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. 

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. 

To be continued. 

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.

 

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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his Attack on Science, Part Two

 

 This is my second 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. Part three can be found here. 

(Note: I accidentally overwrote a long version of this post with a draft. I have endeavored to restore the long, finished version.) 

Continuing with the Introduction

 I left off midway through the Introduction in the middle of an attack on Fauci and his response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps it was a good place to break. Let me begin this chapter in my blog by addressing larger issues. 

I began my life as a scientist from a Christian perspective. There are few more succinct summaries of science than what can be found in the First Letter to the Thessalonians, chapter 5, verse 21: Test all things. Hold fast to what is good.

Kennedy declares in his Introduction: "Science, like democracy, flourishes on skepticism toward official orthodoxies." No, this is closer to the definition of contrarianism. Skepticism toward official doctrines is only half the story. Science uses skepticism to build useful "truths" that become orthodoxies. Contrarianism does advocate testing all things, but it doesn't hold fast to what is good.

Quite often what is orthodoxy is perfectly correct (that's the goal of science). The body of knowledge of aerodynamics provides what is needed to create airplanes that fly. To claim that aerodynamics is an  orthodoxy that prevents people from flapping their arms and flying off rooftops is ludicrous. That it criticizes people who believe in arm flying and censors them from science journals is a good thing.

Sometimes those orthodoxies are based on errors. Fine. Question and continue to question. But not by invective.  You have to build and test your arguments to improve on those that came before. Hurling bombs to tear things down is cheap. Doing it dishonestly is not skepticism.

Invective, noun. A denunciatory or abusive discourse. (This book, denouncing with its very title.) Kennedy doesn't simply set out to construct a villain in Fauci. He seeks to create a supervillain. The following are the loaded terms he uses to describe the response to COVID and to Fauci himself in the Introduction. 

Invectives directed to the response to COVID. (2nd paragraph of Introduction) generate fear, promote obedience, discourage critical thinking, herd seven billion people to march to a single tune, health experiments with a "novel, shoddily tested, improperly licensed technology so risky that manufacturers refused to produce it unless every government on Earth shielded them from liability." (They got every government on earth to agree to something?) 

(3rd paragraph.) totalitarianism, mass propaganda, censorship, promotion of terror, suppression of debate, vilification of dissent, forcefully prevent protest. unwanted, experimental, zero-liability medical interventions. Objectors faced orchestrated gaslighting, marginalization, and scapegoating. Essentially repeating the second paragraph but changing the words. Forceful invective, poor writing.

(5th paragraph) "suddenly turned against our citizens and our values with such violence." I'll keep an open mind about this, but I don't recall violence. Perhaps he will provide examples, later.

(later) carefully planned militarization and monetization of medicine that left American health ailing and its democracy shattered. propelling our country toward the desolate destination where democracy goes to die.

Invective directed toward Fauci. technocrat who orchestrated a historic coup d'état against Western democracy. power enjoyed by few rulers and no doctor in history. Encouraged his [own] canonization and disturbing inquisition against his blasphemous critics.

Interestingly, Kennedy also attacks Trump. Trump represented an existential crisis. Fauci is contrasted to Trump's desultory, narcissistic bombast. erratic President.

Kennedy says, "Dr. Anthony Fauci spent half a century as America's reigning health commissar, ever preparing for his final role as Commander of history's biggest war against a global pandemic. Beginning in 1968, he occupied various posts at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), serving as the agency's Director since November 1984."

Okay, half-a-century as health commissar? (He repeats "50-year saga" in the Introduction.) Kennedy can't count and his fact checkers can't check. Fauci's early work in the work in the government before he took over NIAID in 1984, a post that hardly serves as commissar, did not have that much influence. Almost forty years might be honest if Kennedy wants to smear him with that title. Capitalizing "Commander" is a cheap smear. COVID, the world's biggest pandemic? I would have said the forty some years of AIDS with 40 million dead outranks the several years of COVID with seven million dead. (Of course, Fauci did have a large role in AIDS.)

