The RFK Jr Hype-Train is Leaving the Station!

The confluence of the Great Distraction, its greatest propagator and an election has now been signed off on by the biggest alt-ish talking heads, and so the whistle is blowing in post-truth America!

Yes, again about Bobby Junior! But only because things are moving very rapidly in what to me seems like a growing inevitability in the 2024 election. As of Friday when I posted my latest article I was only about an hour into the JRE RFK interview, before that had been surprised by the level of Glenn Greenwald’s positive take and support of the RFK candidacy post his interview, and ultimately in part related to that Rogan interview. And then I saw Twitter Tucker pumping it and RFK as well, which I will get to, and that makes for an interesting triumverate of voices essentially pimping this candidate.

And of course it’s all tied to the Vaccine Thing, even though I seriously doubt any of them are in the same place on the vaxx spectrum as RFK clearly is. Which is something that doesn’t seem to matter that much overall, people who align in a greater or lesser degree with RFK, his book and his candidacy range from the “covid vaccine skeptical” kind of like me and I suspect Rogan and Greenwald (I have no idea what Carlson really thinks) to the Loon Squaders mostly on the extreme right who believe it’s all a big NWO project to kill physically and/or cripple psychologically the world’s proletariat.

RFK lies in the middle of that, he isn’t outwardly skeptical about much of anything regarding vaccines, he knows, or at least he works with real dedication to leave the impression he knows, and what he knows is that they are all bad. And they’re all bad because they come from Big Pharma companies and a totally corrupted government regulatory health system working in unison, the government side having suffered under the dictatorship of the REAL Anthony Fauci for the last few decades.

He doesn’t limit himself to covid in any way, which many of the broader community of anti-vaxxers do (again, that is not a pejorative term - I put myself in that broader group), having only vaguely-defined concerns about other vaccines, that in part because of the paradigm of Big Pharma and in part as residual contact with the core anti-vaxx movement. He also doesn’t openly go that far down the road of nutterism on vaccines, although he extends occasional lines into that world, perhaps to snag some extremist followers.

Obviously the attraction to his candidacy in this broad group goes farther than his anti-vaccine advocacy; what gives him chops in the huge anybody-but-Clintonites crowd are his positions on the wars, on censorship, on regulatory capture generally, on environmentalism (sans the climate change carveout for some), etc., which to some extent can be viewed as a cafeteria of selections intended to enhance the core issue of vaccines.

I say that asking you how many people you think support RFK Jr based only on that stuff, but are mainstreamers on anything involving vaccines including covid, and think the anti-vaxx movement is a little dangerous and kind of crazy? He may have tried to reel those people in at the very beginning, with the rather disingenuous vaxx-free construction of his announcement address, but that ship has sailed and today his core issue is as was always inevitable, the vaxx/Big Pharma stuff strapped to the pandemic.

Which means his supporters mostly are and will increasingly become people in that broader anti-vaxx world. So his winning or losing really comes down to how many people figure out the covid vaccine problem and embrace with some sense of outrage that narrative.

Given that, his mission has to be to at least partially convince people of the vaccine problem, because that’s almost the only way to broaden his base, or at least to convince other people of that who have real influence and can help him. If you are a mainstream Democrat who is opposed to the war and doesn’t want the party to re-nominate the Weekend at Biden’s corpse, you have to at least feel somewhat comfortable with what is being sold as lunacy in the mainstream left media in order to punch the ballot for Bobby.

And of course if he gets elected there has to be a broad constituency in the country supporting what surely will be his main presidential objective, number one on his agenda, which is to deal with what he has from his opening address generically called the chronic disease problem in America. That of course is a generalization of the vaxx problem, with the same basic villains - the Healthcare-Industrial Complex centered on Big Pharma and corrupt government health-related agencies and institutions. Without that broad constituency, congress would surely snuff out his core agenda, and the courts would aid in that.

Let’s remember Trump only had any governmental impact because his constituency took over the GOP and so the party apparatus basically had to play along. That started to break down some at the very end, but the threat of what is happening now, another MAGA run, has limited that to a great degree. But I think it’s still not Trump’s party above the proletarian level; if it was he would likely be treated like Killary was in 2016.

