Reason Magazine’s Unreasonable Character Assassination of Robert Kennedy Jr.
Richard Gale and Gary Null PhD
Progressive Radio Network, August 6, 2023
Today, the largest purveyor of misinformation and fabricated propaganda is the US government, think tanks, compromised NGOs, social media and the mainstream corporate media. Behind this web and its false narratives is a network of powerful special interest groups who fund script writers and journalists, traitors to their profession, in order to promulgate their message. This certainly seems to be the case of a hit piece targeting Robert Kennedy Jr recently printed in the Libertarian publication Reason. Liz Wolfe’s smear job is only one among many efforts to criticize and delegitimize Kennedy as a viable presidential candidate and to associate him with conspiracy theories. The rise in Kennedy’s popularity in the polls clearly shows he represents a very real challenge to the status quo in Washington. As the campaign season proceeds, we can expect to see many more such sullied articles, and they will increase in direct proportion to the threats Kennedy poses to those in power.
For many, Kennedy’s appearance in the presidential race is a breath of fresh air for voters across the political spectrum. He represents those higher ideals of his father and his uncle JFK. Traditional Democrats despair at the party’s lack of substance. This segment are older, more independent yet cling to the party out of loyalty while simultaneously being fed up with the Clinton Wall Street New Democrats and their duplicity, lack of traditional liberal ideals and its growing legacy of deceit and dishonesty. This arrives at a time when a July Gallup poll found Americans’ faith in our political institutions at an historical low, with public confidence in the presidency at 26 percent and Congress at 8 percent. The television news and prejudiced print media, which Wolfe represents, are equally at dismal lows of 14 percent and 18 percent respectively. Therefore it is understandable that Kennedy would worry the ideologues in Washington because they are at loggerheads over what might happen to their control over national policy if he were elected. What they can be certain of is that Kennedy will not be as compliant and manageable as Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama and Biden.
We therefore offer a simple rebuttal to this so-called journalist and challenge Reason‘s editorial board for their serious negligence in properly vetting a cheap screed that is demonstrably false. If popular internet personalities such as Jimmy Dore, with no medical background whatsoever, are capable of identifying Wolfe’s distortions and untruths, her article should rightly tarnish the journal’s credibility and call its motivation into question.
Wolfe’s Reason article purports to be an objective critique based upon scientific evidence, especially regarding vaccines and infectious disease. Instead, she fails to support any of her maligned accusations with reliable evidence. For a person who writes about sex workers, tattoo parlors, cancel culture, the tech industry and free speech, in our opinion her essay displays all the features of the intellectually-challenged and an incapacity to tackle complex subjects that are beyond her technical comprehension; but that is no surprise – it is characteristic of today’s dominant culture of journalism. This is the kind of journalism one might expect from politically motivated tabloids such as the Daily Beast, which has a propensity to commission any nickel and dime journalist to knock off op eds solely for the purpose of discoloring truth and facts.
Because Wolfe’s personal opinions are so disproportionally misinformed, her rhetoric is thoroughly derogatory bordering on libel. Kennedy on many occasions since announcing his presidential candidacy has been challenged about his stance on vaccine safety. Repeatedly he has retold the story about filing a complaint in the US Southern District of New York Court against the Department of Health and Human Services for its failure to provide a single documented example for any vaccine on the CDC’s children’s vaccination schedule showing that it has been properly tested against a placebo like all pharmaceutical drugs before licensure. By HHS’s own admission, Kennedy stated, no such clinical trial exists. The court document states:
“The [Department]’s searchers for records did not locate any records responsive to your request. The Department of Health and Human Services Immediate Office of the Secretary conducted a thorough search of its document tracking systems…. Also conducted a comprehensive review of all the relevant indexes… of records maintained at Federal Records Centers…”
Except for those mentally handicapped, what other proof is necessary? The federal agency’s attempts to explain away the rationale for the absence of placebo controlled studies in pre-licensure vaccine clinical trials violates all scientific standards of efficacy and safety. Here we enter the twilight zone of corporate science and encounter perhaps one of the most ludicrous declarations in the history of modern medicine. The HHS responds,
“Inert placebo controls are not required to understand the safety profile of a new vaccine and are thus not required. In some cases, inclusion of placebo control groups is considered unethical. Even in the absence of a placebo, control groups can be useful for evaluating whether the incidence of a specific observed adverse event exceeds that which would be expected without administration of the new vaccine.”
This is voodoo medicine and magical thinking; however, these are not the words of witchdoctors but rather our senior government health officials responsible for the public safety of children’s health and well-being.
Besides there is a voluminous body of peer-reviewed scientific papers showing a strong causal relationship between toxic vaccine ingredients and the rise in childhood neurological disorders. Biology professor Brian Hooker, and a father of a vaccine-injured autistic son, recently published one of the few thorough studies to date comparing the health status between vaccinated and unvaccinated children. Hooker’s and his colleague Dr. Neil Miller’s results reported a statistically significant higher incidence of lower mental development, inflammatory gastrointestinal disorders (as Andrew Wakefield’s Lancet study reported), asthma and ear infections among those vaccinated. Wolfe’s argument that the high rate of delayed mental conditions, such as autism or ADHD, is simply a consequence of undiagnosed cases is at its core disingenuous. It is also stupid. Preparing for this rebuttal to put Wolfe’s wildly opinionated jeremiad into context, we have been unable to find a single robust study in the National Library of Medicine that even suggests Wolfe’s claim might be reasonable. Moreover, Kennedy has never placed all of the blame for the rise in autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders on vaccines. As a seasoned environmental attorney for several decades, he is knowledgeable about other environmental toxins found in common everyday household products that contribute to neurodevelopmental delays. Wolfe could have at least conducted a very simple internet search to discover exposure to methylmercury, PCBs, brominated flame retardants, endocrine disruptors, organic pesticides, etc. among the top ten environmental contributors to autism and learning disabilities. A recent study from Hebrew University in Jerusalem has reconfirmed earlier evidence that fetal phthalates in “everywhere plastic” interfere with emotional and behavioral developmental issues in 2 year old boys.
