Making Sense with Sam Harris - #325 — A Few Thoughts About RFK Jr.

Episode Date: July 3, 2023

Sam Harris discusses Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s recent appearances on other podcasts. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, in the last housekeeping, I said I would say something about the RFK phenomenon. I'm not going to spend too much time on this. At the moment, I don't think it merits an especially deep treatment. merits and especially deep treatment. But I think there's something that should be said, because RFK has been everywhere of late, and I declined to have him on this podcast. At one point, a mutual friend reached out, offering to put us together, and I declined for the time being. You know, perhaps I will talk to him at some point, but I hope it doesn't come to that. But he's spoken to Rogan and Jordan Peterson and Barry Weiss and Bill Maher and Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, I think.

He was on the All In podcast and some of the hosts there through a fundraiser for him for his presidential campaign. for his presidential campaign. All of these people are friends or friends of friends or former friends, except for Tucker Carlson, who, as I pointed out a few podcasts back, is just a well-established liar. I don't know how anyone is holding him up as an honest broker of information. But all these people, to one or another degree, failed to understand the problem with platforming a person like Robert Kennedy Jr. And this term platforming is now stigmatized as somehow being at odds with a commitment to free speech, right? Only someone who doesn't support free speech or who doesn't understand that sunlight is the best disinfectant would worry about, quote, platforming a person

like RFK or anyone else, right? Why not just talk to anybody? What could go wrong? What are you afraid of? Admittedly, this becomes somewhat understandable when a person is running for president and polling, at least according to one poll, higher than any other person in the Democratic Party. So yes, when someone is garnering that kind of public support or apparent support, it is newsworthy and the argument for talking to them is easier to make. But then you have to do the hard work of real journalism, right? You can't just put a microphone in front of the guy for a few hours and hope that your bullshit detector is going to go off at the right time. And the truth is, even if you do your

homework, you can't know in real time, you certainly can't establish in real time that someone is lying, right? And so with certain people, and I'm afraid to say that RFK appears to be one of these people, there's such a pattern of misrepresentation with respect to facts that you just have to decide in advance that a person can't be trusted to speak honestly about important topics. And so, yes, it becomes irresponsible to platform such people. And I'll show you an example of this in a moment. But the general point to make here is that there's no good reason to talk to RFK about vaccines and vaccine safety and vaccine science because he's not a scientist and he's not a doctor.

He's a lawyer and an activist. And as a lawyer and an activist, he has, for the last 20 years, worked rather hard to create a mood of suspicion with respect to the scientific establishment. Although, ironically, he's also an environmental activist. And as Michael Shermer has pointed out, he sings an entirely different tune with respect to established science on the topic of climate change. He goes on and on about trusting the scientific consensus there. And anyone who doesn't is a crank. In fact, worse, a crank who should be jailed. RFK has actually said that anyone who spreads misinformation about climate change should be jailed, right? In particular, the Koch brothers.

On his account, they should be prosecuted for reckless endangerment. Now, RFK is a lawyer, and he's well aware that we have a First Amendment that protects people espousing their bad ideas, but he thinks that the relevant corporations and think tanks that don't have personal First Amendment protections should be prosecuted and destroyed. This is Exxon and Koch Industries and the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. All of these organizations should be destroyed on his account. And anyone who's playing the same just-asking-questions routine he's playing with respect to vaccines,

but doing it on the topic of climate change, he wishes we had a law that would allow us to prosecute these people. Because on his account, they should be enjoying three hots and a cot at the Hague with the other war criminals. Those are his words. So all you free speech absolutists who insist upon the wisdom of platforming the sky at every opportunity might want to reflect on his commitment to free speech. Again, this man is an activist and a lawyer. And lawyers have very different relationships to making arguments than scientists do. So on each of these podcasts, he has spread a host of wacky ideas, some of which may in the fullness of time turn out to be true,

but most of which certainly won't. He blames SSRIs for mass shootings. He thinks that cell phones cause brain cancer. I think he has also said that Wi-Fi causes brain cancer, but it seems that he's most concerned about cell phones. He thinks they damage the blood-brain barrier and damage mitochondria, and he also claims to be sitting on groundbreaking evidence for all this. He, in the past, has sounded skeptical that the HIV virus causes AIDS. He's just asking questions there. He has said that the pandemic restrictions during COVID were part

of a CIA plot to exert totalitarian control over our society. Incidentally, he is absolutely sure that the CIA killed his uncle, JFK, and he's pretty sure the CIA killed his father, RFK. But above all, he thinks that childhood vaccines, in particular the MMR vaccine, causes autism. I'll talk about that in a moment. But the problem is that he is tapping into something that is real, and which he, I think, has appropriately diagnosed. If you listen to him talk about the pervasive distrust of institutions at this moment in American history, and in particular, how the institutions earned this distrust in recent years, he's right about all that. And this is something that I've talked about a lot

on the podcast. So he's messaging into an environment where there is a massive appetite for contrarian takes on more or less everything. This has been an absolute boon to the misinformation cult that he has been at the center of for two decades. And this is the cult of vaccine fear. And again, the truth here is complicated, because some vaccines have been recalled. Vaccine injury is a real thing. Some vaccines don't work as well as advertised.

