The Church of Disease Chronicity and Proliferation

Preventable disease is RFK, Jr's religion so I'm calling for a crusade

Why does AIDS need its own day anyway? Credit: altcdc.altgov.info

Yesterday, the US government advised federal employees that they were not going to acknowledge World AIDS Day on December 1st. They had better not spend a single taxpayer penny on it or publicly promote it, and if they go to any events, they had better not say a word about it there, either.

This is a little strange, considering human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection is one of those chronic diseases that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. purports to be at “epidemic” levels. Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) is the end-stage of HIV disease, so in my book it qualifies as one of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) priority chronic diseases. HIV infection has a known impact on mitochondrial function and metabolism, which he and all his functional medicine cronies are frequently concerned about. You can reduce AIDS cases by reducing the prevalence of the chronic infection that causes it, so this should be a top MAHA priority. Why doesn’t Kennedy want to even acknowledge that AIDS is a preventable disease that the US department he runs has made incredible progress against? Why doesn’t he want to prevent other diseases or even allow HHS employees to talk about them?

Because he doesn’t want to prevent diseases, whether they are chronic or acute. More disease means less opposition to his agenda. More disease means a much larger market for the supplements and miracle cures he and his friends are selling. More disease means there will always be a need for MAHA. More disease means more death, and the body count will be the achievement by which Kennedy’s legacy is measured.

My colleagues attended the recent Children’s Health Defense conference and wrote thoughtful articles about it. They conclude that we need to fundamentally change the way we understand and communicate with the people who are willfully joining the MAHA movement. I agree with that. The methods we have used to win back public trust in evidence-based science and health policy are not working against the MAHA siren song and we need to change our approach. I agree that we should meet people where they are, with empathy and without judgment, and try to understand how to build bridges rather than erect barriers. That is certainly something we all should think about and it will be a long-term effort.

But I also think that we need to pursue accountability: people did not just spontaneously become ensnared in MAHA pseudoscience because scientists and public health officials communicated ineffectively or didn’t handle the COVID-19 pandemic perfectly. The MAHA movement is growing because its leadership relentlessly lies about science and health to convert new followers to their beliefs. As much as we need to do a better job reaching the public, we need to stop tolerating dishonesty and anti-vax proselytizing from the officials who are attempting to systematically dismantle public health. That starts and ends with Kennedy, who is the high priest of the MAHA faith. Let’s examine what he’s been up to lately in his ardent quest to promote ever more prevalent preventable disease.

HIV denial is a hell of a drug

Professor Bobby commands the lectern with his usual nonsensical horseshit

We know that the root cause of AIDS is HIV infection, so you would think that if Kennedy is serious, he would attack that. HIV infection is preventable with pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), including newly approved long-lasting medications like lenacapavir. HIV infection can’t be cured without a bone marrow or stem cell transplant (and it’s only been cured a handful of times this way, under exceptional circumstances), but it can be treated very effectively with anti-retroviral drug cocktails, which have extended people’s lives by decades. Drug treatment has turned HIV from a death sentence to a manageable—albeit chronic—condition.

To reduce HIV transmission and ensure that HIV-positive people have access to treatment, events like World AIDS Day are critical for raising awareness, connecting people to resources, and destigmatizing the disease for the impacted community. However, for the US government to engage honestly with the more than 1.2 million Americans living with HIV on World AIDS Day would require admitting that President Donald Trump’s decisions to shutter the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and gut the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) have caused massive setbacks in the global fight against HIV/AIDS. Millions have lost access to anti-retroviral drugs and an unquantified number of people have died already as a result of these cuts, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) annual report published yesterday.

The fact is that under Kennedy’s leadership, HHS has done nothing to address the HIV epidemic in the US either. They have cut grants and programs for HIV research, data collection, and community outreach, altered government websites, and demoted or fired senior officials overseeing HIV research in the US. Kennedy has effectively made it much more difficult to prevent both HIV and AIDS for millions of people at home and around the world. He has also destroyed pathways to new methods for preventing HIV completely.

There is no vaccine for HIV. Although anti-retroviral drugs work very well to prevent transmission and to control disease progression, they can select for drug resistant HIV variants and do not offer lifetime protection. An HIV vaccine that prevented transmission would obviate the need for PrEP drugs. A therapeutic vaccine for HIV might keep viral loads so low that it would prevent transmission in an HIV-positive vaccinated host, while also preventing progression to AIDS. Vaccines could end the ongoing HIV pandemic for good.

