Barry Gilheany ✍ The distinguished and perpetually optimistic psychologist Stephen Pinker remains true as to his prediction that the arc of human progress is still pointing in the direction of the Better Angels of Our Nature. 

It is a claim that those of us who cling to the faith in a better nature of humanity and the hope that it will, in the long run, win out. Discounting the tautologous barb from John Maynard Keynes that in the long run we are all dead, those of us in this camp have to accept that at this juncture; at this intersection of multiple inflection points including Ukraine, Gaza and accelerating climate change, humanity, if not actually going backwards, is being confronted by a sharp fork in the road towards the triumph of our better angels. For just as the global human body politic (or at least the Western hemispheric democratic part of it) is under attack from the Triple P virus of Populism, Polarisation and Post-Truth; so, the actual human body is under attack from a viral war on science centred on hostility to vaccination. For a persistent but, for much of the 20th and early 21st centuries, a marginalised lobby of faux, anti-authoritarian cranks and alternative health missionaries united by hostility to one of the most universally successful public health measures ever – the use of vaccines to treat infectious and often fatal diseases – now have an advocate in the most powerful administration in the Western hemisphere. Step forward, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – the current US Secretary for Health and Human Services.

For in his first five months in office, this scion of the USA’s most famous political dynasty has taken a multi-pronged scalpel to vaccination programmes involving:

  • The firing all seventeen members of the Centres for Disease Control’s key vaccine advisory committee, abandoning decades of medical expertise in favour of eight loyal placemen, one of whom has reportedly cited non-existent scientific studies.
  • The withdrawal US support for Gavi, a vaccination initiative estimated to have saved the lives of more than seventeen million children globally in the past two decades.
  • The ceasing of government funding into future mRNA vaccines, calling into question the US response to the threat of avian flu and other potential global pandemics.
  • A response to measles outbreaks in Texas and New Mexico which rather than urging families to vaccinate their children, recommended Vitamin A, and cod liver oil.
  • The reduction of the National Institutes of Health research budget by 40%
  • Asking an anti-vaccination conspiracy theorist disciplined for practising medicine without a licence to issue a report on long discredited links between vaccines and autism [1]

This agenda is being carried out under the aegis of Make America Healthy Again (MAHA). Kennedy’s mission is ostensibly to concentrate less on infectious diseases and more on chronic conditions such as obesity, diabetes, and autism, which he cites as powerful evidence that America is sick. However, instead of confronting the food giants over additives in the nation’s diet or campaigning to improve the quality of school lunches, Kennedy put to the top of his priorities a campaign of retribution against government medics and scientists in order to vent his personal mistrust of vaccines. Before looking at more detail on his ‘war on science,’ it is worth examining the intersection of vaccine scepticism, alternative/complementary/New Age health discourse and anti-state libertarianism that powers the MAHA agenda and its hostility to public health institutions. It is a coming together that has a dark past and is darkening the present.

The ’Purity’ of Anti-Vaccination Beliefs

In 2022, a Pew Research Centre poll across nineteen countries found that 70% of respondents cited misinformation as a major threat to their country second only to climate change as a global threat, Vaccines are a perennial source of misinformation. They have been accused of being “unnatural” since their invention and false claims made about them are almost perpetually recycled. In the 1800s, the smallpox vaccine was rumoured to turn people into “human-cow hybrids” due to its cattle-derived formula. Today, COVID vaccines are simply alleged to ‘alter your DNA.’[2]

Vaccine hesitancy does not automatically equate to belief in conspiracism. Big Pharma has a notorious history of covering up information on the side effects of medication, as in the appalling episode of the use of the thalidomide drug on pregnant women which caused up to 10,000 miscarriages and infant deaths, as well as the maiming of tens of thousands of new born children in the late 1950s and 1960s. Confidence in vaccine programmes is severely dented when used for ulterior motives such as when the CIA used public vaccination as a cover for its agents in Pakistan. Within ethnic minority communities in the US and UK, vaccine suspicion can be accounted by historical memories of grossly unethical medical experimental programmes such as the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment performed on African American males in Tennessee between 1932 and 1972 and generally because of adverse experiences from medical professionals.[3]

The nature of vaccine development and ignorance around its process also provides, albeit spurious, rationales for anti-vaxxers. Vaccine development usually takes around ten years and within this decade window, the process largely consists of securing funding, trial participants, ethics board approvals and so on – all work that can be hastened without skipping steps in the approval process. The first Covid -19 jabs were developed, by contrast, in less than twelve months and built on work that had been going on for decades and because coronavirus had become the world’s overriding priority. Covid jabs are not classed as ‘experimental’ – as many conspiracists claim – and did not miss any usual trial stages.

