RFK Jr. Praises Wacky Wellness Crusaders and Blames Fauci For Everything From Bad Breath To Jock Itch

RFK Jr. starts off his massive diatribe against Anthony Fauci ("The Real Anthony Fauci") with a Heroic Heroes honor roll, a rather dubious list of people's champions that includes "holistic psychiatrist" Kelly Brogan, who touts the health benefits of coffee enemas and urine therapy, and alternative medicine practitioner Tom Cowan, whose medical practice was crippled by a five-year probation imposed for his having prescribed an unapproved quack cancer treatment to a patient he never met. Both of these "heroes" deny the validity of germ theory, and Cowan even denies that the heart is a pump. 

Brogan also proves curiously eager to convince us that vaccines are part of a spiritual fight to the death with modern medicine. Just as public health officials were struggling to figure out how to respond to the novel coronavirus - no easy task - she announced that their efforts were akin to the "dehumanization agendas that preceded the Holocaust." 

Uh, right.

As though seeking to out-do his heroic heroes, RFK Jr. bizarrely endorses injecting a form of bleach into the bloodstream as a treatment for Covid, which for him is merely a "flu-like virus." He approvingly cites the teaching protocols of popular alternative health practitioner Dr. David Brownstein on the matter. Says Brownstein:

"We've been treating viral diseases here for twenty-five years. COVID can't be any different. In all that time, our office had never lost a single patient to flu or flu-like illness. We treated people in their cars with oral vitamins A, C, and D, and iodine. We administered IV solution outside all winter with IV hydrogen peroxide and vitamin C. We'd have them put their butts out the car window and shot them up with intramuscular ozone." (emphasis added)

The butts out the window image is priceless, but just to be clear, RFK is here talking about intravenous injections of hydrogen peroxide, which is a form of bleach. So apparently Donald Trump is not unique in believing injecting bleach may serve as a good medical treatment. RFK explicitly endorses it.

Turning to more serious matters, RFK is a full-blown AIDS-denier who says the disease is caused by "the gay lifestyle." He favorably cites the views of Christine Maggiore, without mentioning that she was an AIDS-denier who refused treatment and then died of the disease, as did her three-year-old daughter, who was infected and denied treatment by her mother. 

Eagerly promoting the AIDS-denial work of Peter Duesberg, RFK claims that anti-retroviral drugs prescribed to HIV patients are actually harming them. Duesberg managed to convince former South African Prime Minister Thabo Mbeki (1999-2008) that antiretrovirals that allowed patients to live with AIDS were actually poison. Mbeki refused to allow patients to have the medicine, leading directly to more than 330,000 unnecessary deaths, according to multiple studies. 

Casually bouncing from accusation to accusation, RFK makes little effort to organize his thought. He seems to have vacuumed up every paranoid anti-vax fantasy off the internet and simply dumped it between the covers of his book, not caring that these recycled delusions have already been thoroughly debunked, some of them many times.

He blames Fauci for every real or imagined negative outcome during the pandemic. Nowhere does he note or care that Fauci's political role was that of an adviser: he didn't create policy, and those who did were free to ignore what he said, and often did. Fauci's responsibility for events was drastically more limited than RFK wants readers to believe.

Nowhere does RFK take account of the complexity of events that contributed to the Covid disaster. For example, any fair account of the pandemic has to note that obfuscation of events early on in China guaranteed that pandemic response would go badly elsewhere. Beijing failed to make clear to the world that they hadn't contained the virus, letting international airplane flights continue taking off after domestic flights had been shut down. 

The U.S. added to this bad response with a serious error of its own. An extensive and detailed pandemic preparedness plan started by the George W. Bush administration and continued by Obama was simply scrapped by Trump, leaving the U.S. unable to mount a rapid response to SARS-CoV-2. To make matters worse, the CDC made a big mistake in testing. WHO had its own test, which they were distributing to various countries throughout the world, as per standard practice, so that monitoring and testing for the virus could begin immediately. But the CDC opted to make its own test, which didn't work, giving lots of false negatives. This left U.S. health authorities weeks behind in detecting how far and fast the virus was spreading, which meant they had to rely on more extreme responses like lockdowns than they otherwise might have had to do. 

After thus forfeiting more sustainable pandemic restraint measures, the Trump administration then made the situation worse by deciding not to lead at all, defaulting to a free-for-all between the states, which wasted colossal energy fighting over supplies and improvising fifty competing ways of responding to the crisis. Washington released general guidelines, but left implementation up to state governors. 

Blaming Fauci alone for all this makes little sense, however gratifying it may be to heap rage and contempt on a convenient scapegoat, and it is simply preposterous to describe the pandemic response as a coup d'etat against democracy, as RFK does. Pandemic measures have long been lifted and life proceeds very much like it did before Covid existed.

Blowing off concern over damage done by Covid, which he dismisses as another name for the flu, RFK lambastes lockdown measures for allegedly having visited immense economic and psychological damage on children. We have no way of knowing, he says, how many people died of isolation and unemployment and other lockdown induced causes, though he assumes the number has to be enormous, because U.S. life expectancy decreased by 1.9 years during lockdown,

But he can't even bring himself to consider that that might have had something to do with a deadly new virus killing thousands of Americans every day and over a million in two years. However implausible, he remains firm in his conviction that the lockdowns did everything and the virus nothing, and that we can't know how extensive the damage was, though RFK obviously wants us to feel free to let our imaginations run wild, which seems to be the aim of his book. 

