"Do They Want Children to Die?"
Interrogating RFK Jr. & the Anti-Vaccine Movement's Agenda
On the excellent podcast "We Want Them Infected" with neurologist Dr. Jonathan Howard, who wrote the book of the same name, and medical cultural anthropologist Wendy Orent, the pair review the present state of public health in America and the plague of medical disinformation that is presently compromising Americans' health and regressing the nation backwards. A recent refrain from Wendy, expressing frustration with the modern anti-vaccine movement and their crusade against public health, is when she asks, "Do they want children to die? I don't understand it."
My dear internet friend of a friend Wendy, I unfortunately possess the cursed knowledge you seek. The short answer is: Yes. However, the justifications are complex and have a long and storied history behind them. Apologies as you’re likely already familiar with most of this.
America the Incubator…of Terrible Ideas
In 1916, American author & anthropologist Madison Grant writes The Passing of The Great Race, an extensive and horrific racist diatribe arguing for the supremacy of a Nordic race. He argued that pandemics were actually a net positive for society, as they would kill off the infirm, the "worthless," and the "insane." This obviously isn't rooted in any form of science - the “superior” Vikings suffered from the numerous diseases of their era, (BDJ Open) and chronic illness.
Of course, the 1918 pandemic which immediately followed proved just how utterly worthless his thesis was, killing many who were young and in the prime of the health. This was always an absurd, completely fictional fantasy rooted in masturbatory moral depravity - one that the consequences of trying to make this fantasy a reality would go on to inspire countless books, films, and television shows. Hey, here's a scene from one of them for good measure:
This book would later go on to be quoted by a relatively minor political figure in mid-20th century Western European politics that you've probably never heard of: Adolf Hitler. Carrying out eradication of these alleged "inferiors" with Aktion T4, this larger agenda centered around an elaborate fantasy of Aryan superiority over "inferior" races did not end well for Germany. Cities were firebombed, and German children marched through the streets at gunpoint by foreign soldiers to bury bodies in concentration camps such as Buchenwald. In post-war 1947, the United States government even produced a short film about the absurdities of "master race" fantasies:
Sadly, this garbage was never fully eradicated from the public sphere. Its origins go back the schoolyard playground. When you have nothing of value to contribute or any positive qualities about you, one has a natural inclination to engage in bullying - attacking those who are different in some fashion, establishing your own worth by branding another as inferior. We see this today with conservative loudmouths and their obsession with trans people, who make up ~1% of the population and are largely trying to mind their own business. A lot of people would be out of a job if American society realized the fact that a disgruntled man who does nothing, except spew hate into a microphone all day, has absolutely nothing of value to say.
In a civil democratic society based in science, it's understood that everyone has worth and the potential to make valuable contributions, regardless of age, gender, race, disability, etc. - collaboration is the great engine of innovation, and all. It's also understood that society also consists of groups that cannot work, for various reasons - this includes children, full-time caretakers like stay-at-home parents, the elderly, and the disabled. Yet, they are loved and have value as part of their respective friends' and families' lives, and the government does not have the right to extinguish them or deny them the essentials for living.
"Like with covid, they will tell you that the people we are going to lose from measles don't count. That there was something wrong with them, that they earned it, that good and strong people don't need to worry. Every life is a universe. Every loss counts." -BlueSky user saracuda
A Modern Remix of Classically Terrible Fictions
In the fictional fantasies of worthless loudmouth men, the only metric to judge people's worth is how much value the ownership class can extract from their labor. Billionaire white nationalist Jeffrey Tucker, a major backer of the Great Barrington Declaration and other COVID disinformation artists (Vinay Prasad, Tom Jefferson) believes that teenage girls are wasting their time in public school. They should instead be given a Hooters uniform and a pack of Virginia Slims!
Another example would be Zeke Emmanuel, brother of crooked Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel, who believes that life is not worth living beyond the age of 75. Notably, he advised the Biden Administration's pandemic response.
A more prominent example would be tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, who fancies himself the next Julius Caesar because he founded a social media hellscape that turns your uncle's brain into mush with low-effort conspiracy theory memes - and bought another whose primary objective is to make young girls insecure about their own bodies. Zuck & other tech billionaires like Peter Thiel, who believes harvesting the blood of young people will prolong his lifespan, funded the propaganda of Brown University economist Emily Oster, who pushed fraudulent data to justify getting thousands of unvaccinated children killed with COVID-19. It's worth noting that this would be a major influence on Biden's failed COVID-19 response, which Final COVID Czar Ashish Jha boldly endorsed from the start.