RFK, his structural problem was clear from the beginning, as much as he’s a Kennedy his conspiratorial taint plays much better on the right than the left. In my view, what that likely means is that his whole battle is the nomination; if he beats Biden or perhaps whoever replaces him he’s essentially won the election - Trump always had the vague scent of a conspiracy theorist, but RFK is openly and proudly one, and a subscriber to one of the longest-lasting and extreme ones, right up there with the climate change conspiracy. And by that I don’t mean Dallas, that hardly raises eyebrows today.

So if you put Trump up against RFK, the Donald will lose elements of his base while the Dems will simply have nowhere to turn but to Bobby.

And that includes the Jews who own and run that party. Unlike New Hitler Trump, there is nothing that really scares them about Bobby and the Chosen People, he’s nested in Jewish Hollywood and recites the Israel speech as well as anyone. They don’t like the war thing I’m sure, but Inauguration Day is 17 months away and surely a deal can be made if still needed to back him down from that already-wobbly perch leading his “national conversation”. A deal that gives him what he really wants - which, btw, can rightly be defined as to make lots of (Jewish) lawyers a shitload of money on class action suits. I’m sure they also don’t care for the way he throws “neocons” around, but I suspect they feel the same way I do on that - he doesn‘t even know what the fuck that word really means; if he did you’d never hear him use it.

So what he really needs to do is to win over parts of the Dem base and the left outside of that, the Bernie crowd. Which I guess gets us to Rogan and Tucker, and the growing sense that there’s an RFK hype-train about to leave the station, and you better climb onboard while you still can.

Let’s start with leftist Greenwald and his promotion of the Rogan interview:

That is followed by part of the RFK piece I included in my last article where he cites “RFK Jr’s remarkable four-hour appearance on Joe Rogan’s program, which, if you haven’t watched, I really urge you to do so.” It’s actually three hours, and the discussion wasn’t that wide-ranging, it was narrow and deep on numerous aspects of one single topic.

Oh, and 21-28% of Dem voters is roughly a quarter and not so much “close to one-third” of those voters. And the Williamson 6-8% part of that is important, as compared to maybe 1% in 2020 - America isn’t belatedly falling in love with her, rather it’s Dems who don’t want more warmongering Old Joe, can’t accept anti-vaxxer loon Bobby, and have no one else to turn to. If Bernie got in the race her support would shrink like George Costanza jumping into an ice-cold lake, and it likely would also nuke Bobby’s chances of winning.

So Glenn’s main angle on that intro was the Big Pharma regulatory capture part, which is and has been part of left ideology for a long time, the regulatory capture most notably back to Reagan in the ‘80s; I’m not sure when the overstated Big Pharma boogeymanning started on the left. That’s mostly all fine, but what isn’t is the uncritical and unselective way that he promotes what RFK actually said, in its entirety. I guess the details don’t matter if you’re taking shots at something problematic?

I’m not going to get back into all the various slippery and false facts fire-hosed at Joe and his audience by RFK in that interview, but I do want to mention some interesting moments, including this one, when after talking about vaccines and chronic diseases for about the first 90 minutes (and Rogan does at least start to subtly probe at some of the stuff RFK claims after the first hour) they stop to verbally hug it out. Here’s part of RFK’s embrace of Rogan the truther, and then another angle on that related to someone he specifically mentions:

Btw, the position that Weinstein takes there about social-outcasting of people who say unacceptable things is the same position that fellow IDW Jew Sam Harris has taken on Holocaust denial; Weinstein, on the other hand, has said that the criminalization of denial speech is understandable given the nature of that personally-horrific event. The equivalent would be, say, Cornel West saying that anyone who differs from the general simplistic Uncle Tom’s Cabin view of slavery and the Civil War as the War to Free the Slaves could reasonably be subjected to jail time. And how about in a few years somebody who says transsexuality isn’t completely normal? Lock ‘em up!

I think the juxtaposition of these two videos kind of says it all, especially what RFK says about Rogan and how history will or should see him in this totalitarian era - when he has been and is in fact a frontman for the class of totalitarians, a modest-level Truther who will never get anywhere near the actual truth.

