Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and His Attack on Science, Part Three

 

 This is my third entry into a critique of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. The first entry can be found here and the second entry can be found here. A summary of the first three entries can be found here. 

Superspreader Events

 At the end of my last entry, I detailed the rise in COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths after the 2020 Sturgis, South Dakota Harley-Davidson rally. Those increases took place in South Dakota and neighboring states. I made the case that such events, contrary to Fauci's guidance, were what caused the disastrously bad numbers of COVID deaths in the United States when compared to countries that did adhere to Fauci's advice. In a later installment, I will detail how individual states not adhering to Fauci's advice experienced worse outcomes.

Another superspreader event was the June 20, 2020 campaign rally by Donald Trump in Oklahoma. While the motorcycle rally was in the hundreds of thousands of individuals, the Trump rally was much smaller, so it is likely there will be a smaller effect. 

Before I do go to the data, let me make a pair of predictions. Hypotheses: beginning, let's say three weeks after the rally, the state numbers in Oklahoma, and in the neighboring states of Kansas, Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri, COVID infections will bump up to a greater degree than the national numbers. Starting about six weeks later, the COVID deaths in these states will increase to a greater degree than the national numbers. 

Let's look at the numbers. They took about an hour to gather, summarize, and calculate. If only Kennedy cared to spend the time. (Numbers are from worldometers (a source cited in Kennedy's book: they have an easy way of choosing specific geographic locations and linking cumulative data to a specific date.)

Number of cases reported. (Percent increase compared to June 20, the day of the rally)

	Cases, June 20	Cases, July 11	Cases Aug. 1
Oklahoma	10058	19837  (97.4%)	36607  (264%)
Kansas	14150	22598  (59.7%)	30739  (117%)
Arkansas	15519	28563  (84.1%)	43577  (181%)
Texas	131321	303984  (131%)	515287  (292%)
United States	2382139	3464328  (45.4%)	4915770 (106%)

 

Number of deaths reported. (Percent increase compared to June 20)

	Deaths, June 20	Deaths, August 1	Deaths, August 31
Oklahoma	446	732  (64.1%)	1121  (151%)
Kansas	260	361  (38.8%)	457  (75.8%)
Arkansas	246	522  (122%)	994  (304%)
Texas	2687	8069  (200%)	14394  (436%)
United States	125167	161458  (29.0%)	195962  (56.5%)

 

(Note: not all states reported on the same days. For example, some did not report on Saturday. Sometimes I used data from the proximal day.)

 

While Kansas did moderately worse than the US as a whole in its statistics over the above time period, all the other states did dramatically worse. I am not suggesting that all the increases in Oklahoma and its neighboring states were due to the Oklahoma Trump rally, but a marked increase did occur.

 

The June 20 Oklahoma rally represented Trump's first rally since the COVID lockdowns began. He went on to hold over 60 more rallies before election day. [as listed in Wikipedia]  Certainly these events were not according to Fauci's counsel. 

The Drop in Life Expectancy

Returning to Kennedy's arguments, he notes the drop in life expectancy in the United States subsequent to the COVID pandemic. 

"Anthony Fauci seems to have not considered that his unprecedented quarantine of the healthy would kill far more people than COVID. . . We have no way of knowing how many people died from isolation, unemployment, deferred medical care, depression, mental illness, obesity, stress, overdoses, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, and the accidents that so often accompany despair." (That last sentence is painful to type. He has no sense of hierarchy, cause of death, repetition of concepts, etc.) He goes on to discuss the drop in life expectancy in the US and UK and among Hispanic and Black Americans.

Kennedy declares, "This dramatic culling was unique to America." No, it wasn't. And the claim that it was negates Kennedy's arguments that Fauci's policies had lethal effects worldwide. While unacceptably high, the United States did not nearly have the highest rate of COVID deaths. Those that had higher death rates also had multiyear loss in life expectancy: Peru experienced a decline in life expectancy of 3.8 years between 2019 and 2021, Brazil, 2.6 years, Hungary 2.2. 

Kennedy goes on with the quote: "I naively thought the pandemic would not make a big difference in the [age of survival between US and other countries] gap because my thinking was that it's a global pandemic, so every country is going to take a hit," said Steven Woolf, Director Emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. "What I didn't anticipate was how badly the US would handle the pandemic. These are numbers we aren't at all used to seeing in this research; 0.1 years is something that normally gets attention in the field, so 3.9 years and 3.25 years and even 1.4 years is just horrible. We haven't had a decrease of that magnitude since World War II."

