[insane_dreamer]

> he's repeatedly amplified nonscientific views about vaccine safety. For example, as recently as 2023, "Autism comes from vaccines".

I've heard this said in the NYT and elsewhere, but have yet to read any actual quotes of his __in context__.

> RFK Jr is doing is sowing doubt in established science.

the first rule of science is that it is never "established". This is especially true in health sciences, where thing that we were pretty sure were one way turn out not to be that way, or are much more nuanced than we thought. So challenging established thought is what scientists should be doing.

Now if RFK is a public health official then that is probably counter-productive and not really the place to be doing that. But he hasn't been a public health official to my knowledge so far.

I don't know that much about RFK but one thing I do like about him is that he's speaking out against the unhealthy processed food industry, which I don't hear hardly anyone else doing. (Lots of people say "eat healthy" but there's not that many people saying "these large multinationals are feeding you garbage for profit".

[dekhn]

He said it on Fox. You can go view the video here: https://www.foxnews.com/video/6330950198112

When you say that science is never "Established", that's horse pockey. Established means we have a high level of confidence (not absolute). Yes, things get updated, for example we now don't go around saying that "stress causes ulcers". And when it comes to vaccines, multiple high quality studies have failed to find a relationship between vaccines and autism, while the original work has been discredited (shown to be false) and retracted. Yet the news cycle about that caused large numbers of people in the US to not get their kids vaccinated for many different things (and also blame the vaccines for their children's autism). (to be realistic, vaccines do have side effects and there is an entire program detected to detecting those problems).

As for whether he's been a public health official: no, but he has worked on environmental and public health problems before (I don't recall if this is before or after he ate so much fish he got mercury poisoning).

I don't think many people are complaining about him speaking against processed food, but again, the policy he promotes should be thoughtful, not knee-jerk.

[aphantastic]

He’ll head the Department of Health and Human Services soon, little use debating what his position is here when we will see it play out soon.

I do recommend you read his book, https://lfpl.overdrive.com/media/6093658, it seems you are of the misconception that a paper being retracted is a statement that it is false. In reality, it’s a statement that state officials (sponsored by big pharma) have threatened the livelihood of the author and/or publisher. It’s extortion, not science.

[dekhn]

I'm sorry but I refuse to argue with people on the internet who think retractions are because the state threatened an author.

Further, I'm not going to read RFK's book. I place it in the same category as 9/11 Truthers- not even worthy of inspection.

[aphantastic]

Ah. Well that tells me all I need to know about your intellectual honesty.