However, these prosaic technicalities simply did not matter to conspiracists who as vaccines became the primary pathway towards a return to normality and because of the urgency which governments pushed them saw the hidden hand of Bill Gates behind a nefarious plan to depopulate the world. Some latched onto the idea that Gates was trying to directly depopulate the world by having the vaccine cause fatal clots and heart attacks. This theory was based on some retrospectively ill-judged but spliced comments had had made about a population control vaccine a few years before the outbreak of Covid. Conspiracists have ever since attributed any heart attack or unexplained death of an athlete or celebrity to the vaccine, which has been covered up.[4]

Other versions of this eugenicist narrative are that they would render people infertile, as the singer Nicki Minaj appeared to believe when she infamously tweeted a warning that it had given her cousin’s friend swollen testicles and made him impotent. Others believed that the effect on women’s menstrual cycles was so strong that people’s fertility could be affected simply by vaccine ‘shredding’ – just being near a vaccinated person was enough.[5]

Conspiracy theories around the Covid vaccine and vaccination generally move from the ridiculous to the sinister when one investigates their centrality in the pseud-science that undergirds the “wellness” alternative health and spirituality world. In their take down of the alternative medicine world in Conspirituality, Beres et al find that for many in the alt-health, New Age, and conspirituality movements the authentic vaccine against all disease is spirituality, injected from above and incubated from within. This helps us to understand why real-world medical vaccination is framed in horror film scenarios by conspiritualists obsessed with being poisoned by the Deep State, tech billionaires, vampiric doctors, or modernity itself.[6]

The bloodiest battles of conspirituality wellness are fought over what kind of authority and expertise is allowed to enter and influence the internal, vulnerable space of the body. Blood is the fluid – both immanent and transcendent – by which the inner body becomes visible.[7] And it was blood that was to be the totem and signifier of the anti-vaccination movement and QAnon and other Alt-Right movements that it developed such a symbiosis with in the form of the “pureblood” hashtag which anti-vaxxers used to denote their pristine status.

It is unclear which Tik Tok influencer kicked off the “pureblood” trend. The likely originator first posted in early September 2021. The keyword text was laid over her mugging face animated by shifting filters: We will No longer be referred To as Unvaxxed… We simply go by… Pure blood. The trend was then boosted by an array of right wing and alt-health influencers including Instagram alt-health star @selfhealingmama, or “Chloe Angeline” who in a selfie sermon suggested that vaccinated people were infecting unvaccinated people, especially women, with viral shredding, correlating, in her role as an entrepreneur in Conscious Pregnancy+Birth+Motherhood, random anecdotes of women feeling nauseated, sweaty, anxious, or having a bad period to being increasingly surrounded by vaccinated people. Needless to say, she offered no hard data to evidence her case.[8]

But the poster girl for hashtag pure blood was Dr Christine Northrup. Retired ob-gyn and women’s alternative health icon, author of the bestselling Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom first published in 1994 and a top MLM (Multi-Level Marketing ) guru as well as earning nearly $1 million in yearly sales with the Usana supplements company, she has become a primary vector of QAnon and Covid-19 conspiracism into mainstream arenas.[9]

An example of Dr Northrup’s networking experience in these concentric circles of conspiracism was her attendance at and address to a Health and Freedom Conference hosted at Rhema Bible Training College in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The attendees comprised a veritable who’ s who of MAGA, pseudoscience and QAnon influencers. Among them were QAnon digital general Mike Flynn and the lawyer Lin Wood, instrumental in fomenting the Stop the Steal conspiracy movement concerning the 2020 Presidential election and who fantasised on Twitter about Vice President Mike Pence facing “execution by firing squad” for “treason”. At Rhema, he took to the stage to call for the execution of all political enemies.NA[10]

