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I'm upvoting you because this is genuinely what people I know who are fans of RFK Jr. say and apparently believe.

I believe that there's a yawning epistemological void built into this way of thinking that makes it unlikely that it will result in better health outcomes for anyone. However, I think a narrative most people can agree with is that a broken food system and healthcare system have fostered mistrust of the medical and public health establishment among many and driven people to seek alternative ways of finding "truth" and understanding the world around them.

I'm not necessarily a fan of RFK, I don't really know much about him to be honest. I'm just giving my view on why people might have voted for him. But thanks for your support for me sharing my views. That seems to have become challenging the last 5 years, I've noticed.

I don't trust governments and big corporations in general. And I find it amazing how many people are so trustworthy about a new vaccine technology that hasn't been tested widely, globally organized by mayor governments and big corporations. And I've done a lot of research about it and I'm not convinced about the effectiveness of it. There are many studies with different results, that can be interpreted in many ways, could have been mangled with / cherry picked, has many parameters influencing it, etc.

And I find it weird that there is so little attention to so many obvious improvements we can make in our health and environment. But we do have the money for LBQT+ projects in South Africa or something.

And then if someone comes along who kind of questions it a little bit, he is condemned by a lot of people like he's some kind of psycho.

If I put that all together in one equation, I get a big frown. Not a trustworthy feeling.

The issue with discussion is that many people (see refurb in above thread) are doing so dishonestly.

It's easy and cheap in terms of time to whatabout, while costly in terms of time to cite ones sources.

Consequently, it's time-effective to troll via whataboutism, without any intention of having a substantive discussion.

For example,

> ... new vaccine technology that hasn't been tested widely... There are many studies with different results, that can be interpreted in many ways, could have been mangled with / cherry picked, has many parameters influencing it, etc.

That's easy to say, in the same way I could say,

'All vaccines that are approved for mass US use go through rigorous safety studies and demonstrate negligible to no safety concerns at scale.'

I've done a lot of research too.

Given our contradictory opinions, only facts actually matter.

Unfortunately, media-style driveby fact pulling has become the standard there as well. I.e. 'Look at this one study I found that supports my position.'

With regards to the measles vaccine and similar widely deployed ones, it is scientifically defensible to say there haven't been issues at scale. (Because we would have seen them)

And with regards to newer mRNA platforms, the irony is that they're conceptually safer than traditional vaccines, because we're skipping intermediate biological steps and directly creating the outcomes we want, rather than trusting our (incredibly complex) immune systems to get things right.

Time will tell on long term results, but from a pathways perspective I'd take a newer mRNA vaccine over a newer live/attenuated vaccine any day of the week.

Your patience and clarity of speaking in an understanding and respectful way is truly impressive. If things are going to get any better, more people like you are needed. I'm certainly taking notes.

Nobody has a position without being passionate about what they believe. :)

And we should all try to value each others' passion, whether or not we agree.

Well, have you never ever heard about studies being funded for getting a certain results. So then you can't even trust the studies. Or do you believe this is not happening at all?

> a broken food system and healthcare system have fostered mistrust

The issue with this line of thinking is that the brainrot has taken hold of significant numbers of people even in societies with working healthcare and food system (although not completely sure what that is).

I am an American and I'm speaking about America, where we have an all-time high 40%+ obesity rate and a 14% food insecurity rate at the same time. Both are overrepresented for people with low incomes. For reference, obesity and food insecurity in Germany (which has one of the highest obesity rates in the EU) appear to be ~23% and 4%, respectively.

For reasons we don't fully understand (but probably have something to do with the ubiquity of highly processed, low nutrition, low fiber, high calorie density foods -- plus the lack of time to cook and the breaking-up of family & community fabrics among lower income communities), we've created a society that makes more of us fat, more than our first world peers, even while dangling many Americans (especially children and the poor) over the precipice of starvation. This is a broken food system.

