In reviewing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, my first four posts dealt with the Introduction. Those first four entries can be found: Entry #1, here. Entry #2, here. Entry #3, here, and Entry #4, here. The first entry critiquing Chapter One is here. The third entry is here. This is the second entry.
Anthony Fauci recently came out with a biography. I've not read it. Unlike Kennedy's book, I bet it has page numbers. Reading it might be helpful to provide perspective to some of what Kennedy is claiming. Kennedy doesn't often help decipher what he is saying: his statements often do not have footnotes that can lead me to his sources.
Continuing Chapter One.
I've found that when Kennedy does present footnotes they often go directly to a conspiracy-mongering source and do not go to where the quote or data originally came from--if it came from anywhere beyond the conspiracy theorist. If this is to be the standard, Kennedy could easily be cited for his whoppers as though they had any connection to reality.
I found this next assertion particularly egregious because it represents all of Kennedy's slapdash, hateful, and poorly sourced material. "Dr. Fauci dreamily recounted his own grade school measles and mumps vaccines—an unlikely memory since those vaccines weren't available until 1963 and 1967 [respectively], and Dr. Fauci attended grade school in the 1940s." (Fauci was born in December 1940.)
#1. The first mumps vaccine came out in 1948, it was the live-attenuated mumps vaccine that came out in 1967. Kennedy does not know vaccines.
#2. The measles vaccine did first come out in 1963. However, I couldn't find where Fauci claimed he got a measles vaccine as a grade school student. In contrast, he does say he got the measles as a child and wished there was a vaccine.
#3. What is the source that Kennedy cites for Fauci's dreamy reminiscence? Disclose TV on Twitter. The post is no longer up. From Wikipedia: "Disclose.tv is a disinformation outlet based in Germany that presents itself as a news aggregator. It is known for promoting conspiracy theories and fake news. . . . [it] platforms hate speech, including Holocaust denial and neo-Nazism, on its message groups." When Kennedy quotes reasonable sources, the information disagrees with his assertions. Perhaps that's why he has to rely on Neo-Nazi sources.
Another statement says, "[Fauci] supported jabs for previously-infected Americans, defying overwhelming scientific evidence that post-COVID infections were both unnecessary and dangerous. Under questioning on September 9, 2021, Dr. Fauci conceded he could cite no scientific justification for this policy." Sounds damning. The source given? Tucker Carlson's The Daily Caller. A hack opinion piece. As this article in the magazine, Science, declares in its title, "Almost everything Tucker Carlson said about Anthony Fauci was misleading or false."
Kennedy returns to frothing at the mouth (he never really leaves). "The shockingly low quality of virtually all relevant data pertinent to COVID-19, and the quackery, obfuscation, the cherry-picking, and blatant perversion would have scandalized, offended, and humiliated every prior generation of American public health officials." (Maybe Kennedy chose not to include page numbers to make his own quotes difficult to source. I've started writing page numbers on the bottom of the pages. This would be page 4 of Chapter One.)
I have presented enough evidence of Kennedy outright lying, mischaracterizing, and inventing to say that he is the quack, he cherry-picks data, and blatantly perverts the truth. If this is the quality of research he put into his anti-vaccine books, vaccines must be panaceas.
Also page 4, Kennedy says, "At the onset of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci used wildly inaccurate modeling that overestimated US death by 525 percent." Okay, this can be connected to a footnote, "How one model simulated 2.2 million deaths from COVID-19" and a second article saying that 352,000 deaths in 2020 made that number into an overestimate of 525%.
COVID didn't stop killing in 2020, nor at the time Kennedy wrote his book. The US death total climbed to 1.2 million. In the worst case scenario, for example, if the US had Peru's death rate, that death rate would have left 2.2 million dead (this number is a coincidence, the "one model" cited above didn't have the hindsight of what did happen when the infection was left unchecked).
In general Kennedy seems to regularly think that the world stopped at the time he turned in his book (October 2021). His claims that the middle class was driven to virtual extinction in the United States or Black-owned businesses went permanently bankrupt were not supported by data that later came out (and really not supported by the data of the moment or in his citations). He didn't seem to think that the world would go on and a lot more research would address the questions he posed.
Kennedy makes passing potshots using arguments about "herd immunity" numbers and counting who died from COVID. These are important issues and if this was my full time job I would address them here. If Kennedy does bring them about in detail, I'll make a more detailed discussion.