Northrup showed more restraint in public, confining herself to making false claims that the mRNA vaccines might prevent the formation of the placenta, make women infertile, and poison the sperm of men. But on smaller stages, she is less inhibited. For there she ventured the opinion that vaccines are not simply poisonous, but a planned spiritual attack on the blood of the righteous, fulminating on a QAnon podcast in August 2021 that “This is an evil agenda by bloodline families that’s been going on for two thousand years." But backstage, Wood took the violent insanity of QAnon to a logical conclusion – the danger that vaccines posed to children. When he came out with the nailed-down antisemitic blood-libel in his warning “To the people at home … if you’re killing little children, if you’re sacrificing little children, if you’re drinking the blood of little children, watch out”, he was also referring to the adrenochrome substance that in the deranged QAnon vision, the Elites extract from kidnapped children to ingest as a youth elixir.[11]

And so, children are pure and empty vessels for adult neuroses that flow in two opposite directions. As the victims of vaccination, their innocent blood is allegedly corrupted, with made-up consequences such as autism. As the victims of QAnon blood libel, innocence is extracted from their veins, leaving a lifeless, terrified husk.[12] The imagery of supposedly vaccine damaged children that anti-vaxxers flaunt in the manner that antiabortionists display of aborted foetuses both speak to innocence and purity of children violated by tyrannical forces like the Deep State, the medico-public health establishment personified by Dr Anthony Fauci or Planned Parenthood. In the case of vaccination, the violation occurs at the tip of a needle, where the state gains access to the inner person.[13]

To return to Kennedy’s “second US revolution” in which, according to what he told a libertarian conference in 2021, “There’s a lot worse things than dying”, his taking of an axe to public health programmes at home and abroad will have global impacts on the battle against infectious diseases. When Kennedy declared that children and pregnant women no longer needed to be vaccinated against Covid, the American Academy of Paediatrics and other groups sued his department, alleging “an assault on science, public health and evidence-based medicine.”[14]

Jeremy Faust, a Harvard public health expert, characterised Kennedy’s decision to withdraw the US from Gavi, a global vaccine initiative, as “one of the deadliest decisions ever made by any American.” Not that he cares in that he seems to relish establishment disapproval and has been outspoken in reply. He has accused public health eminence grise Anthony Fauci in his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci of orchestrating a coup d’etat against western democracy” with his response to the pandemic. After taking office, he called the department’s research agencies “sock puppets” of the pharmaceutical industry.[15]

On HIV treatment, Kennedy is on course to supplant the notorious HIV/AIDS denialism of the late Thabo Mbeki when President of South Africa between 1999 and 2008. For in his first six months in office, he has sacked the entire Office of Infectious Diseases and HIV Policy and ordered the National Institutes of Health to phase out its guidelines for HIV prevention and treatment at home and abroad by next year. His proposed budget for the Department of Health and Human Services also eliminates core funding for HIV treatment at home and abroad – after Elon Musk’s elimination of foreign aid ended Pepfar or the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, which officials estimate has saved more than 25 million lives, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa.[16]

Just as Covid denialists do, Kennedy asserts that Aids is not caused by a virus but by environmental and lifestyle factors and that treatments approved by the agencies that he now controls were a conspiracy to generate profits for the pharmaceutical industry. To support this faux radical, anti–Big Capital stance that - just with antivax ideology - is coated with thick layers of anti-statist libertarianism, Kennedy in his book on Fauci quotes Aids-denialists Celia Farber and Peter Duesberg to argue that Fauci, then the nation’s top biomedical scientist, duped the public decades earlier into funding HIV drugs for personal gain. He has also suggested that the recreational drug party poppers which are sold legally in the US cause Aids as they were “in all the gay bars and bathhouses” before the epidemic.