We have similar issues with health care: we spend more on healthcare than any other country in the world, by a mile. The US spends about 1.5x to 3x per capita on healthcare (adjusted for PPP) compared to most of the other OECD countries. However, our health outcomes are... not great. We hover around 50th place in the world on most metrics, close to Panama. Additionally, our healthcare system is byzantine and deeply, deeply painful to interact with.

If people in countries with high-performing health and food systems are getting infected with America's particular brand of brain worms, all I have to say is: you really don't understand how good y'all have it in this particular respect, and consider that mistrust of government regulation may worsen the situation, not improve it.

> America's particular brand of brain worms

You (Americans) are not that special :). Antivax brainrot was started by that Wakefield study in the UK, distrust of government/establishment is and was widespread in many countries, sometimes for good reasons. Moreover many of the brainrot-infected people actually have it good and don't need any regime change. What I think has actually happenned is that spreading disinformation has become cheap thanks to soc. networks and that was then weaponised by the most unscrupulous people. This is not connected to any physical reality except access to capital by the baddies. What is now happenning is the disinformation beast - the name for that which I like is disordered discourse - has to be perpetually fed or it will eat even those who it brought to power. So now it is destroying institutions. It will get worse everywhere, I'm afraid.

> Why don't people focus on their general health instead of taking more and more medicines and vaccines and whatnot

Why are these mutually exclusive? The scientific community agrees that Americans have unhealthy diets and lifestyles and that this needs to be addressed. They also agree that it is good for people to spend time in nature and that some exposure to pathogens helps in building immunity (this is actually the idea behind vaccines).

> Well, maybe, it could be, perhaps, that the vaccines were not that effective as they were marketed, has there been mangled / cherrypicked with data

The “vaccines cause autism” study is the definition of manipulated and cherry-picked data, yet RFK Jr still pushes it and claims like it. You don’t have scientific evidence on your side that proves vaccines are dangerous/causing health problems, so why should anyone take your claims seriously? Vague statements like “what if it’s true” is not good policy.

> They also agree that it is good for people to spend time in nature and that some exposure to pathogens helps in building immunity (this is actually the idea behind vaccines).

Yes, but the new mRNA vaccines work in a very different way. Normally you would need to take a vaccine one or two times, in a span of several years or even just one time in your life, and then you trained your imune system against the pathogen.

With mRNA vaccines, you are not really protected against the pathogen, you are still vulnerable, although supposedly less. And you need to take boosters kind of regularly.

Apart from that, mRNA is a very new technology that hasn't been tested a lot. Normally a vaccine has a testing period of 5-15 years before it is deployed to the public. That is to me a valid reason to be sceptical about the technology, and I find it suspicious that there is so much opposition to people that are sceptical about it.

> Why are these mutually exclusive?

Not saying they are, but there's a right balance between them, like everything. I remember a lot of studies showing that Vitamin D treatment was just as effective as the vaccine, but there wasn't much attention for it, probably because you can't patent it and make lots of money with.

> Vague statements like “what if it’s true” is not good policy.

There are lots of things to question and to be sceptical about. I think many people are prejudgemental about the criticism and are closed minded about it. And then we cannot even have a healthy discussion about it. Which is a reason for many people to be more suspicious about the whole thing.

> Normally you would need to take a vaccine one or two times, in a span of several years or even just one time in your life, and then you trained your imune system against the pathogen.

That's an incomplete understanding.

If you really want to understand vaccines, you need to start by understanding our immune system, because every vaccine platform interacts with it.

Basic primer links, in order of increasing verbosity. Note that all of these are first-semester, undergraduate-level understandings of the topic for people who actually develop drugs. The details get much more complex.

[0] https://www.cedars-sinai.org/blog/why-vaccine-boosters.html

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279364/#_i2225_whichpa...

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4590614/

> With mRNA vaccines, you are not really protected against the pathogen, you are still vulnerable, although supposedly less.