It is strange for Kennedy to quote Dr. Steven Woolf as someone who supports his contentions. Woolf has vocally denounced characterizations that say the COVID response and not COVID caused additional deaths. 

Steven Woolf wrote: "Conspiracy theorists—citing dubious evidence—claimed the gap reflected deliberate underreporting of deaths to downplay COVID-19 or the alleged dangers of lockdowns, vaccines, or masks." Steven H. Woolf. Policies Have Consequences: Measuring Excess Deaths During the COVID-19 

And Woolf is quoted here: 

"I don't disagree with the fact that the pandemic has been responsible for an enormous number of excess deaths in the US and that adults age 25-44 were deeply affected. But it's ridiculous to attribute this catastrophe to vaccine mandates and boosters." 

Can Kennedy find anyone to quote who doesn't undermine his theories? Yes, he can. Alex Gutentag.

Cost of Quarantines — Death

Kennedy's next section of the Introduction is titled Cost of Quarantines — Death. Here we get to some pretty serious stuff. 

Kennedy quotes Alex Gutentag as writing, "Globally, the impact of lockdowns on health programs, food production, and supply chains plunged millions of people into severe hunger and malnutrition."

Kennedy usually lists the qualifications of those he cites (see Steven Woolf, Director Emeritus, etc., above). So, that means by not mentioning Gutentag's qualifications, Kennedy is hiding something. Kennedy didn't note that Alex Gutentag teaches middle school to special school kids in Oakland, California. Good for him. He is a conservative commentator and anti-trans advocate, things you can do without qualifications. 

I should note here that at the end of the Introduction there is a list of sources cited. These sources are not numbered as footnotes usually are. Each entry is preceded by <?> suggesting that someone intended to provide footnote numbers but never got around to it: which would have been helpful to find the source of the quotations. I've never seen a book so crappily presented. (Later chapters have footnotes with numbers at the end of the chapter, but no numbers to connect them to in the text. I guess the footnotes are numbered to prove he can count.)

To his credit, Kennedy doesn't just rely on an unqualified author in an online magazine, he goes on to support the man's assertions. "According to the Associated Press (AP), during 2020, 10,000 children died each month due to virus-linked hunger from global lockdowns." Now I know where those who accuse me of supporting tens of thousands of child deaths get their numbers from. (Kennedy's assertions, not those of the AP article, as I will show you.)

The AP article does not say that the deaths were due to global lockdown. It does agree with that assertion in part, saying that "the coronavirus and restrictions are pushing already hungry communities over the edge." (italicization mine) In this statement and those that follow, Kennedy makes no efforts to separate the effects of COVID from imposed restrictions. 

 

The fuller quote from the article, "All around the world, the coronavirus and its restrictions are pushing already hungry communities over the edge, cutting off meager farms from markets and isolating villages from food and medical aid. Virus-linked hunger is leading to the deaths of 10,000 more children a month over the first year of the pandemic . . ."

Okay, I would like to understand this better, so I examined the source. The article is written on July 27, 2020. There was no "first year of the pandemic." It is written from the country of Burkina Faso. The accompanying picture of a starving child is dated November 2019. That country had it first COVID case in March 2020, and 56 deaths due to COVID through September. They also had war lords disrupting their food supplies for five years. What is meant by virus-linked hunger? Is that because the food chain supplies have been broken by people being infected by the virus or, as Kennedy suggests, due to the response to COVID? Kennedy doesn't provide anything to help sort that out. Burkina Faso's life expectancy in 2019 was 60.04 years. In 2022, it was 59.77. There was no massive drop. Kennedy suggests the country did follow Fauci's guidelines and that was why they suffered. They seemed to have fared well.

Among all countries, Peru was the worst hit by COVID. This was due in part to political chaos: Peru had four presidents during the course of 2020. Burkina Faso, with its warlords and internal fighting suffered in a similar way and yet they didn't have so many consequences.

Kennedy states, "In 2020, disruptions to health and nutrition services killed 228,000 children in South Asia." This matches up with a March 17, 2021 BBC news report that says "The disruption in healthcare services caused by Covid-19 may have led to an estimated 239,000 maternal and child deaths in South Asia." The article clearly states that it is COVID doing the disruption, not the response to COVID.

