Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is distancing himself from his anti-vaccine work as he seeks to become the leader of the nation’s top health agency under President Donald Trump, according to government ethics documents released Wednesday.

Kennedy has pulled in roughly $10 million in income from his work over the past year, which includes speaking fees, leading an anti-vaccine nonprofit and legal fees, government ethics forms filed for his nomination show. He has millions of dollars more tied up in investments and other assets.

If confirmed, he has promised to stop collecting fees on some of his vaccine lawsuits involving the U.S. government.

  • Bonesince1997@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Can’t wash that filth off. He wanted to pull covid vaccines right in the middle of the pandemic. Effective they were, and not the whatever-the-hell he believed/represented. Fuck this guy. He’s a danger to our health.

    • Orbituary@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I don’t know how people are snowballed into believing his drivel. I have an extremely intelligent friend what loves what RFK says. I’m convinced it’s because he hated the inconvenience of getting the shots.

      • ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 months ago

        I am a therapist who does desensitization for specific phobias as part of my repertoire and one of the things I do somewhat regularly is needle desensitization for kids that struggle to get their vaccinations and blood draws, especially kids with autism. It’s no fun but unfortunately a part of life.

        Often when I do it their parents have to leave the room or look away which is outright cowardly and sends a really bad message to their child who is terrified of needles

        anti vaccination originally started rising in popularity because a lot of parents of kids with autism wanted an explanation for why their kids were “disabled” (keep in mind this goes back to like the 90s leading up the the discredited wakefield study in 1998). Then it had other people latch on for similar reasons, by the early to mid 2000s those people were blaming ADHD, dyslexia, generic “learning disabilities”, allergies, etc on vaccination. This is all pretty well established.

        But I have this theory that it kept growing in popularity because people were simply afraid of getting needles. Covid was the catalyst for it to truly explode because a great deal of adults could skip most compulsory vaccinations. Before Covid if you were really stupid you could skip flu shots and your parents probably forced you to get most of the truly necessary ones ages ago. But then all of a sudden the big bad government is saying you need to get a big scary needle!! And not just one, but two!! And then maybe get them indefinitely!

        The core kooks who say it has 5g nanochips or whatever probably truly believe that. But that’s probably a small minority. A great deal more are probably people who are otherwise sensible but are willing to enter delusional beliefs and are extremely susceptible to the kooks rhetoric because it allows them to believe something that enables them to endorse what they truly want to do, which is avoid the extremely brief moment of pain, because they are entitled whiny babies that cannot handle even a second of discomfort

        This is just my theory though

        To back this up with garbage anecdotal data I have talked to physician friends who describe adult patients having a much lower likelihood of getting bloodwork orders filled, a much lower rate of getting things like flu shots and newer vaccinations like hepatitis, shingles, hpv, chickenpox, etc.

        • Halosheep@lemm.ee
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          2 months ago

          I wonder, if it’s even possible, if a device like the tasso blood collector would help people with this issue.

          Needles are still involved but they’re significantly smaller and you can’t even feel or really even see them during the process.

          I’ve had blood drawn using it and you can’t even feel it happening. It does take a lot longer than a typical blood draw, though.

          https://www.tassoinc.com/tasso-plus