breaks down, people turn to personal vigilance.”

 

This is what Nesrine Malik said,

 “Vaccine rejection doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s easier to dismiss hesitancy and conspiracies as unhinged behaviour; it makes us feel less unnerved by displays of unreason from those who we think are, or should be, rational people. Sure, among vaccine-hesitant people are those who are simply stubborn, misanthropic or selfish. But, just as the pandemic exploited the weaknesses of our economic and public health systems, vaccine hesitancy has exposed the weaknesses of states’ bond with their citizens. There are no easy answers for how to deal with those who repeat conspiracy theories and falsehoods, but scrutinising the systems that lost their trust is perhaps a good place to start.”

 

I think Malik makes a lot of sense. It is not a simple answer to a complex problem. It is a complex answer, as it should be. 

In the west, since the time of extreme neo-liberalism of Saint Ronny Reagan, the Iron Lady, Maggie Thatcher, and to a lesser extent their dedicated follower Brian Mulroney anti-government propaganda has flourished since the 1980s as Americans and Canadians have been fed a steady diet of dubious claims that the state is unreliable and predatory.  As Saint Ronald Reagan said, “the most scary 11 words in the English language are, ‘I am from the government and I have come to help.’ For decades, conservative political leaders have repeated over and over and over again that the government cannot be trusted.

As a result many of us believe this. And that is a costly mistake. This is all part of neo-liberal dogma/propaganda that the government can’t be trusted only the private sector is worth our trust.

Of course, this ideology has for decades served the interests of the wealthy who care most about minimizing their personal or corporate taxes. This ideology is now so prevalent that even people whose best interests would be served by government are reluctant to accept its help. Governments provide many things of enormous value including hospitals, roads, libraries, universities, parks, environmental regulations, health and safety standards to name only a few. Governments are important!  And vaccines are a very important part of this. For decades we have been taught, and many of us believed, that governments are bad and private enterprise is good. Now we are paying a heavy price for blindly following that ideology.

Vaccine Hesitancy and Distrust of Government

Epidemics/Pandemics, Trust and Distrust

 

Years after I first heard about vaccine hesitancy, I learned that a cousin of Christiane and her financial wizard of a husband, also believed the Covid-19 vaccines were unsafe. They tried to persuade their elderly and smart mother not to take them. Remember that at the time scientists were telling us all that the elderly were particularly at risk from Covid-19 and all of them should take the vaccines as soon as possible. The mother of her cousin consulted with her son who was a scientist.  He told his mother, in no uncertain terms, that her daughter and son-in-law were out to lunch. “Trust the scientists,” he said.

Who should you trust?

One of my favorite writers, not a physician, but a smart journalist, is Nesrine Malik writing for The Guardian, a respected political journal.  She understands politics well. Medicine not so much.

This is what Malik  said in an article in that magazine during the Covid-19 pandemic:

“People with the wildest theories about the pandemic can be found in countries even where most people don’t have access to the internet, cable TV or the shock jocks of commercial radio. A common impulse is to write off those espousing conspiracies, consigning them to the casualties claimed by WhatsApp groups, disinformation or silent mental health issues. These things may be true – but vaccine hesitancy is a symptom of broader failures. What all people wary of vaccines have in common, from Khartoum to Kansas is their trust in the state has been eroded. Without understanding this, we will be fated to keep channelling our frustrations towards individuals without grasping why they have lost trust in the first place.”

 

That run a bell for me.  I have attended anti-vax rallies. I have listened to vaccine deniers. I have heard their views.  I have listened to them and talked to them. Mistrust of the state and the government are in fact, from my limited experience, a common element.

In fact, as Malik wrote,

“This mistrust can run so deep that people will trust almost any source of information other than the government. In my birthplace of Sudan, fewer than 1% of the population have been fully vaccinated and ventilators are even rarer than vaccines. The story is much the same in several other African countries, where vaccine availability is so poor that people will drop everything and head to a hospital based on nothing but a rumour that free shots are available that day. But for many other people, those rare lifesaving vaccines sound suspiciously like too much of a good thing.”

 

In some of these places, distrust of government is well-founded.  In places like Canada, mistrust of government by indigenous people is well-founded. They know what it is like to be lied to by the government and to suffer the dangerous consequences.

Malik said that even in her family in Sudan two vulnerable members of her family had heard a rumour that an electrical power shortage, which happens there a lot, had resulted in the vaccines being improperly stored and hence were dangerous. When Sudan got a new batch, many of the people believed that “the West” had sent them rejected vaccines to test them on foreign humans. They wanted first to use African guinea pigs while getting favourable PR before trying the batches on their own people. Again, for a country recently colonized such theories were not as whacky as they might sound to us.

Distrust of governments in such places is understandable. What about Canada or the United States?

The Miracle of Vaccines?

Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trust and Distrust

Few things have surprised me as much as vaccine hesitancy.  The first time I remember coming across this phenomenon was at a conference at Arizona State University which Christiane and I attended.  It was a conference organized by SCETL, their School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. It was our first of many annual conferences we attended there. Attending their annual spring conference was a highlight of our trip down south each year. And they also served us lunch. That year they even gave us wine. All of this for free. They had professors from universities around the country and even Europe and Canada speaking. It was fantastic. And they opened it for members of the public. Christiane and I were a bit nervous the first time we attended, thinking, naturally we did not belong. These were top academics and journalists and thinkers from around the world. But we enjoyed it immensely.

