Introduction

The New York Times on September 12 published yet another hit piece against presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that usefully illustrates how the function of the mainstream media is not to inform but to indoctrinate.

This is obvious from how the Times habitually mischaracterizes the retraction by Salon of Kennedy’s 2005 article “Deadly Immunity”; how it absurdly characterizes Kennedy as a conspiracy theorist for pointing out how the government serves the pharmaceutical industry; and how it mindlessly dismisses scientific research showing that the healthiest children among the US population are those who have remained completely unvaccinated, as detailed in a new book by Kennedy and Dr. Brian Hooker called Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak.

What the Media Won’t Tell You about RFK Jr.’s “Deadly Immunity”

The New York Times article’s headline dismisses Kennedy as holding “Fringe Views”, and to support that characterization, the article includes a typical reference to his 2005 article “Deadly Immunity”:

Mr. Kennedy’s public work against vaccines began in 2005, when he published articles in Rolling Stone and Salon claiming a link between vaccines and autism. The news outlets later withdrew the articles.

As usual, the Times references Salon’s 2011 retraction of “Deadly Immunity” as though this were proof that the thesis of Kennedy’s article was false. Notably, while the article has since disappeared from Rolling Stone’s website, that publication never retracted the article and, to the contrary, stood by it after Salon’s retraction.

Most importantly, what the Times doesn’t tell its readers is that none of the corrections made to the article that Salon’s editors cited as the reason for its retraction substantively affected Kennedy’s thesis. I detailed each of those corrections, at least some of which were introduced by the editors themselves, in my freely available e-book The New York Times vs. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: How the Mainstream Media Spread Vaccine Misinformation.

As I summarized in my June 28 article “The Mainstream Media’s Reign of Error: Correcting the Record about RFK Jr.’s ‘Deadly Immunity’”, here are key points that Salon’s editors did not dispute:

• From the late 1980s through the 1990s, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) substantially increased the number of mercury-containing vaccinations on its recommended childhood schedule.
• Throughout this time, nobody in the CDC or US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had ever bothered to consider the potential harms from this increased exposure to a known neurotoxin, and when the FDA finally got around to doing the simple calculations as a result of a Congressional directive in 1997, government officials realized that the CDC’s routine childhood vaccine schedule was exposing infants to cumulative levels of mercury that exceeded the government’s own safety guidelines.
• Once “public health” officials realized this, with the understanding that it was only a matter of time before this damning realization became public, they panicked and scrambled to resolve the impossible dilemma of how to disclose the FDA’s finding without causing irreparable damage to their own credibility.
• In the wake of the FDA’s realization of how the CDC had been recklessly placing children’s health at risk, an analysis of the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) data was carried out by CDC epidemiologist Tom Verstraeten, which study found mercury-containing vaccines to be associated with a statistically significant increased risk of autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders.
• The documentary record indicated that the CDC sought to make the statistical significance of that association go away through subsequent revisions of Verstraeten’s analysis that strayed from the original study protocol.
• Attendees at the CDC’s “Simpsonwood” conference expressed concerns about the potential health impacts of exposing children to harmful levels of mercury and the potential legal liability resulting from the government’s malfeasance.

The New York Times avoids having to address any of those undisputed points by lazily citing the retraction as though that constituted a sufficient rebuttal to the facts that Kennedy reported.

The Denial of Early Treatments for COVID‑19

In the next paragraph of its latest hit piece on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Times states:

During the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Kennedy spoke at dozens of events where he claimed that the drugs ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine could help treat Covid. Numerous studies published during and after the pandemic have found otherwise. Mr. Kennedy has not addressed those studies.

The Times could just as well have stated that the government and mainstream media have claimed that off-patent and inexpensive drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine don’t work, but numerous studies have found otherwise.

The key point I wish to make here, though, is that the Times’ claim that Kennedy “has not addressed” studies finding no statistically significant benefit of ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine is a willful lie.

We know that this is a deliberate lie because in its very next paragraph, the Times criticizes Mr. Kennedy’s book The Real Anthony Fauci, which includes a detailed discussion of how the government sought to deny inexpensive and generic early treatment options to COVID‑19 patients in favor of pushing vaccines and newer patented drugs like remdesivir.