Some people can't get vaccinated because they have real allergic reactions. Those people, incidentally, rely on the rest of us to get vaccinated so they can be protected by herd immunity. The COVID vaccines don't work as well as we hoped. The herd immunity argument goes out the window there because they don't prevent transmission. With any medical intervention, you can always find prevent transmission. With any medical intervention, you can always find horror stories. I mean, literally, you can find people who have died from aspirin. And when you're talking about medical interventions on healthy people, especially healthy kids, that can sometimes go wrong, this understandably triggers everyone's deepest fears. I let them stick a needle in my child and he died. Every parent's worst nightmare. So it's into this schema that RFK has been

spreading his lies, it seems, for 20 years. So while he can be quite compelling in describing the national mood of distrust, listening to him on that topic is like listening to an arsonist report from the scene of a fire which he helped start. He has been part of the problem all along. Okay, so in particular, he thinks that the MMR vaccine causes autism because it has mercury in it, or had mercury in it. And that is a claim that has been thoroughly debunked. It's based on what is now acknowledged to be a scientific fraud. Andrew Wakefield published a study in The Lancet in 1998,

which has since been retracted. And I believe 10 or 11 of his 12 co-authors supported the retraction. And the evidence for his fraudulence has been established in at least one book-length expose. And in any case, thimerosal, the preservative with the traces of ethylmercury, any case, thimerosal, the preservative with the traces of ethylmercury, was removed from childhood vaccines 22 years ago, in 2001, to appease the concerns of parents. And the rate of autism has not decreased in the meantime. And also kids who don't get vaccinated get autism. And it's also a fact that children absorb more methylmercury, which is the natural environmental form of mercury. They get more of that in their first months of life than they ever got ethylmercury

in the vaccines. And methylmercury has a half-life in the bloodstream that's 10 times that of ethylmercury. So it's more likely to do harm. Anyway, Kennedy continues to spread fear about childhood vaccines and this spurious link to autism. And when he is pushed by any of these podcast hosts, he says he's just asking questions or he just wants the same scientific standards to apply to vaccines as get applied to everything else, right? But he's not just asking questions. Again, he's spreading a mood of suspicion and fear and he is claiming, in many cases explicitly, but in every case at least tacitly,

that the link between vaccines and autism has been established. And certainly he's never admitting that it has been debunked as a fraud. But this fraud gave birth to the modern anti-vax movement, and this fraudulence appears to animate what RFK Jr. is doing now. Because he is demonstrating a pattern of systematically misrepresenting the conclusions of the studies he cites. And he also just appears to make things up. And the important point here is that there's no way for a podcast host to know that he's doing that in real time. He makes claims about the FDA and the CDC that just appear to be flat wrong. Now I'm going to read you something that Paul Offit wrote in 2017 in Stat News.

Paul Offit is a pediatrician and a vaccine expert. I believe he's on the patent for the rotavirus vaccine. And Kennedy has made some crazy claims about this and his relationship to it. In any case, Offit wrote the following in response to an interview that Kennedy gave back in 2017. This is Offit. Kennedy also said that he wanted to ensure, quote,

that vaccines are subject to the same kind of safety scrutiny and safety testing that other drugs are subject to, end quote. In fact, vaccines are subjected to greater scrutiny than drugs, much greater. The CDC spends tens of millions of dollars every year on the Vaccine Safety Data Link, a system of linked computerized medical records from several major health maintenance organizations that represents about 7 million Americans, 500,000 of whom are children. Nothing like this exists on the drug side. Frankly, if a Drug Safety Data Link existed, the problem with Vioxx as a cause of heart attacks might have been picked up much sooner. Perhaps most outrageous was Kennedy's claim that, quote, the hepatitis B vaccines that are currently approved had fewer than five days of safety

testing. That means that if the child had a seizure on the sixth day, it's never seen. If the child dies, it's never seen, end quote. Safety monitoring for the hepatitis B vaccine, like all vaccines tested before being licensed, involved determining the side effects in the Okay, so there is Offit doing some of the laborious and boring work of putting out just one small fire that Kennedy created in an interview. Kennedy says that these vaccines aren't tested by the standards of ordinary drugs, whereas the opposite has been the case. And then recently on the Rogan podcast, Kennedy attacked Paul Offit by name, claiming that he had made $186 million with Merck based on his rotavirus vaccine. This is what Offit recently wrote in response to that. RFK Jr.'s statement about my $186 million deal with Merck was a complete and utter lie, and it's resulted in hate mail, physical altercations with anti-vaccine activists, and three death threats. One caller threatened my children. By falsely labeling me

