It’ll Only Hurt For a Little While

 

from Sandy McReynolds 

Our fine HHS Secretary RFK Jr. (from a post on quora.com):

Why did RFK Jr, say “The only vaccine that has been tested in a full-blown placebo trial against an inert placebo was the Covid vaccine,” when a review of the literature by Dr. Jake Scott revealed 258 times it has been done?

It’s true that Kennedy stated:

The only vaccine that has been tested in a full-blown placebo trial against an inert placebo was the Covid vaccine.

The more important part of Kennedy’s statement is what he said next:

The other 76 shots that children in this country received between birth and 18 years old, none of them have been safety tested in prelicensing studies against the placebo, which means we don’t understand the risk profile for those product.

Kennedy is echoing a closely parallel statement that he made two years previously:

Vaccines are exempt from prelicensing placebo-controlled trials, so that there’s no way that anybody can tell the risk profile of those products or even the relative benefits of those products before they’re mandated.

Of course, saying “Kennedy is wrong” is, at this point, close to redundant.

Kennedy’s claim that children in the U.S. receive 77 shots between birth and 18 years old is wildly inaccurate. The CDC only recommends 16 vaccinations for children in this age group. And, of course, many parents, influenced by Kennedy’s “vaccine skepticism,” are not giving their children all of these vaccines.

More to the point, after hearing Kennedy’s 2023 statement, Dr. Jake Scott, a renowned vaccine specialist at Stanford University, knew the statement was false. He then spent months combing through research studies and the professional literature to determine that 9 of those 16 recommended vaccinations have, in fact, been tested against inert placebos, and 5 of the remaining 7 vaccines have been tested against active placebos.

Scott described Kennedy’s claims as “demonstrably false.”

Scott also pointed to the massive polio vaccine trials in 1954, where 400,000 grade-school were vaccinated, half with the polio vaccine and half with an inert placebo (saline solution). The results of the tests were announced on April 12, 1955, and the results demonstrated that the polio vaccine was at least 90% effective in preventing paralytic polio.

That test was conducted more than 70 years ago, and the results have been a matter of public record since the day Kennedy was born. Dr. Scott’s response was blunt:

It’s frankly astounding that someone who made such easily disprovable claims is now heading HHS and continues to promote similar misinformation. We compiled this evidence specifically to counter these false narratives with hard data.

Sandy