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RFK Jr. rejects cornerstone of health science: Germ theory
- josefritzishere 1y agoThere is a very real possibility that RFK has brain damage from long-term drug abuse.
- ketchupdebugger 1y agonot from the brain worm that ate part of his brain?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- neaden 1y agoDrugs, worm, and mercury poisoning. None of it has been good for his brain.
- CoastalCoder 1y agoFYI, the game "Plague, Inc." has a new game type: misinformation.
- gryfft 1y agoOh, to be Madagascar.
- CoastalCoder 1y agoOr Greenland. Freaking Greenland. I swear, it's like a ship goes there only once every two years, and the crew scrubs it down with bleach every day.
- FrustratedMonky 1y agoSame has been speculated about Trump. And Musk is pretty open about drug use. The "just say no" party, is pretty baked.
- Symmetry 1y agoTrump is a famous teetotaler so I'd be skeptical there. When I started getting worried about Elon around 2018 the drugs were part of it but also the persistent sleep deprivation. But there's also the way his father went a bit crazy in his 40s which I only learned about recently.
- yapyap 1y agoAlong with his ultra rich but antisocial upbringing and the exploitation he was exposed to from a young age with the mines, apartheid and everything I’d say there is no hope for him.
- jebarker 1y agoJust looked up why Trump is sober. I think this is the first time I've ever read anything about him and felt some admiration.
- kstrauser 1y agoYeah. Basically, his horrid, abusive father drove Don’s older brother, Freddie, to alcoholism. I read Mary Trump’s “Too Much and Never Enough” and it actually made me sympathetic toward Donald. That's not to say I forgive him or that he gets a free pass. But wow, I'm not sure how he could've ended up any different. The world would be better if Fred Trump Sr were emotionally capable of saying “I love you, son.”
- dowager_dan99 1y agoHe doesn't drink alcohol or do recreational drugs, but it's surprising that he's aligned with RFK because Trump seems to love fast food and refined sugar. His terrain must look pretty rough!
- afavour 1y agoI don't know about drug abuse but the brain worm, the mercury poisoning... I'm certainly confident in saying he's not right in the head.
- stevenwoo 1y agoHe has admitted in interviews that he was addicted to narcotics for 14 years and claims that it made him a better student (while now saying kids should not be taking any drugs) https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rfk-jr-heroin-addict/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rfk-jr-heroin-addict/
- giraffe_lady 1y agoSo? A lot of people have brain damage and don't pursue evil professionally. I myself have a TBI-related disability and yet have not rejected germ theory. I was a long term drug abuser as well! None of these are explanations for his policies.
- taylodl 1y agoEvery member of this administration is thoroughly incompetent. It'd be funny if it didn't have dire consequences for the United States.
- infogulch 1y agoThis is a shallow and transparent hit piece, not sure what it's doing on HN.
- yapyap 1y agoHit piece on?
- martinky24 1y agoHit pieces on anti-vaxxers I guess. I don't see the problem.
- afavour 1y agoCan you expand on what makes it shallow? To my reading it is a thorough accounting of a passage in a book RFK wrote about germ theory and how his beliefs run counter to scientific consensus. What's wrong with that? If repeating the words a person themselves has written makes something into a "hit piece" what does that say about the words?
- plsbenice34 1y agoI just read the section in his book that the article refers to and within context it doesnt say anything that the article suggests. It doesn't say anywhere that he believes in the noxious vapors of miasma theory or that he doesnt believe germs exist. Did you read it? Can you quote where he says he doesnt believe in germ theory? I am not sure he even misunderstands miasma theory. At a certain point in history, miasma theorists were incorrect about the exact mechanisms for spreading disease — they didn’t understand the concept of disease vectors in the environment, like mosquitoes — but their drainage and sanitation solutions were highly successful. I think that is what he refers to with statements like "miasma’s approach to medicine". At worst it seems like he may have used the term 'miasma theory' in a different way than is typical, which hardly justifies the claims in the article. The section of his book ends with this: "As a final side note, it seems to me that a mutually respectful science-based, evidence-based marriage incorporating the best of these two clashing dogmas would best serve public health and humankind". How can he write that if he doesn't believe in germ theory as the headline clearly implies? He is looking at the history of science and making deeper statements about the general approaches to studying the spread of disease. I think the article seems to willfully and intentionally misrepresent the text.