Kennedy cites Fauci as saying "attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science." Rather than those nine words, Kennedy should have at least provided his full sentence. "A lot of what you're seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science, because all of the things that I have spoken about, consistently from the very beginning, have been fundamentally based on science."

"Attacks on me" without "a lot of" makes it sound like Fauci is claiming infallibility. And Fauci does go on to explain his assertion. He further stated in that interview, ". . .if you go through each and every one of them, you can explain and debunk it immediately. I mean, every single one."

I don't know if what Fauci says is true. It has been fairly easy to debunk most of the details Kennedy has provided so far. I do know that it is dishonest of Kennedy to take Fauci's comments out of context. (I started this critique being skeptical about Kennedy. I am beginning to get disgusted by his poor writing and how he chooses snark over context.)

Kennedy goes on to say "[Dr. Fauci acknowledged] that he twice lied to Americans to promote his agendas." Kennedy leaves it at that. There is not enough information to determine what Kennedy is referring to. I will be interested to see Kennedy give the details on that assertion. He has yet to win my confidence. 

Kennedy says, "Dr. Fauci's acolyte [meaning devoted follower]—CNN's television doctor Peter Hotez—published an article in a scientific journal calling for legislation to "expand federal hate crime protections" to make criticism of Dr. Fauci a felony." Kennedy goes on to call Hotez a "high visibility henchman." 

From Kennedy's writing so far, let me make a prediction: the above is a wildly dishonest statement. It doesn't pass the sniff test. The actual paper "Mounting antiscience aggression in the United States" does not nearly come close to suggesting criminalization of criticism of Fauci. Fauci is not even the focus of the article. Out of 13 paragraphs in the article, Fauci is mentioned only in the context of a "Fire Fauci Act" introduced in Congress by Marjorie Taylor Greene and Representative Jim Jordan claiming Fauci is hiding something. 

The article does address "expanded protection for scientists currently targeted by far-right extremism in the United States." To address this targeting, "Still another possibility is to extend federal hate-crime protections." Hate crime protections do not extend to criticism. Nowhere does it suggest that people not be allowed to criticize Fauci. 

"Dr. Hotez, who says that vaccine skeptics should be snuffed out." Ooh. How ominous, how violent. No, Hotez said that "An American anti vaccine movement is building and we need to take steps now to snuff it out." From: Will an American-Led Anti-Vaccine Movement Subvert Global Health? 

Kennedy goes back to giving Fauci superhuman status. "Dr. Fauci's direct and indirect control—through NIH, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust of some 57 percent of global biomedical research funding. . ." What is this precisely saying? "Global research funding" is a term given for US funding of projects outside of the US. Is that what he means? Or the total funding of biomedical research around the globe? Which sounds like what he is suggesting.

Fauci was in charge of NIAID, not NIH. NIAID has 15% of the budget of NIH. And then there are other US agencies involved in research which total in budget, around 80 billion (NIAID is 8% of that total.) Research America states that industry (Big Pharma for example) in the United States spent $161.8 billion in research in 2020 far more than the government or private foundations. 

Fauci was the head of NIAID. That doesn't mean he single-handedly controlled its research. I have served on panels to decide which projects are funded. I never once heard a word from the top bosses which projects should be chosen or rejected. Serving on the board of Wellcome Trust or the Gates Foundation doesn't make Fauci the big decider, or as Kennedy puts it, that he had "direct or indirect control."

Fauci did have a lot of influence beyond his government position, but more like a pebble tossed into a rock pile: not nearly "control." If Fauci did have control of the COVID epidemic response, it would have gone differently. He would have put a muzzle on Trump and perhaps vaccinated Trump for rabies. I would argue that Kennedy and his skeptics had more influence in driving the COVID response disaster. People listened to him. 

Fauci and Deaths Due to COVID

Kennedy transitions to discuss "Fauci's" record in regards to COVID. "As the world watched, Tony Fauci dictated a series of policies that resulted in by far the most deaths, and one of the highest percentage COVID-19 body counts of any nation on the planet." He goes on to cite deaths by percentage of population. 

