Reading RFK Jr so that you don’t have to

post by braces · 2024-11-22T00:59:19.583Z · LW · GW · 1 comments

Contents

  Lockdowns
  The DTP Vaccine
None
1 comment

Some people in my orbit suggested reading Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s book The Real Anthony Fauci.

Here’s my story of wading through a few pages of the book and trying to understand the basis of the claims. My takeaway: there's a lot of sloppiness here, and several times the book’s claim isn’t supported by the citation. 

Often, though, the citation is fine. The arguments are carried by shoddy science and massive leaps in causal attribution. For a lot of the anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown takes, there’s at least some study by some scientists showing really bad effects. And the scientists are real—it’s just a small sample or poor design. 

Sorting things out honestly is hard, especially with bad faith actors using sloppy language to describe highly selected but serious-sounding findings. My notes on the text follow.

Lockdowns

First, the Introduction has a section on the harms from lockdowns (p.11). I gravitated toward it because it had a lot of numbers. I’m open to the claims that lockdowns were net negative, with severe and diverse harms.

Here’s the first paragraph:

As Dr. Fauci’s policies took hold globally, 300 million humans fell into dire poverty, food insecurity, and starvation. “Globally, the impact of lockdowns on health programs, food production, and supply chains plunged millions of people into severe hunger and malnutrition,” said Alex Gutentag in Tablet Magazine. According to the Associated Press (AP), during 2020, 10,000 children died each month due to virus-linked hunger from global lockdowns. In addition, 500,000 children per month experienced wasting and stunting from malnutrition—up 6.7 million from last year’s total of 47 million—which can “permanently damage children physically and mentally, transforming individual tragedies into a generational catastrophe.” In 2020, disruptions to health and nutrition services killed 228,000 children in South Asia. Deferred medical treatments for cancers, kidney failure, and diabetes killed hundreds of thousands of people and created epidemics of cardiovascular disease and undiagnosed cancer. Unemployment shock is expected to cause 890,000 additional deaths over the next 15 years.

We’ll go sentence-by-sentence. 

As Dr. Fauci’s policies took hold globally, 300 million humans fell into dire poverty, food insecurity, and starvation. 

I couldn’t find the source for this. When I search “300 million” and lockdowns, I see it referenced when saying that 300 million people were under lockdown in the United States and (separately) China. So maybe he just means people under lockdown?

[Skipping full sentences quoted from a Tablet magazine article.] 

According to the Associated Press (AP), during 2020,10,000 children died each month due to virus-linked hunger from global lockdowns. In addition, 500,000 children per month experienced wasting and stunting from malnutrition—up 6.7 million from last year’s total of 47 million—which can “permanently damage children physically and mentally, transforming individual tragedies into a generational catastrophe.” 

The AP article and the second sentence above is based on this Lancet comment that derives the 10,000 number using predictions from a different Lancet comment (Headey et al). The predictions from Headey et al assume an 8% drop in GNI in LMICs and also that governments do nothing to prevent these issues. So it’s certainly wrong to say “died”--10,000 per month was a projection under an unrealistic counterfactual.

Also, in practice, according to Our World in Data (OWID), there doesn’t seem to have been an increase in malnutrition and I could not find any studies saying that the increase in child mortality actually happened. However, I’m not sure that we’re able to measure malnutrition well in 2020-2021, so wide confidence intervals on that one.

In 2020, disruptions to health and nutrition services killed 228,000 children in South Asia. 

The source for this is a BBC article which cites this UNICEF report. It's a shaky modeling exercise predicting a 15% increase in neonatal and an 18% increase in maternal deaths in India, for example. The same models predict that 400,000+ people would die without lockdowns. So taken literally, the cited report is saying that lockdowns saved 200,000 lives. 

Further, here’s OWID child mortality and maternal mortality in South Asia over that period. As with malnutrition, I can't see any increases (although COVID could have made measurement harder). 

Deferred medical treatments for cancers, kidney failure, and diabetes killed hundreds of thousands of people and created epidemics of cardiovascular disease and undiagnosed cancer.

The cardiovascular disease concern is in this Time article (cited in the Tablet piece), extrapolating from increased alcohol and decreased exercise and citing a few medical articles. Doctors were also saying this about cancer. For example: “The COVID-19 pandemic will result in nearly 10,000 additional deaths due to breast cancer and colorectal cancer over the next decade, according to NCI projections” and see this paper for a review. 