- yapyap 1y ago“New president of US Space flight rejects the Newton’s law of gravity” Eventually you hit a point where something or someone is so stupid you can’t comprehend that what they say is what they really think. Like you may intellectually ‘know’ with near certainty that they are that stupid but the emotional centre of your brain can not accept it. I hit that point with the politics of the US a long time ago, in the back of your head you think these are capable-ish people just grifting off the stupid people but that’d require such a malicious intent it’s from an emotionap standpoint nearly impossible again. This is a paradox that will never be answered with certainty but given the track record of the current US president (and his pre political business ventures) I’d say it is stupidity, I’m nearly certain of it.
- arisAlexis 1y agoImagine a flat earther nasa president, it's kinda the same here
- feverzsj 1y ago[flagged]
- belter 1y agoIt is entirely possible we are living a real timeline of the Men in Black. Now if you please look carefully at your screen please...While I make it flash remotely for a second...
- kccqzy 1y agoI'm very glad the article contains an explanation of germ theory, miasma theory, and terrain theory. When talking to people in real life who have forgotten their middle school biology classes, I actually hear these theories referenced often but of course without the name. The idea that "diseases stem from imbalances in the internal 'terrain' of the body, such as malnutrition or the presence of toxic substances" sound plausible and intuitive, and is true to some extent, which is why people fall for it. I mean sure malnutrition causes diseases such as the lack of vitamin C causing scurvy, and substances like mercury cause poisoning; these are real. It's just that I found it astounding that both RFK Jr and several people I've met in real life would choose to believe these while discrediting germ theory.
- mapmeld 1y agoWhen I've seen discussion of these in the past, belief is often connected to fear or guilt stemming from how bodies react differently to exposure and/or infection. There's an element of randomness whether you breathe in enough of a pathogen, or run into a super-spreader. It can be a relief to think that people are predisposed to do better or worse, and either you were already immune or you can control it.
- binary132 1y agoAt the risk of playing devil’s advocate, I think it is very weird how differently different people responded to Covid. Some people barely got a cold. Others died. I really don’t think you can write it off to “well ${dead_person} just inhaled more of it”.
- JohnFen 1y agoThat's no different that with most other diseases, though. Everyone's body is different and has different levels of resistance to different things. The same disease often affects different people to different degrees. The most dramatic examples of this are when children start going to school and bring home various colds and such. Some of them barely affect the children at all, but will leave the parents bedridden. And some barely affect the parents at all and leave the children bedridden.
- Kenji 1y agoWhat a gross misrepresentation of RFK Jr.'s views. He thinks that people who are healthy, by means of nutrition, sports and absence of contact with environmental toxins, are much more resilient to germs and other health conditions. Which is obviously true. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
- duxup 1y agoThe scale of ignorance among those in charge of the federal government now is astonishing. Even President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho deferred to smarter people.
- viraptor 1y agoNot only that, he ran a program to actively find them and didn't exclude the prisoners. More clever and progressive than many real people.
- bastard_op 1y ago[flagged]
- andrewclunn 1y agoThe worst comments are the flagged ones. The most untrue are the dead ones. Trust the establishment to not falsely characterize their critics. Why woudl anyone call something that opens with, "With the rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., brain worms have gotten a bad rap..." a hit piece? Oh baby, give me that big pharma K street revolving door propaganda! Empiricism is dead, credentialism gutted it to make a skin suit that academia now wears, so it's the science now! Preventative care is only legitimate if you pay the health industry for it! I look forward to the day when we can just label anyone who doesn't trust "the science" as insane so we can lock them up. Maybe if I'm a good boy they'll give me a weekly vaccine to protect me from misinformation. I wouldn't want to risk me having unapproved positions if I'm accidentally exposed.
- hugeBirb 1y ago[flagged]
- pixelatedindex 1y ago> Empiricism is dead, credentialism gutted it to make a skin suit that academia now wears, so it's the science now! What does this mean? I’d imagine you can’t just buy the credentials (there’s no lack of trying though), but like… what’s the litmus test? There’s also a concept called peer-reviews, which generally gets people of varying credentials who work in the field to weigh in on the matter. > I look forward to the day when we can just label anyone who doesn't trust "the science" as insane so we can lock them up. There’s no such thing as “the science” as much as you want it to be. Science is a process, it changes with more data. You trust the data, not the science. > Preventative care is only legitimate if you pay the health industry for it! Nobody is saying that. For example, people have been taking some form of lemon and honey to ward off things common cold, fever, etc. But for new diseases, there’s no preventative care (by definition). > Maybe if I'm a good boy they'll give me a weekly vaccine to protect me from misinformation. Now you’re talking like an idiot. Nobody ever in the scientific field says shit like this. Shame on you. Where did your critical thinking skills go?
