The message arrived in my DM’s on Twitter earlier today. Have you seen this, followed by a link? It was from a close friend who is active in a community that polices medical fraud and misinformation, calling out con artists and exposing scammers. I’m used to most of the rubbish I find when I follow these links, but this one shocked me.
The link led to a new website, set up by Robert F Kennedy Jnr (RFKJ), and featured a new film they’ve just finished shooting. The site and film is laughably entitled Medical Racism, the New Apartheid. To save you the effort of registering, you can watch the video here. Sadly, despite all their apparent production skills, the video format doesn’t support playback on an iPhone.
The website compares racism in medicine to new apartheid and features a poorly produced hour-long expose on mostly, you guessed it, vaccines. No surprise, if you know RFKJ. He lives to discredit vaccines and the majority of his social media posts, marketing, and appearances are driven by this agenda. He has, during the course of his crusade, befriended anyone he feels can further his cause, quite literally anyone.
It would appear that he has now run out of compatriots and has instead tried to co-opt, in one fell swoop, every single African American. In fact, he’s extended his reach now to incorporate every single person in possession of black, brown, or dark skin. It is the most outrageous act of appropriation by a white person in living memory, and deserves an award, if only for the sheer audacity and bare-faced cheek of it.
Many will see through this movie and be able to identify the agenda and the appropriation. For those of you who cannot, perhaps because the video strikes a chord, plays to your anger, or reminds you of your own situation. this post will explain why Robert F Kennedy Jnr is as toxic to African Americans as he is to healthcare.
Apartheid
Let’s start here as the name of the site and the video scream it out. Medical racism, the new apartheid. Appropriating the term ‘apartheid’ for his latest pet project shows that neither RFKJ nor his Muslim, White, and token African American producers truly understand what they are dealing with.
Apartheid was a term used by the late Hendrik Verwoerd in the fifties and late sixties to describe a new policy of racial segregation, which his minority white government enforced in South Africa. It extended to everything. A person of color growing up in South Africa wasn’t able to attend universities, vote, climb on buses, eat in restaurants, sit on certain beaches, or enter toilets or buildings and amenities earmarked as WHITE ONLY. People of color were forcibly relocated from their homes to new areas.
There was a simple logic that sat behind Verwoerd’s policy. Unlike the American settlers that had managed to all but destroy the indigenous people they encountered on arrival, Dutch, English, and German settlers to South Africa had encountered black people in numbers so vast, they had no option other than to try and manage them. Apartheid was seen as the ultimate solution. A limitless, faceless workforce.
Outnumbered ten to one, allowing the majority (Black South Africans) access to democracy, education and other privileges seemed on the surface to be tantamount to political suicide. Apartheid was a control mechanism. Ring fence the masses and keep them under constant aggressive surveillance and subjugation. Probably up there as one of the worst ideas in history, it was doomed to failure and was eventually replaced in 1994 with democratic rule under Nelson Mandela. It is worth noting that many entrenched legacies of apartheid are still evident in South African culture.
So now, you should be clear on what apartheid is. It is a societal mechanism employed by a corrupt minority government to enslave and suppress the majority. It is and was unique to South Africa, who in their own way, overcame it in the most spectacular, peaceful reversal of power in modern history.
Apartheid was not specific to black people, although they suffered disproportionately. It targeted all non-white races in South Africa, including Asians, Indians, and others. America faces a completely different set of issues that are, for the most part, steeped in pure racism and the mistaken belief in the superiority of the white ruling caste.
African Americans and their plight
The discussion around culture-based care in medicine is nuanced and complex. It exists for various reasons, most of which are rooted in deep generational racial prejudices. It is almost irreparable as long as the individuals creating policy still hold these views, and many do. The opinions an individual espouses in public and the beliefs they hold in private are often at odds.
This racism extends from the top down and permeates care. A nurse with a dislike for Asian, African American, or Hispanic patients is less likely to pay attention to their needs and unfortunately, clusters of this racist-based care tend to converge. I’ve written about this at length here and even discussed how the data and diagnostic care systems we develop can exacerbate these racial or cultural biases. It’s a problem that needs fixing. Urgently.
We do this by continuously highlighting issues of individual care. Examples that cannot be unseen or unheard. Statistics prove the case for inequitable healthcare in America, but statistics is a poor tool in the information war. Data are impersonal and unrelatable for most. We care about people and we react to fellow human’s strife. This is how we reverse generations of racism in healthcare.
