Over the last year or so, fervent anti-vaxxers have become a major presence on our alt-media website, a situation I found very disagreeable. Many of our longtime columnists—Mike Whitney, Paul Craig Roberts, Linh Dinh, Gilad Atzmon, and Israel Shamir—had also moved strongly into that ideological camp, with Whitney’s long articles drawing enormous readership from across the Internet.
I’ve never paid any attention to vaccines and my own views on the role they might play against Covid were entirely mainstream and conventional, as I explained a couple of months ago in a candid 9,000 word interview:
Are the Opponents of the Covid Injections “Anti-Vaxx Crackpots”? Interview with Ron Unz Mike Whitney • The Unz Review • August 1, 2021 • 9,000 Words
The resulting comment-thread—heavily laced with ferocious attacks against me—soon exceeded 200,000 words and became quite sluggish, so I was forced to follow it up with two successive Open Threads on the vaxxing controversy. Several of the anti-vaxxing articles by Whitney, Roberts, and Dinh also provoked enormously long exchanges.
The commenting-software I’ve developed for this website is quite powerful and flexible, allowing meaningful debates that may easily reach the length of a hefty book, a situation quite rare elsewhere on the Internet. As a consequence, some of the anti-vaxxers declared that our million or two million words of anti-vaxxing discussions probably constituted the largest such repository in existence, an achievement that gave me rather mixed feelings.
I’d gradually discovered that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., heir to the famous family, was a leading public figure in the anti-vaxx movement, and he released his lengthy book on the subject last month. A commenter whose opinion I respect had strongly endorsed it, so I decided to get a better sense of the issue directly from that source, and bought it by clicking a button.
Others apparently shared my interest. For ten days or so, The Real Anthony Fauci became the #1 bestseller on Amazon, and it has now accumulated over 1,500 reviews, 95% of them five-stars, which must be close to a record. The work also carried a couple of dozen strong endorsement-blurbs, mostly from medical doctors or scientists, including a Nobel Laureate, but also from public figures across the ideological spectrum including Oliver Stone, Tucker Carlson, Naomi Wolf, and Mark Crispin Miller. Meanwhile, despite its huge success and the famous name of its author, the work seems to have been greeted by almost total silence across the media.
I found the book itself rather unprepossessing. Although the text seemed fine and generally well-edited, I noticed some peculiar stylistic quirks. The text-margins were extremely narrow, so narrow that the pages lacked any chapter-headings, while the font-size was also smaller than normal, and tiny for the quoted passages. These unusual choices allowed a work that should have filled 600 or 650 pages to be squeezed down to just 480, but at the cost of some readability, with the intent probably being to minimize the length and the price. There were a couple of thousand reference-notes, but instead of being shown on each page or grouped together at the end, they were distributed chapter-by-chapter, which I found inconvenient. Worse still, the book lacked any index, severely diminishing the usefulness of the hard copy version, which I prefer reading. All of this suggests that the book was produced in considerable haste, but I think it would have been worth the effort to take an extra week to produce an index or reorganize the notes, and perhaps this will be done in a second edition.
However, none of these flaws nor the apparent near-total lack of any media coverage or advertising seem to have hindered the rise of this gigantic #1 bestseller, proving that controversial content does still sometimes triumph over anything else.
But evaluating that content is another matter entirely, especially for an ignorant layman such as myself. A sizable fraction of the author’s two thousand source-references are to academic journal articles or discussions of other scientific studies, and I am neither a medical doctor nor a biological researcher, so even if I had tried to check any of them—which I did not—I wouldn’t have been able to properly weigh their evidence against that on the other side. Therefore, all my remarks, at least with regard to the scientific issues, should be taken with a large grain of salt.
Surprisingly enough, and very contrary to my expectations, Kennedy’s stated position on vaccines seemed rather mild, quite different from the wild fear-mongering so regularly encountered on the Internet. He claimed that many vaccines weren’t properly tested, often had harmful side-effects, and were promoted mostly due to the profiteering of greedy pharmaceutical corporations and their subverted governmental regulators, accusations far more moderate—and far more plausible—than I had assumed he would make. While it’s not at all uncommon for wild-eyed anti-vaxxers to warn of millions—or even billions!—of deaths due to the current Covid vaccination drive, I didn’t see any such egregious claims in the carefully-documented chapters of this book.
Some of his theories about vaccination efforts over the last couple of decades do seem rather implausible to me. He regards Microsoft founder Bill Gates as a nefarious mastermind behind the global vaccination project, though Gates’ suggested motive is the multiplication of his wealth and power rather than a diabolical plot to exterminate most of the human race, with the latter allegation being widespread among the more excitable anti-vaxxers. But despite reading Kennedy’s account with an open mind, I saw nothing to seriously challenge my own much more mundane explanation. After having been vilified in the 1990s as a monopolist who had become the wealthiest man in the world by selling mediocre, buggy software, Gates may have simply sought to redeem his reputation by funding completely innocuous do-good projects, and he selected public health and vaccines as obvious choices, never dreaming that two decades later these efforts would have become so exceptionally controversial.