So, either the Times writer, Sheera Frenkel, did not read the book but is pretending to have done so, or she did read the book and is pretending that Kennedy didn’t include a chapter written specifically to address the types of studies that the government has cited to support its policies. Either way, she’s trying to deceive her readers.

As Kennedy explained in The Real Anthony Fauci,

From the outset, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and other therapeutics posed an existential threat to Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates’ $48 billion COVID vaccine project, and particularly to their vanity drug remdesivir, in which Gates has a large stake. Under federal law, new vaccines and medicines cannot qualify for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) if any existing FDA-approved drug proves effective against the same malady . . . .

Dr. Fauci has invested $6 billion in taxpayer lucre in the Moderna vaccine alone. His agency is co-owner of the patent and stands to collect a fortune in royalties. At least four of Fauci’s hand-picked deputies are in line to collect royalties of $150,000/year based on Moderna’s success, and that’s on top of the salaries already paid by the American public. . . .

The types of studies cited by Dr. Anthony Fauci et al., Kennedy reasoned, were effectively designed to fail “by employing faulty protocols, most of which showed HCQ efficacy administered without zinc and Zithromax which were known to be helpful. But their main trick for ensuring the protocols failed was to wait until late in the disease process before administering HCQ—when it is known to be ineffective.” (Emphasis added.)

Instructively, it is the Times that hypocritically has not addressed Mr. Kennedy’s criticism of government policy. In fact, as though it somehow proved Kennedy wrong, Frenkel cites a New England Journal of Medicine study in which hydroxychloroquine was given without zinc.

Just as tellingly, the authors of that study received funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is the government agency under the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that Fauci directed for nearly four decades.

Thus, it is the Times that is failing to address Kennedy’s argument and not vice versa.

The Times similarly ignores how Kennedy documents how the government has ignored studies showing beneficial effects of ivermectin on patient outcomes and instead relies on studies effectively designed to fail to support the recommendation against its use in COVID‑19 patients.

For more on how the government has waged a war on ivermectin, see my September 7 article “‘Study’ on COVID-19 ‘Misinformation’ Propagates CDC Misinformation”, and read The Real Anthony Fauci. (Hey, I know the Times doesn’t want you to, but that’s all the more reason why the book is worth reading.)

Absurdly Denying Fauci’s and Gate’s Partnership with Big Pharma

Further illustrating the intellectual laziness and dishonesty of Times writer Sheera Frenkel, she next references The Real Anthony Fauci by stating:

And he wrote a book claiming that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s top medical adviser for the pandemic, and Bill Gates, a founder of Microsoft, conspired with drug companies to profit from vaccines. Dr. Fauci and Mr. Gates have rebutted the claims.

The link Frenkel provides to support her claim that Kennedy’s assertion has been “rebutted” is to a CNBC article titled “Bill Gates denies conspiracy theories that say he wants to use coronavirus vaccines to implant tracking devices”.

Mr. Kennedy is not mentioned in that article. There’s a really good reason for that, which is that Kennedy has never claimed that the vaccines contain microchips, so this amounts to an implicit strawman fallacy on the part Frenkel. Her claim that Gates (and Fauci) “rebutted” anything Kennedy has said in that article is simply false. It is another deliberate deception.

The Times has previously gone further by explicitly claiming that Kennedy has said that the COVID‑19 vaccines are intended to implant people with microchips, which is a malicious lie, as I detailed in my August 18 article “Why Do Some of RFK Jr.’s Own Family Members Believe the Media’s Lies about Him?”

Setting aside the newspaper’s reliance on the fallacy of strawman argumentation, it is absurd for the Times to deny that both Fauci and Gates have “conspired” with pharmaceutical companies.

Note that “conspired” is the Times’ word for it, not mine or Kennedy’s. I would say “colluded”, although the Times has a point inasmuch as it is technically incorrect to suggest there has been a conspiracy because this collusion has occurred right out in the open for everyone to see. 

For instance, Fauci’s NIAID and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have both literally partnered with Moderna in the development of its mRNA COVID‑19 vaccine. In fact, the NIH has claimed joint ownership of Moderna’s vaccine on the grounds NIH scientists have patent rights as co-inventors of the vaccine.

Naturally, the Times withholds such details from its readers in attempting to characterize Kennedy as having propagated an outlandish conspiracy theory as opposed to observing an empirical fact about how the federal “public health” agencies operate.