Kennedy talks of serious matters such as increased rates of "child abuse, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, obesity, mental illness . . . Suicide among children by 50 percent" among other terrible consequences. Again, he doesn't sort out COVID from the response to COVID. Having a grandparent (among others) die due to COVID could certainly add to depression. It was a terrible time. Personally, I would have described the COVID response as a far second to COVID itself in terms of stress.

There are two things implicit to all Kennedy's assertions. The notions that the response was too drastic and that lockdowns and other the responses were universally applied. Without supporting his argument, he says the response was the problem. He glosses over COVID itself as being a killer. Again and again he blames Fauci for the worldwide response and then provides evidence that the world did much better than the US.

Next up: Economic Destruction and Shifting Wealth Upward

This is a brief section. "Dr. Fauci served as ringmaster in the engineered demolition of America's economy." This hasn't aged well. Employment has come back, the GDP has rebounded, even the post-COVID inflation is down to reasonable levels. Kennedy says the business closures contributed to a run-up in the national deficit — "the interest payments alone will cost almost $1 trillion annually." The 2020 budget, which Fauci was hardly responsible for, ran a $3.2 trillion dollar deficit, primarily due to a Keynesian stimulus being injected into the economy. We do not have a 30% interest rate. The $1 trillion dollar a year interest payment is based on 80-plus years of accumulated debt.  

Kennedy goes on to say, "His lockdown shattered the nation's once-booming economic engine putting 58 million Americans out of work, and permanently bankrupting small businesses, including 41 percent of Black-owned business, some of which took generations to build. The Endnotes references don't give a citation for this, although it wasn't hard to find a source. 

Counter to that assertion, small businesses did not permanently close. Small businesses are counted in two ways. Total small businesses including single person businesses and those with at least one employee. Both means of counting had increased numbers from 2019-21. 

Total small businesses: 2019: 27.1 million; 2020: 27.2 million; 2021: 28.5 million. 

Those with at least one employee: 2019: 6.08 million; 2020: 6.12 million; 2021: 6.27 million.

As for Black-owned businesses, Kennedy didn't cite the article but the following made the news. "The report estimates that 41% of Black-owned businesses across the country shut down between February and April . . ." CNN, others. This is not permanent bankruptcy. Furthermore, the lockdowns didn't start until mid-March. "The first statewide order in the United States that restricted mobility to reduce the transmission of coronavirus was issued by California's governor on March 19, 2020 and it required all residents to remain at home except when engaging in essential activities ... the number of states with statewide stay-at-home orders increased from 9 on March 23 to 21 on March 26 to 30 on March 30, and 41 on April 3." From: Statewide COVID-19 Stay-at-Home Orders and Population Mobility in the United States, Grant D Jacobsen, Kathryn H Jacobsen. 

So, did 41% of black-owned businesses go bankrupt even as "lockdown" orders were still rolling out? Of course not. A study from the prestigious Pew Research says there were 134600 black-owned businesses in 2019, 141900 in 2020, and 161000 in 2021.

Kennedy says the COVID deficit will likely bankrupt the social safety net. The safety net has certainly survived so far. There are those who would like to gut it.

His next section is titled: Enriching the Wealthy.

It begins, "Dr. Fauci's business closures pulverized America's middle class and engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history."

I am reluctant to criticize this. On the one hand, instinctively I would guess there was a cash grab during COVID. On the other hand, just about everything Kennedy has said so far is a lie.

As songwriter Leonard Cohen wrote: "The poor stay poor, the rich get rich, That's how it goes. Everybody knows." Certainly this is Fauci's fault.

Beyond invective, Kennedy says an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line. Let's look at the numbers in poverty, US, 2019 to 2022. 2019: 39.5 million. 2020 38.4 million. 2021, 41.4 million. 2022 (most recent year available) 41.0 million. There was a temporary bump of nearly 2 million.

Beyond these figures, Kennedy says that online meeting application usage zoomed (including Zoom) and these enriched their owners. Other big businesses certainly suffered. The cruising industry and tourism in general.

Kennedy goes on to repeat himself, as he often does, ". . . the demolition of our economy, the obliteration of a million small businesses, the collapsing of the middle class, the evisceration of our Bill of Rights, the tidal wave of surveillance capitalism . . ." (Note: I hate surveillance capitalism.) 

I haven't noticed the collapse of the middle class. The Pew Research Center measures the percent middle class. 2019, 51%, 2021, 50%, 2023, 51%. (I couldn't find numbers for 2020 and 2022, perhaps they do this each two years.)