 

For lunch that first year we sat at a round table and were joined by a real estate salesperson. She was also an ordinary citizen like us but enjoyed exploring new ideas, like us.  But she shocked me. She countered a statement that one of the professors had made about autism not being caused by vaccines. She said she had done a lot of research and it was now very clear that vaccines were dangerous and did actually cause autism. “We should never take them,” she said. We should never allow our family members to take them either.

 

I had never heard of this idea before. It surprised me because I had always been a staunch advocate of vaccines since as a young lad terrified of polio during the polio pandemic of the 1950s.  I remember hearing that some people who had polio would have to live most of their entire lives inside an iron lung. Even children my age could be subjected to that. How awful was that? We had a polio victim down the street from us. He was not in an iron lung but I feared for him. Even more I feared for me. It was very scary. The disease affected many young children like me and they were kept alive by these iron lungs.

 

Then like a miracle from God a polio vaccine was discovered.  It could protect us from such a fate. Later I realized this was not a miracle from God, it was a miracle of science. Scientists were so smart they figured out how to save us from these dreadful iron lungs.

 

Then years later as a pretty old man in Arizona State University, I was told that  these vaccines were not safe. How could that be? This was before Covid-19 when I learned many people distrusted the Covid-19 vaccines. I, again, was overjoyed when these vaccines were made available.  Who was I to believe? The real estate agent or scientists I heard on TV or read about in respected journals?  I did a little research too. And it indicated there was a crazy conspiracy theory going around that vaccines caused autism.

 

To me the issue was clear. I would not believe the real estate agent even though she had seemed intelligent and sincere. She knew a lot about vaccines. At least compared to me.  I doubted that she learned more on the Internet than these respected scientists. It just seemed highly unlikely. But I was determined to learn more.

 

Dying of Stubbornness and Ignorance

Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trump, Trust and Distrust

 

North Americans are repeating what they did during the Covid-19 pandemic. They are not heeding good science in favour of more attractive positions self-learned on the Internet.  Charles Blow wrote in the New York Times this during the Covid pandemic and it sounds ominously familiar:

“So, we have a situation in America where people are dying and will continue to die of ignorance and stubbornness. They are determined to prove that they are right even if it puts them on the wrong side of a eulogy. This is like watching millions of people playing in traffic.”

 

We must remember how during the Covid pandemic people in hospitals diagnosed with Covid-19 refused to believe their physicians even as they lay dying.  We see something similar now with regard to measles. Physicians have made it clear how important the measles vaccine has been in safely reducing the consequences of measles and saving thousands of lives and yet many continue to disbelieve the scientific evidence or the advice of medical advisors in favor of Internet quacks. As Blow said this about those times:

“All the while, the patients on ventilators gasped for breath, and refrigerated trailers filled with bodies. Death is one of the ultimate truths of life, and yet not even it could dissuade the headstrong from casting doubt on the science.”

 

 

Blow called this “anti-vax insanity.” That is what it was during Covid. And that is what it is again in the case of Measles. The Covid-19 vaccines were incredibly safe and so are the measles vaccines, yet too many people refuse to take them.

 

Blow said this about the reaction of conservatives to scientific evidence relating to Covid-19:

“Why were Americans turning away a vaccine that many people in other parts of the world were literally dying for? Many did so because of their fidelity to the lie and their fidelity to the liar. They did it because they were — and still are — slavishly devoted to Trump, and because many politicians and conservative commentators helped Trump propagate his lies.”

 

Once again conservative leaders are leading their faithful adherents to their doom. Blow also said during the Covid-19 pandemic  “They are too dug in, too committed to the lies and conspiracies, too devoted to rebellion.” Again, the vaccine deniers are showing their over commitment to “lies and conspiracies” about the measles vaccines.

 

Note as well the words, “too devoted to rebellion.” I will come back to that in a future post.

 

A fighter for justice

Oligarchy, Social democracy

 

All his political life Bernie Sanders has been a passionate fighter for justice. But in the United States, even though the Sanders/AOC ‘Fighting Oligarchy Tour’ was wildly popular most Americans were content with the injustice.  Everyone knew these tax cuts for the wealthy oligarchs were coming because Trump never hid the fact. He knew his supporters would buy that. They voted for it. A lot of poor people even voted for it. In some cases they voted for Trump for strange reasons. For example, many voted for Trump, I believe, because they enjoyed the cruelty of deporting immigrants, illegal or otherwise. They enjoyed trampling on the rights of vulnerable people. I was struck by the glee on their faces at the Republican National Convention in 2024 when they held signs that read, ‘Mass Deportation Now.’ There is something very sick about this country I once loved.

 

Bernie Sanders made another important point. Why are the richest people in the world getting richer while 800,000 people in the US sleep on the streets?  And 60% of Americans are living pay cheque to pay cheque? Why are taxes being reduced on the rich while poor people have their Medicaid benefits cut and children of poor people have their nutritional intake reduced?  In what kind of a world does this make sense?

