Transcription
From Micro TV. This is Beyond the Noise, episode number 11, recorded on August 2nd, 2023.
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I'm Vincent Rakinello and joining me today is your host, Dr. Paul Offett.
Hi Vincent. Well, this is the video version of Paul's column on Substack called Beyond the Noise: Cutting to the Chase on Important Health Topics. And today, Paul, let's take a look at your most recent column, The Real Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and it's a tale about RFK Jr. and Tony Fouchy. And let's start by having you tell us what kinds of things RFK Jr. has said about Dr. Fouchy.
Well, he he wrote a book called The Real Anthony Fouchy, which was a densely written long book, which was a diet tribe against Dr. Fouchy as well as other public health officials and scientists. Um, he has said on Lex Friedman's podcast, which is very popular, has as many as three million viewers per uh episode. Um, he said that that Tony Fouchy is a horrible person, a horrible human being, which is remarkable. I mean, look at everything that Dr. Dr. Fouchy has done over the last 40 years for public health. He's a hero. He's an American hero. And although he didn't get everything right during the pandemic because none of us got everything right during the pandemic, he certainly was trying and he certainly did a lot of very good things during this pandemic. And what has Robert F. Kennedy Jr. done that's been good.
So in your column, you start by comparing uh the histories of the two and what they have done for health. It' be useful to go over that a bit here.
Sure. So, Dr. Fouchy came into the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the early 1980s and and sort of quickly rose to be the head of that. He did really important work on certain autoimmune diseases like Wegner's granulomatitosis where he really figured out treatments for what were previously fatal diseases recognized by the American Association of Rheumatology as some of the most important contributions in rheumatology in the previous 20 years. He did a lot of work on HIV in terms of understanding the mechanism by which it was immune suppressive. Um he certainly did excellent work regarding um the the NIDA's oversight of work of people like Barney Graham and Kismechia Corbett regarding the construction of the mRNA vaccines that ultimately became Madna's vaccines. He was certainly involved in the creation of Operation Warp Speed during the Trump administration, which was able to to basically spend 11 billion dollars on six vaccine candidates. Four made it to the finish line. And it's because uh they took the risk out of it for pharmaceutical companies. And so we had a vaccine that was the fastest vaccine ever made, directed against one of the more difficult and elusive pathogens that we've had in SARS KV2. certainly had unusual biological and pathological characteristics using a novel technology mRNA that we were able to have an enormously successful vaccine and safe vaccine. He had everything to do with that. That vaccine's probably saved three million American lives. That's RF that's that's uh uh uh Tony Fouchy and thank you. We're lucky to have someone like Tony Fouchy.
What has RFK Jr. done during this whole pandemic? I mean, he's just basically said that COVID 19 vaccines were quote the most dangerous vaccines ever made. He said that African-American people specifically um do worse with the with this vaccine and that that there's been when Hank Garren died that it was one of a range of specific and unusual wave of of deaths among elderly African-Americans caused by the vaccine. So all he's done is put out disinformation about vaccines where whereas on the other hand you have someone like Tony Fouchy who's who's frankly saved American lives. These two men are in no way comparable.
Why does RFK Jr. call Tony Fouchy such a horrible person? Does he does he give any evidence for that in the book?
No. No. No real evidence. I think people I think what what Dr. Fouchy did was um leaned into a libertarian left hook. the fact that he was was saying look we all should wear masks um was you know pushed back by the American public when he was saying we should have vaccine mandates that was pushed back by the American public. Um and so uh he was he was though he was viewed by some in the public as telling us what to do when we as Americans never like to be told what to do.
Unfortunately public health works best when you're told what to do. Isn't that right?
Absolutely. I mean, if you look, for example, at these sort of measles outbreaks that occurred in the in the mid 1970s, it wasn't until they enforced school vaccine mandates that those outbreaks went away, right? You have to care about your neighbor and we're not very good about that.
So, speaking of measles, you you write about a story in Samoa, and I think that would be a good story to tell us.
It's an amazing story. So, in July of 2018, there were two 12-month-old infants that were inoculated with a measles mubella vaccine. Both of whom died within minutes of getting that vaccine. And RFK Jr. and his organization, Children's Health Defense, was all over that story. They had this on Facebook pages. They just trumpeted the notion that measles containing vaccine was killing children in Samoa.
Now, very quickly it was figured out what the problem was because why would someone suddenly die after getting a measles vaccine. So, so one possibility is it has something to do with the live attenuated viruses themselves, but that's far too quick for any virus to have an effect in minutes. I mean, viruses like these can reproduce themselves. They can cause a mild rash or low-grade fever a couple weeks later, but they're not going to kill you in a minute or two. The second possibility was that it was a an anaphylactic reaction, meaning an an immediate type one hypersensitivity reaction. Um, and certainly anaphilaxis can occur with vaccines. Um, it's rare, maybe one to two cases per million, but it it's real. And when it occurs, it actually occurs primarily with a hydraized bo or porine gelatin that's in vaccines, um, some vaccines. Um, and it actually is in MMR2, which is the, uh, measles containing vaccine made by Merc. Um, but that's not the vaccine these kids got. I mean, Samoa didn't use Merk's MMR vaccine. They used a vaccine called Prior Ricks, which is JSK's vaccine, which doesn't contain gelatin. So, all the more reason that that wouldn't be true. Plus, anaphilaxis doesn't just immediately kill you in a minute or two. Usually, it takes five minutes, you develop hives, you develop low blood pressure, shortness of breath, you don't just stop breathing and die.