Unfortunately, Kennedy has cut programs evaluating promising HIV vaccine candidates, so those efforts have been severely delayed, if not rendered futile. And even though both chronic HIV infection and progression to AIDS can be prevented with currently approved therapies, they are no longer as easily accessible. All of this will result in more new HIV infections and more AIDS cases. Why would Kennedy and the Trump administration not want to prevent as many cases of HIV and AIDS as possible?

Because Kennedy does not believe that HIV causes AIDS. My colleague, Kent State University epidemiologist Tara Smith, wrote an incisive paper detailing his lengthy history of HIV denial, unsupported claims that HIV emerged as a result of “vaccine research,” and questioning whether HIV had ever been isolated. These beliefs predate his installation as HHS Secretary by years, with him noting in his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci that “any questioning of the orthodoxy that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS remains an unforgivable—even dangerous—heresy among our reigning medical cartel and its media allies.”

Presenting the massive evidence base showing that HIV is indeed the cause of AIDS as a heretical form of pseudo-religious “orthodoxy” further normalizes health policy decisions based on blind faith and casts doubt unfairly on established scientific methods. If you reject controlled, systematic scientific methods—such as those that unequivocally demonstrate that HIV is a virus that causes a chronic infection and eventually progresses to AIDS in most people—then you might not think HIV is a problem that needs to be solved at all. If you don’t believe that HIV is a virus, then why bother investing taxpayer funds in treating or preventing infection? If you believe that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, and that AIDS is instead caused by lifestyle choices like being gay, having sex or using drugs for fun, eating a bad diet, or not getting enough sleep, then you might think it’s a matter of personal responsibility rather than one of public health. You might even feel unbothered about denying lifesaving medication to people on the basis of the inferior moral character and reckless behavior that supposedly causes them such bad health.

There is a deep, misanthropic cynicism and lack of compassion at the core of HIV denial. If you don’t believe that HIV is the “root cause” of AIDS, then you don’t care whether people get HIV or not. You are willing to let others die for your beliefs. And if you believe the faith-based creed of a disease evangelist over the evidence-based policies and practices of a public health professional, then you are already headed down an Orwellian path where lies are truth, faith is science, and sickness is health. In this realm, Kennedy reigns supreme.

Let’s give a friendly welcome neigh to the CDC’s newest horse paste dealer

It’s giving Jim Mora “Playoffs?! Playoffs!” press conference vibes, except if Mora was a deranged anti-vax surgeon general screaming about medical freedom instead of the number of times the Colts turned over the ball to the 49ers’ defense in 2001

I have to wonder if that brain worm didn’t have a more profound impact in shaping Kennedy’s views prioritizing “early treatment” over disease prevention. In medical contrarian parlance, “early treatment” means “unproven treatment” in place of vaccines. For COVID-19, this typically refers to off-label prescriptions of the anti-parasitic drugs hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Neither of these drugs work for treating COVID-19, but ivermectin is an anti-helminthic (dewormer). It would have worked for the worm.

Less than three weeks after the domestic terror attack, CDC Director Susan Monarez was fired for refusing to preemptively approve Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommendations that would severely block access to vaccines. Kennedy installed HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill as her replacement. O’Neill is a former Mithril Capital (Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm) managing director, ivermectin enthusiast, and toxic and misogynistic longevity cult enabler with no relevant professional expertise in public health. His main contributions as Acting CDC Director thus far have been tweets cheering on the demonstrably inept current ACIP for blocking access to as many vaccines as possible. During the pandemic, O’Neill became an “early treatment” convert and a lab leaker. This led him to say some very stupid things, such as claiming the name “#COVID” was evidence of a globalist WHO plot to cover up pandemic origins and slowed down unspecified research and responses.

#COVID didn’t throw me off, but since I studied SARS-CoV-2 when it was called nCoV-2019 and through the brief HCoV-19 era, I was all good. A virologist doesn’t need to know the virus’s name when we know it by its sequence and phenotype

O’Neill’s lack of health or scientific expertise is immediately apparent the second he chimes in, so Kennedy called up a more credentialed member of Team Ivermectin from the minor leagues. Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph Abraham was just installed as the Principal Deputy Director at CDC. Abraham is such a proponent of “early treatment” regimens (that don’t work for COVID) that he signed an order allowing licensed pharmacists to dispense ivermectin to any adult without a prescription. He also presided over a broad campaign to stop promoting vaccination across Louisiana, which he justified with a full complement of unsupported claims about vaccines: lockdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates kill people, all he sees are vaccine-injured patients, serious safety risks are being suppressed by Big Pharma, blood from vaccinated people may not be safe, and vaccines might cause miscarriages. As with his new boss Kennedy, Abraham responded to Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy’s impotent intervention on behalf of Louisiana’s state immunization program with a well-placed “stay in your lane.” Abraham’s campaign was so successful that it triggered an epidemic of pertussis (whooping cough), which he didn’t bother to disclose to the public for months until after two babies had died. He has used his position to issue conspiratorial medical freedom polemics against vaccination on official Louisiana Department of Health letterhead, in which he stated that COVID-19 vaccine recommendations were “an offense against personal autonomy that will take years to overcome” because everyone hates the CDC’s vaccine-pushing “collectivist mentality.” Abraham is now second in command.

