{"id":215,"date":"2025-01-28T03:25:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-28T03:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/?p=215"},"modified":"2025-09-27T23:29:26","modified_gmt":"2025-09-27T23:29:26","slug":"wsj-why-rfk-jr-is-dangerous-to-public-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/?p=215","title":{"rendered":"WSJ: “Why RFK Jr. Is Dangerous to Public Health."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Entire editorial is below.<\/a> <\/span><\/h1>\n

"He\u2019s made millions from referring clients to trial lawyers, and he advocates mass tort litigation that would ruin the vaccine industry."<\/span><\/h1>\n<\/div>\n

President Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary in return for his presidential endorsement. But Senate Republicans have an obligation to scrutinize his giant closet of business conflicts and dubious ideas.<\/p>\n

Mr. Kennedy is scheduled to appear before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday. Expect him to obfuscate about his ties to trial lawyers, anti-vaccine views, and support for sundry progressive causes. While presenting himself as a truth-teller and slayer of government corruption, he\u2019s as slippery as Anthony Fauci.<\/p>\n

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***<\/h4>\n

Most troubling is his long record of anti-vaccine advocacy. In the past he has claimed that the measles vaccine causes autism despite reams of studies that have found no causative link, and that the polio vaccine might have killed many more than the actual virus. Deadly infectious diseases disappeared because of better hygiene, not vaccines, he asserts.<\/p>\n

He has tried to soften his vaccine skepticism since being nominated, and he now says he won\u2019t take away anyone\u2019s vaccines. He says he merely wants to ensure that vaccines are safe and thoroughly studied\u2014who doesn\u2019t?\u2014and that Americans have access to more information. In Mr. Kennedy\u2019s case, this means opening the industry to lawsuits by the trial bar.<\/p>\n

Mr. Kennedy\u2019s nomination disclosures show he\u2019s received millions of dollars from referring clients to Wisner Baum and Morgan & Morgan, law firms that have sued vaccine and drug makers. Wisner Baum spearheaded litigation against Merck over its Gardasil vaccine, which protects against the human papillomavirus\u2014one of the biggest risk factors for cervical cancer.<\/p>\n

Congress established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in 1986 for children\u2019s vaccines because an avalanche of litigation was driving manufacturers from the market. The program allows patients who believe they\u2019ve been harmed by vaccines to file claims with the government for compensation, which are adjudicated in special vaccine courts.<\/p>\n

Why do vaccines receive more liability protection than medicines? For one, the population of potential plaintiffs is much larger for children\u2019s vaccines than for any other medical product. Juries are especially sympathetic when it comes to children, so the payouts and potential liability are also much larger.<\/p>\n

If patients don\u2019t like the vaccine court judgment, they can still sue manufacturers in federal court. But they rarely do since the standard for proving claims is higher in federal court. But as HHS Secretary, Mr. Kennedy could take action to assist his trial-lawyer pals.<\/p>\n

The HHS Secretary can add or remove vaccines from the compensation program, as well as specify injuries eligible for compensation. Removing vaccines from the program would open up manufacturers to mass torts based on weak evidence, including animal studies and scattered human cases that purport to link injuries to the shots.<\/p>\n

Profit margins on vaccines are typically thin, especially for those off-patent. Companies facing enormous legal expenses and potential damages might stop making vaccines, which is what happened in the 1980s.<\/p>\n

Making more injuries eligible for compensation despite lack of causative evidence\u2014e.g., autism for measles\u2014would also invite more claims. This could bankrupt the program, which is funded by an excise tax on vaccines. That means Congress would have to increase the excise tax, which is paid by consumers, or backfill the compensation fund.<\/p>\n

Another danger is that Mr. Kennedy could turn over vaccine proprietary data in Food and Drug Administration filings to trial lawyers posing as vaccine safety advocates. Lawyers could use this information to claim that vaccine makers concealed evidence of side effects\u2014as plaintiffs do in the Gardasil lawsuits\u2014even if the FDA concluded they weren\u2019t caused by the vaccine.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that some rare vaccine side effects come to light after approval. The FDA recently added Guillain-Barr\u00e9 Syndrome as a potential side effect of RSV vaccines\u2014with an increased incidence of roughly 1 in 130,000. The Trump HHS could build a better system, perhaps with private health groups like the Mayo Clinic, to monitor potential safety risks.<\/p>\n

But Mr. Kennedy\u2019s intimation that vaccines haven\u2019t been thoroughly studied and that the FDA is concealing safety information to protect manufacturers is false. Developers would have to enroll millions of patients in trials to identify very rare side effects, which would be impossible. The FDA recently halted enrollment in several infant RSV trials after Moderna<\/a><\/span> found that babies who received its experimental jab became sicker than those with the placebo. This shows safety monitoring is working.<\/p>\n

***<\/h4>\n

The risk is high that Mr. Kennedy will use his power and pulpit at HHS to enrich his trial-lawyer friends at the expense of public health and medical innovation. It\u2019s telling that Mr. Kennedy hasn\u2019t agreed to stop taking payments from these allies in the Gardasil lawsuit. Senators would be wise to believe RFK Jr.\u2019s career of spreading falsehoods rather than his confirmation conversions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Entire editorial is below. "He\u2019s made millions from referring clients to trial lawyers, and he advocates mass tort litigation that would ruin the vaccine industry." President Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary in return for his presidential endorsement. But Senate Republicans have an obligation to scrutinize his giant closet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=215"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7035,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions\/7035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}