And let’s also remember that he was the most prominent figure to give supportive voice to Renee DiResta and her already-busted Russiagating lies back in 2019. Her 15 minutes of infamy finally came after she had arisen as a key character in the Twitter Files saga, when Matt Taibbi called her “the Zelig of disinformation” in front of his relatively-microscopic audience earlier this year.

When all is said and done, I hope Rogan, in some small way at least, has to pay for his ongoing crime against American society. But that’s just me. Instead, when it truly all goes to shit he can just move to some desert island in the south Pacific with his multi-millions and boat-drink away his retirement years.

But RFK praises him and the Weinsteins in the same breath. Why? I assume mostly because little brother Brett has been a voice against government narratives and actions during the pandemic and on the covid vaccines (I simply can’t listen to Eric, so I don’t know what he was saying). I guess it’s okay to play a part in burning the house down if you also save some of the fine china…

One of the better moments for RFK in his pursuit of the Dem nomination was the discussion on wifi radiation, which was something Rogan knew nothing about, and so sort of freaked out. That gave RFK some credibility, and particularly with people on the left who are kind of freaked out by everything in our technological world today and would like to be able to move out into the woods somewhere and live the holistic organic life, at least in their fantasies. There was also a similarly-useful conversation on vitamins and nutrition later on.

Another interesting exchange happened on the Spanish flu epidemic, nearly two hours into the podcast, while he was playing down the threat to life of measles:

Just as a comparison, here is the wiki on the Spanish flu:

The 1918 flu pandemic, also known as the Great Influenza epidemic or by the common misnomer of the Spanish flu, was an exceptionally deadly global influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus. The earliest documented case was March 1918 in Kansas, United States, with further cases recorded in France, Germany and the United Kingdom in April. Two years later, nearly a third of the global population, or an estimated 500 million people, had been infected in four successive waves. Estimates of deaths range from 17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in history.

Most influenza outbreaks disproportionately kill the young and old, with a higher survival rate in-between, but this pandemic had unusually high mortality for young adults. Scientists offer several explanations for the high mortality, including a six-year climate anomaly affecting migration of disease vectors with increased likelihood of spread through bodies of water. The virus was particularly deadly because it triggered a cytokine storm, ravaging the stronger immune system of young adults, although the viral infection was apparently no more aggressive than previous influenza strains. Malnourishment, overcrowded medical camps and hospitals, and poor hygiene, exacerbated by the war, promoted bacterial superinfection, killing most of the victims after a typically prolonged death bed.

The 1918 Spanish flu was the first of three flu pandemics caused by H1N1 influenza A virus; the most recent one was the 2009 swine flu pandemic. The 1977 Russian flu was also caused by H1N1 virus.

The wiki goes on to say one of the theories of origin is in the US:

The first confirmed cases originated in the United States. Historian Alfred W. Crosby stated in 2003 that the flu originated in Kansas, and author John M. Barry described a January 1918 outbreak in Haskell County, Kansas, as the point of origin in his 2004 article. A 2018 study of tissue slides and medical reports led by evolutionary biology professor Michael Worobey found evidence against the disease originating from Kansas, as those cases were milder and had fewer deaths compared to the infections in New York City in the same period. The study did find evidence through phylogenetic analyses that the virus likely had a North American origin, though it was not conclusive. In addition, the haemagglutinin glycoproteins of the virus suggest that it originated long before 1918, and other studies suggest that the reassortment of the H1N1 virus likely occurred in or around 1915.

Another interesting part of the wiki, especially in light of covid actions, is on public health management:

While systems for alerting public health authorities of infectious spread did exist in 1918, they did not generally include influenza, leading to a delayed response. Nevertheless, actions were taken. Maritime quarantines were declared on islands such as Iceland, Australia, and American Samoa, saving many lives. Social distancing measures were introduced, for example closing schools, theatres, and places of worship, limiting public transportation, and banning mass gatherings. Wearing face masks became common in some places, such as Japan, though there were debates over their efficacy. There was also some resistance to their use, as exemplified by the Anti-Mask League of San Francisco. Vaccines were also developed, but as these were based on bacteria and not the actual virus, they could only help with secondary infections. The actual enforcement of various restrictions varied. To a large extent, the New York City health commissioner ordered businesses to open and close on staggered shifts to avoid overcrowding on the subways. A later study found that measures such as banning mass gatherings and requiring the wearing of face masks could cut the death rate up to 50 percent, but this was dependent on their being imposed early in the outbreak and not being lifted prematurely.