Vacccines
We do not do it by attacking vaccines and hitching our wagon to the anti-vaxxers. I am going to discuss this at length so you understand why this is a flawed and dangerous path to follow,
Vaccines work. They are incredibly effective at reducing very dangerous diseases and conditions that affect us as humans. I am going to compare them to an assault rifle for the purpose of creating an analogy. We all know the havoc one of these weapons can create in the hands of deluded individuals with agendas, and yet, in the hands of a skilled and disciplined soldier, these assault rifles serve as one of the most effective tools we have invented to ensure peace.
The solution to America’s gun problem is to simply outlaw private ownership of the weapons, not to try and ban the manufacture of assault rifles. Any tool in the wrong hands or wielded for the wrong reasons can potentially prove fatal. The same is true of vaccines. We can not build a sustainable, healthy population without the use of vaccines. Numerous problems beset this market, and I’ll address these further in the article.
First of all though, below, a few statements to kick us off, statements made in the film that I want to highlight. These are statements made that are based on partial truths and these apply directly to vaccines. I’ll post these as subheadings with a discussion below each point.
Young black children’s physiology responds badly to vaccines
This needs to be qualified. It is not true across all instances of vaccination and only occurs in some children, but at a rate that definitely warrants immediate and focused attention. To be clear, the term ‘badly’ is incorrect. The children that do react aggressively to vaccination tend to have overly active immune responses and these affect them to varying degrees.
It is widely accepted that African American children tend to exhibit a stronger immune reaction to vaccines and there is an incredibly simple solution to the emerging data on this. Reduce dosage strengths. It’s that simple.
If necessary, look to reverting to the administration of individual vaccines rather than combined vaccines. At this point it is is about restoring public confidence in the vaccine process and showing a willingness to address public concerns, which would go a long way to alleviating any future problems.
It took only a few deaths from blood clots to have the Astra Zeneca vaccine halted while data was analyzed. Our children are most certainly our most valuable and vulnerable patients and deserve as much if not more attention.
Vaccines cause autism in black children
Every child that develops autism, be they black, white, or green, has been vaccinated. It’s the age-old issue of causation and correlation. These children are also all drink milk, eat food and wear diapers. Is plastic contamination in diapers a cause of autism or possibly a diet-based ingredient? It could be. If you’re going to examine vaccines as a cause of autism, then by extension you also need to discount all the other shared exposure we subject our babies to.
Could a heightened immune response to receiving three different types of vaccine in one shot be exacerbated in African American children? I cannot discount this possibility as it has not been disproven beyond clinical doubt by research. The fact, however, that white children, Asian children, and other demographics also develop autism, would tend to indicate that if there is a problem, it isn’t down to the African American’s aggressive immune system.
This isn’t simply an open and closed debate. Wiggle room exists in both directions. plausible wiggle room and the only way to remove this permanently is by way of open, transparent, and independent clinical trials.
Vaccines trials are used to experiment on black children.
True, but they’re also used to experiment on almost every other culture, race, and age demographic. This isn’t a racist thing to be confused with the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, it simply about economics and accountability. Unethical vaccine developers will look for the markets that offer the least resistance, where regulation is lax, and where government officials and regulators can be bought off cheaply.
Every country is guilty of this to varing degrees and it is directly related to price, Poorer areas like Africa, India, Asia and South America will always attract unethical research. If these countries were occupied primarily by white skinned people, the shoe would now be on the other foot. It is not, however, every vaccine and it isn’t every developer that is guilty of these practices. It is a handful of unethical companies driven by profit and a complete disregard for human life.
Mass sterilization fears and fiction
There can be no arguing the logic of mass global sterilization. It’s a strategy that may be the only real way we have of preventing a species-wide extinction and is, therefore, a believable and tempting rabbit hole to fall into. It is however nothing more than that. Have companies experimented with sterilizing groups under the guise of vaccine research? Almost certainly. It offers the perfect cover and a few have been caught redhanded.
There is however a world of difference between a public, approved vaccine and those utilized in trials. Any ingredient designed to cause infertility would be discovered, at multiple points along the approval process and subsequently, in later quality assessments.
Many vaccines are routinely pulled from shelves and tested by independent firms and regulatory bodies. This is, however, also an issue that also needs to be firmly addressed before we become embedded in mRNA vaccines, a technology that is far more difficult and costly to monitor and check.
What else does the film touch on?
It focuses on incidents like Tuskegee, to give racial context to the discussion, and then launches straight into autism and vaccines, RFKJ’s true colors showing within minutes of the opening scenes. Really important issues within black healthcare that have far higher precedence in terms of deaths and cultural impact are glanced over, most are not addressed.
