He’s just a conspiracy theorist that deeply mistrusts the output of scientific research. If it counters medical science, it must be true. Why? Because there is a grand conspiracy at play trying to smother the truth or some such paranoid nonsense. And in true conspiracy theorist fashion, he is one of the chosen that is going to reveal the truth.
Eh, after COVID it doesn't make sense to talk like that. There actually were grand conspiracies to smother the truth in which the output of scientific research was rendered untrustworthy. The people who tried to sound the alarm were slammed as paranoid lunatics, and then turned out to be correct.
And one of the people organizing those conspiracies was Fauci. In order to protect ... virologists. We know all this because we can read the emails and Slack logs where the conspiracies were organized.
As for his other beliefs, like HIV not being the cause of AIDS, well that belief comes from renegade scientists in the 90s who alleged that a young Dr Fauci was at the center of a HIV-related conspiracy organized by virologists to give their field new relevance and grant funding, after attempts to connect viruses with the 60s era 'war on cancer' fell through. One of those scientists was himself a virologist, and another was Kary Mullis. Mullis is famous primarily for being the inventor of the PCR test, he even received a Nobel prize for it.
So where RFK Jr gets this stuff is no mystery.
Anyway the article is wrong. It quotes Paul Offit who makes the same claims in his Substack. I haven't read the book but people who have say Offit is selectively quoting Jr, who does believe germs exist; that he uses the terms miasma/terrain theory interchangeably, and that his book argues for a better balance between the notion of strengthening immune systems and targeted pathogen treatments - not that the latter shouldn't exist at all.
> Eh, after COVID it doesn't make sense to talk like that. There actually were grand conspiracies to smother the truth in which the output of scientific research was rendered untrustworthy. The people who tried to sound the alarm were slammed as paranoid lunatics, and then turned out to be correct.
> And one of the people organizing those conspiracies was Fauci. In order to protect ... virologists. We know all this because we can read the emails and Slack logs where the conspiracies were organized.
> Or take the real story behind two very influential publications that quite early in the pandemic cast the lab leak theory as baseless.
> The first was a March 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine, which was written by five prominent scientists and declared that no “laboratory-based scenario” for the pandemic virus was plausible. But we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely. One of the authors of that paper, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, wrote in the Slack messages, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”
> Spooked, the authors reached out for advice to Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist at the World Health Organization. In his book, Farrar reveals he acquired a burner phone and arranged meetings for them with high-ranking officials, including Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci. Documents obtained through public records requests by the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know show that the scientists ultimately decided to move ahead with a paper on the topic.
> Operating behind the scenes, Farrar reviewed their draft and suggested to the authors that they rule out the lab leak even more directly. They complied. Andersen later testified to Congress that he had simply become convinced that a lab leak, while theoretically possible, was not plausible. Later chat logs obtained by Congress show the paper’s lead authors discussing how to mislead Donald G. McNeil Jr., who was reporting on the pandemic’s origin for The Times, so as to throw him off track about the plausibility of a lab leak.