Here is a Reuters factcheck on the mask and Fauci parts of this: Fact check: Fauci study did not attribute 1918 Spanish flu deaths to bacterial pneumonia caused by masks

So RFK goes from saying it wasn’t a virus and that a vaccine may have been the cause, to it wasn’t the flu that killed people but rather a bacterial infection (which agrees with that wiki and article, but as a consequence of the flu virus), and then he says masks may have been the cause of those infections. He says he’s not really clear on all this, trying to back out of it, but you can see his instincts very clearly, including the lack of clarity at minimum on the viral cause, the problem with vaccines, the problem with masks, the dragging in of Fauci. It’s like superimposing the covid story on the Spanish flu, with all its inherent villainy, which in turn self-reinforces the story on covid - it’s the same playbook, except that it actually IS the same playbook, which is essentially RFK’s narrative.

Toward the end of the podcast it just reverts to RFK’s boilerplate campaign outline and speech. It’s not really an interview per se, it’s just a Rogan-created opportunity for RFK to explain himself in long-form depth - as long as he spends most of that time on the vaccine things, that is. The one thing that caught my ear very late was his use of the term “banksters”, which made me think of the Corbett-world neo-Birchers who surely are part of his CHD influencers, including on his book.

So let’s move on to the Tucker take on this interview. Here is just a moment that jumped out at me, where Tucker mentions RFK’s 2005 article on vaccines and autism titled Deadly Immunity:

What jumped out at me was that I had previously looked into this, and Salon at least didn’t withdraw the article until 2011, after having made, along with Rolling Stone, a series of corrections to the piece shortly after publishing it, which RFK is now blaming on the editors at the publishers. I saw Salon’s explanation of all this, and here is part of what the LA Times said about it in 2011:

Salon on Jan. 16 announced it was removing the story from its website. In explaining of the decision, Kerry Lauerman, Salon’s editor-in-chief, noted that shortly after the story ran it was amended to correct several errors of fact “that went far to undermine Kennedy’s expose.” Salon decided to keep the article posted, duly corrected, “in the spirit of transparency,” Lauerman added.

(Among the corrections was this one: “The article also misstated the level of ethylmercury received by infants injected with all their shots by the age of six months. It was 187 micrograms -- an amount 40 percent, not 187 times, greater than the EPA’s limit for daily exposure to methylmercury.”)

The decision to take the story down altogether came as further criticism mounted over the years.

Here is what Salon itself published then (2011); to be completely thorough on this, I will include everything they subsequently updated 11 years after that in January 2022 at the end of my article:

In 2005, Salon published online an exclusive story by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that offered an explosive premise: that the mercury-based thimerosal compound present in vaccines until 2001 was dangerous, and that he was "convinced that the link between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real."

The piece was co-published with Rolling Stone magazine — they fact-checked it and published it in print; we posted it online. In the days after running "Deadly Immunity," we amended the story with five corrections (which can still be found logged here) that went far in undermining Kennedy's exposé. At the time, we felt that correcting the piece — and keeping it on the site, in the spirit of transparency — was the best way to operate. But subsequent critics, including most recently, Seth Mnookin in his book "The Panic Virus," further eroded any faith we had in the story's value. We've grown to believe the best reader service is to delete the piece entirely.

"I regret we didn't move on this more quickly, as evidence continued to emerge debunking the vaccines and autism link," says former Salon editor in chief Joan Walsh, now editor at large. "But continued revelations of the flaws and even fraud tainting the science behind the connection make taking down the story the right thing to do." The story's original URL now links to our autism topics page, which we believe now offers a strong record of clear thinking and skeptical coverage we're proud of — including the critical pursuit of others who continue to propagate the debunked, and dangerous, autism-vaccine link.