Kennedy makes the assertion that the CDC stated that "only 6 percent of COVID deaths occurred in entirely health individuals. The remaining 94% suffered from an average of 3.8 potentially fatal morbidities." A citation leads to a number of statistics from the CDC including a relevant table. The table has been updated through 2023 but has basically the same numbers cited by Kennedy. It says over 5% of deaths listed no comorbidity on the death certificate with 4.0 average comorbidities.
First of all, COVID killed by a mechanism, not just the presence of COVID. Those with only COVID on the death certificates were the small percentage of those forms filled by those who were lazy. The comorbidities cited? Respiratory failure. Heart failure. Septicemia (infection in the blood). These were not persons walking around with septicemia or with their hearts not beating before they contracted COVID. People who were entirely healthy did not die of COVID. COVID made them sick and their breathing and hearts stopped.
Kennedy states that many of the tests for COVID may have overstated the results because, quoting Fauci, they amplify "dead nucleotides." Nucleotides are a chemical and are never living. He cites another conspiracy-embracing news site as a source for this comment.
Tucker Carlson, misinformation sites, John Solomon are not primary sources. If they say something that is correct--and they do on occasion--they would have primary sources. Kennedy states that viral injury surveillance system may underestimate injuries by 99%. He provides no citation, not even the meaningless ones he reflexively goes to.
Here's a fun one. Kennedy likes to talk about 9/11 conspiracy theories and brings that up here (although he does not blame Fauci for 9/11). "Public surveys showed that, just as Fox News audiences were shockingly misinformed following the 9/11 bombings, CNN viewers and New York Times readers were catastrophically misinformed about the facts of COVID-19 during 2020. Successive Gallup polling showed that the average Democrat believed 50% of COVID infections resulted in hospitalization." (Page 5 of Kennedy's book.)
Problems with his statement.
#1. There is nothing in the Gallup poll about CNN viewing and New York Times reading.
#2. There is no way to read the poll and come to the conclusion that the average Democrat responder said 50% of those with COVID were hospitalized. The poll was divided in two parts: risks for those vaccinated and risk for those not vaccinated. (Over half the U.S. population was vaccinated at the time.) The poll said 54% of Democrats believed that the risk of being hospitalized with vaccination was 1% or less while a mere 2% of Democrats believed it 50% or higher. In contrast, 7% of Republicans said the hospitalization rate was 50% or higher with vaccination. (chart below) The numbers did change for perceptions of risk for those non-vaccinated. In this case, 53% of Democrats said 30% or higher.
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| The Gallup poll cited in Kennedy's Endnotes. This is for vaccinated population. |
#3. In a CDC article (the same as linked above) it says that 748,363 (65%) of U.S. COVID deaths took place at a "healthcare setting, inpatient," for example, hospital. Others took place at a "nursing home/long term care facility (15%), or "Home (10%)," and further listed places. Not going to a hospital did not make COVID less serious.
#4. The Gallup poll he cites lauds Democrats for understanding vaccine efficacy. "Democrats provide much higher and more accurate vaccine efficacy estimates than Republicans (88% vs. 50%), and unvaccinated Republicans have a median vaccine efficacy of 0%, compared with 73% for vaccinated Republicans." In other words, those Republicans who weren't getting vaccinated believed the vaccines had a 0% efficacy.
#5. The same Gallup poll in their Appendix, estimated the hospitalization rate of those not vaccinated to be 89 times higher than those vaccinated. "Using these adjusted figures, we calculate that the hospitalization rate for the vaccinated population is 0.01% (or 1 in 10,914), and the rate for unvaccinated adults is 0.89% (or 1 case in 112 people)."
#6. The poll provided an interesting graph of vaccination rates among those who identified as Democrats, Republican and Independents.
An update: (12/1/24). I decided to run some numbers to see what percentage of COVID-19 patients were in the hospital at the time this poll came out. Cumulatively, for the two weeks leading up to September 7, 2021, there were 2.24 million new cases of COVID in the United States. Over those same two weeks, there were 170,117 hospital admissions for COVID, approximately 7.6%. (Sources 1, 2) Source 1, use the chart for new cases in the past two weeks and select a date. For source 2, select the line for hospitalizations over the past week for September 7 (83,639) and then for August 31 (86,478).
We are into page 5 of Chapter One. I don't know how long I can keep this up. Clearly Kennedy didn't care about checking his material. To be continued.
Martin Hill Ortiz is the author of several novels including most recently the thriller, Floor 24.
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| Floor 24 Oliver-Heber Books |
"From the mob underworld to the tops of new skyscrapers, Floor 24 is a heart-thumping New York 1920's historical mystery!" - Holly Newman, bestselling author of A Chance Inquiry mystery series.
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