Similarly, although there is certainly much to condemn in the responses of the American and European governments to the Covid epidemic, my own interpretation sharply diverges from that of the author. In his opinion, the lockdowns and other disease control measures taken by our political elites represented a planned, sinister strategy for destroying all our traditional freedoms and establishing a totalitarian police state, while what I saw instead was utter incompetence.
China had responded brilliantly to the totally unexpected threat of a mysterious, highly-contagious disease, imposing an extremely severe short-term lockdown a thousand times larger than anything seen in world history; this allowed the government to completely stamp out the virus with minimal human losses, while restoring normal life for almost all Chinese within a month or two. But when the West tried to mimic that successful approach, the lockdowns imposed were so haphazard and disorganized that they proved entirely ineffective at controlling the virus, and since our flummoxed leaders had no other solution, they kept those lockdowns in place for a year or more, so that millions died while the lives of many hundreds of millions were severely disrupted.
My analysis is obviously quite different from Kennedy’s. But if we merely disagree about whether our ruling elites should be condemned and punished for their evil subversion or instead for their criminal incompetence, we are obviously allies in every practical sense, and disputing such matters of interpretation serves no purpose.
This relates to a broader criticism. Though many of the substantive, factual claims Kennedy makes seem reasonably plausible and are usually well-documented, they are often presented in an overly shrill tone that I found distracting, a tone that at times almost lapses into hysteria. Given the enormity of the issues involved and the millions of lives at stake, his tendency is quite understandable, but I think the book would have been strengthened if the same material had been presented in a more restrained manner.
RFK Jr. clearly ranks as a leader of America’s anti-vaxxer movement, which may broadly encompass 20-30% of our population, and his massive bestseller seems likely to become its seminal text. Meanwhile, I would regard myself as very much on the other side, but after carefully considering his views, I think the disagreements may be more apparent than real. I lack the scientific expertise to evaluate 95% of his claims. Yet even if many or most of them were correct, I do not think I would need to retract any of the statements I made in my long August interview denouncing “anti-vaxx crackpots.”
His first and longest chapter discussed the various proposed responses to the Covid epidemic, arguing that the use of extremely cheap but reasonably effective medical treatments such as Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin (IVM) had been torpedoed by the vested interests of the powerful pharmaceutical industry, eager for lucrative profits from experimental vaccines and their own patented and very expensive drugs. This exact debate has been raging on the Internet since the early months of 2020, and I have never taken a stand on the contentious issue. But although I can’t weigh the credibility of the scientific studies he cites against those on the other side, I thought he made a reasonably persuasive case, especially with regard to IVM.
Unlike some of his more extreme supporters, Kennedy seemed to fully admit that Covid is a dangerous disease, but correctly emphasized its extreme age-skew. He pointed out that the vaccines have proven far less effective than originally predicted, and he noted that they were rushed into widespread release without sufficient testing, which may eventually lead to major future health problems. The legal fig-leaf that allowed the normal regime of patient trials to be set aside was the claim that no other medical treatment existed, and this probably explains the widespread attacks on the use of IVM. Moreover, the vaccination of children or the youthful seemed very misguided given mildness of the illness for those age-cohorts.
Mandatory vaccination efforts enforced by serious legal or employment sanctions are the explosive flashpoint of the anti-vaxxer movement, but these never made any sense to me. The vaccines appear ineffective in preventing infection or transmission, and their main benefit is to greatly reduce the risk of serious illness or death. So the vaccinated have little to fear from those who reject the needle, while the latter can made an informed—or perhaps emotional—choice in weighing the risks of a relatively untested vaccine against those of severe Covid illness. Given the extreme paranoia of a considerable segment of anti-vaxxers, heavy governmental pressure may even be proving counter-productive. The Hidden Background of American Biological Warfare Programs
Kennedy is most closely identified with Covid vaccine issues, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover few sharp disagreements on those matters, but I was even more pleased with his discussion of one of my own areas of focus. I regard the long-obscured history of America’s massive biowarfare program as central to properly understanding the global epidemic currently ravaging the world, but any such association has been almost entirely avoided by mainstream journalists and even within the alternative media very few have been willing to broach that subject. Yet Kennedy squarely confronts the reality, devoting his last and second-longest chapter to this topic, ensuring that many millions will probably now encounter it for the first time.
Although the author is a liberal Democrat, with deep ideological roots and the strongest of family pedigrees, in today’s topsy-turvy America his only significant mainstream media coverage came from an hour-long interview by Tucker Carlson of FoxNews, who praised him as “one of the bravest and most honest people” he’d ever met. And near the end of that broadcast, listeners were told that if they only read one chapter of the book, the section on American biowarfare was the most important:
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