• Catma@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      Its a combination of things and time.

      First is name recognition. If you hear things from a name you know you are going to give it more consideration regardless of its insanity.

      Second is Jenny McCarthy broke the brains of a lot of American moms, in the 2000s? I think it was going on her massive tour of talk shows saying vaccines cause autism. She was never an expert and the only study ever cited was debunked. Massive TV talk shows put her on to nation wide audiences including Oprah, known for giving us such awesome people as Dr Oz and Dr Phil. Saying she knew her child better and the causes of autism vs what those dorks in science were saying gave some people the idea you could know better than an expert in a field.

      Next the internet became what it is… an awful place where you can find a number of people to agree to damn near anything. Yea maybe before there was one mom who was anti vax in your town and everyone thought she was a kook. Now she has friends online that can provide her with wild stories and made up statistics that you cannot counter on the fly. Mommy blogs and now influencers talk about all different ways to keep your baby safe from “big pharma” and their evil vaccines but you should totally buy this $250 a month bone broth, methalyne blue pill that will keep you healthy. Disregard the fact its never actually been tested and we wont tell you where it comes from.

      I think anti intellectualism is the final piece to this. No longer do people feel ok saying “I dont know” when presented with hard questions or things they habe no basis in. We have fought against things science has shown us because it doesnt match our beliefs, evolution, or it isnt immediately obvious what it hurting, climate change, or we have never experienced the horrors of some diseases, anti vaccine.

      RFK Jr ticks all these. He is a Kennedy and regardless of your political affiliation you know that name. He speaks to the same anti vaccine sentament McCarthy started years ago. Ignore all those deaths in American Samoa that were the cause of him preaching his anti vaccine bs. He is also clearly not an expert so he is not made bias by those evil intellectuals in their ivory towers. He studied this stuff and didnt need to do any of that stupid testing.

      Long and short of it, RFK Jr is only the picture of health to those who want him to be. They see the same stuff we all do but it doesnt matter because he says what they want to hear.

      Sorry this was longer than I expected it to be.

      • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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        16 days ago

        Oprah

        It’s weird how she tends to get a pass on things, but how was she not the Joe Rogan for the daytime TV set?

  • MrSulu@lemmy.ml
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    17 days ago

    RFK disputed the cause of death. This is a specific level of fucked up when you know that someone has lost their baby.

  • DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    I would say I’m shocked that the CDC director is a coward.

    Kennedy ordered Erica Schwartz, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to remove the deaths from the agency’s data. CDC staff had already accepted the deaths as being from measles and had reported them as such. Schwartz reportedly removed them from the public website without objection, though a report on Thursday revealed they are still included in an internal CDC database.

    However, her confirmation hearing strongly hinted she was going to cave to RFK Jr’s anti-vax bullshit.

    Cassidy kicked off questions by asking Schwartz directly: “Will you commit to this committee and to the American people to have the same integrity as [Monarez]? That if asked to do something which is wrong for public health, that you will stand up as she did [and] object, if necessary, publicly.” But Schwartz didn’t answer the question directly, only saying that she has led by integrity and that she took the Hippocratic oath as a doctor.

    https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/07/two-trump-health-nominees-crash-and-burn-in-tense-senate-hearing/

  • velma@sh.itjust.works
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    17 days ago

    Damn, I thought it might be children with how they were gatekeeping the info. This is incredibly sad.