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Peter Hotez, M.D., Ph.D., is a vaccine researcher who’s COVID-famous. He has previously appeared on Joe Rogan’s show and ripped into Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over his anti-vaccine position. RFK Jr. is anti-vax, generally; he has criticized the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine, which has successfully worked for decades. He and Hotez have had a long-standing public debate. Last Thursday, RFK Jr. slammed Hotez on Rogan’s show, saying Hotez refused to debate him regarding vaccines. Rogan then pledged $100,000 to a charity of Hotez’s choice if he would agree to appear with RFK Jr. on his show to do a debate. I understand why Hotez said he didn’t want to debate RFK Jr., and it’s not because all the facts are on RFK Jr.’s side. It’s because, very often, when you are debating somebody like RFK Jr., he might start moving the goalposts or he might just start moving from study to study. The reason this has become a hot topic is because Hotez is falling back on the same mask of authority the entire scientific establishment has used about a myriad of issues over the course of the last three years, and they’ve been wrong every time. Latest Releases: |
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But the reality is that somebody has to have this debate. If not Hotez, then he should name the person. If RFK Jr. is giving out misinformation, then somebody needs to rebut him. The question isn’t if Hotez is going to convince RFK Jr., because he’s not. The question is, can he make a coherent argument as to what exactly RFK Jr. is doing? Hotez and his ilk are claiming that because Hotez is a doctor or because the science is settled, this means they no longer have to debate the issue. But that’s just not true. That is not the way that human minds are changed. It’s not the way that any of this goes because the scientific establishment has destroyed itself over the course of the last decade or so. There are many claims of RFK Jr.’s that I disagree with. He keeps claiming a lot of people say there is a link between vaccinations and autism. The reality is that there is no solid scientific evidence linking vaccinations to autism. We really don’t know what causes autism. We do know that there’s a genetic component to it because siblings who have autism tend to have other siblings who have autism. But the notion that we know the cause of every disorder and disease in human history is just not true. And this is particularly the case with a broad-spectrum disorder like autism. Quite often when talking about vaccines, the burden of proof is put on the vaccines to prove they are not causing autism, as opposed to the burden of proof being put on people claiming vaccines are causing autism. One of the things that’s happened is that people have linked the rise in autism to the rise in vaccine usage because they say, “Well, they both occurred when you were a child.” Yes, but there are a lot of other things that occur when you’re a child. In fact, the original claim about autism being linked to vaccinations was made in 1998 when Andrew Wakefield and 12 of his colleagues ran a study in The Lancet which suggested that the MMR vaccine could predispose children to pervasive developmental disorder and behavioral regression. 
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This became a bombshell despite the fact that the study only used a small sample size. Epidemiological studies were conducted and published soon after, and they refuted the link between MMR and autism Wakefield and his colleagues had put forth. The paper ended up being fully retracted in February of 2010, and the editors of The Lancet admitted that several elements in the paper were incorrect. Wakefield and his entire crew were held guilty of ethical violations and scientific misrepresentation. But that didn’t matter because their claim had already entered the bloodstream of the conversation with regard to autism. So when RFK Jr. continues to claim again — without any strong evidence at all — that vaccines are linked to autism, that link has never been proven in any sort of durable way. The underlying pervasive problem here is not RFK Jr.’s claim that if the people who are “the science” destroy their credibility they have to debate him. The underlying pervasive problem is that the same exact people who are claiming the science is settled on vaccines are also claiming the science is settled on global warming, gender-affirming care, and universal-masking for the COVID virus — and the science is not settled on any of those matters. This has reopened the door as to the need to debate all of these claims. RFK Jr. suggests that when babies get vaccines, they get ethylmercury in the vaccines, and this is what causes autism — that it crosses the blood brain barrier and gets embedded in the brain. The evidence for this is extraordinarily scanty, as Paul Offit, M.D., pointed out at STAT News. These are the types of claims RFK Jr. frequently makes. But again, why can’t Hotez point that out to him? RFK Jr. is now a prominent figure on the American public scene. Somebody who is a vaccine defender owes it to the public to rebut some of these claims. But Hotez won’t do it. Latest Episode: |
Ep. 1750 - BREAKING: Hunter Biden CHARGED, Pleads GUILTY...NO Jail Time Hunter Biden is slated to plead guilty to gun and tax charges; Trump goes on Bret Baier’s show, where he proceeds to ignore all of his lawyers’ advice; and Secretary of State Antony Blinken prostrates himself before Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. |
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This gets back to the key point: If nobody rebuts the claims, the claims win. The reason nobody will refute the claims is because there’s a class of people who have considered themselves the specials. And those specials will not descend from the mountaintop to explain themselves to everybody else. The problem is that those special people who had a hundred years of “look at our amazing science, it’s made life better for you” on their side blew it over the last 10 years. It was one thing for them to say, “We’re here on the mountaintop, handing you down magical science that will make your life better,” when they were actually handing down magical science to make your life better. But when what they hand down is no longer magical science to make your life better, people start to say, “Okay, now you need to come down from the mountaintop and explain yourself.” RFK Jr. may not even be a reliable source on all of this, but the reason somebody should debate him is because the same people who say they will not debate are the same people who have been lying to you for years. If they had represented the science and had brought actual scientific progress to the fore, that would be one thing, but once they mixed in the bad, they were no longer great science givers. Now, they are people who have to defend themselves because they have sullied themselves. Ben Shapiro Top five headlines:
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