Kennedy presents the figures of death rates from COVID per million population as of September 30, 2021, presumably the cutoff time at which he turned in the book. 

He begins with the United States: 2107 deaths per million. The subsequent countries are Iran 1449 deaths per million, Sweden 1444, going on, selecting 16 more countries, citing Japan with 139 per million and ending with Tanzania 0.86 deaths per million. 

I followed these numbers closely as they came out. Kennedy's list represents an odd assortment of countries, avoiding those with the worst numbers. I'll get to those numbers in a moment. 

First, what is remarkable is how Kennedy's table totally undercuts his arguments. Throughout his introduction Kennedy has been decrying how Fauci had a huge influence over the world. Japan, among others, essentially, followed his advice. They had fewer than 7% the US death (as of September 30, 2021). Japan did quarantines. Japan did masking. Better than the United States did. 83% of people in Japan were fully vaccinated (as of November 2022, I couldn't find September 2021 figures) versus 64% in the United States. Some people in the United States listened to anti-vacciners.

Furthermore, what is left off the table are countries that did poorer than the United States and pursued policies counter to Fauci's advice. As of September 30th, 2021, Peru had 5880 deaths per million. Those countries that didn't follow his advice? Brazil, through its leader, Jair Bolsonaro, famously rejected Fauci's advice. They had 2708 deaths per million. Hungary through its strongman, Viktor Orbán, had 3095 deaths per million. (Use the above link, go to the country, the cumulative death charts and select date.)

The Kennedys have great hair. My counter argument will probably make RFK Jr.'s stand on end. The failure of the American response to COVID is because we didn't listen to Fauci. He was undercut every step of the way. By Trump declaring the infection wasn't that bad. By declaring the infection would be gone by summer. By holding mass political rallies that served as superspreader events. Trump declared that the infection was all a political game and would disappear the day after elections. 

I will examine one such superspreader event and its consequences in detail, partly because I had run the numbers myself at the time. Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota, permitted a Harley-Davidson bikers rally in August 2020 and August 2021 attended by a total of nearly a million "vehicles." (Attendance cited by vehicles, not people. Presumably at least one person per bike.) 

Back during 2020, when I had to stay at home, I took up a project of ranking states and the District of Columbia weekly by their COVID-19 statistics to see which states were doing better and which ones were doing worse, adjusted for population. The two graphs below show the increase in hospitalizations in South Dakota and, because many bikers were not local, I added North Dakota (the same were true for other bordering states. I'll go into their statistics briefly, but will mainly focus on the Dakotas). The 2020 Harley-Davidson rally took place from August 7 to 16. The delay in hospitalizations (and ultimately deaths) is because the rally merely seeded infections. The real problem came from those who became infected infecting others, and those, in turn, infecting still others. I will presented infection numbers and deaths after the hospitalizations.

South Dakota, 2020

 

North Dakota, 2020

I would argue that hospitalizations best describe the toll of COVID infections. Deaths can be related to improvements in therapy or negatively by having hospitals overwhelmed. Cases are often underestimated with those who are asymptomatic or who have minor symptoms not being tested and counted. Other states that border South Dakota:

Nebraska, 2020

Wyoming, 2020

Montana, 2020

Iowa, 2020

Minnesota, the one other state that bordered South Dakota, I don't have a snapshot of its hospitalizations in my archive. Here are two states over the same time period that did not have dramatic increases in hospitalizations. 

Georgia, 2020

California, 2020

In the week before the South Dakota rally, South Dakota ranked 15th among states (and DC) in having the lowest rate of increase in COVID-19 infections. North Dakota was in the middle of the pack. By the week ending September 5, North and South Dakota would take up the last two places, positions they kept until the week ending November 21. 

North and South Dakota, dead last, week ending October 17

State rankings, week of July 27, before the rally.

Here is the beginning of the uptick of cases in South Dakota (left) and North Dakota (right). You might almost say some happened around the middle of August.