As Principal Deputy Director, Abraham is the highest ranking permanent CDC official with a medical degree. This means that he will make important agency decisions that O’Neill is unqualified for (in other words, all of them), because they must be made by a credentialed expert or they constitute medical advice or clinical guidance, such as approving ACIP recommendations. Normally these tasks would be handled by the CDC Director, who historically has always had a doctoral degree. However, to fill that position, Kennedy will need to identify a candidate who would survive a Senate confirmation hearing. Even spineless Cassidy, who is both a pro-vaccine hepatologist and the chair of the Senate HELP Committee, is unlikely to advance any candidate who will aid Kennedy’s efforts to break every promise he ever made to preserve vaccines in his own confirmation hearing.

However, unlike the permanent CDC Director, the Principal Deputy Director does not require Senate confirmation, which is very convenient for Kennedy. In Abraham, he has a loyal functionary who will dutifully approve the descheduling of every vaccine that crosses his desk. O’Neill can occupy the Acting Director position indefinitely and helpfully enact Kennedy’s agenda on the back of Abraham’s medical license. I will be surprised if a permanent CDC Director is appointed at all in the foreseeable future.

It’s been apparent for a while now that the federal government doesn’t intend to burn HHS to the ground. That’s not actually better than if total annihilation was the goal. CDC has lost such a vast wealth of expertise and capacity that it is essentially in a vegetative state. Rather than pull the plug, Kennedy will repopulate key leadership positions with political appointees like Abraham who will do his bidding. CDC will never be the agency it was—at least not for many years, and the turning point where rebuilding would even be possible is not within sight—but it will reanimate itself enough to carry out some basic functions. The only problem is that those functions will be turned into tools for executing Kennedy’s agenda. The nation’s agency for preventing disease will be weaponized against the American people in the service of advancing Kennedy’s fanatical opposition to vaccination and the many revenue streams this creates for him.

Who gave Bobby the website password?

Attempts to rein Kennedy in have not worked, particularly when admonition comes from Cassidy. Back in February, Kennedy secured Cassidy’s vote to advance him out of the HELP committee by promising him that he wouldn’t mess around with vaccines, particularly the childhood vaccination schedule, and they would be close collaborators. As soon as Kennedy was confirmed, he promptly broke his promise and started immediately messing around with vaccines in any way that he thought he could get away with. And Cassidy let him get away with a lot.

When Kennedy failed to endorse the MMR vaccine for measles prevention during the outbreak in West Texas, Cassidy described the “gestalt” of his lackluster response as “let’s get vaccinated!” When Kennedy fired the competent ACIP in June, Cassidy said they wouldn’t be replaced with anti-vaxxers and shared a Wall Street Journal editorial by Kennedy making baseless allegations of conflicts and corruption among the ACIP experts who were fired. Kennedy replaced ACIP with anti-vaxxers less than a week later. Cassidy then tweeted that the ACIP meeting should be delayed until the panel could be fully staffed and vetted. This request was ignored.

Kennedy has humiliated Cassidy now on multiple occasions, including when Cassidy attempted to intervene unsuccessfully to prevent Monarez from being fired. In that circumstance, Cassidy reproached Kennedy for attempting to strongarm Monarez into rubber-stamping his anti-vax agenda, so Kennedy appealed to Trump to fire her. Trump did.

After Monarez was fired, Cassidy put out another statement demanding that the next ACIP meeting be delayed. That was also ignored. That ACIP meeting removed the measles-mumps-rubella-varicella (MMRV) combination vaccine from the schedule, attempted to do the same with the hepatitis B virus (HBV) vaccine birth dose, and managed to push through some unenforceable COVID vaccine recommendations after a day-long disinformation-fest about turbo cancer, invented vaccine injuries, and sudden death.

But the greatest insult so far was when Kennedy ordered the CDC’s website modified to suggest that there is no proof that vaccines do not cause autism. If I were Cassidy, that asterisk would haunt me for the rest of my days.