As to what percent Americans identify as middle class or upper middle class, this is not measured every year, but in 2019 it was 52%. In 2022, it was 52%. In 2024, it was 54%. (Being an opinion, it is sampled by Gallup Polls.)

The next section is Failing Upward.

Here, there are fewer statistics (Kennedy does badly whenever he cites statistics) and more tirade. "The 'J. Edgar Hoover of public health' has presided over cataclysmic declines in public health, including an exploding chronic disease epidemic that has made the 'Fauci generation'---children born after his elevation to NIAID kingpin in 1984 ---the sickest generation in American history and has made Americans among the least healthy citizens on the planet." He goes on to say that America spends more than any other country on health care and does the worst among developed nations by the way of results. By many metrics, that is true. As for Fauci being a kingpin that is just Kennedy's ongoing delusion.

Kennedy focuses in part on autoimmune diseases. He says, "Some 80 autoimmune diseases, including juvenile diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, Graves' disease and Crohn's disease, which were practically unknown prior to 1984, suddenly became epidemic under his watch." That sentence makes me want to scream. Juvenile diabetes practically unknown prior to 1984?  Rheumatoid arthritis? Graves' and Crohn's disease? On what planet does someone have to live on to think these were "practically unknown" prior to 1984? I imagine every physician on earth would drop their jaw at that statement.

Let's look at juvenile diabetes. The journal Diabetes has a fine article summarizing various studies that have looked at the prevalence of juvenile diabetes (also called type 1 diabetes) throughout the world. A major U.S. survey in 1935-36 found the prevalence "for the age-group under 15 years was 0.35/1,000 for boys and 0.41/1,000 for girls. In contrast, National Health Interview Surveys undertaken later in the century gave prevalence figures of 1.30 and 1.60/1,000 under age 16 years for 1973 and 1976." The paper cited a study that concluded "a sharp upturn in the incidence of insulin-dependent diabetes had occurred in the U.S. around the mid-century." The Rise of Childhood Type 1 Diabetes in the 20th Century. Edwin A.M. Gale

The abovementioned paper included the above graph of increases in diabetes among children under 10 in Norway per 100,000, which the authors describe as the best surveyed nation. A sharp increase that began in the mid-1950s slowed down toward the end of the century. 

So, what about more recent years? While the authors of this study looked at 4.9 million U.S. children up to 19 years old, they provided the numbers to calculate those who were under 15 years of age allowing a more direct comparison to the above US studies. In 2001, the incident rate was 1.17 per 1000, in 2009 the incident rate was 1.46/1000, and in 2017, the incident rate was 1.56/1000 (compared to the above cited 1.60/1000 for 1976). An epidemic!

Rheumatoid arthritis? Do I need bother? Kennedy clearly doesn't. From looking over several reviews, it appears that their findings can be summed up as follows. "Frequency data are conflicting. No proof exists from cohort studies that the incidence of RA has changed over time. Overall, the prevalence of RA is stable or on the rise." 

Kennedy goes on to list disorders that he says have become "commonplace" in American children including narcolepsy (now at 24 per 100000) and Tourette's syndrome (now at 30 to 60 per 100000). 

What reason does Kennedy give for why these illnesses are increasing? "So vaccines are a potential culprit . . . other possible perpetrators . . . are corn syrup, PFO flame retardants, processed foods, cell phones and EMF radiation, chlorpyrifos, ultrasound, neonicotinoid pesticides."

For the remainder of the Introduction, Kennedy mostly describes what he will go on to prove. Whew. So much better. So much of what he has said so far, not only did he not provide evidence to prove it, the evidence and the people he cited went a long way to disproving what he said. 

I have skipped over some of his claims. (For example, the incidence of Crohn's disease from above). This is not due to having found something that supports his claims and then not wanting to mention it. It is because this review of his book so far is already running the length of the book. I kept hoping for a pages where he would make reasonable, supportable, factual statements. Or else some let up to his poorly written diatribe. Some hope that something he stated would be supported by anything beyond his say-so. 

I started this series of blogs with a very different view of Kennedy. Now I recognize he knows nothing of science, health, critical thinking, or decency. He is a hatemonger and a blithering conspiracy theorist and I am certain my impatience is showing compared to the first two installments. On to Chapter One. 

Continued in a summary of the first three posts.

Martin Hill Ortiz is the author of several novels including most recently the thriller, Floor 24. 

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.