As measles makes a resurgence across the world but especially in the US and UK with fatal consequences due to falling herd immunity levels (a death of a child recently in Alder Hey Hospital, Merseyside) due in no small measure to the lies of Andrew Wakefield on the links between the MMR vaccine and autism and the cacophony of scare stories spread by his deluded followers, it is important to restate that vaccination represents a signature triumph in public health in its eradication of smallpox, virtually eliminated polio and reduced the mortality and morbidity rates of the myriad of childhood diseases of yesteryear, all though government funded and mostly freely distributed science. The pseudo-scientific conspirituality which has crystallised around vaccination is not coincidental. Discrediting vaccine science with false claims about injury rates, cardiovascular incidences or mercury poisoning and autism is crucial to the business models of the alternative health practitioner who claim to be able to “boost the immune system” with herbs and acupuncture. [17] The collectivist experience of vaccination and its delivery strikes is a massive rebuff to the “nanny state,” survival of the “purebloods” ethos of Make America Healthy Again with its hatred of socialised medicine. That the forces of anti-health science have a voice in the White House is a matter of concern to all of humanity.

References
  
[1] Andrew Gumbel A war on science: Kennedy’s slash-and-burn approach to public health. The Observer. 27th July 2025 pp.26-27

[2] A Practical Guide to Debunking Misinformation. A collaboration between University of Cambridge, BBC Media Action, and Jigsaw

[3] James Ball, The Other Pandemic. How QAnon Contaminated the World. London: Bloomsbury pp.147-48

[4] Ibid, p.149

[5] Ibid

[6] Derek Beres, Mathew Remski & Julian Walker (2023) Conspirituality. How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat. New York: Public Affairs, Hachette Books pp.97-98

[7] Ibid, p.98

[8] Ibid, pp.98-99

[9] Ibid, pp.179-80

[10] Ibid, p.100

[11] Ibid, pp.100-01is

[12] Ibid, p.101

[13] Ibid

[14] The Observer. 27th July 2025 p.26

[15] Ibid

[16] Evan Moffitt ‘Dark Age’ for HIV treatment as vaccine sceptic wields the axe. The Observer 27th July 2025 p,27.

[17] Beres et al, pp.101-02

Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

The 'Vaxatious' Robert F. Kennedy Jr And The War On Public Health

Barry Gilheany ✍ The distinguished and perpetually optimistic psychologist Stephen Pinker remains true as to his prediction that the arc of human progress is still pointing in the direction of the Better Angels of Our Nature. 

It is a claim that those of us who cling to the faith in a better nature of humanity and the hope that it will, in the long run, win out. Discounting the tautologous barb from John Maynard Keynes that in the long run we are all dead, those of us in this camp have to accept that at this juncture; at this intersection of multiple inflection points including Ukraine, Gaza and accelerating climate change, humanity, if not actually going backwards, is being confronted by a sharp fork in the road towards the triumph of our better angels. For just as the global human body politic (or at least the Western hemispheric democratic part of it) is under attack from the Triple P virus of Populism, Polarisation and Post-Truth; so, the actual human body is under attack from a viral war on science centred on hostility to vaccination. For a persistent but, for much of the 20th and early 21st centuries, a marginalised lobby of faux, anti-authoritarian cranks and alternative health missionaries united by hostility to one of the most universally successful public health measures ever – the use of vaccines to treat infectious and often fatal diseases – now have an advocate in the most powerful administration in the Western hemisphere. Step forward, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – the current US Secretary for Health and Human Services.

For in his first five months in office, this scion of the USA’s most famous political dynasty has taken a multi-pronged scalpel to vaccination programmes involving:

  • The firing all seventeen members of the Centres for Disease Control’s key vaccine advisory committee, abandoning decades of medical expertise in favour of eight loyal placemen, one of whom has reportedly cited non-existent scientific studies.
  • The withdrawal US support for Gavi, a vaccination initiative estimated to have saved the lives of more than seventeen million children globally in the past two decades.
  • The ceasing of government funding into future mRNA vaccines, calling into question the US response to the threat of avian flu and other potential global pandemics.
  • A response to measles outbreaks in Texas and New Mexico which rather than urging families to vaccinate their children, recommended Vitamin A, and cod liver oil.
  • The reduction of the National Institutes of Health research budget by 40%
  • Asking an anti-vaccination conspiracy theorist disciplined for practising medicine without a licence to issue a report on long discredited links between vaccines and autism [1]