I couldn’t find anything quantitative on kidney failure and diabetes, although surely disruptions harmed these kinds of patients to some degree. Here’s an anecdotal report from India.

I don't think an increase has happened although it was predicted by many medical experts. Here's the age-adjusted death rate for neoplasms from CDC data. There are more careful ways to check, but this seems to rule out large impacts of deferred care.

Unemployment shock is expected to cause 890,000 additional deaths over the next 15 years.

The source for this is an economics paper using old-school macro techniques to measure the correlation between life expectancy and the unemployment rate. Hard to disprove and perhaps reasonable as a first pass, but I would bet that these numbers would be disproven by any study using person-level data to measure the impact of COVID-related layoffs on mortality. For reference, the numbers imply around 60,000 deaths per year from unemployment shock over the next 15 years. Diabetes kills 100,000 per year.

Here’s the second paragraph:

The lockdown disintegrated vital food chains, dramatically increased rates of child abuse, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, obesity, mental illness, as well as debilitating developmental delays, isolation, depression, and severe educational deficits in young children. One-third of teens and young adults reported worsening mental health during the pandemic. According to an Ohio State University study, suicide rates among children rose 50 percent. An August 11, 2021 study by Brown University found that infants born during the quarantine were short, on average, 22 IQ points as measured by Baylor scale tests. Some 93,000 Americans died of overdoses in 2020—a 30 percent rise over 2019. “Overdoses from synthetic opioids increased by 38.4 percent, and 11 percent of US adults considered suicide in June 2020. Three million children disappeared from public school systems, and ERs saw a 31 percent increase in adolescent mental health visits,” according to Gutentag. Record numbers of young children failed to reach crucial developmental milestones. Millions of hospital and nursing home patients died alone without comfort or a final goodbye from their families.

Sentence by sentence again:

The lockdown disintegrated vital food chains, dramatically increased rates of child abuse, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, obesity, mental illness, as well as debilitating developmental delays, isolation, depression, and severe educational deficits in young children. 

No source for this although some of the claims are covered below. But all seems plausible?

One-third of teens and young adults reported worsening mental health during the pandemic.

The book only cites an article about a study of 571 Appalachian Ohio teens here? But seems plausible and larger studies say the same thing.

According to an Ohio State University study, suicide rates among children rose 50 percent. 

This is…a huge effect. The text is wrong, the reference cites the CDC, not Ohio State. And the CDC study does show a 50% increase in ER visits for suicide attempts among girls age 12-17 in February to March 2021. They’re talking about the red box here, which is just a portion of the lockdown period.

Concerning, but pretty different from what’s stated in the book. I looked for a study on the impact of lockdowns on child suicides. The best one estimates an increase of 4%.

An August 11, 2021 study by Brown University found that infants born during the quarantine were short, on average, 22 IQ points as measured by Baylor scale tests.

The 22-point IQ difference should sound a little extreme on its face. This is a 1.5 ( = 22/15) standard deviation drop, which would move a median infant down to the 7th percentile. 

Here’s the paper, on 700 infants in Rhode Island. I couldn’t find the version using Baylor (or more accurately Bayley) assessments. They do report a drop with a smaller effect size. Other papers find the same thing. I doubt that lockdown babies will look that different a few years out, but I’m not sure.

Some 93,000 Americans died of overdoses in 2020—a 30 percent rise over 2019. 

Yep.

Record numbers of young children failed to reach crucial developmental milestones. Millions of hospital and nursing home patients died alone without comfort or a final goodbye from their families.

No cites. Schools still seem messed up.

The DTP Vaccine

Chapter 10 (“More harm than good”) goes through several vaccines that RFK Jr thinks are killing people on net. I worked through the first section called “DTP Vaccine: African Genocide” (p.137). Diving right into the sentences. I skip stuff about WHO decisions and Bill Gates since it’s harder for me to sort through the evidence there.

A wave of gruesome brain injuries and deaths followed the introduction of diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTP) vaccines in the United States and Europe in the 1970s.

No source given. I don’t think it’s true, as you'll see below.

As early as 1977, a study published by British physicians and researchers in The Lancet established that the risks of the whole-cell pertussis jab (used in the DTP vaccine) exceed the risks associated with wild pertussis.

