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Transcript:
When I was a kid, people were allowed to smoke inside restaurants. Prior to the ‘80s they would just smoke anywhere, but by the time I was old enough to not be a little shit in public, you’d walk into a fancy place like Chi-Chis or Bennigans and the host would ask if you prefer the smoking or nonsmoking section. We would pick nonsmoking, so we’d sit at a table that would sometimes be a few feet away from a sign that said “smoking section,” with a table a few feet on the other side full of people blowing smoke out, which would float into the air and slowly drift past the sign and into our lungs, as smoke does. Like a “no peeing” section in a pool, there’s really no way to divide an open restaurant into “smoking” and “nonsmoking” sections.
Similarly, you cannot cleanly divide the Earth into “disease” and “no disease” sections. For instance, as I’ve mentioned previously, the United States eradicated measles in the year 2000 thanks to a commitment to vaccinating everyone. However, measles continued to show up and have little outbreaks here because people would come in from outside the country carrying it, and if they happened to interact with enough people, especially unvaccinated people, it would flare up and need to be put out with quick action from public health officials.
And in 2020 of course, COVID spread around the world very quickly, and it was only thanks to quick and decisive action that countries like New Zealand managed to make it through relatively unscathed. Public health officials warned that in order to truly end the pandemic, we’d not only need to vaccinate the vast majority of people in “developed” countries like the US, but also in countries that might not be able to afford Moderna and Pfizer’s fast-tracked MRNA vaccines. That’s why people like Peter Hotez worked to develop a vaccine that could be produced quickly and inexpensively using technology available in those countries, which absolutely saved lives but of course, the developed world stopped caring about COVID so we weren’t actually able to end the pandemic, anyway.
But my point is that diseases do not recognize borders, which is just one reason we should all be disgusted by the latest idiocy from US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.. Last week, RFK announced that he would be withdrawing the US from funding Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.
This may not shock you, but not a single thing RFK said in that video is true. No one stifled anyone’s free speech over the COVID vaccine. The COVID vaccine is absolutely safe for pregnant women, as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists pointed out in May when RFK used the same claim to stop recommending the vaccine to pregnant people:
“It is very clear that COVID-19 infection during pregnancy can be catastrophic and lead to major disability, and it can cause devastating consequences for families. The COVID-19 vaccine is safe during pregnancy, and vaccination can protect our patients and their infants after birth.
“In fact, growing evidence shows just how much vaccination during pregnancy protects the infant after birth, with the vast majority of hospitalized infants less than six months of age—those who are not yet eligible for vaccination—born to unvaccinated mothers.”
The 2017 study that found the DTP vaccine increased all-cause mortality was not a “landmark.” In fact, it was a small observational study of a few hundred children. A 2022 randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of 50,000 children found that the DTP vaccine DECREASED all-cause mortality. Yet RFK has the complete lack of self awareness to accuse Gavi of “ignoring the science” that they find “inconvenient.”
By their own estimates, Gavi has saved the lives of nearly 19 million children around the world since its founding in 2000. As Hana Kiros recently pointed out in The Atlantic, 19 countries have “graduated” from the program and are now able to fund their own vaccinations, with Indonesia moving on to become a funder of the Alliance. And according to the director of the World Health Organization, “…since 2000, the number of children who die each year before they reach the age of 5 has fallen by more than half, largely due to the power of vaccines. By Gavi’s estimates, the U.S. canceling its Biden-era pledge to provide $1.2 billion this donation cycle could lead to the deaths of more than 1 million children who otherwise would have lived.”
Let’s highlight that: RFK, Jr. is about to kill a MILLION children. A million. If you visit impactcounter.com, you can see a running total estimate of how many people have died thus far thanks to the Trump administration cutting funding to necessary programs. As of this recording, it’s at 106,140 adults and 220,745 children. Those are now rookie numbers. RFK, Jr. is about to commit mass murder. As Edward Nirenberg commented on BlueSky, “if I were HHS Secretary and my goal were to kill as many children as possible, it would be difficult to distinguish the actions I would take from those that Kennedy has taken.”
One of Gavi’s other major funders is The Gates Foundation, which pledged $1.6 billion to the alliance over the next five years. With a net worth upwards of more than $100 billion, Gates could easily cover for the US backing out. So, usually my call to action at the end of a video is asking you to call your representative or vote them out or something, but the US is no longer a democracy and most Democratic representatives no longer fight for the will of their constituents. We are now, quite officially, an oligarchy run by tech billionaires. So, if you happen to live in Venice and see Gates wandering around town during Jeff Bezos’s $50 million multi-day wedding spectacular, maybe tap him on the shoulder and ask if he’d mind sending a text to his secretary to write another check and save a million lives. You know, if he feels like it or whatever.