First come infections, then hospitalizations and then deaths. The increase in deaths in the Dakotas was not immediate, but over time became overwhelming. For South Dakota, on August 17, the day after the rally ended, the death toll stood at 153 statewide. In four months that number was up to 1300 (and still on a steep slope of climbing) an increase of 750%. In North Dakota, over the same time period, the deaths increased from 126 to 1195, an increase of 848%. In contrast, nationwide, between August 17 and December 17, the deaths increased by 89%. Numbers source. 

The Sturgis bike rally superspreader event is presented only as an example. There were others. So, did this motorcycle rally and other superspreader events occur because people were listening to Fauci? 

By downplaying the infection, Trump created a resistance to public health care precautions and ultimately had a lot of people reject the vaccination, a vaccination that Trump's policies helped create. If we did listen to Fauci, the U.S. numbers would be like those of Japan and not closer to those of Brazil. 

Furthermore, Trump gave credence to worthless therapies. I see by the chapter titles that Kennedy will discuss some of these therapies. I will deal with those arguments as they come.

A last point as I come to the end of this post. In my first entry into this series of blogs, I skipped over the Acknowledgments, suggesting that it had little to do with a critique. Now, I would like to note that Kennedy thanked eight individuals as fact checkers. That is significant. They did a poor job. His editors did a poor job. I have no fact checkers and I can usually quickly find errors (or perhaps just conscious falsities) in what he presents. 

I am about halfway through the Introduction. I cannot give you a page number. The book has no page numbers. This is in spite of referring to page numbers in the index and the table of contents. It has the feel of being self-published, even though it went through Skyhorse Press.

Continued in Part Three. 

(Note: I apologize for multiple versions of this post. I posted a long version and then accidentally overwrote with a shorter draft. In this post, I have endeavored to restore what I lost.)

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. 

Continue reading →

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his Attack on Science

 

 Big Conspiracy

 You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant. Author Harlan Ellison.

When I was a teenager and living with my brothers being raised by a single parent, my mother rented a house in the small town of Las Vegas, New Mexico. It had a coal heater in the basement and, next to that heater, the previous tenant left behind a huge pile of religious-themed magazines. One title promoted the doctrine of creationism, specifically that God created the earth about 6,000 years ago. Articles declared that the propagation of the theory of evolution was the biggest conspiracy of all time. Science journals refused to publish creationist articles due to prejudice and fear of the truth. The creationists declared themselves to be like Galileo, rejected by the orthodoxy of corrupt secular science. 

Those journals set the tone for me to understand all the subsequent "biggest conspiracy ever" tales of my lifetime. The faked moon landing, those surrounding the AIDS virus, those denying global warming, and those surrounding vaccines and COVID (among many others). The advocates of those theories were unjustly persecuted. They were rejected for telling the truth. They were Galileo, struggling against the corrupt orthodoxy of the world. They often chose a timeline that showed that the world had gone to hell since a key event in their conspiracy occurred. They often choose a villain that is real: corporate corruption, personal greed, to be part of the focus of their wrath.

Having researched HIV for 30 years, I have been at the target end of some of these. HIV doesn't cause AIDS. AIDS was designed to kill homosexuals. Science and corporations are suppressing natural chemicals that would cure AIDS and promoting those that sponge the most money off of the sick (an argument that I would partly agree with but not to most of its particulars, there is a multiplicity individual drugs and alternative products). 

Remarkably, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says that he is not anti-vaccine, that he is merely pro-vaccine safety. He has yet to write a book promoting the general worthwhileness of vaccines. However, he has written the books Vaccine Villains (2017), Profiles of the Vaccine Injured (2022), Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak (2023), among others and the one I will focus on in my blog: The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (2021).

The Title and the First Material.

The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health: A Critical Analysis. The title certainly doesn't pull punches or fail to name villains. This is already a problem for me. I prefer to be convinced step-by-step before being confronted. Being told what is "real" before providing evidence of it is the equivalent of the Soviet Union official newspaper, Pravda, which translates to "The Truth." Okay, so convince me. 