Dismissing the Scientific Evidence that Unvaccinated Children Are Healthier

This most recent hit piece on RFK Jr by the Times’ was brought to my attention by Dr. James Lyons-Weiler in his Substack article “Today's New York Times on Kennedy Relies on Faulty Opinion Blog Article Which Relied on Faulty Opinion Blog Article”.

Dr. Lyons-Weiler was referring to the final two paragraphs of the article, in which the Times refers to Kennedy’s organization Children’s Health Defense and his mostly recently published book:

Late last month, Children’s Health Defense announced a “people’s bus tour” across the United States to collect stories from people who were harmed by vaccinations and other health protocols introduced during the pandemic. The side of the bus was emblazoned with “Vax-Unvax,” the title of Mr. Kennedy’s new book.

The book, released on Aug. 29, includes faulty claims about vaccines and relies on findings from at least one discredited study. The new book is Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speakby Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dr. Brian Hooker. Lazily, Frenkel claims that the book relies on “faulty claims” without providing even one example of a claim the book makes that is “faulty”, much less an explanation as to why it is faulty.

Instead, Frenkel lazily links to a Health Feedback article that ridiculously criticizes a study by Dr. James Lyons-Weiler and Dr. Paul Thomas on the grounds that it was retracted, and the grounds for retraction, according to the journal editors, was that “the conclusions are not supported by strong scientific data”.

However, what neither the New York Times nor Health Feedback inform their readers is that the journal editors failed to specify what conclusions they were claiming to be unsupported by the data, much less to present an explanation as to how the data failed to support those conclusions.

Instead, Health Feedback cites a blog post from Dr. David Gorski, who stupidly criticized the study’s measurement of “Relative Incidence of Office Visits” (RIOV) on the grounds that this is “a new, unvalidated metric”.

This happens to be the same study I discussed extensively in my book The War on Informed Consent: The Persecution of Dr. Paul Thomas by the Oregon Medical Board (which features a Foreword by RFK Jr), so I am very familiar with both the study and the circumstances surrounding its retraction.

In short, what the study found is that Dr. Thomas’s completely unvaccinated pediatric patients had significantly lower incidences of a broad range of health conditions compared to his vaccinated patients.

The journal editors retracted the study based on an anonymously written letter of complaint that happens to closely reflect the claims made by Gorski in his blog post.

The faux “fact check” article by Health Feedback mindlessly parrots Gorski’s asinine argument that the study’s findings were “based on a new, unvalidated metric developed by the authors.”

This is an absolutely absurd criticism.

First of all, if the fact that a methodology is new were to be a determinative factor in whether a study should be published, then, logically, no scientific advancements in study design could ever be made.

Health Feedback ludicrously states that Lyons-Weiler and Thomas “did not provide evidence showing it is a reliable indicator of disease incidence.”

But that statement, too, is idiotic.

To back up a bit, Gorski’s criticism deliberately ignored the fact that the study also utilized an older, standard approach of measuring incidence of diagnosis, which likewise resulted in the finding that the unvaccinated children had significantly lower odds of being diagnosed with numerous health conditions.

Thus, according to the very argument adopted by Gorski, Health Feedback, and the New York Times, the study did use a valid methodology, but their solution to this self-contradiction of their argument is to simply ignore how the study also used the standard method of calculating odds ratios.

Moreover, it is absurd to describe RIOV as somehow invalid when all it means is that, instead of simply measuring whether a child had a diagnosis for a given disease or disorder, they measured incidence of office visits for that diagnosed health condition.

As explained in the study, RIOV provides more information than the standard methodology because the typical calculation of odds ratios only considers the binary “yes/no” question of whether a child has received a diagnosis, whereas RIOV goes further by indicating the extent to which that condition required health care.

In other words, RIOV provides an indication as to the severity of the diagnosed condition as opposed to simply measuring how many children in the practice received a given diagnosis.

Implicitly, since measuring RIOV starts with measuring incidence of diagnoses, to suggest that RIOV is not “a reliable indicator of disease incidence” is to also suggest, ludicrously, that the typical methodology of measuring incidence of diagnosis is not a reliable indicator of disease incidence. It is thus yet another self-contradictory argument.

The retraction was additionally based on the argument that its findings were simply an artifact of parents of unvaccinated children not utilizing health care, and therefore unvaccinated children really are just as sick as vaccinated kids, but the unvaccinated kids just haven’t been diagnosed.