So if you look at the way that this was carried in the media um in in Samoa, scientists and clinicians immediately weighed in and said this was the dilluent because it when it when the Samoan vaccine comes as a powder it then you you re you reconstitute it with a dilluent made from water and then you inject it. Um and and immediately you can see the the newspaper articles there were scientists said there there was a dilluent problem. Something happened with the dilluent that wasn't the dilluent it was supposed to be.
And that's right. So what it ended up being was that the two nurses actually instead of using water as a dilluent used a lethal dose do dose of a muscle re relaxant and they knew it. I mean one of the nurses came back that night and retrieved that vial from the garbage and brought it home with her because she knew that she had made a mistake and awful.
It's awful. It is. Mistakes like this do happen. Um when it was discovered these two nurses were actually jailed for 5 years which I think frankly was far too harsh for this kind of thing. I mean, it wasn't willfully done but in any case very quickly it was known that this was a dilluent problem and had nothing to do with the vaccine. Nonetheless knowing that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continued to beat the drum that the measles vaccine was killing children in Samoa.
So this was July 2018. In June 2019 he goes to Samoa. He meets with an antivaccine activist named Taylor Winterstein with whom he takes a picture. He meets with senior officials and continues to put the notion out there that measles vaccine was killing children. As a consequence, the vaccine rates dropped from the 70% range to 30% range. And between September and December of 2019, there was a massive outbreak of measles in Samoa. There were 5,700 reported cases and 83 deaths. Almost all of those deaths occurred in young children.
So the two deaths that were initially uh caused by a nursing error became 83 deaths in many ways because of RFK Jr.'s advocacy that that vaccine had actually been the problem when it was the dilluent that was the problem. Um it's it's interesting that that's a very high death rate. Normally the death rate for measles is about one in a thousand. So when you see 5,700 cases, you'd expect five to six deaths, not 83 deaths. And it makes you wonder whether one of two things is true. whether one that there were far more cases than were reported or two that that uh usually when you die from measles you die from pneumonia dehydration that they just weren't very good about providing things like supplemental oxygen or introvenous therapy to to combat the dehydration and that accounted for the higher death rate which was most amazing to me in this during that outbreak when between September and December uh RFK Jr. wrote a letter to the Samoan prime minister and said that he thought that this this outbreak was was may well be due to just a defective measles vaccine virus and that it was that defective measles vaccine virus that was causing the outbreak when obviously it was just wild type measles.
So no one was paying attention to him anymore at this point. Thousands of people were were being vaccinated. Tens of thousands were being vaccinated. And for that reason the Samoan measles outbreak ended. And when it ended RFK Jr. said it didn't end because of the the massive uh immunization program. It ended because of better nutrition and cleaner water. So, he never ever admitted how wrong he was and how culpable he was and really responsible in some ways for those infant deaths.
It's a terrible story and it shows you how disinformation can kill.
Why isn't RFK Jr. accountable for these deaths?
Well, again, I think in many ways he should I think in many ways what he should do were he a better person, he should go back to Samoa, apologize to the Samoan prime minister and visit each of the families of the 83 mostly children who died and apologize for being so horribly wrong about about his notion of what really had happened in Samoa, but he hasn't. So he has put his goals of being antiax maybe as you said before to scare people about vaccines and uh have no more mandatory vaccines. He's put those goals above the lives of these 83 kids.
Is is that a fair assessment?
Yes, that's a fair assessment. He has one goal to scare people about vaccines and and you know it's okay to be wrong. I mean, it's okay to fear initially that maybe there was a problem with the vaccine. That's okay. It's okay. But when it became very clear very early that that wasn't it, that it was the dilluent that was the problem. Back away. Say I was wrong and and any of the disinformation that you're in the midst of doing, stop because you look and see what happened. That ultimately 83 mostly children lost their lives because of what was his power. I mean, he is he's um he's a famous man. He has a famous name. Robert F. Kennedy was a a senator, attorney general, a very well-known and well-liked man. He is his son. He bears his name and that gives him a lot of power. That gives him an enormous platform. And that platform can be used to do good or do harm. And in this case, certainly it was used to do harm.
So what's the lesson from this story, Paul?
Disinformation kills. You know, we talk endlessly about freedom of speech. There are limits to freedom of speech and I think this is one of them. I mean, the old line from the Supreme Court was you shouldn't be able to shout fire in a crowded movie theater. Well, that's certainly true here. If if the reason that those Samoan children died was because you had a health system that didn't serve children well, meaning wasn't very good about providing say supplemental oxygen or giving introvenous fluids, and it's especially true there that we need to have a high vaccine rate to prevent these these kinds of diseases from occurring because they're less able to take care of them. And so it's a fragile population and it was not in any sense treated that way and thus those children were put at risk and lost their lives. So I think the lesson is is I I don't like this freedom of speech argument when people say look I mean I'm free to say whatever I want. Okay, this is what happens when you say whatever you want. So maybe there should be limits that you shouldn't be able to have a disinformation campaign. Each of those 83 kids was someone's child. And so think of it that way. If it's your child and you've lost your child, it hurts. And it hurts because of someone's misinformation, especially when it's preventable. I mean, there's so much in medicine that we don't know. There's so much that we can't do. This we know. Specific viruses cause specific diseases and vaccines can prevent those diseases. That makes it all the more tragic when it's preventable.
You can find Paul Offett at beyond the noise on Substack. We'll put a link in the show notes. That's Beyond the Noise with Dr. Paul Offett. Thank you, Paul.
Thank you.
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