The book begins, as many do, with quotes. The first quote is Nobel Prize winner and heroic discoverer of the AIDS virus, Luc Montagnier. The second is talk show host Tucker Carlson, a go-to person for such conspiracies as the stealing of the 2020 election or the global warming "hoax." Another quote comes from actor Rob Schneider, "Deuce Bigalow." I would never have guessed that the opinions of Montagnier and Deuce Bigalow would be found together. 

As for many of the others cited, Kennedy has a nasty habit of quoting the person for one thing they agree with and ignoring the fact that they would treat many of his arguments with alarm or else that they have other wild opinions that would make any view they have a suspicious or worthless. I will come to examples of these time and again. Using prominent people who agree with one thing Kennedy is saying to give him and his arguments gravity but who would strenuously disagree with mostly ever thing else is dishonest. It would be easy for Kennedy to quote me for something we agree on: for example, the sins of big Pharma. I would hate to be quoted by him or to be associated in any way with his work. He would probably say, in my case, no loss.

Dedication & Acknowledgments

The tome (and this is a tome and a doorstop) begins with "Dr. Anthony Fauci's opinions and proclamations have been omnipresent in American media, and some people might assume his ideas are universally supported by scientists or that he somehow represents science and medicine."

Hoo-boy. So many problems with that first sentence. I would hardly call Fauci's pronouncements omnipresent and no scientist's ideas and actions are universally supported by scientists. Science is an argument. When it's good, it's a fair and bracing argument. When it starts with a sentence like this, it is a crap argument. "Some people might assume" is lazy writing that can fit anywhere into any argument. And, of course, Fauci does "somehow represent science and medicine," in fact, that is Kennedy's chief complaint, that he shouldn't. Perhaps if this sentence was better written Kennedy could have landed his point.

The next sentence is also problematic. This worries me. To analyze this book, am I going to have to go sentence by sentence? "To the contrary, many leading scientists and scholars around the world oppose lockdowns and other aspects of Dr. Fauci's pandemic management." First of all, another way to slide in a specious argument, is to use the word "many." It is so vague that it can mean hundreds of the millions of scientists or millions of them. "Opposing lockdowns or other aspects"? To get past that requirement you would have to completely agree with Fauci on everything. I don't agree with Fauci on everything. Doesn't make me want to be part of Kennedy's claimed "many." 

Robert Kennedy is a good lawyer. He provides sentences composed of smoke and mirrors to wow without concern for substance. The above sentences could be used to fit just about anything that anyone could claim is a controversy. Substance is science. The writing so far is crap. 

I am critiquing this while reading a page at a time. That has some faults. Perhaps a convincing argument will be built. However, Kennedy is not writing this in such a format. He is stating his conclusions before supporting them. 

Continuing with the dedication, he talks about heroes of the truth who "may one day restore from the shattered souls" of the medical profession and the scientific establishment.

In dedication, he names 47 individuals, all but one preceded by the title "Dr." (that one is also a doctor, poor editing). Some are noted for their accomplishments, some are merely referred to as physician. 

I really don't want to go through 47 names and research each of their positions. I suspect some of them do agree with Kennedy, and are not being named because they are miscellaneous heroes. Instead, I used a random number generator to choose two to look at. The numbers that came up were 13 and 36.

Hoo-boy. The thirteenth entry was Dr. Didier Raoult, as the book put it, Director Infectious and Tropical Emergent Diseases Research Unit (France), physician and microbiologist. Technically, this was not true. He retired in 2021 after a scandal regarding his ethical practices "30 years of unregulated experiments on humans." Journals retracted six of his pre-COVID papers. A criminal investigation is underway. Perhaps Kennedy will declare him one of the persecuted. 

The thirty-sixth entry is Dr. Catherine L. Lawson, Rutgers University Research Professor, Institute for Quantitative Biomedicine. Her profile in the Rutgers page says that she is retired. I reviewed her published articles and couldn't find her opinions on COVID. Her one paper that refers to COVID at all, says, "New features and resources are described in detail using examples that showcase recently released structures of SARS-CoV-2 proteins and host cell proteins relevant to understanding and addressing the COVID-19 global pandemic." I contacted her. She politely replied, saying that she was surprised to be on the list but that she did support Kennedy's efforts at vaccine safety.