Mortality rates in black mothers, infant deaths at birth, access to proper care and health management, the societal impacts of poverty on developing children. Long-term impacts of lack of access to properly balanced nutrition, spiraling obesity, diabetes, coronary disease, and other emerging co-morbidities that are rooted in poverty and race. Poor health outcomes of a group that has not had equitable access to care. RFKJ does not deem these factors important enough to warrant addressing them.
Covid is focused on in terms of the vaccine, as you would expect from Kennedy. He doesn’t care about your skin color or the real problems that lead to the health inequalities African Americans experience. He points to higher instances of covid deaths in the black communities without properly explaining why. He cares only for promoting his anti-vaccine campaign and he is using the African American as a tool to further this agenda. It is an unethical, highly objectionable, and offensive film when viewed in its proper context and if I were to have my culture appropriated to promote such rubbish, I would be up in arms.
Kennedy is in fact contributing to the problem. It isn’t simply African Americans that experience these health disparities. They are felt to varying degrees by Asian, Hispanic, and Native American communities across America. Allowing ourselves to become sidetracked from the very real problems of systemic health inequality by focusing on deluded washed-up politicians and misguided millionaires is counterintuitive to seeking workable solutions.
We all know problems exist within healthcare. These are openly acknowledged and as the scales of racial inequality are gradually balanced in America, healthcare too will benefit. Sadly, nothing this wrong can be corrected overnight. Ask post-apartheid South Africa. Fixing things properly, to arrive at solutions that sustain all communities, irrespective of color, requires time, patience, and wisdom. Qualities that are in very short supply in Robert F Kennedy Jnr’s world.
Fundamental Vaccine Issues
There exist a number of issues surrounding vaccines that need to be addressed as a matter of urgency to restore public faith. Perhaps the most serious of these is the most insane piece of legislation ever passed relating to American Healthcare. So crazy, that it is almost impossible to image any other origin for the legislation, than the lobby groups of large pharma.
National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986
Signed into law by Ronald Regan in 1996 the NCVIA does the following. It’s purpose is to eliminate the potential financial liability of vaccine manufacturers due to vaccine injury claims to ensure a stable market supply of vaccines, and to provide cost-effective arbitration for vaccine injury claims. Under the NCVIA, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP) was created to provide a federal no-fault system for compensating vaccine-related injuries or death by establishing a claim procedure involving the United States Court of Federal Claims and special masters.
The legislation resulted in exactly what large Pharma had anticipated. A massive boom in the production and profitability of vaccines. They had just been handed a get-out-of-jail-free card by the US government, a carte balance to forge ahead, protected as they were, against any and all claims, and most importantly, this particular phrase. Accountability. None exists, to this day.
Now you while you can argue the necessity of this law until you’re blue in the face, you shall not contest the consequence. You cannot, in any world driven by good conscience, legally enforce a product on the public in a case where you’ve removed their right to legal recourse. It reeks of complicity and corruption. Denmark smells like roses,by comparison.
If you tell me I am legally required to vaccinate my child and then tell me I have no recourse against the manufacturer if things go wrong, this is a proposal no sane parent should be expected to accept. It is simple logic. The very fact you’ve had to legally enforce a “no accountability” clause is that there is likely to be accountability. If the product was flawless and posed no risk, why the need for the legislation?
It’s a little like buying a Tesla and the dealer asks you to sign a waiver. The waiver says that if the wheels fall off, the engine blows up, or if you’re suddenly transported to an alternate universe, you won’t be able to sue Tesla. If you don’t sign, you won’t get the car. Sounds a little fishy, doesn’t it.
It is beyond the pale of reason that no one has legally contested enforced vaccinations in the US-based simply on this construct. It serves as a standing indictment of the power of large pharmaceutical conglomerates and the influence they wield. While I do not question the safety of individual vaccines, I seriously question the legality of enforcing them on an already weary public, and the issues surrounding the Covid vaccines have thrust this whole discussion into the spotlight as never before.
There is absolutely no transparency with regards to research into vaccine issues and appointing the FDA or CDC to act as their own watchdogs over what are essentially internal issues, also reeks of complicity and coverup. Whether these exist or not is secondary to the argument. The problem lies in creating an atmosphere that suggests the possibility. Why even go there.
Audits and clinical trials to assess and allay vaccine based concerns should be conducted independently and overseen by auditors shileded from the sphere of influence of the FDA, CDC and large Pharma.
Give the people clear answers and ensure they are transparent. They deserve them and so do vaccines. and please don’t conflate vaccines with race-based nonsense. We are all in the same boat, together, and if we continue to bicker, no one paddles.
With thanks to Peter M Heimlich, one of the good guys.
