Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Successful businessman lists the ways in which government aid propelled him to the success he has, and Trump/Republicans are attacking these benefits.
Measles cases reached a 33 year record high likely due to people not getting vaccinated. Those attacking vaccines are getting people killed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a5EibCmkrQ
“Kennedy has politicized the U.S. vaccine approval process by summarily firing all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)”
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“Typically appointed to four-year terms, Kennedy has taken the unprecedented step of prematurely sacking the entire panel. Two days later, he announced his selection of eight new members, many of whom are chiefly famous for espousing contrarian views with respect to vaccine safety and efficacy.
So what did Kennedy find wrong with the original ACIP panel? The secretary asserted that it “has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interests” stemming from members’ “immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy.” At least in his Journal op-ed, the secretary offers no evidence of any unreported or improper conflicts of interest among those he just fired. It is worth noting that the fired ACIP members were vetted before they were appointed and that they each declare any conflicts that later emerge before each of the committee’s meetings.
What about RFK Jr.’s vague claims hinting at nefarious “immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms” on the part of committee members? If your automobile keeps stalling out, you take your jalopy to a trained mechanic for diagnosis and repair. If your computer system has been hacked, you seek help from qualified computer engineers. You earnestly hope that your mechanics and computer engineers are fully immersed in their respective systems of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms—that is, you hope they are experts who know what they are doing.”
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“The HHS secretary gives his game away when he characterizes his wholesale firing as being “above any pro- or antivaccine agenda.” With respect to his new ACIP appointees, Kennedy promised that “none of these individuals will be ideological anti-vaxxers.” That’s great. After all, an anti-vaccine agenda makes as much sense as anti–automobile repair or anti–computer debugging agendas. The agendas we want are pro–making cars run, pro–computers correctly ciphering, and pro–vaccines that protect against diseases.
However, in looking over the backgrounds of the new ACIP members, several of them can be fairly characterized as being at least anti-vaxxer-adjacent.”
https://reason.com/2025/06/12/under-rfk-jr-vaccine-approval-is-getting-more-politicized-not-less/
“Anyone following the rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement can’t help but recall former First Lady Michelle Obama’s efforts to improve Americans’ diets — and the vitriol she faced in response.
Now, many of the same Republicans who skewered Michelle Obama as a “nanny state” warrior have embraced the MAHA movement.”
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” Kass said he was happy to find common ground with Kennedy and his MAHA brigade where possible. But he argued Kennedy’s HHS has done little to actually improve the health of the public so far, and was instead mostly taking steps that would do real damage, including by undermining the use of vaccines.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/06/14/michelle-obama-nutrition-adviser-maha-interview-00405018
Trump’s NIH Chief Lets Loose on Fauci, Vaccines and Covid Cover-Ups
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/05/14/jay-bhattacharya-nih-chief-vaccines-covid-interview-00345488
“Vaccine “skeptic” David Geier has reportedly been hired by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as a data analyst to oversee a new study probing the possible links between vaccinations and autism.
High-quality research and transparency are not likely outcomes from a project headed by Geier. Geier and his physician father, Mark, have published in a variety of obscure journal articles claiming that vaccines cause autism. Based on those sketchy publications, they began hiring themselves out as “expert witnesses” in hundreds of vaccine-related lawsuits. Mark Geier was stripped of his medical license by the Maryland Board of Physicians over dosing autistic children with his home-brewed treatments.
The Geiers asserted that their research had found that tiny amounts of ethyl mercury preservative (thimerosal) in some vaccines was the culprit behind the rise in autism diagnoses. Interestingly, thimerosal has never been used in the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine that has most widely been blamed for causing autism. However, excepting seasonal flu vaccines, thimerosal in the U.S. was removed from any other vaccines in 1999. Amusingly, the Geiers took note of that fact and published an article in 2006 claiming that autism rates were subsequently declining. As it happens, the rate of autism diagnoses has increased since then. Evidently tiny amounts of mercury in vaccines has nothing to do with autism.
In any case, the claim that vaccines cause autism has been comprehensively debunked.
“The problem with the Geiers’ research is that they start with the answers and work backwards,” said Dr. Steven Black, director of the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center in Oakland, California, in 2005. “They are doing voodoo science.”
By applying his methodology in his new study of the putative relationship between autism and vaccines, Geier will doubtlessly and transparently get the answers that our new secretary of Health and Human Services thinks he already knows.”
https://reason.com/2025/04/03/rfk-jr-hires-a-vaccine-skeptic-to-find-the-cause-of-autism/
Vaccines clearly saved a lot of lives; lockdowns…it’s not clear they were worth their heavy costs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l0E78e7XnI
“COVID-19 vaccines and boosters have proved to be highly effective in preventing severe cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.”
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“A September 2024 review in the journal NPJ Vaccines reports that the risk of myocarditis is about six times greater for those who are infected with COVID-19 than for those who are vaccinated. A February 2025 article in the European Heart Journal compared patients who experienced post-vaccine myocarditis to those who experienced post-COVID-19 and conventional myocarditis. The researchers found that post-vaccine myocarditis patients were less likely to be hospitalized and experienced fewer cardiovascular events.”
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“The most comprehensive analysis of the safety of COVID-19 vaccines is the cohort study of 99 million vaccinated individuals published in April 2024 in Vaccine. The researchers confirmed that the incidences of previously identified rare safety signals following COVID-19 vaccination were quite low.”
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“By March 2022, Fauci and his colleagues acknowledged “the concept of classical herd immunity may not apply to COVID-19” in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. “Living with COVID-19 is best considered not as reaching a numerical threshold of immunity, but as optimizing population protection without prohibitive restrictions on our daily lives,” they concluded. Population protection, among other things, now involves inoculations updated much like seasonal flu vaccines to boost waning antibodies and to counter emerging variants of the COVID-19 coronavirus. Ultimately, Biden’s 2021 “summer of freedom” turns out to have been a fond but illusory hope of a permanent respite from COVID-19. Given this reality, current COVID-19 vaccines are now primarily designed to prevent severe disease and death rather than infection.”
https://reason.com/2025/03/14/are-covid-19-vaccines-safe-and-effective/
A second child in Texas has died from Measles. The infections are driven by low vaccination rates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjF271JNHHQ
“Five months later, federal health officials, industry executives and the public health community say they’re more worried than ever.
Kennedy in his first seven weeks atop the Department and Health and Human Services has dramatically reshaped the U.S. health apparatus, eliminating entire agency divisions, abruptly shifting policy priorities and leaving the sprawling department in what six current and former employees described as an unprecedented state of upheaval.
The health secretary and his team forced out top scientists in charge of developing new vaccines and evaluating the safety of medicines, stripping away centuries of collective expertise and institutional knowledge. Government offices that manage key functions like ensuring safe drinking water and alerting Americans to contaminated drugs have been decimated.
In the meantime, Kennedy appointees have sought greater control over scientific decision-making in agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration — going against longstanding norms and roiling a health sector that accounts for nearly one-fifth of the U.S. economy.
“It’s a mess,” said one former senior HHS official granted anonymity to discuss internal matters. “What was once a very robust place to work, that was trying to lead on innovation, is gone. It’s just gone.”
The rapid overhaul, punctuated by last week’s mass firing of 10,000 employees, has left the HHS workforce traumatized and the broader health community in deep distress, according to interviews with nine current and former health officials, as well as five other public health experts and industry officials, most of whom were granted anonymity for fear of retribution.”
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““They got rid of all the people who made the place work,” said one health official. “It doesn’t seem to be achieving their aims. Unless their aim was just to cause chaos and torpedo morale.””
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/09/rfk-revamp-health-hhs-00280101