- delichon 1y agoI was involved with the raw vegan community in liberal Santa Cruz California for a number of years, and this was a very common opinion there. In some presentations I felt like the local extremist for insisting that germ theory was a good thing that led to the advantages of modern medicine. I now travel more in conservative trending carnivore circles where I haven't heard germ theory denial. On the contrary they tend to take particular pleasure in referring to conventional studies, to counter accusations of their own extremism. From my own experience it seems that RFK has imported these views more from the left than the right. Do others have a different experience?
- pogue 1y agoDoes it matter where he got his viewpoint? He could have heard it on a bus going to Cucamonga for all we know. At this point, trying to trace back which side is at fault for RFK's incredibly absurd ideas is mute and irrelevant unless you're just looking to give some rational for why he came to those conclusions. We need to educate people from an early age in media literacy, skepticism and science. Make The Demon-Haunted World a mandatory read for every high school student.
- delichon 1y agoI see what you mean, if you're only interested in developing political weapons, rather than curious about the shape of the world, it isn't relevant.
- mindslight 1y agoTrying to ascribe it to "the left" or "the right" is trying to form a political weapon. The shape of the world is that we now have a clown car administration of utter retards, each pushing their own strain of feel-good harmful nonsense. The root cause of what has allowed these moronic ideas to take hold and grow ultimately comes down to affluenza and anti-intellectualism. The political leanings of the pockets where each of these strains were allowed to fester doesn't particularly matter, because the overriding commonality is that they make believers feel good and special for "knowing something others don't".
- ourmandave 1y agoAssuming you hadn't been laid off by DOGE, imagine having to work for this stupid clown. Maybe the Emperor can appoint a Moon Landing Denier to run fucking NASA.
- spacemadness 1y agoI can imagine being a stable minded MD right now, especially one working on policy, must be especially horrible.
- jaybrendansmith 1y agoThat would fit, actually.
- billy99k 1y ago[flagged]
- knappa 1y agoAs I recall, most of the complaints about big pharma were about price-gauging. This is entirely different.
- kstrauser 1y agoI do so wish practical probability was a required class for all students. Yes, vaccines — as with all medical procedures — have bad outcomes for some people. You can't inject everyone with saline without someone having a bad reaction, if only because it ended up stabbing a tendon or something. However, the risk of injuries for all common vaccines are orders of magnitude less than the harm from the things they decrease. For ever 1 person harmed by a vaccine, 100 people don't get seriously ill from the disease it counters. And while it’s an enormous bummer for that 1 person, the other 100 experienced a modern miracle of public health. No one’s ever said vaccines can't make you sick. (Well, they've said that they provably do not cause autism, but that's a different claim.) They've said that if you go to Vegas and have an option to bet where you have a 99% chance of winning $1000 and a 1% chance of losing $1000, you take that bet every time.
- aaronbaugher 1y ago> No one’s ever said vaccines can't make you sick. Except all the people who ran around yelling "100% safe and effective" four years ago.
- JohnTHaller 1y agoLink to the article in case the anti-science flagging brigade brings it down: https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/04/rfk-jr-s-anti-vaccine-stance-is-rooted-in-a-disbelief-in-germ-theory/ https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/04/rfk-jr-s-anti-vaccine...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- iJohnDoe 1y agoWe know there are crazy people out there. We know people have wild ideas and beliefs. Even smart and logical people can latch on to things that seems radical or don't follow common sense. It's part of being human. The problem we face today is that the we no longer have adults or rational people in the US government. As a nation, the US did an okay-ish job at keeping people like Marjorie Taylor Greene out of government positions. We didn't let people like Musk take control over everything. The writing was on the wall for a while we were headed in this direction. They were quickly gaining ground to take control of everything. The Republican side during the Trump impeachments were a spectacle. There is obviously a very large population in favor of the spectacle. The US has simply failed repeatedly to get out and vote and keep the wackos out power. Well, here we are. It truly is a shame and we're paying the price.