The asterisk is MAHA administrative jargon for “fuck you, Bill Cassidy”

Since Kennedy’s clear intent in altering the CDC’s page is to imply that doubt remains about whether vaccines cause autism, it’s hard to read that asterisk allowing him to keep his promise on a very bad faith technicality as anything but a brutally dismissive insult. Kennedy even told the New York Times that he told Cassidy about his plans to change the website. Cassidy “disagreed,” Kennedy shrugged, and asterisked him anyway. Even now, Cassidy, who is facing a primary and clearly has been outplayed by Kennedy, stops short of speaking up despite the fact that Kennedy’s plans are plainly obvious.

There are very few Republicans brave enough to challenge Kennedy. Cassidy is exemplary of the cowardice that will characterize his party’s conduct through this dark period for American health, but he is not alone. The fact is that Kennedy is openly using government websites meant for sharing critical health information and guidance with the public to lie about vaccines. Worse, he is not just lying about vaccines. He is lying to discourage parents from vaccinating their children. This will cause children to become infected with diseases that are completely preventable. It will cause children to get sick, become disabled by, and die from these diseases. Doing nothing in the face of preventable epidemics is complicity with the injuries and the deaths that they cause.

I take it on faith that not preventing preventable disease is morally wrong

Like Kennedy, I am Catholic, but I am not particularly devout. I don’t consider myself a deeply religious person, probably because I am a scientist, both as my profession and my approach to most things. I typically make decisions—even about things in my personal life, like developing my own thoughts and opinions—by analyzing evidence rather than defaulting to church doctrine and priestly advice. I prioritize rational, informed actions over the fate of my immortal soul. However, consistent with my Catholic upbringing, I do have a very strong belief that it is wrong to kill or harm people, either directly or through inaction. Kennedy sounds like he’s a lot more observant than I am, so he has to know that Catholics consider this to be dogmatically sinful. In fact, it’s a mortal sin (the kind where you burn in hell for all eternity). I don’t usually think of it in such Catholic terms, but I really do believe to my core that it is a moral abomination to sit idly by while Kennedy makes and enforces policies that will directly lead to thousands or even millions of deaths.

I have had a bad past couple of weeks, including threats of death and violence, a far-right extremist social media incitement campaign to get me fired, a bunch of exhausting travel, and non-stop crises of varying severity across all aspects of my life. But all these problems pale to the single biggest tormentor of my mental health: my knowledge of the consequences of Kennedy’s actions in vaccine policy. To be extremely clear, for every vaccine that Kennedy successfully blocks or restricts access to, children will suffer and die.

Watching as completely preventable mass epidemics become increasingly inevitable is a truly ghastly experience, especially when fighting back feels increasingly futile (and it often does). When these epidemics begin—as some already have—we won’t know at first because of anti-public health lackeys like Abraham not warning the public about them. We will only appreciate these consequences when the numbers are too high to ignore. HIV rates will skyrocket and more and more people living with HIV who have lost access to medication begin developing AIDS. Pertussis and measles outbreaks will be larger and more frequent and we’ll start to see more mumps, hepatitis A, chickenpox, and rubella. I fear we’ll see infant tetanus and paralytic polio cases, as well. More will die of pneumonia and meningitis. Flu seasons will always be worse as vaccine uptake decreases and we aren’t able to match vaccines with circulating strains as well because we don’t have adequate surveillance data. What resources remain in the HHS will be used to manufacture evidence and hide the full extent of these epidemics from the public. Health care systems will be taxed to their limits and, in some cases and communities, overwhelmed. This will be exacerbated by cuts to health care that Kennedy has also effected. The fact that I can see this coming in advance is no comfort, considering I’m not sure what to do about it besides scream, save receipts, and give my therapist lots of work to do.

But I believe that it is immoral to do nothing at all. I cannot bear to have this in my head and just learn to live with it. I cannot accept this, as a virologist, an American, and as a decent human being. Kennedy does not have a differing opinion about public health that needs to be respected. He is a true believer in a faith that measures its success by its death toll. I believe that is profoundly wrong and it is unworthy of respect or professional decorum. It is antithetical to American values, which led us to build a world-leading national taxpayer-funded public health agency that used science to free people from the scourge of these terrible diseases. It is antithetical to what motivates ethical scientists, clinicians, and public health professionals, which is the desire to prevent people from getting sick and dying. It is antithetical to everything I believe in.

We need to stop treating Kennedy as if this is just more of Bobby Brainworm doing wacky shit and acknowledge that a lot of people are going to die as a result of his beliefs. That moment draws ever closer. It’s time for everyone as a community to admit what Kennedy is—a fanatical and very competent preventable disease evangelist—but also to decide for ourselves who we are and what we believe in. And then we need to act on those beliefs. I believe that most people oppose mass preventable death. I am trying to have faith that most people will find the courage to oppose it now.