To some extent there is nothing wrong with the dedication as presented as long as it is treated in the spirit of a dedication. If he dedicated it to Galileo Galilei, that would be fine. It doesn't mean that Galileo endorses the book. 

I will skip over Acknowledgments as it has nothing to do with his arguments.

I will mostly skip over the Publisher's Note. It is the opinion of the publisher. Skyhorse Publishing does take on a variety of controversial issues (and sometimes controversial people) but that is free speech. Perhaps I will revisit this subject. I believe censorship is going to be part of Kennedy's arguments.

Introduction.

Finally getting to the meat of the book, we have the introduction. It begins with a quote. 

"The first step is to give up the illusion that the primary purpose of modern medical research is to improve Americans' health most effectively and efficiently. In our opinion, the primary purpose of commerically funded clinical research is to maximize final return on investment, not health." John Abramson, MD, Harvard University.

I almost completely agree with this sentiment. It does, however, refer to commercially-funded clinical research, so it is a bit strange to use it to begin a critique of government-funded research. Okay, there is a fair amount of connection between the two, but that should be established before making such a critique, or be substituted with a quote that actually addresses government-funded research. Also, it should be noted that John Abramson is adamant about the effectiveness of COVID vaccines, as can be found in this interview where he describes COVID vaccines as being protective twenty times above not taking them. 

Such acts of drawing on the prestige of scientists while ignoring the bottom line of what they say makes me suspect every quote used by Kennedy. Which is not fair on my part. I am sure he's bound to quote some who genuinely support his views.

Okay, on to a lengthy diatribe, perhaps his core diatribe. I encounter a problem here. How to quote it without running foul of copyright laws but to give his arguments their due. 

I should at least provide the opening salvo. "I wrote this book to help Americans–and citizens across the globe–understand the historical underpinnings of the bewildering cataclysm that began in 2020." Hey, that's a good opening sentence. It doesn't rely on fuzzy words or generic arguments that could apply to anything. 

It continues with "In that single annus horribilis, liberal democracy effectively collapsed worldwide." Okay, now I'm having problems. Providing the conclusion as a fait accompli. I would feel much more receptive to his arguments if he began, in a lawyerly way, to say that "I intend to show. . ." Frankly, this is an argument that is selecting the readership. In your face! Agree with me and we go on.

And he does go on. Still, first paragraph. "The very governmental health regulators, social media eminences, and media companies that idealistic populations relied upon as champions of freedom, health, democracy, civil rights, and evidence-based public policy seemed to collectively pivot in a lockstep assault against free speech and personal freedoms." (end of first paragraph)

I do appreciate he couched this with the word "seemed." This is what seemed to Kennedy and others to be happening and it is clear he is expressing an opinion rather than claiming a fact. He repeats "seemed" in the next sentence which reiterates and expands this notion.

Skipping down a little. For the third paragraph he abandons seemed and declares "shell-shocked citizens experienced all the well-worn tactics of rising totalitarianism. . ." 

I am not going to analyze this line-by-line. It would be tedious for you and much of the first several paragraphs repeat what has been said above. It can be summed up with his declaration of the COVID response as "a bewildering array of draconian diktats . . ."

In the fifth paragraph we get to Dr. Anthony Fauci. "Standing in the center of all the mayhem, with his confident hand on them, was one dominating figure." Okay, from an American perspective, that is arguable. I would have said that Donald Trump was the one I would choose to fit that description, for America. Trump (and then Biden) had more power than Fauci, one of several major scientists at NIH and the other agencies that oversee health research. When it came to the worldwide response, I would make a spitball estimate that Fauci had a small percentage of a role. Below WHO, the EU, those leaders of the billions who live outside of the United States, etc. And for the worse, I would say the leaders of China played a more dominating role. Yes, the United States does take an oversized role in influencing the world, but not so much as to provide "one dominating figure." 