This agenda is being carried out under the aegis of Make America Healthy Again (MAHA). Kennedy’s mission is ostensibly to concentrate less on infectious diseases and more on chronic conditions such as obesity, diabetes, and autism, which he cites as powerful evidence that America is sick. However, instead of confronting the food giants over additives in the nation’s diet or campaigning to improve the quality of school lunches, Kennedy put to the top of his priorities a campaign of retribution against government medics and scientists in order to vent his personal mistrust of vaccines. Before looking at more detail on his ‘war on science,’ it is worth examining the intersection of vaccine scepticism, alternative/complementary/New Age health discourse and anti-state libertarianism that powers the MAHA agenda and its hostility to public health institutions. It is a coming together that has a dark past and is darkening the present.

The ’Purity’ of Anti-Vaccination Beliefs

In 2022, a Pew Research Centre poll across nineteen countries found that 70% of respondents cited misinformation as a major threat to their country second only to climate change as a global threat, Vaccines are a perennial source of misinformation. They have been accused of being “unnatural” since their invention and false claims made about them are almost perpetually recycled. In the 1800s, the smallpox vaccine was rumoured to turn people into “human-cow hybrids” due to its cattle-derived formula. Today, COVID vaccines are simply alleged to ‘alter your DNA.’[2]

Vaccine hesitancy does not automatically equate to belief in conspiracism. Big Pharma has a notorious history of covering up information on the side effects of medication, as in the appalling episode of the use of the thalidomide drug on pregnant women which caused up to 10,000 miscarriages and infant deaths, as well as the maiming of tens of thousands of new born children in the late 1950s and 1960s. Confidence in vaccine programmes is severely dented when used for ulterior motives such as when the CIA used public vaccination as a cover for its agents in Pakistan. Within ethnic minority communities in the US and UK, vaccine suspicion can be accounted by historical memories of grossly unethical medical experimental programmes such as the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment performed on African American males in Tennessee between 1932 and 1972 and generally because of adverse experiences from medical professionals.[3]

The nature of vaccine development and ignorance around its process also provides, albeit spurious, rationales for anti-vaxxers. Vaccine development usually takes around ten years and within this decade window, the process largely consists of securing funding, trial participants, ethics board approvals and so on – all work that can be hastened without skipping steps in the approval process. The first Covid -19 jabs were developed, by contrast, in less than twelve months and built on work that had been going on for decades and because coronavirus had become the world’s overriding priority. Covid jabs are not classed as ‘experimental’ – as many conspiracists claim – and did not miss any usual trial stages.

However, these prosaic technicalities simply did not matter to conspiracists who as vaccines became the primary pathway towards a return to normality and because of the urgency which governments pushed them saw the hidden hand of Bill Gates behind a nefarious plan to depopulate the world. Some latched onto the idea that Gates was trying to directly depopulate the world by having the vaccine cause fatal clots and heart attacks. This theory was based on some retrospectively ill-judged but spliced comments had had made about a population control vaccine a few years before the outbreak of Covid. Conspiracists have ever since attributed any heart attack or unexplained death of an athlete or celebrity to the vaccine, which has been covered up.[4]

Other versions of this eugenicist narrative are that they would render people infertile, as the singer Nicki Minaj appeared to believe when she infamously tweeted a warning that it had given her cousin’s friend swollen testicles and made him impotent. Others believed that the effect on women’s menstrual cycles was so strong that people’s fertility could be affected simply by vaccine ‘shredding’ – just being near a vaccinated person was enough.[5]

Conspiracy theories around the Covid vaccine and vaccination generally move from the ridiculous to the sinister when one investigates their centrality in the pseud-science that undergirds the “wellness” alternative health and spirituality world. In their take down of the alternative medicine world in Conspirituality, Beres et al find that for many in the alt-health, New Age, and conspirituality movements the authentic vaccine against all disease is spirituality, injected from above and incubated from within. This helps us to understand why real-world medical vaccination is framed in horror film scenarios by conspiritualists obsessed with being poisoned by the Deep State, tech billionaires, vampiric doctors, or modernity itself.[6]

The bloodiest battles of conspirituality wellness are fought over what kind of authority and expertise is allowed to enter and influence the internal, vulnerable space of the body. Blood is the fluid – both immanent and transcendent – by which the inner body becomes visible.[7] And it was blood that was to be the totem and signifier of the anti-vaccination movement and QAnon and other Alt-Right movements that it developed such a symbiosis with in the form of the “pureblood” hashtag which anti-vaxxers used to denote their pristine status.