What is clear is that Carlson’s claims are dubious at best and flat-out lies at worst: he says, “…and both publications swiftly caved, both pulled the story and disavowed it”, but is pulling down the story six years later swiftly caving? Is correcting errors in it swiftly caving, especially considering RFK now says they were the publications’ errors? Note that their 2011 statement on those errors was, “we amended the story with five corrections that went far in undermining Kennedy's exposé”, assumedly meaning the corrections weakened his claims in his writing of it, which seems reasonably clear if you read all of the corrections. They don’t all seem massively material to me, but I guess one can’t know for sure without reading the piece.

In any case, Tucker is spinning like a whirling dervish, SOP. Here Carlson gets to the Rogan interview, where the spinning goes into overdrive:

Now, I find the hypothetical particularly interesting in its misrepresentation and misapplication. What makes so much of RFK’s stories compelling is that in fact we DON’T see those things like that passenger sees the smoke. I mean, I don’t see a generation of crippling chronic disease when I go out and walk through the world, and I certainly don’t see an epidemic of autism.

Among other things, what Carlson doesn’t ask are the specifics of those Kennedy children allergies and how serious they are - it’s one thing if you’ve blown up like a balloon and could die after being in some form of close contact with something like ingesting it, it’s another if it’s been a rather minor irritant that might have gone undiagnosed 30, 40, 50 years ago. You need all the information.

The source I looked at (AAFA) says, “In 2021, 7.6% of non-Hispanic Black children had food allergies, compared to 5.5% of non-Hispanic white children.” So if 70% of his kids have food allergies there’s something specific at play in that family (which I guess just could be very bad luck). But I would bet he kinda knows what that is, surely he’s gotten good medical advice, it’s not a complete mystery.

That source also says food allergies have increased over the last 20 years, which it doesn’t quantify. If you read this BBC article on that increase (it says 3% of people in 1960 to 7% today according to one source, so over 60 years), you will see it’s also a very complicated matter - and so something that can be exploited by citing selective statistics, an RFK habit: Why food allergies are on the rise

Btw, the CDC stats say 11.6% of black children have asthma, not 25% - maybe Bob failed basic math in school like Glenn. But hell, one out of four sounds a lot more ominous than one out of nine.

Anyway, back to the hypothetical. At least as accurate would be you sitting quietly and contentedly on that plane and then suddenly saw RFK stand up and scream, “the cabin is full of smoke, and it’s been happening since 1989!”, and then you saw Rogan stand up and say, “yeah, I think maybe you’re right!” You still don’t see any smoke, but you start imagining that you do.

I remember when I was a kid in elementary school in the ‘60s and it was a small school, K thru 6 with about 30 kids in each class/grade. The school also had a special education class that wasn’t as large, but it was more than just a handful of kids. We didn’t have much contact with those kids, and I can only remember one kid who I think came out of that and joined the rest. But they comprised perhaps close to 10% of the school. In the RFK story that would be much greater today - 20%, 30%, maybe more. That seems improbable, and certainly noticeable.

The story that Tucker tells is about the kind of changes people talk about, and if they are actually happening then people are talking about them, and I mean a LOT. And yet one can move through life without noticing that?

If smoke is filling a cabin, everyone is going to be screaming about that, trust me. Why did it take covid for RFK to gain much traction at all if this stuff is so clear and obvious? When I go to the grocery store I don’t see kids in special helmets knocking cans off the shelves with their heads, if I’ve ever seen that it was many years ago and I’ve forgotten. So why not? Am I just not observant? Maybe.

What I think is interesting is applying this story to what has with certainty been going on and that is quite obvious - all the detrimental stuff that has been happening in this century that people do talk about, if perhaps not enough: the endless wars, Wall St. and the Great Recession, the fomented social conflicts and wokeism, the billionaire oligarchs and giant business monopolies, the battle over speech and truth, the level of rejection of Clinton/Bush for Trump/Sanders in 2016, the inexplicable change to the Democratic Party in particular, inflation and more bank bailouts, on and on. Everyone knows this stuff is happening and they acknowledge it, but what they don’t know is why it’s happening.