Fauci was head of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), an institute with a budget of around 6.5 billion dollars. NIAID is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In 2021, NIH had a budget of 42.9 billion dollars. As you can see, he was in charge of a fraction of NIH and NIH is a fraction of the total U.S. health research budget along with other large agencies such as USDA and CDC. On top of this, Fauci was an advisor to the president. Fauci's influence was important, but hardly all-dominating. If Fauci were all-dominating, Trump would not have made many of his pronouncements regarding COVID.

Kennedy goes on to talk about himself, about his history as a Democrat, and his fights as an environmental lawyer against Big Oil and Big Coal. Good for him. (I'm not being sarcastic: good for him.)

Here he pivots to what I consider a disingenuous presentation. "NIH owns hundreds of vaccine patents and often profits from the sale of products it supposedly regulates." Umm, no. NIH does not profit anymore than the National Park Service profits from selling snowglobes in their tourist centers. I suppose the next sentence is there to state that individuals pockets money. "High level officials, including Dr. Fauci, receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products they help develop and then usher through the approval process."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Soviet dissident and Nobel Prize winner, once said that, with a careful reading of Soviet newspapers you could learn the hidden truth. This applies to the above sentence. First of all, it uses the classic advertising lingo of "up to." Save up to 50%, a true statement which includes "or save nothing at all" and even "pay more." (I fell for this while switching my cellular service a couple of years ago. It's going to be $35 a month, no hidden fees, right? I asked a half-dozen times.) Secondly, the sentence says "high level officials including Dr. Fauci." This tells me that Kennedy didn't have Dr. Fauci's numbers. If he did have Dr. Fauci's numbers and they were bad, he would have presented them. Or, if he was being out and out dishonest, and had Fauci's numbers and they were unimpressive, he was lumping Fauci together with others to make Fauci look like he was getting a lot of money. 

The next sentence says "The FDA receives 45 percent of its budget from the pharmaceutical industry . . ." an enlightening observation, but Fauci doesn't work for the FDA. Kennedy is making the case for Fauci as guilt due to others guilt. (Hey, we got a bad system.) There are other problems with that sentence. A good deal of the money the FDA receives comes from pharmaceutical companies who pay for the process to try to get their drugs approved. That's a good thing and a bad thing. Good: Make them pay. Bad: The money is almost like lobbying. There are dramatic instances where that monetary influence has led to bad decisions. There are also instances where conscientious workers at the FDA turned down drug approvals in spite of heavy, well-funded pressure from the pharm industry.

This blog is running very long and I'm barely half-way through the introduction. There are so many problems with the book. I will continue my analysis in future blog posts. I will leave with two matters. First, I should share this next sentence because it is sounds like a thesis statement and finally does talk about what Kennedy intends to prove rather than just hurling manure. I think it is an excellent place to let Kennedy speak for himself without comment or critique.

"In this book, I track the rise of Anthony Fauci from his start as a young public health researcher and physician through his metamorphosis into the powerful technocrat who helped orchestrate and execute 2020's historic coup d'état against Western democracy." 

I will finish this entry by addressing the following statement. "His [Fauci's] $417,608 annual salary makes him the highest paid of all four million federal employees, including the President." (The President makes $400,000.) First of all, this is not true. As to how many federal employees make more, I do not know. However, with a ten-second Google search (I type fast), I found that the head of the Tennessee Valley Authority made in the millions and several of his underlings made more than a million. 

Secondly, this statement lacks context. Physicians are typically among the highest paid public employees. The average U.S. physician specialist makes $380,000 per year (plastic surgeons average $570,000). Fauci would not be considered the average specialist–and I'm not saying that simply because of his reputation (Time Magazine Man of the Year) which would have added to his salary in the private sector. He has been a physician going on fifty years and a private career would have been paying him much more than "the average" physician, a set which includes those just out of medical school. Fauci took a pay cut to do his job.

To be continued. Part Two.

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.

Continue reading →