Children having their lives thrown away to entertain the fantasies of boorish loudmouthed men is not the hallmark of a great society. It's a sign that it's on the verge of collapsing. When unvaccinated children die of infectious diseases, the central fantasy of the anti-vaccine believer is that they had underlying conditions which rendered them "inferior" and "disposable," in contrast to one's own imagined superior health. It's an exploitative perversion.
Now we can talk about the biggest pervert of them all: The Secretary of Health & Human Services, who recently declared that the best treatment for measles is the breast milk of an unvaccinated woman.
Listeria Burgers & Raw Breast Milkshakes
Which brings us to the larger Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Cinematic Universe and its extended roster of characters. There was a time where it was widely understood that RFK Jr. was a fringe scam artist quack, a close associate of child abuser Andrew Wakefield, and a morally depraved character who took advantage of the gullible on social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, owned by Mark Zuckerberg. The COVID-19 pandemic is notable because it's the first pandemic in which social media connected the world with instantaneous communication, for better and for mostly worse. Contrarian quack influencers were able to exploit these networks to grow a significant following for personal profit, and institutions have been too cowardly to police this exploitation amongst their own staff - Stanford & UCSF letting their faculty ride the coattails of RFK Jr. to fame and fortune, most notably.
These fringe ideals that originated in the anti-vaccine movement were then tragically laundered from the fringes of low-effort conspiracy memes into mainstream publications by once-credible journalists who refused to engage in basic inquiry. "Immunity debt" being the most obvious. Before that, the American public was indoctrinated with the fantasy that children didn't need a COVID-19 vaccine & all mitigations should be dropped before one was available. This left many children very sick, disabled and dead - as well as many parents after their child brought the virus home from school. Now, liberal pundits such as Leana Wen in the Washington Post (PAI) are endorsing economist Jay Bhattacharya for NIH Director, who believes letting new viruses - potentially made in a lab - repeatedly burn through tens of millions of children in rapid fashion is a net positive for pediatric health and development.
It was foolish to think that this mythmaking would be contained to a singular infectious disease - nonsense about risk-free lifelong immunity conferred from viral infection, "mild" (not hospitalized) bouts with viruses being beneficial to one's health and development, and so forth - and would further legitimize the central premises of the anti-vaccine fantasy realm. One that tells your unvaccinated child is strong and has value if they survive the same virus that has killed other children, who were weak and would have grown up to be a drain on society as a “useless eater.”
The flip side of this coin is that children who are constantly ill are incredibly profitable, as worried parents struggle to find effective treatments. If you're a quack scam artist who shills for unregulated supplements that don't actually treat illnesses, then supply needs to manufacture its own demand via exploiting social media disinformation campaigns, often fearmongering about The Medical Establishment™. Of course, the problem is that when you wind up becoming The Medical Establishment™, and you're doing such a terrible job that children are dying - just as experts warned - well, that tends to put a dent in the whole kit-n-kaboodle.
So, to re-iterate Wendy, the answer is: Yes. The modern anti-vaccine movement needs unvaccinated children infected, sick, and dying from infectious diseases so they can profit from population-wide pestilence. Because men like RFK Jr. are so utterly worthless & a drain on civilized society, they need to pretend they have value by raging against doctors and scientists who actually save lives, and exploiting gullible parents who fall for the lies he's shilling - and buying the supplements he's selling. If other children's lives have to be thrown away to entertain this useless old man's fantasy of health supremacy, then that's a price he's willing to pay. Sabotaging modern medicine from doing their job is how these grifters stay in business - even if it means banning the entire field of epidemiology, as Dr. Ellie Murray explains:
We need to go back to looking at anti-vaxxers under the same light as skinheads, pedophiles, flat earthers, and other common swine.
Instead, the federal government is looking to condemn over a million worldwide to death from HIV/AIDS by ending the USAID PEPFAR program - yearly. All under a childish fantasy that infectious diseases merely filter out the weak, infirm, and unprofitable from society - and that these viruses respect the lines us foolish humans draw on a map.
Over a century later, Madison Grant’s fantasies live on in the dreams of the wealthiest, most depraved cranks holding the reins of our economy.