The way this was characterized by the anonymously written letter to the journal editors is that parents who vaccinate “are more sensitive to the health of their children”.

Of course, that condescending and insulting assumption could accurately be described as “unvalidated”.

The idea that parents who choose not to vaccinate are just less “sensitive” to their children’s health is ludicrous. I should know because I am one of them, and it is precisely because of my sensitivity to my child’s health that my wife and I have chosen not to vaccinate him.

(He is healthy, by the way. And, yes, that is not just our own parental assessment but the assessment of pediatricians we have taken him in to see for routine checkups; although, after coming under new ownership, the practice we were originally with expelled us for not complying with the CDC’s schedule. You can read my excoriating letter to the arrogant and ignorant doctors in that practice here. Our son’s former primary care physician from that practice, last time he saw our son for a routine checkup, jokingly lamented that it had been such a long since he’d seen our son because he is so healthy.)

Setting aside my personal view as the parent of a completely unvaccinated and healthy child, it is absurd to retract a study on the grounds of a hypothetical selection bias. If hypothetical confounding factors were a reason for studies not to be published, no observational study could ever pass peer review!

This is plain idiocy!

Heck, plenty of studies cited to support public vaccine policy get published despite known selection biases (e.g., Hviid et al.), yet you don’t see Gorski, Health Feedback, or the New York Times calling for their retraction on the grounds that there might be confounding factors. The hypocrisy is staggering.

Rendering the criticisms of the study all the more ludicrous, Lyons-Weiler and Thomas actually preempted that very objection by conducting an analysis to test the hypothesis that parents who do not vaccinate have children who are undiagnosed with various medical conditions simply because they never go in to see the doctor.

They showed that, on the contrary, while vaccinated children had a much higher relative incidence of office visits for fever, which is an expected outcome of vaccination, this was not the case for incidence of routine “well-child” visits. In other words, the parents of unvaccinated children attended routine checkups just as routinely as parents of vaccinated children. (Which makes perfect sense in the case of Dr. Thomas’s practice since his practice was founded on the principle of respecting parents’ right to make their own informed choice.)

After the retraction, Dr. Lyons-Weiler along with Dr. Russell Blaylock conducted a follow-up study in which they ran numerous additional analyses to test the hypothesis that their findings were simply due to differences in healthcare-seeking behavior between parents who vaccinate and parents who don’t. They showed that, among the pediatric patients born into Dr. Thomas’s practice, the unvaccinated attended routine office visits at least as much if not more so than vaccinated patients.

In sum, there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that the retraction of the study was warranted. On the contrary, all evidence indicates that the retraction was politically motivated.

Dr. Thomas’s sin that cost him his license was that respecting parents’ right to make their own informed choices about childhood vaccinations, and the sin committed by Thomas and Lyons-Weiler with their study comparing health outcomes among vaccinated and unvaccinated patients was committing heresy against the vaccine religion by exposing the big lie underlying the CDC’s routine childhood vaccine recommendations.

For additional details about just how absurdly anti-science this retraction was, see my October 2022 article “Breakthrough Study Shows Unvaccinated Children Are Healthier”. Also read my book The War on Informed Consent for much more information about how the study was conducted and why its findings are so critically important.

I have also read Kennedy and Hooker’s new book Vax-Unvax, having been sent an advance review edition. The blurb that I consequently wrote is included in the book. Here it is:

While the CDC continues to refuse to do the type of vaccinated versus unvaccinated study that parents have long been demanding, independent researchers have forged ahead, and the results are now quite clear: unvaccinated children are healthier. In Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Brian Hooker review that data as well as many additional studies comparing health outcomes between those who did or did not receive individual vaccines. This is an essential resource for the serious researcher and a valuable guide for anyone wishing to exercise truly informed consent. The graphs helpfully included with the discussion of each study covered speak for themselves. It is past time for the ‘public health’ establishment to stop deceiving the public with their proclamations of official dogma about the ostensible safety of these pharmaceutical products.

I encourage you to learn more about the science that the government and mainstream media want to conceal from you. The reason why they want you to think there’s nothing to see here will become obvious to you once you see those graphs. Here’s a relevant one from the study by Dr. Lyons-Weiler and Dr. Thomas:

And here is a petition you can sign to call on the shameless, cowardly, and intellectually dishonest journal editors to un-retract the study.