 

It only makes sense from the point of view of the oligarchs.

 

Sanders believes that such maneuvers are only possible because of the corruption of politics by the huge influx of cash since the Citizens United case. The corrupt election finance laws in the United States are the problem. Those laws allow the rich to put unlimited funds into politics to fund both Democrats and Republicans and then to tell them what to do. This is what oligarchy is all about. And the United States has it. Government for the rich.

 

As a result of those laws and the corrupt system they generate as well as the current constitutional rules, and a conservative controlled Supreme Court,  it will be very difficult  for the U.S. to get out of this mess. Ever.

 

Bernie asked another good question: Does it make sense for the richest man in the world to be allowed to cut funding to support funding to support nutrition for poorest children in America?

 

Why is the United States the only major country not to guarantee health care to all of its citizens. To Bernie Sanders the answer is clear. The problem is caused by a corrupt system flooded with money from the rich so that it’s interests can be served at the expense of the majority of people. The system has been ruined by too much money.

 

Sander also asked, “Does it really make sense for Elon Musk, the richest man in America to own as much wealth as the bottom 52% of the population combined? Who thinks that makes sense?”

 

Here is another question from Sanders: “Can such a system be called anything other than an oligarchy?”

 

One more thing puzzled Sanders.  At the same time as the  American Congress has arranged for a $2.7 trillion tax cut to the wealthiest Americans $2.7 billion was cut from spending on cancer research by the Musk-led DOGE department. That doesn’t even benefit rich people! Does Elon Musk think he can buy a cure for cancer? Does it really make sense to put a chainsaw to work on cancer research? Or other important scientific research projects which have been cut? This is madness. The madness of Trump is the madness of oligarchy.

 

This is what happens when the United States elects as president a man who has the empathy of a turnup. Even capitalists must understand that such a corrupt system urgently needs reform.

 

On the tour with AOC, Sanders also said, “They own the Congress, they own the White House, but they don’t own us.”

 

Sanders also said, “I’ve been to every state of this country the people of this country do not want oligarchy. They do not want authoritarianism. And they want a government that works for all of us, not just the 1%.”

 

The people have the electoral power; they just have to seize it. That is what a fighter for justice is trying to do. But he needs help.

 

What is oligarchy?

Social democracy

 

It is generally agreed that Russia has an oligarchy. But what about the United States? Is it also an oligarchy? To answer that we must know what an oligarchy is.

 

Oligarchy is a system of government  in which the government is in the hands of the very few who use that power for their own benefit, including the power to keep that system in place. Such a system allows the privileged to retain their privileges, even when they make no sense.

I also heard  Bernie Sanders interviewed by Stephen Colbert on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. And Bernie was a gem. I felt the Bern. On the show he started off this way:

“We are living increasingly in an oligarchic society. When I was at the inauguration…standing   right behind me were three of the wealthiest guys in America.  Multi-billionaires who were nominated by Trump to head up main government agencies.

 

Lincoln talked about government of the people, for the people, and for the people. What you get now is government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires…And these are not nice guys. They are extremely greedy people. And they want it all. And we are living in a moment of the greater inequality of income than we have ever had in the history of the  country.”

 

 

I once had a friend ask me what is worse income inequality or poverty?  That is a tough one. Not an easy question to answer. This friend specializes in tough questions. Both are bad. This day, Sanders railed against inequality which can tear apart democracy even in the richest country in the world where most people are rich by world standards.  But is that good enough? Not according to Sanders. And I agree with him.

 

In the United States which has more billionaires than any other country in the world, those billionaire have made it very clear that they want a government that is good for them, no matter how bad it is for everyone else. That is precisely what an oligarchy is.

As Sanders said,

“They are willing to step on anybody to get more.” What’s good for billionaires is good. End of story. It doesn’t matter who gets hurt in the clamor of the billionaires for more. This is the world we live in now. As Sanders said, “It is hardly unfair to say the American government is an oligarchy.”

 

Americans of course don’t think about their own country as an oligarchy. Russia is an oligarchy. China is an oligarchy. America is a democracy. Bu are they right? There is a lot of evidence that they are wrong.”

That is why America is willing to fund $600 billion in tax cuts that benefit primarily the rich, and particularly the very rich They don’t care what they take away from poor people. This is shown by the fact that Americans are by and large eager to cut Medicaid for poor people, reduce nutritional food for poor and hungry children, and education for all children just to get tax cuts that benefit mostly very rich people.  As if they are the ones that need help. This is modern America. This is strong evidence that America is an oligarchy.

 

And Sanders concluded, “in no religion on earth would anyone think this is moral behaviour.”

 

But in the land of Trump, this is what justice looks like. It is the only thing Republicans in the US can agree upon. They will even ditch long standing wishes, like balancing the budget, to get tax cuts for the wealthy—i.e. for the oligarchs and their kin. The conservatives in their midst say the government can’t afford anything, except tax cuts for wealthy people. That is a no-brainer. And that is precisely what it is.