“That sounds like a fever dream, but it’s also pretty close to the experience of living in the United States at the moment. All around you things seem to be fraying and getting worse, your gut tells you there’s something very bad going on. All the evidence suggests there is. But the people in charge won’t acknowledge that. ‘Everything’s fine,’ they scream, ‘stop noticing!’”

Yes indeed. So who’s in charge? They can’t stop you from noticing the smoke, but you’ve been trained from childhood to avoid at all costs looking in the right place for the answer - “Is it coming from the bathrooms? How about the overhead luggage bins?”, while out on the wings the engines are in flames.

Even the supposedly independent-minded who habitually watch Rogan get remedial training from people like Eric Weinstein, with Rogan happily providing the venue and raking in the profits. You have been trained almost from birth that smoke doesn’t exist, and if you think you see it that means you are a very bad person. In some countries seeing that smoke and asking about it can land you in prison (which Tucker actually included in his story, the TSA arresting the passenger when they land).

So if not seeing the smoke means dying in a plane crash, so be it - can I have another drink please? That’s America today.

I also found it amusing that Tucker mentioned something about Russian conspiracy theory, given that RFK Jr failed to reject those falsified theories until a few weeks ago. I guess he doesn’t notice everything…

The interesting angle to Carlson as the public face of the Trump crowd pimping RFK is that, in my view, he’s potentially cutting off his nose to spite his face - as I said, if RFK gets nominated and runs against Trump, he’ll likely win. So it’s a delicate game Tucker is playing.

What am I saying? - the only person Tucker the Fucker wants to win is Tucker, he certainly could flip with the socio-political winds to support a nominated RFK in 2024 and beyond. What I’m sure he doesn’t want, getting back to the Progressive-Libertarian Alliance, is four more years of Biden and his almost-inevitable Veeplacement, and pushing RFK now hurts Biden. That will be a theme in the GOP right media, just as pushing Trump seemed like a good strategy in the left media in 2016. Pump the nutter.

But of course that kind of thinking also applies to Joe and Glenn. There certainly is some kind of political preference playing in all of them, but that can be more complicated than one thinks. And if you don’t consider the fame and fortune angle to any professional alt talking head, you need to start over from scratch.

So let’s get back to the station and the hype train. A threshold has been crossed here, it is no longer a sign of hidden nutterism for someone in the mainstream to engage seriously on anti-vaxxism. And to do so essentially uncritically, which is what I find both interesting and frustrating. What has enabled that of course is the pandemic experience, built on top of the Trump era experience - if the pandemic hit in 2015 instead of 2020 we would be living in a very different world today, because an Obama administration handling both the year one lockdown and year two rollout phases would have been taken very differently. And I’m not saying he would have done it brilliantly differently in any way, I’m just saying it wouldn’t have been nearly as politicized on both sides, and the country wouldn’t have been as pre-wired to spin out of control as it was by 2020.

But RFK has benefitted hugely from that, first writing The Book that radicalized the pandemic story in an audience ready for that while building the foundation for the anti-vaxx transition, then jumping into the presidential race with a freshly-minted set of issues (the war, censorship, etc.) and intentions not initially including vaccines, but now having quickly surfaced the vaccine thing as really the core matter (while still denying that). I mean, in three hours did they ever really talk about anything else? Only at the end. He also added a vaxx-related first-day-in-office item (banning drug adverts) for the first time, to my knowledge.

He’s also dead right about end-running the filterers by using the podcasters, it is now a legit strategy. He is a pretty smart guy, even as he may be rather naive as well, at least outside his element.

But we’re already at the point that the time for any kind of thoughtful analysis about this issue and candidate related to that is in the past. The train is fired up, the seats are now filled, it’s pulling out of the station, and the only question is: are you on board or not?

But it won’t necessarily make to the end of the line, at least not if that’s the shining city on the hill, mixed-metaphoring using a Reaganism. Because his story IS very vulnerable, and it CAN be attacked if that is done thoughtfully and rationally, and not emotionally, which is the way that Trump was/is always attacked. That was one of my reactions to that NBC interview article I discussed in my last piece, as much of a mass media hit piece as it was, it wasn’t all just trash.