It is unclear which Tik Tok influencer kicked off the “pureblood” trend. The likely originator first posted in early September 2021. The keyword text was laid over her mugging face animated by shifting filters: We will No longer be referred To as Unvaxxed… We simply go by… Pure blood. The trend was then boosted by an array of right wing and alt-health influencers including Instagram alt-health star @selfhealingmama, or “Chloe Angeline” who in a selfie sermon suggested that vaccinated people were infecting unvaccinated people, especially women, with viral shredding, correlating, in her role as an entrepreneur in Conscious Pregnancy+Birth+Motherhood, random anecdotes of women feeling nauseated, sweaty, anxious, or having a bad period to being increasingly surrounded by vaccinated people. Needless to say, she offered no hard data to evidence her case.[8]

But the poster girl for hashtag pure blood was Dr Christine Northrup. Retired ob-gyn and women’s alternative health icon, author of the bestselling Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom first published in 1994 and a top MLM (Multi-Level Marketing ) guru as well as earning nearly $1 million in yearly sales with the Usana supplements company, she has become a primary vector of QAnon and Covid-19 conspiracism into mainstream arenas.[9]

An example of Dr Northrup’s networking experience in these concentric circles of conspiracism was her attendance at and address to a Health and Freedom Conference hosted at Rhema Bible Training College in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The attendees comprised a veritable who’ s who of MAGA, pseudoscience and QAnon influencers. Among them were QAnon digital general Mike Flynn and the lawyer Lin Wood, instrumental in fomenting the Stop the Steal conspiracy movement concerning the 2020 Presidential election and who fantasised on Twitter about Vice President Mike Pence facing “execution by firing squad” for “treason”. At Rhema, he took to the stage to call for the execution of all political enemies.NA[10]

Northrup showed more restraint in public, confining herself to making false claims that the mRNA vaccines might prevent the formation of the placenta, make women infertile, and poison the sperm of men. But on smaller stages, she is less inhibited. For there she ventured the opinion that vaccines are not simply poisonous, but a planned spiritual attack on the blood of the righteous, fulminating on a QAnon podcast in August 2021 that “This is an evil agenda by bloodline families that’s been going on for two thousand years." But backstage, Wood took the violent insanity of QAnon to a logical conclusion – the danger that vaccines posed to children. When he came out with the nailed-down antisemitic blood-libel in his warning “To the people at home … if you’re killing little children, if you’re sacrificing little children, if you’re drinking the blood of little children, watch out”, he was also referring to the adrenochrome substance that in the deranged QAnon vision, the Elites extract from kidnapped children to ingest as a youth elixir.[11]

And so, children are pure and empty vessels for adult neuroses that flow in two opposite directions. As the victims of vaccination, their innocent blood is allegedly corrupted, with made-up consequences such as autism. As the victims of QAnon blood libel, innocence is extracted from their veins, leaving a lifeless, terrified husk.[12] The imagery of supposedly vaccine damaged children that anti-vaxxers flaunt in the manner that antiabortionists display of aborted foetuses both speak to innocence and purity of children violated by tyrannical forces like the Deep State, the medico-public health establishment personified by Dr Anthony Fauci or Planned Parenthood. In the case of vaccination, the violation occurs at the tip of a needle, where the state gains access to the inner person.[13]

To return to Kennedy’s “second US revolution” in which, according to what he told a libertarian conference in 2021, “There’s a lot worse things than dying”, his taking of an axe to public health programmes at home and abroad will have global impacts on the battle against infectious diseases. When Kennedy declared that children and pregnant women no longer needed to be vaccinated against Covid, the American Academy of Paediatrics and other groups sued his department, alleging “an assault on science, public health and evidence-based medicine.”[14]