- dkkergoog 1y ago[dead]
- ifyoubuildit 1y ago[flagged]
- palmotea 1y ago> I didn't flag this, but it looks like the typical slop reporting that comes with the topic (do you really need to spend the first page talking about brain worms?). It's from Ars Technica, which I used to like but kinda got tired of. They regularly have kind of "two minute hate" columns against their house villains, and revel in schadenfreude.
- tbugrara 1y agoIndeed. I wonder who profits the most from vilifying RFK. ;)
- mike_hearn 1y agoDon't care about RFK Jr one way or another, but I checked a few claims in the article and every fact check failed. This is the most maliciously written article I've ever seen on Ars Technica :( Examples: > Kennedy published a story in Rolling Stone and Salon.com titled "Deadly Immunity," which ... described Offit as "in the pocket" of the pharmaceutical industry and claimed RotaTeq was "laced" with thimerosal. They don't link to the article but the only place "in the pocket" appears is a direct quote from Offit himself arguing that he is immune to conflicts of interest [1]. > Rolling Stone and Salon amended some of the article's problems, but eventually Salon retracted it and Rolling Stone deleted it. The wording implies that the article had so many factual errors by RFK Jr it was pulled shortly after publication, but Salon actually deleted it six years later in sync with the release of a new book on public health by a Salon staffer. Nor were any of the errors material to the case the article made, and Salon apologized to RFJ Jr in writing for introducing them as they reduced the word count of his article. None of this section is remotely close to what really appears to have happened. > Looking back, Offit said he was sandbagged. "He's a liar. He lied about who he was; he lied about what he was doing. He was just wanting to set me up," Offit said. Nothing in the article "sandbags" Offit in any way. He's treated with kid gloves and only appears twice, both times via direct quotes from himself. > But Kennedy has frequently used thimerosal as a vaccine bogeyman over the years, claiming it causes harms (there is no evidence for this). It's literally toxic. > he doesn't believe in a foundational scientific principle: germ theory ... Kennedy is a germ theory denialist and terrain theory embracer And yet Ars admits (much later) that "Kennedy seems to accept that bacteria and viruses are real" and that terrain theory obviously does have merits. People who have read his book (I haven't) have said Kennedy just wants a better balance between improving people's general health and specifically pathogen-targeted pharmaceuticals. [1] https://archive.org/stream/deadly-immunity-by-robert-f.-kennedy-jr./Deadly%20immunity%20-%20by%20Robert%20F.%20Kennedy%20Jr._djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/deadly-immunity-by-robert-f.-kenn...
- fredthompson 1y agoRFK Jr. " “Right now we have about 842 cases, Chris. And Canada, they have about the same number. They have one-eighth of our population. Europe has ten times that number. Our numbers have plateaued.” He noted that for years, the CDC has insisted the only way to manage measles is through universal vaccination. But Kennedy challenged that approach. He argued that people who have concerns about the MMR vaccine—whether it’s due to aborted fetal debris or DNA particles—deserve access to treatment options. “And that’s what we’re developing at CDC right now,” Kennedy said, “protocols for treating measles.” ----- "Terrain theory" holds that "you are what you eat." Well, uh...yeah, that's true. "Terrain theory" also holds that ingesting pollution and poisons...poisons a living creature. Well, uh...yeah, that's true. mRNA is dangerous, very dangerous. It was abandoned as such during animal trials. The large drug companies have been facing "patentagedon", the expiring of patents on which their profits are based. Traditional drugs are somewhat analogous to salves. What do drug companies want? Does it benefit them to prevent/solve disease or is it more economically advantageous for them to always be "needed?" There is no substitute for healthy food, a clean environment, and exercise. No amount of synthesized chemicals artificially introduced to a human body will/can replace that. Some drugs are highly useful, some are barely marginal. What's a multi-billion dollar company to do if/when it "solves" the majority of major problems? The answer is "perverse incentive." Factory food, factory pharma, big tech, political parties, etc., etc., etc....any entity which becomes too large AND whose major reason for existance disappears...fights to survive, including creating false need. It's the story of human existence through all societies. So...maybe, just maybe, both terrain and germ theory, like all theories, are an attempt to reduce totality into a useful modeling tool. WRT that article, it's a desperate shill hack job, not structured well at all, and full of logical fallacies and lies.