Even if he does win, don’t expect that the smoke-filled plane will clear out and land safely. Because his whole candidacy is about the Great Distraction of the pandemic that it’s built upon, and its success will be completely attributable to the very thing Tucker described, the inability to comprehend what is actually happening. Incomprehensibly caught in a storm at sea, the electorate will steer toward any port they see. As the famous - and bizarrely cynical - line from the (Jewish) film The American President went, they don’t drink the sand because they’re thirsty, they drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.

And in this case it’s not just the voters, it’s the candidate himself. He’s the guy on that plane who sees the smoke, but has absolutely no idea what it is - other than a golden opportunity to sue the airline, drive Boeing out of business, and fire everyone at the FAA, that is.

Here are Salon’s corrections/updates to their Deadly Immunity article retraction I mentioned earlier:

UPDATE: January 31, 2022

In the interest of transparency and preserving the historical record, Salon's editors have decided to reproduce here the five corrections originally appended to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s 2005 article, which remained archived on a separate page after the article was removed. At some point in Salon's history, that original corrections page was lost in a site upgrade or redesign, breaking the link Kerry Lauerman included above. The contents of that page, however, were captured by the Internet Archive. A retrieval today — you can find it here on the Wayback Machine — shows the following corrections, documented as they were appended, in ascending order. (We have also fixed previously broken links to Salon's interview with Seth Mnookin and the site's autism topics page.) — Erin Keane, Editor in Chief

Corrections:

The story "Deadly Immunity" has been updated to correct inaccuracies in the original version. As originally reported, American preschoolers received only three vaccinations before 1989, but the article failed to note that they were innoculated a total of 11 times with those vaccines, including boosters. The article also misstated the level of ethylmercury received by infants injected with all their shots by the age of six months. It was 187 micrograms -- an amount 40 percent, not 187 times, greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury. Finally, because of an editing error, the article misstated the contents of the rotavirus vaccine approved by the CDC. It did not contain thimerosal. The story has been corrected. Salon and Rolling Stone regret the errors. [Correction made 6/17/05]

An earlier version of "Deadly Immunity" stated that the Institute of Medicine convened a second panel to review the work of the Immunization Safety Review Committee that had found no evidence of a link between thimerosal and autism. In fact, the IOM convened the second panel to address continuing concerns about the Vaccine Safety Datalink data-sharing program, including those raised by critics of the IOM's earlier work. But the panel was not charged with reviewing the committee's findings. Salon and Rolling Stone regret the error. [Correction made 6/22/05]

An earlier version of "Deadly Immunity" inadvertently dropped a word and transposed two sentences in a quote by Dr. John Clements. It also incorrectly stated that Dr. Sam Katz held a patent with Merck on the measles vaccine. In fact, Dr. Katz was part of a team that developed the vaccine and brought it to licensure, but he never held the patent. The story has been corrected. Salon and Rolling Stone regret the errors. [Correction made 6/24/05]

After publication of the June 16 story "Deadly Immunity," Salon and Rolling Stone corrected an error that misstated the level of ethylmercury received by infants injected with all their shots by the age of six months. It was 187 micrograms -- an amount forty percent, not 187 times, greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury. At the time of the correction, we were aware that the comparison itself was flawed, but as journalists we considered it more appropriate to state the correct figure rather than replace it with another number entirely.

Since that earlier correction, however, it has become clear from responses to the article that the forty-percent number, while accurate, is misleading. It measures the total mercury load an infant received from vaccines during the first six months, calculates the daily average received based on average body weight, and then compares that number to the EPA daily limit. But infants did not receive the vaccines as a "daily average" -- they received massive doses on a single day, through multiple shots. As the story states, these single-day doses exceeded the EPA limit by as much as 99 times. Based on the misunderstanding, and to avoid further confusion, we have amended the story to eliminate the forty-percent figure. [Correction made 7/01/05]

The June 16 story "Deadly Immunity" misattributed a quote to Andy Olson, former legislative counsel to Sen. Bill Frist. The comment was made by Dean Rosen, health policy advisor to Frist. Rolling Stone and Salon regret the error. [Correction made 7/21/05]