You are protected against the pathogen, because you're generating the same targeted antibodies as other vaccine platforms stimulate.

Also, that mRNA injections are inherently consumed by the immune system as part of their function is specifically what increases mRNA vaccines' safety profile, as opposed to other vectors (e.g. carrier viral). [0]

The fact that boosters are needed has nothing to do with mRNA being used as a vaccine platform, but is instead a characteristic of the virus being targeted -- if you made a measels vaccine using an mRNA platform, it would also be a once-lifetime vaccine. (Because measels isn't as liable to mutate as flu-type viruses)

Why isn't that done? Because mRNA platforms are newer, and we've already figured out effective vaccines for the more "easy", less mutating viruses of consequence.

[0] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...

> I find it suspicious that there is so much opposition to people that are sceptical about it.

Because (a) COVID was a worldwide pandemic, (b) during that pandemic certain people used vaccine skepticism for political gain (whether or not it had any factual basis), and (c) there are people (RFK Jr) who make a substantial amount of money by talking/writing about vaccine skepticism.

The annoyance and hostility towards those making bad faith arguments for personal gain are less to do with closing down discussion and more to do with judging people who actively harm public health.

Or to put it another way, if RFK Jr knew that measels vaccinations would stop the outbreak in Texas, do you think he would say so?

> You are protected against the pathogen, because you're generating the same targeted antibodies as other vaccine platforms stimulate.

So why do they say for the COVID vaccines that you are still able to get it? And people also do?

Would you argue that we needn't concern ourselves with polution so long as we eat healthier diets? Its obvious that the health benefits are not only additive they are multiplicative.

There is no amount of general health that is a replacement for not getting deadly diseases. We should acheive the best results by vaccination and other measures and should we deprive ourselves of this option we should not advance any of the other aspect of public health.

Let me reiterate this statement

>will build such a strong immune system that we need much less medicines and vaccines.

Is absolutely nonsense.

There is no substitute for not getting deadly health destroying diseases. General public health is a slog that if it improves it will do so over many years and it will do so faster if people get fewer deadly diseases.

But it is clear that most of the victims of the pandemic where people with a lowered immune system. If our immune systems are generally stronger, it could be that pandemics disappear, because the pathogen can't spread fast enough.

Then we can still of course have certain medicines for people with lowered immune system.

And regarding pollution, I think we should get rid of it, but also adjust for it as long as it's there, by supplementing our bodies with the nutrients lacking in our diet because of the current pollution.

> If our immune systems are generally stronger, it could be that pandemics disappear, because the pathogen can't spread fast enough.

That's not how viral genetic evolution or our immune systems work.

R0 isn't typically effected by the strength of a population's immune systems, but the severity of symptoms is.

That's because the most infectious time is during initial viral replication and shedding, before your immune system has scaled its response (which takes time) enough to decrease viral load.

If everyone in the world had super immune systems, COVID would have still been a pandemic, but we would have had fewer deaths.

Ok, so then it's a pandemic but not a problem. So that's good too right?

Roll dice for mutation, for every person infected.

There has never been a time in history without epidemics. Its better now than historically because of vaccination. If we take it away countless people will die and others be damaged.

The problem is that you have formed strong opinions about this topic whilst knowing almost nothing about it.

We can't eliminate all disease by living healthier lives and we can't even make the people we have as healthy as they might be. In the actual world and in a fictional best of all possible worlds vaccination makes us healthier.

Or vaccination makes us weaker. Because our own immune system gets trained in an unnatural way.

How is it that various native tribes weren't affected by the virus? Difference in immune system obviously. So better immune systems definately helps lower diseases and prevent pandemics.

And the really ironic thing is that RFK’s general message of “this is a toxin” is aligned quite closely to the comments you see on HN about PFTE’s, air pollution, food additives, etc.

Then suddenly the other team brings up the same thing and the same people shout them down.