In a 58-second video posted on the social media site X, Kennedy said he removed COVID-19 shots from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations for those groups. No one from the CDC was in the video, and CDC officials referred questions about the announcement to Kennedy and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

U.S. health officials, following recommendations by infectious disease experts, have been urging annual COVID-19 boosters for all Americans ages 6 months and older.

A CDC advisory panel is set to meets in June to make recommendations about the fall shots. Among its options are suggesting shots for high-risk groups but still giving lower-risk people the choice to get vaccinated.

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    That is just not a proper headline… You are missing critical context? More like, “Kennedy, who recently willingly swam in literal shit with his own grandchildren, says…”

    • D_C@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      “Kennedy, who’s brain was ‘partially’ eaten by a worm, says…”

  • barneypiccolo@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    He’ll ban the diagnosis of Autism next, then declare that it’s cured.

    Then HitlerPig will take credit for it, and tell the world that he cured Autism all by himself.

  • Showroom7561@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    This is what happens when the Health Secretary is someone who never actually studied medicine, practiced as a doctor, or even spent time as a nurse.

    • vividspecter@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      There are public health and epidemiology degrees that would be more useful for this role than studying medicine (although doing both would be helpful, and many do). Brainworm doesn’t have any qualifications so it’s immaterial, of course.

      • Showroom7561@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        It wouldn’t be so bad if he was relying on experts for his information. But he’s balls deep in conspiracy theories, spreads disinformation, and seems to be completely unqualified to speak on any matters of public health.

        He’s causing more harm than good, and his duty is supposed to be to benefit public health!

      • curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 month ago

        They need to understand the materials they are provided.

        It is necessary. Calling the head of HHS just an administrative position is part of the problem here.

        • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Depends what materials they are provided.

          In terms of technical understanding the administor should just see

          “My expert in X recommends A, B or C

          “My expert in Y recommends D, E or F

          “I have resources Z

          “I choose B and D

          They don’t necessarily need to know anything about X or Y. In fact it would be preferable if they didn’t have any half baked ideas about X or Y formed from conspiracy theories.

  • wewbull@feddit.uk
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    1 month ago

    A few things to get out of the way

    1. RFK is completely nuts and doesn’t belong anywhere, let alone in office.
    2. Vaccines are a good thing and vaccine campaigns have suppressed some very nasty diseases.

    I don’t disagree with this policy though. (…and that is this post obliterated).

    We already take a conservative approach with medical treatments and pregnancy, including some forms of vaccination which we do not give to pregnant women. I have absolutely no problem being conservative with treatment which work in a different way to previous treatments.

    With young children, I don’t think the benefit / harm calculation for the individual ever supported giving it to them. The probability that catching COVID would cause you serious harm was always lower the younger you were. Whereas the probability for side effects was always there. The only rationale to vaccinate children was to limit transmission in the population which is something it utterly failed to do.

    The role out of the COVID treatments was (IMHO) a high risk strategy but arguably necessary because of the situation we were in. We’re now in a different situation. We should be re-evaluating the decision made in a time of crisis to see if they still hold up.

    • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I thought they’ve always been very conservative about pregnant woman and very young kids for vaccines (and other treatments in general).

  • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I think this makes as much sense as saying you don’t need to disinfect surfaces anymore, because a “surface” is immune from infection.

  • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    His latest proclamation is he wants anyone with an NIH grant to be required to publish in a gov run journal instead of, say, Lancet or Nature. He feels they are “corrupt” without providing a shred of evidence, never mind they are peer reviewed. So he’d prefer a gov system where papers could be rejected because they don’t align with his conspiracy views and they wouldn’t be allowed to publish elsewhere.

      • brendansimms@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        (1) That link is for the Danish Health Authority, not all of Europe. (2) The Danish Health Authority recommends pregnant women get vaccinated, whereas RFK said it will NO LONGER be recommended for pregnant women to get vaccinated. So they are opposite. They align on saying healthy children and under 65 are not being recommended to get vaccination. (3) RFK made it political by making this recommendation BEFORE the public scientific review panel made its analysis of vaccine recommendations for the year. i.e. a political appointee made a decision for a scientific community without their input.

        • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Same in UK including no pregnancies. I’m not going through every country in Europe. The point is that the US rules are not out of step with the rest of the world.

          RFK and US medical insurance rules may be crazy, but the science is pretty standard.

  • Zenith@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    So many women about to be arrested for murder when their body spontaneously aborts a fetus due to a preventable COVID infection

  • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    I can’t comprehend how they can still be salty about the pandemic vaccines.

    Sure, lots of things went wrong in the pandemic, but those who got the jab went on with their lives, no health issues.

    A lot of people made an ass of themselves and now have to pretend for the rest of their lives that vaccines don’t work.

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      They hated so many things about the pandemic. I don’t think the Venn diagram of the various idiotic pet peeves and conspiracy theories is exactly one circle, but there seems to be a lot of resentment for many things coming from the same basic set of people, clustered in the Republican Party. They hated so many things.

      1. The people that took measures to protect themselves and others, meaning social distancing and masks. The qons hated this and they hated it so much. They hated this stark reminder that donvict couldn’t just wish Covid away and make the stock market behave as he wished. They would often claim they saw everyone in cars by themselves with masks on, as if that was the only such use, lol. But boy they were mad about it!
      1. The government stepping to help people in need with stimulus checks. This seemed to enrage a lot of them, even if they cashed that check themselves.

      2. The notion that there was a safe and effective vaccine seems to have really driven them up the wall. I don’t know if it’s because they saw lots of people not relying on “thoughts and prayers” when it came to a pandemic? They really hated being laughed at about the horse dewormer stuff, let me tell you that much.

      3. I think what drove some of them the craziest is that many of them have a need to be in-person to bully someone and Covid probably denied them a lot of that. I noticed the people wanting people “back to work” the most were these types. I think Joe being able to “campaign from his basement” as donnie failed to get re-elected and do the most basic of things to be popular during a pandemic really just drove them to total incoherence. Many of them were already marginal with the Pizzagate and Qanon shit, but Covid drove them right off a cliff. I think Obama getting elected, then Covid drove a large portion of our population into batshit insanity.

      • fishy@lemmy.today
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        1 month ago

        I was reading the/r/conservative response to this last night and they see themselves as persecuted and are unable to grasp why people who were unlikely to die from COVID should still take precautions against it. To you and me the story is plain and simple; we do it to hopefully slow the spread and help keep the most vulnerable as safe as possible. Hooray that worked (mostly). Now they say “see it was nothing, the vaccine was and is fake.” They’ve completely forgotten about the literal truck loads of corpses and that COVID couple have been magnitudes worse if more variants had surfaced.

        It’s awful but I kinda wish we did let it get that bad, if enough of those halfwits died the whole world would be better off.

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 month ago

      A lot of people made an ass of themselves and now have to pretend for the rest of their lives that vaccines don’t work.

      So many of our problems literally boil down to people refusing to ever admit they were wrong about anything

      • Triple Iris@lemmy.wtf
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        1 month ago

        They’ve built not only their political career on lies and misinformation, but also their personal lives. If they did admit they were wrong, they’d not only lose their jobs but it would force them to questions every aspect of themselves, and they’re far too afraid of what they’re going to find to ever do that.

    • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 month ago

      Germany’s RKI doesn’t recommend the vaccine for anyone below 60 except people at risk or working in medical fields, same with the flu vaccine.

      Our public health insurances do not cover non-recommended vaccines as the board members are personally held liable if they cover what isn’t necessary or economical. Not if they cover too little though.

      As such, only a small minority of Germans have received COVID boosters since ~2022.

    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      Much as I hate to sound like I’m defending Kennedy… The WHO doesn’t recommend routine vaccination for healthy adults under 50 beyond the first dose.

    • LePoisson@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      No the CDC did not say this. RFK Jr did, I’m not going to be surprised when the CDC panel has different recommendations. Which shouldn’t really happen with the HHS secretary since the CDC falls under the HHS but we haven’t had someone as wildly unqualified as RFK Jr in that position (at least not that I know of) so normally the CDC and HHS leadership are in lockstep.

      • garretble@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        You’re right. I guess I read “Kennedy” and interpreted “CDC.”

        I hope someone inside has the guts to speak out.