STAT quotes established hoaxer (Ian Lipkin, coauthor of Proximal Origins paper that RFK helped reveal was a lie) to try and take down RFK's plan to improve kids' health

The publication STAT expects people to pay $499/year to read this drivel. Which may have been written as advertising, as earlier the Astra-Zeneca logo was displayed on it.

https://www.statnews.com/2024/08/30/rfk-jr-trump-campaign-public-health-policy-issue/

For decades, Kennedy has pushed the unfounded theory that vaccines cause autism. He founded a nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, to promote the same message and equip generations of American mothers with the tools to reject inoculation for their children. Study after study has failed to find evidence of a link between vaccines and autism. So his group’s message broadened to link vaccines to other conditions, including autoimmune disease, allergies, and ADHD. 

A whopper! CHD has always been interested in all the effects of toxins on our children. RFK, Jr. came to vaccines after suing coal burning plants for the mercury poisoning they released into the environment and its deleterious effects. And vaccines do cause regressive autism.

He has also claimed Covid vaccines were not effective and put people at higher risk of severe disease and death. Data show the opposite, and go even further: suggesting vaccination may lower people’s risk of developing autoimmune diseases and long Covid. 

Another whopper! COVID vaccines “may” do any number of things. What they definitely do is cause myocarditis, strokes, heart attacks, and deaths, as data from many countries shows, with increases in overall deaths (“all-cause mortality”) of 10-20% post vaccination. Major Japanese TV station just did a long story about this problem. https://x.com/_aussie17/status/1829397758102610186 and last week Danish and Swedish data were published showing the same thing, which I linked to on the substack. A book of autopsy data confirming spike protein damage causing deaths, from the collection of Arne Burkhardt, is about to be released. Dr. Burkhardt died suddenly last year, but was able to prove the killer spike proteins embedded in arteries and organs resulted from vaccination but not from infection: https://www.letterpressberlin.com/histopathologie/histopathologie.html

Many Americans still believe that the safety and benefits of measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccines — the target of autism and chronic health conspiracies in the 1990s — outweigh the risks. But their confidence falls off notably for coronavirus shots: Just 62% of Americans believe their benefits outweigh risks, according to Pew Research polling last year. Kennedy said in an interview this month that he would not give his children the MMR vaccine if presented with the opportunity again. 

“Having lived through Covid, and seeing the importance of vaccines, my hope would be that some of this could be behind us,” said Ian Lipkin, an epidemiologist at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health who has sought to dismantle anti-vaccine arguments. “But it continues to rear its head” with Kennedy joining the Trump team. 

Who is this Dr. Lipkin? He is a deep state medical insider who has actively worked to muddy the waters on autism and vaccine injury, chronic lyme disease and chronic fatigue syndrome, in effect helping to deny disability claims of many thousands of Americans. He moved on to associations with Peter Daszak (on whom he bestowed an academic appointment at Columbia), working with the WHO and promoting ONE Health, and pushing the biosecurity agenda. Here is a paragraph from his bio:

Dr. Lipkin served as co-chair of the Steering Committee of the National Biosurveillance Advisory Subcommittee and as Director of the Northeast Biodefense Center and the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Center on Diagnostics, Surveillance and Immunotherapeutics for Emerging Infectious and Zoonotic Diseases, the only academic WHO Center focused on diagnostics and discovery. He has collaborated with the Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, USAID PREDICT, US Department of Agriculture, US Food and Drug Administration, Agilent Technologies, Pfizer, Roche 454 Life Sciences, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google.org, Institut Pasteur, and OneHealth Alliance.

Lipkin’s list of selected publications omits the most downloaded medical research paper ever: The Proximal Origins paper published in Nature Medicine in March 2020 to dissuade the world that Sars-CoV-2 could have come from a lab. He was the third author. True to form, he has tried to weasel out of that association.

If Trump pulls from Kennedy’s playbook, the FDA would also be on the hook for requiring part of more extensive safety studies for vaccines. Kennedy has argued repeatedly, in press interviews and his 2023 book, “Vax-Unvax,” that federal drug regulators do not require follow-up on “acute and long-term adverse effects” of childhood immunizations. 

This is nothing new: Kennedy has repeatedly asserted that vaccines aren’t required to undergo as rigorous of testing as other pharmaceutical products. In a 2017 interview with STAT, he claimed vaccine safety tests only last a few days or weeks, and that vaccines aren’t studied against placebo. 

Everything the Stat authors assert in the above two paragraphs about RFK, Jr. is true. They provide no evidence to the contrary. Who would be against adequate safety studies for drugs and vaccines?

In other remarks and campaign materials, Kennedy has stated a desire to change the NIH’s research focus away from infectious disease and toward chronic disease prevention, with an emphasis on “toxic chemicals (PFAS, glyphosate, neonics, etc.), air and water pollution, microplastics, electromagnetic pollution, ultra-processed foods, and pharmaceutical products.” Neonics are a kind of insecticide, and electromagnetic pollution refers to the currents emitted by devices, such as computers, televisions and cellphones. 

Kennedy has also brought up the idea of taking legal action against scientific journals for “publishing fake science to promote the mercantile ambitions” of various industries, including food and pharma. Forcing journals to publish more studies on the unconventional “root causes” of chronic disease would give people the evidence they need to go after industry, he said. “You can’t sue a company for making your children fat, for poisoning them so that their microbiome doesn’t work anymore,” Kennedy said in a video on his campaign website. As a lawyer, Kennedy took part in the Monsanto lawsuit that alleged glyphosate in the weed-killer RoundUp was causing cancer and other diseases.

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

Fact-checking claims on the roots of childhood chronic disease

Experts in pediatric disease told STAT that it’s true that diagnoses of chronic health conditions have increased in the past several decades. More children are being diagnosed with diabetes, developmental disabilities, asthma, mental health issues, food allergies, and other illnesses. The global prevalence of obesity has tripled since a sharp uptick beginning in the 1980s. But the numbers don’t reflect one of Kennedy’s favorite figures: That 60% of children in the U.S. are disabled by chronic disease.

Some estimates of pediatric chronic disease prevalence go as high as 20%. Many diseases and disorders don’t rise to the level of a severe disability. If mild chronic conditions are added in, the number may rise to about 40% of children. Less than 2% of children in the 1970s had severe conditions that interfered with daily life, according to national survey data. Those are dramatic increases in just a few decades, but not to the level Kennedy claims, said James Perrin, a Distinguished Chair in Pediatrics at MassGeneral Hospital for Children. 

It’s difficult to know what share of those increases are a result of better, more consistent screening, clearer diagnostic criteria, or simply more awareness among patients and clinicians. For example, rates of autism that were calculated for the first time in the 1960s sharply increased in subsequent decades, once diagnostic criteria were expanded and there were more studies of prevalence around the world….

With so many factors shaping the health of American children, it is impossible to pin trends in chronic health on broad childhood vaccination that even skeptics acknowledge will prevent serious infections such as measles and pertussis. Yet the anti-vaccination movement continues to come up with new claims.

“It’s like whack-a-mole. They come up on one side and you take care of that, and then they pop up someplace else,” said Lipkin. “They just keep moving the goalposts.”

Lipkin is not a pediatrician, not a toxicologist, not an infectious disease expert. The best way to describe him is Deep State apparatchik. Or someone who is sent to create fake science and push out sound bites intended to muddy the water about various important public health issues, or someone sent as a hit-man to make the public think that Making America Healthy Again is a bad idea and those who want to do so don’t know what they are talking about.