Richard Roberts got 80 Nobel laureates to sign anything: a letter to NIH demanding EcoHealth/Daszak's grant be reinstated. A letter to Senators demanding they don't confirm RFK.
82 of these Nobel laureates also demanded we vote for Kamala Harris! And 155 of them just adore GMO foods, though I doubt they eat them.
Roberts claims, “The group tries to stay out of politics whenever possible.” What a joke that is! Extremely wealthy Sir Richard Roberts is a massive activist for GMO foods as well as for meddling in national elections and appointments. Here’s what he says in a bio titled, “Why you should love GMOs”:
I have organized a campaign of Nobel Laureates to try and influence the debate, which now has 155 co-signees. I will use Golden Rice as a clear example of the costs of these shortsighted policies. Millions of children have died or suffered developmental impairment because of a lack of Vitamin A in their diet. Golden Rice could reverse this, but has become a target of the Green parties because it is a GMO. This is foolish and dangerous. How many more children must die before this is considered a crime against humanity?
- Richard J. Roberts, New England Biolabs
Why would the Blob corrupt the institution of the Nobel Prize? Why not? They will corrupt anything they can. 1993 Nobel laureate Roberts, aged 81, has been a reliable operative for doing so. One wonders how many of the 155 prize winners know much about GMO foods, and why they so readily step out of their lane, in unison, to herald GMO’s supposed benefits. Don’t they know they are tarnishing the brand? The Blob can just move on to the next brand once the gild is off this lily.
Sir Richard Roberts has his fellow Nobel laureates so well organized he can get them to sign on, in droves, to utter trash. Such as that Kamala Harris’s platform (whatever it was, since it was not explicated very clearly) was so fabulous that 82 Nobel prize winners had to publicly support her Presidential bid. Who the heck are they to tell the rest of us who is the better candidate? Is this the revenge of the experts? I hate to tell them, but experts are no longer an admired species around here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/science/kamala-harris-nobel-winners.html
Now 77 of them have spoken out about the dire attack on science if RFK, Jr. is confirmed as HHS Secretary. Do these geniuses know they have been rolled up by the Blob?
This group of Nobel laureates embarrassed themselves 4 years ago after they demanded that the NIH give Peter Daszak his grant back. They probably did not know EcoHealth Alliance from a hole in the wall, but at least 77 of them admonished NIH nonetheless.
Roberts had been asked to organize the letter on behalf of Daszak by Rita Colwell, a former director of the National Science Foundation, CIA collaborator and EcoHealth Alliance Board member.
Below you can find the Nobel laureate letter demanding money for Daszak. And, btw, he got it back, and more in late 2020:
https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.abc9393/full/nl_letter_final-1710959215477.pdf
So after standing up for Daszak and Kamala Harris and bad food, today they have been activated to throw shade on Bobby Kennedy’s nomination for HHS Secretary. This is truly a “Revenge of the Nerds” situation. Bobby has the beautiful wife, mansion, 6 or 7 kids, a famous name, a brilliant intellect, devotion to the nation’s health and well-being, and the Nobellates are trying to spoil the party. Bobby doesn’t trust the experts. So we’re gonna have a public tantrum over it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/health/kennedy-hhs-nobel-laureates.html
Dec. 9, 2024
More than 75 Nobel Prize winners have signed a letter urging senators not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
The letter, obtained by The New York Times, marks the first time in recent memory that Nobel laureates have banded together against a Cabinet choice, according to Richard Roberts, winner of the 1993 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine, who helped draft the letter. The group tries to stay out of politics whenever possible, he said.
But the confirmation of Mr. Kennedy, a staunch critic of mainstream medicine who has been hostile to the scientists and agencies he would oversee, is a threat that the Nobel laureates could not ignore, Dr. Roberts said.
“These political attacks on science are very damaging,” he said. “You have to stand up and protect it.”
The laureates questioned whether Mr. Kennedy, who they said has “a lack of credentials” in medicine, science or administration, was fit to lead the department responsible for protecting public health and funding biomedical research.
“Placing Mr. Kennedy in charge of DHHS would put the public’s health in jeopardy and undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences,” the letter warned.
Read the Letter From Nobel Laureates Urging That Mr. Kennedy Not be Confirmed
More than 75 laureates have written an open letter describing Mr. Kennedy’s selection for H.H.S. secretary as detrimental to public health.
If confirmed, Mr. Kennedy’s opposition to well-established public health tools, like vaccines and the fluoridation of drinking water, would pose a risk to the country’s well-being, the letter said.
The laureates decried Mr. Kennedy’s promotion of conspiracy theories. Mr. Kennedy has falsely linked vaccines to autism, rejected established science showing that H.I.V. causes AIDS, and suggested, without evidence, that the coronavirus targeted and spared certain ethnic groups.
The laureates also noted that Mr. Kennedy has been a “belligerent critic” of the agencies that would fall under his purview, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.
Mr. Kennedy has threatened to fire employees of the F.D.A., which he says has waged a “war on public health,” and has promised to replace hundreds of N.I.H. employees the day after Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
More broadly, he said that vaccine scientists “should be in jail and the key should be thrown away,” according to NBC News.
“The leader of DHHS should continue to nurture and improve — not to threaten — these important and highly respected institutions and their employees,” the letter said.
In a statement on Monday night, a spokeswoman for the Trump transition team said: “Americans are sick and tired of the elites telling them what to do and how to do it. Our healthcare system in this country is broken, Mr. Kennedy will enact President Trumps agenda to restore the integrity of our healthcare and Make America Healthy Again.”
Seventy-seven laureates — in medicine, chemistry, economics and physics — signed the letter. They included Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, who were awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of microRNA, and Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, who won the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Sciences for research on global inequality.
Dr. Harold Varmus, a 1989 Nobel Prize laureate who signed the letter, said that scientific research — which depends on federal funding and helps drive the country’s economic growth — is impossible to disentangle from the political climate.
“Science is dependent on the political structures of this country,” he said. “I don’t think we should be burying our heads in the sand just because we’re scientists.”
For many of the signatories, this is the second political campaign they’ve participated in this year. Dozens of Nobel Prize winners signed an open letter in October endorsing Kamala Harris for president.
Dr. Roberts hoped that this letter will be successful. Even if the letter swayed a small number of senators, he said, it might be enough to block Mr. Kennedy’s appointment.
“Maybe there are some who will read this and think, Well, we really do want to protect the health of our citizens,” he said. “They didn’t elect us so that we could kill them.”
Teddy Rosenbluth is a health reporter and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
I will never again respect the Nobel Laureate title. What a sad farce.
Apparently, Nobel Laureate means ‘ bought out’… or else.