Sensible people, however, cannot ignore the fact that Covid itself caused considerable emotional damage. Roughly one hundred thousand children lost their primary or secondary care-givers to the disease, an inherently traumatizing experience. Also, millions of children were infected and many thousands hospitalized for Covid in the U.S., and it would be foolish to think that all of them emerged emotionally unscathed. On top of that, children who suffer from Covid can be at risk for Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome, and also long-Covid, not to mention that upwards of two thousand children actually died of Covid. 

All of this likely contributed to sharply negative mental health outcomes for a wide swathe of the population, but RFK Jr. doesn't mention any of them, so fixated is he on solely blaming Anthony Fauci for everything bad. 

He talks about how the rich got richer during the pandemic (bulletin: the rich are always getting richer under capitalism), and notes that small business owners were ruined by the lockdowns. This is true, but RFK's version of events simply notes that these things happened, and then blames Fauci. He provides no proper analysis of the events themselves, and no summation of what we ought to learn from them. For example, he ignores the glaring fact that many physicians in private practice were part of the wave of "small business" collapse, which they definitely would not have been if Ivermectin were effective against Covid, as RFK insists it is. Why didn't physicians write prescriptions for Ivermectin if doing so would have saved their patients' lives and their medical practices? RFK doesn't say.

In an effort to convince us that public health officials badly over-reacted to events, RFK laments that we cowered in fear from a mere "flu-like virus," without noting that COVID killed more Americans in its first year than the flu did in the previous ten years, and in two years about twice as many Americans as the Civil War did. It's no simple matter to determine what would credibly constitute over-reaction to death on such a huge scale.

He complains about "two weeks to flatten the curve," without noting that that was a political slogan, not a scientific prediction about the expected course of the pandemic. In any event, a prolonged pandemic response occurs by default if we continually refuse the solution, as RFK did. He wasn't listening to Covid policy direction at any time during the pandemic. How is it not obvious that refusing the solution guarantees the persistence of the problem?  No policy will ever work if people refuse to cooperate in solving it.

Moving on from Covid, a favorite RFK claim is that none of our childhood vaccines have been safety tested, which is simply false. In fact, every childhood vaccine has to be safety tested, and all of them are closely monitored after being commercially released.  That is why we have such an abundance of evidence demonstrating that anti-vax claims are untrue. 

RFK claims to be concerned about the increase in chronic disease in the U.S. starting in the 1980s. Unfortunately, he just blames Fauci and vaccines for the trend, in defiance of logic. In fact, medicine progressed leaps and bounds during this period and before, and children benefited greatly. In the second half of the 20th century childhood mortality rates decreased dramatically, and vaccines helped to eliminate deadly diseases common among children. Examples include childhood cancers, congenital heart disease, cystic fibrosis, spina bifida, leukemia, and sickle cell disease. But RFK just ignores these developments, presenting a uniformly bleak medical picture and blaming Fauci for everything, real or imaginary.

Many of the babies that previously died we are now able to save, although they are often of very low birth weight, which correlates with a higher than average risk of chronic disease later in life. What RFK is saying very clearly is that the U.S. was healthier before when such children didn't survive. Given his training as an environmental lawyer he actually could make a positive contribution here by helping discover the social causes of disease. We know, for example, that children born to low-income families are more likely to develop chronic disease, because of poor nutrition and proximity to pollution sources like waste incinerators.

But working towards solutions doesn't interest him; he prefers the laziness of blaming vaccines for everything. 

He flatly ignores the fact that vaccines were being administered to children decades before the 1980s, which he identifies as the watershed moment when they started producing increased chronic disease. But why did vaccines suddenly turn toxic in that decade and not before? RFK doesn't say.

Unsurprisingly, he also believes that vaccines cause autism, a claim debunked to the point of tedium by many scientific researchers, and thus not even worth debating anymore.

In the end, it's clear that the only thing RFK really cares about doing with his book on Fauci is indulging his boundless loathing for the man. This adolescent fixation contrasts sharply with Fauci's tireless efforts to fight the scourge of deadly infectious diseases, which benefits us all. Most impressive was his relationship with the late Larry Kramer, an aggressively confrontational AIDS activist who publicly accused Fauci of being a mass murderer and an incompetent idiot due to the federal government's grossly inadequate AIDS response, but gradually became his close friend after Fauci took no offense and invited Kramer and other activists to participate in AIDS advisory boards and workshops, against the advice of his scientific colleagues. Though their relationship never stopped being contentious, it proved immensely constructive, and Fauci's tearful good-bye to the AIDS activist when he finally succumbed to the disease in 2020 provides moving testimony as to how decent people can collaborate and care for one another even when they are officially opposed.

You won't find any such wisdom in RFK Jr.

Sources:

On RFK Jr., see "Reviewing RFK Jr.'s bad book about Fauci - Introduction," Dr. Dan Wilson, Debunk The Funk, March 2, 2022

On Kelly Brogan and Tom Cowan, see Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker, Conspirituality - How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, (Public Affairs, 2023) pps. 85, 159

On RFK Jr.'s endorsing injecting ourselves with bleach to ward off Covid, see Dr. Dan Wilson, "Reviewing RFK Jr.'s bad book about Fauci" - Chapter 1, Debunk The Funk, March 22, 2022

On the deadly consequences of AIDS denialism in South Africa, see Anthony Fauci, On Call - A Doctor's Journey in Public Service, (Viking, 2024) p. 157,

On Larry Kramer and Fauci's friendship see Fauci, On Call - A Doctor's Journey in Public Service, (Viking, 2024) pps. 95-117.