He’s referencing this article by a sole researcher, Gordon Stewart, who was the UK’s RFK Jr. The effectiveness of the pertussis jab seems pretty uncontroversial so I'm holding off on a deep dive into pertussis for now. Here’s a figure.

Six years later, a 1983 NIH-funded UCLA study found that Wyeth’s DTP vaccine was killing or causing severe brain injury, including seizures and death, in 1 in every 300 vaccinated children.

The case-control study referenced is Baraff et al, which points out that SIDS tends to happen around DTP vaccinations. It’s based on 145 SIDS deaths in LA County (out of a total of 382 that they tried to contact). 

The core evidence is in the histogram below, which shows days since DTP appointments in the blue bars and days since doctor appointments without vaccinations in the green bars (I made this from two tables in the paper).

They think an eerie number of SIDS deaths happened right after the DTP shots. It’s true that there are more SIDS deaths within 24 hours of the DTP shot. And the two distributions are significantly different. But the evidence here seems marginal and probably shouldn't convince you of anything.

Also, I read the paper and could not find the 1 out of 300 number. All the reported risks are lower.

[Skipping to medical claims] That year, the Danish government and the Scandinavian vaccine behemoths, Statens Serum Institut and Novo Nordisk, commissioned prominent Scandinavian scientists Søren Mogensen and Peter Aaby—both vocal champions of the African vaccine program—to lead an illustrious team of international researchers to examine all-cause mortalities after the DTP inoculations.

That massive study put the lie to Gates’s mantric incantation that his investment in the DTP vaccine has saved millions of lives. In June 2017, the team published a peer-reviewed study in EBioMedicine, a high-gravitas journal in Elsevier’s publishing house armada. The article parsed data from a so-called “natural experiment” in Guinea Bissau, where half the children in certain age-groups were vaccinated and the other half were not. The division was randomized.

It wasn’t randomized, it was just arguably random whether babies got the vaccine at 3 or 5 months.

The 2017 study shows that, following their DTP immunization at three months, vaccinated girls had tenfold higher mortality than unvaccinated children. The girls were dying of a wide range of diseases—pneumonia, anemia, malaria, dysentery—and for two decades no one noticed that the dying children were predominantly those who received the vaccine. 

The table below has the core result from the paper. They did find that vaccinated infants had higher mortality. Five out of 651 infants died in the unvaccinated group compared to 11 out of 462 in the vaccinated group. So, there were 7 excess deaths in the vaccine group. Still, the p-value for the differences in proportions is 0.026—a significant difference. The 10x estimate for girls is based on a total of just 4 deaths among girls and insignificant at conventional levels.

Overall this seems like results worth reporting. But the 10x estimate for girls is obviously bonkers. 

Further, after the publication above, co-author Peter Aaby (a hero of RFK Jr’s story) published a 2x larger study on the effect of DTP. Their findings are the opposite. The DTP group fared better. Main results below.

16 of 1,795 infants in the DTP group died compared to 13 of 603 of the no-DTP group, so the control group had 2x higher mortality. (These numbers come from summing the Ns in the column headings and All Deaths in the bottom row.)

If DTP really caused a 5x increase in death, about 180 DTP infants should have died! Of course, a 10x increase in mortality would have been even more crazy. (This study uses control variables, but a 10x difference should be obvious without. )

In other words, Gates’s DTP vaccine—instead of saving 10 million lives, as he claims—may have unnecessarily killed millions of African girls. At least seven other studies have confirmed DTP’s association with high mortality in vaccinated girls compared to unvaccinated. The idealistic Americans who donated to Gates’s African vaccine project—believing they were saving African babies—were actually funding a continent-wide female genocide.

The cited review has this section on the DTP vaccine. None of the studies are randomized and the effect is indistinguishable from zero if you remove the three studies from the Guinea-Bissau team (which includes the 2017 study above).

Gates and his WHO vassals continue to bully African nations into taking their lethal DTP vaccines by threatening to withdraw financial aid to their health departments and HIV programs if the government fails to achieve national uptake targets (90 percent).

Can’t find evidence of this.

Notes: Updated 11/23/2024 to add CDC cancer deaths and a review paper on expected cancer deaths due to deferred care.

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