Jeremy Faust, a Harvard public health expert, characterised Kennedy’s decision to withdraw the US from Gavi, a global vaccine initiative, as “one of the deadliest decisions ever made by any American.” Not that he cares in that he seems to relish establishment disapproval and has been outspoken in reply. He has accused public health eminence grise Anthony Fauci in his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci of orchestrating a coup d’etat against western democracy” with his response to the pandemic. After taking office, he called the department’s research agencies “sock puppets” of the pharmaceutical industry.[15]

On HIV treatment, Kennedy is on course to supplant the notorious HIV/AIDS denialism of the late Thabo Mbeki when President of South Africa between 1999 and 2008. For in his first six months in office, he has sacked the entire Office of Infectious Diseases and HIV Policy and ordered the National Institutes of Health to phase out its guidelines for HIV prevention and treatment at home and abroad by next year. His proposed budget for the Department of Health and Human Services also eliminates core funding for HIV treatment at home and abroad – after Elon Musk’s elimination of foreign aid ended Pepfar or the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, which officials estimate has saved more than 25 million lives, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa.[16]

Just as Covid denialists do, Kennedy asserts that Aids is not caused by a virus but by environmental and lifestyle factors and that treatments approved by the agencies that he now controls were a conspiracy to generate profits for the pharmaceutical industry. To support this faux radical, anti–Big Capital stance that - just with antivax ideology - is coated with thick layers of anti-statist libertarianism, Kennedy in his book on Fauci quotes Aids-denialists Celia Farber and Peter Duesberg to argue that Fauci, then the nation’s top biomedical scientist, duped the public decades earlier into funding HIV drugs for personal gain. He has also suggested that the recreational drug party poppers which are sold legally in the US cause Aids as they were “in all the gay bars and bathhouses” before the epidemic.

As measles makes a resurgence across the world but especially in the US and UK with fatal consequences due to falling herd immunity levels (a death of a child recently in Alder Hey Hospital, Merseyside) due in no small measure to the lies of Andrew Wakefield on the links between the MMR vaccine and autism and the cacophony of scare stories spread by his deluded followers, it is important to restate that vaccination represents a signature triumph in public health in its eradication of smallpox, virtually eliminated polio and reduced the mortality and morbidity rates of the myriad of childhood diseases of yesteryear, all though government funded and mostly freely distributed science. The pseudo-scientific conspirituality which has crystallised around vaccination is not coincidental. Discrediting vaccine science with false claims about injury rates, cardiovascular incidences or mercury poisoning and autism is crucial to the business models of the alternative health practitioner who claim to be able to “boost the immune system” with herbs and acupuncture. [17] The collectivist experience of vaccination and its delivery strikes is a massive rebuff to the “nanny state,” survival of the “purebloods” ethos of Make America Healthy Again with its hatred of socialised medicine. That the forces of anti-health science have a voice in the White House is a matter of concern to all of humanity.

References
  
[1] Andrew Gumbel A war on science: Kennedy’s slash-and-burn approach to public health. The Observer. 27th July 2025 pp.26-27

[2] A Practical Guide to Debunking Misinformation. A collaboration between University of Cambridge, BBC Media Action, and Jigsaw

[3] James Ball, The Other Pandemic. How QAnon Contaminated the World. London: Bloomsbury pp.147-48

[4] Ibid, p.149

[5] Ibid

[6] Derek Beres, Mathew Remski & Julian Walker (2023) Conspirituality. How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat. New York: Public Affairs, Hachette Books pp.97-98

[7] Ibid, p.98

[8] Ibid, pp.98-99

[9] Ibid, pp.179-80

[10] Ibid, p.100

[11] Ibid, pp.100-01is

[12] Ibid, p.101

[13] Ibid

[14] The Observer. 27th July 2025 p.26

[15] Ibid

[16] Evan Moffitt ‘Dark Age’ for HIV treatment as vaccine sceptic wields the axe. The Observer 27th July 2025 p,27.

[17] Beres et al, pp.101-02

Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

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