Taking a side smack at Dr. Andrew Wakefield, Wolfe has evidently fallen into the same rabbit hole as every other pro-vaccination ideologue before her to accuse the British gastroenterological specialist as the father of the anti-vaccination movement. However, what Wakefield’s retracted Lancet paper concludes makes no reference to the MMR vaccine as a cause for autism. The paper states,
“We have identified a chronic enterocolitis in children that may be related to neuropsychiatric dysfunction. In most cases, onset of symptoms was after measles, mumps, and rubella immunization. Further investigations are needed to examine this syndrome and it’s possible relation to this vaccine.”
Wakefield solely reported an association between vaccine-induced enterocolitis and neuropsychiatric dysfunction. Nor did the study make any reference to the MMR as a possible causal agent for autism. Since the Wakefield incident, later independent research has confirmed his original reporting to have been accurate.
In her accusatory potshot at Kennedy and Wakefield as the culprits who ”stoke” anti-vaccination frenzy, we can observe the utter sloppiness in her research. Remarking on the 2015 and 2019 measles outbreaks as a result of a decline in vaccination compliance, Wolfe’s sole reference is an article published in 2010, five years before the events she reports. Furthermore, the notion of the MMR’s success in eradicating mumps has no merit whatsoever. Mumps outbreaks most often occur among the mostly heavily vaccinated populations. This is not speculation; it was the conclusion of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation. Moreover, in 2014, a Pennsylvania court ruled that two Merck virologists’ lawsuit against the MMR manufacturer would go to trial. The scientists’ charges are that Merck’s claims of its mumps vaccine’s effectiveness is knowingly false and was part of Merck’s business strategy to deceive health authorities for financial advantage in order to monopolize the market. At that time, Merck’s mumps vaccine earned the company $621 million. The case has now expanded into antitrust litigation against the vaccine maker for misleading the public.
Wolfe’s attempt to debunk Kennedy’s comments about the rise of polio cases in relation to the vaccine is again poorly researched. First, the World Health Organization claims about a 99 percent decline in global polio cases has been held suspect by many. We might remind ourselves that this is an organization that has been repeatedly wrong about many of its pandemic predictions and preventative policies including the H1N1 swine flu, Zika virus and Ebola pandemic scares, none that could even be ruled as serious epidemics. Although the polio vaccine has been discontinued in developed nations, due to the adverse risk of “polio-like paralysis” or acute flaccid paralysis (AFP), it is still administered in poorer developed nations for one sole purpose: it is easier to manufacture and more cost effective. AFP continues to affect polio vaccinated populations in the thousands. One of the most nefarious vaccination boondoggles launched by Bill Gates occurred in rural India in 2011. Within a year following a massive vaccination campaign, with an increased dosage of the polio virus due to its failure to generate an adequate immune response, there were over 53,500 reported case of non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP), which is clinically indistinguishable from wild polio paralysis yet far more fatal. The Indian health authorities’ investigation was published in the April-June 2012 issue of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics and a legal suit was filed against Gates. Unsurprising, despite the evidence to the contrary, Bill Gates and the WHO announced India was a polio-free nation in 2014, another sleight of hand performance of vaccine voodoo. A later study reported that there have been 490,000 cases of polio-like paralysis in India between 2000-2017. In his article assessing the polio vaccine’s history and efficacy appearing in the journal Medical Veritas, Dr. Neil Miller recounts various incidences of polio outbreaks due to river and sewage contamination. Most poignant was a Japanese discovery of a new infectious polio strain found in Tokyo’s waterways. After genetic sequencing, the novel mutation was traced back to the polio vaccine.
If Bobby Kennedy is correct, and all of our federal health agencies are wrong, then millions of young children’s lives are at risk. Oddly for a new mother, whose child now faces the CDC’s childhood vaccination schedule, Wolfe seems unwilling to critically evaluate the potential risks that Kennedy has been warning about for two decades. Seemingly Wolfe is far more concerned with political virtue signaling in order to pull the rug over the eyes of Reason’s predominant Libertarian readership and to revile Kennedy on a host of topics she vagrantly takes out of context.
Yet overall, we believe Wolfe’s article is so shoddy it would unlikely pass for a poor senior high school research paper. Her level of shock journalism could be mistaken for the berating diatribes of Rachel Maddow, Sean Hannity, Mehdi Hasan or Joy Reed. This is tabloid fiction at its finest. Reason’s senior editors should also be held to account for their failure to fact check and conduct due diligence on Wolfe’s sophomoric effort. Their publication has been discredited and people should avoid it at all costs. If Wolfe’s essay is any indication of the quality of Reason’s contents, there is nothing to be gained by giving it further attention. One measure that determines the integrity of a journalist who specializes in character assassination is to invite them to a public forum for a debate. However, at no time during my 50 years as a national broadcast host has a journalist I have confronted on any health issue accepted the challenge. Kennedy likely would not be learned enough to debate Wolfe about the merits of tattoos; but we am certain she would never accept the opportunity to back up her disparaging remarks and her shameless medical ignorance to debate Kennedy publicly.
