1/ I watched Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Joe Rogan yesterday and it gave me an opportunity to look into some of the "old-school" antivax claims.
First Joe Rogan let's us know that he used to think RFK Jr. was "kinda loony", but now he's a true believer in RFK's antivax claims.
2/ Before getting into vaccine stuff, did you know RFK Jr. also believes that cell phones and WiFi give you cancer, damage your mitochondria and give you "leaky brain?" That's the kind of guy we are dealing with.
3/ Joe is initially skeptical but does a rigorous fact-checking by having Jamie pull up a website by a crackpot org (that works with RFK Jr.) "Environmental Health Trust" which repeats the same claims.
Joe is convinced. "We gotta get rid of WiFi!"
4/ RFK Jr's claims are a bit different from the covid conspiracy content that I usually watch because at least John Campbell, Bret Weinstein, etc. are churning out fresh bullshit every week. RFK's "thimerosal in vaccines causes autism" theory has been debunked for decades.
5/ But here it is anyways, I guess. His central conspiracy theory is that the CDC commissioned a study by Verstraeten which found that the thimerosal in vaccines causes autism...
6/ and then nefariously conspired at a conference called Simpsonwood to cover it up. And they would have gotten away with it too, if RFK Jr. hadn't exposed them by publishing the transcript of the meeting!
In summary
a) No, the Verstaeten study doesn't show that
b) RFK's evidence for the grand conspiracy at Simpsonwood is one out of context quote.
8/ The general theme with all of RFK Jr.'s scientific claims are
a) He takes correlations in observational studies (especially pre-controlling for confounders) to be conclusive evidence of causation
b) He ignores studies that shows he is wrong or claims they are fraudulent
9/ If you actually look up the studies he mentions, it's trivial to find how he absurdly misrepresents them. E.g. he claims that a Burbacher study shows thimerosal only appears to be processed out of your bloodstream because it's accumulating in your brain!
14/ He claims a DTP vaccine is extremely deadly based on one cherry-picked correlational study. Here is a full discussion of this claim: skepticalraptor.com/skepticalrapto…
15) He thinks AZT (the first antiretroviral for HIV) was highly lethal and just pushed by big pharma for profit.
No, AZT monotherapy was highly suboptimal and early dose levels were too high, but it was still better than nothing. aidstruth.org/myths/#m8
16/ Eventually we get into covid and covid vaccine conspiracies. They are all perfectly familiar. E.g. "Ivermectin was suppressed so the vaccines could get Emergency Use Authorization!"
17/ I love this theory because it's so iconically convoluted. The FDA organized a conspiracy of hundreds of scientists to run fake, intentionally underpowered clinical trials in order to satisfy a misreading of the requirements for EUA. More here: apnews.com/article/fact-c…
18/ He enjoys playing bizarre word games, like insisting vaccines are the only drug that don't have to be safety tested before approval. It's trivially false and everybody knows it; vaccines are extensively tested for safety in clinical trials.
19/ If pressed on it, he would probably move the goalposts to insist that all of the post-marketing surveillance done to detect rare adverse vaccine effects should be done before approval, which is impossible.
20/ He favors the popular "make ridiculous extrapolations about all-cause mortality from the initial clinical trials" approach. I've posted about this many times before. The initial clinical trials were powered to detect efficacy against infection.
21/ Tea-leaf reading the statistically insignificant variation in all-cause deaths in those studies is meaningless. Post-marketing surveillance (VSD) and all large-scale studies find significant covid and all-cause mortality reductions due to the vaccine.
22/ For fun, here's one nonsensical claim he makes about how "they" (who?) claim 100% vaccine efficacy (they do?) because "2 is 100% of 1."
Anyone have any clue who made the claim he is supposedly refuting here? I think this man is very confused.
23/ Another bizarre claim, that some of the evil scientists purposely overdosing patients with Hydroxychloroquine to kill them to make it seem like HCQ doesn't work have been "charged with homicide"
Anyone know who he's referring to?
end/ Anyway, I think we're going to be hearing a lot from this guy in the next couple years so I thought it would be worthwhile to familiarize myself with some of his greatest hits.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Checking in with John Campbell. God he is shameless.
Feigned outrage over a Phase 1 clinical trial with 50 participants for mRNA flu vaccine.
Yah... that's how big Phase 1 clinical trials are. He very intentionally never gives the audience context for what a phase 1 trial is
lol here's John Campbell on December 19th, 2020 in a video called "excellent vaccine news" where he seems to know full well how large a Phase I clinical trial should be
How to make clips of Eric Weinstein's appearance on Joe Rogan today? 4 hours of consistent insanity, and everything he says is buried under three layers of narcissistic Weinstein lore. Well here's an attempt anyway.
1/ Eric now thinks the UFOs really are aliens
2/ Lots of talk of his theory of everything (GU) being our only hope of getting us off this planet by giving us the power to traverse extra time dimensions. So why isn't Elon consulting with him!?
3/ Eric is simply more ethical than other physicists, who doomed humanity by creating nukes and then didn't bother coming up with a theory to get us off this planet
#5: JBP explains to Andy Ngo that at the core of Antifa member's evil hearts is the drive for "revenge against God for the crime of Being." Then he starts crying.
#4: JBP took a bunch of psilocybin and saw his own DNA
#3: After his twitter account is temporarily suspended, JBP releases a missive/warning to his enemies from his villain headquarters. "Up yours, woke moralists! We'll see who cancels who."
1/ Ron DeSantis had a "Vaccine Accountability Roundtable" today where he assembled various scientists (and Bret Weinstein) who have been instrumental and generating antivax talking points throughout the pandemic. twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1…
2/ They spent a lot of discussion complaining that the pandemic response was compromised because of the degree to which they have been censored, which I find ironic considering the outsized popularity these figures enjoy compared to the quality and impact of their papers.
3/ In this thread I will go over the papers they discuss. First, Martin Kulldorff claims that the Great Barrington Declaration he authored with Jay Bhattacharya has been proven correct in retrospect.
Alongside the obvious candidates, the list includes Christine Benn who wrote one of the dumbest preprints of the pandemic which suggests that the non-mRNA vaccines have magical non-specific beneficial effects which reduce your non-covid mortality by 30%! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
This result seems to be due to an unusually high number of non-covid deaths in the control group of the J&J vaccine trial due to things like car accidents and suicide. So I guess the J&J and Astrozeneca vaccines prevent against those things.
1) Bret is coming around on the idea that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. He has realized it's not such an easy idea to dismiss.
2) Kanye has been talking about how much he loves Hitler. Bret's take is this just proves how twitter should have absolute free speech (so we know who loves hitler). I'll give you one guess what Heather's take on Kanye's antisemitism is. That's right. The problem is trans people.
3) Bret hypothesizes that the NYT is deploying bot armies to post hate speech on twitter to game the numbers so that they can write articles about how there is more hate speech on twitter.