as someone willing to line my pockets at the expense of children's health, RFK Jr. put both me and my family at risk. Before our rotavirus vaccine was recommended by both the CDC and the World Health Organization for all infants in 2006, rotavirus killed about 2,000 children every day in the world. Our vaccine is estimated to save hundreds of lives every day. It's the professional accomplishment of which I'm most proud. What exactly has Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accomplished? Using the platform of a famous name, he's chosen to lie about vaccines and vaccine safety, no doubt putting children in harm's way. Now he's running for president of the United States, end quote. So again, that's the problem. He's messaging into this fever dream of distrust and frank fear. And all these other podcasters and people like Elon Musk

are doing the same. What we desperately need at this point is a CDC and an FDA that we can trust. And insofar as the basis for trust has really eroded, we have to fix that. But what we do not need is someone like Elon Musk dunking on vaccine experts in front of 140 million people and putting their lives at risk, as he recently did with a different doctor, Peter Hotez. And we don't need people like Joe Rogan giving another four hours to a just-asking-questions routine. Because again, people like RFK are not just asking questions. They make shit up. Here's an example. This is from Jordan Peterson's podcast. And if you haven't heard RFK before, he's got a vocal condition called spasmodic dysphonia, the effects of which you will certainly notice. Listen to the anecdote he tells here. I've seen again and again and again,

you know, people like Jake Tapper, who did this, who worked with me for three weeks doing this incredible documentary on an article that I published in 2005 about a secret meeting at DEC sponsored with 75 vaccine makers about how to hide from the American public the links between autism and vaccines. And I obtained the transcript for these from those meetings. I published them in Rolling Stone. And Jake Tapper, prior as the Rolling Stone publication data approach, he spent three weeks with me doing an exclusive for ABC, which he was then working for, on my article, a companion piece. And the night before the piece was supposed to run, he called me up and he said, the piece just got killed by corporate.

And he said, in all my career, I have never had a piece killed by corporate. And I'm so mad. And then after that, I called him the next day, and he went dark. And I've never spoken to him again, but he's become kind of this shill for pharma since then. And I've watched that happen to so many, you know, announcers on TV. Now, in response to this, Jake Tapper wrote an article on the CNN website titled, RFK Jr.'s Reign of Error, Correcting the Record About Yet Another False Claim He Just Made. I'll just read what Tapper wrote here, because only Tapper was in a position to know that what

Kennedy was telling Peterson on that podcast was a lie. This is Tapper wrote here because only Tapper was in a position to know that what Kennedy was telling Peterson on that podcast was a lie. This is Tapper now. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Democratic candidate for the presidency, went on the Jordan B. Peterson podcast on June 5th and told a wild and false story about me from 2005 that I want to tell you about. RFK Jr. has made so many false and wild claims about any number of vital topics, most dangerously about childhood vaccines, per his own siblings, that my interaction with him 18 years ago is small potatoes. He told the story as, quote,

evidence of TV news networks trying to censor the truth when it came to vaccines. In it, he mangles the facts and wildly misrepresents what actually happened. The truth about it is instructive because of how untethered he is to facts. Flashback to 2005. Kennedy was co-publishing a piece on Salon.com and Rolling Stone with his spurious, since-disproven claims about autism and vaccines. After amending the story with five significant corrections, Salon.com ultimately took it down. Rolling Stone, too, removed the piece, but with less transparency. As Seth Mnookin, wrote for Scientific American, in 2017,

quote, Kennedy made his name in the anti-vaccine movement in 2005 when he published a story alleging a massive conspiracy regarding thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that had been removed from all childhood vaccines except for some variations of the flu vaccine in 2001. In his piece, Kennedy completely ignored an Institute of Medicine Immunization Safety Review on thimerosal, published the previous year. He's also ignored the nine studies funded or conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that have taken place since 2003. This is back to Tapper now. Among the many, many errors, as CBS News reported, quote,

Kennedy's Rolling Stone article originally said that the link between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real. But since The Lancet retracted the original piece of research that made that link, and since the British Medical Journal then revealed that the study wasn't merely a mistake but an outright fraud, the entire notion that vaccination and autism are somehow linked has been thoroughly debunked. So back to 2005. I was a reporter with ABC News, and Salon.com reached out to see if we were interested in doing a TV spot tied to the publication of the Kennedy Jr. piece. I interviewed him via phone with a TV crew in his office and prepared a spot for World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. In Kennedy's bizarre

retelling a few days ago, and I just played you that relevant clip, I worked with him, quote, for three weeks doing this incredible documentary, end quote. No and no about his Rolling Stone story. Please note he makes zero mention of the article having since been retracted and disappeared. And then, quote, the night before the piece was supposed to run, he called me up and said, the piece just got killed by corporate. End quote. I didn't say that in any way, and the piece wasn't killed. This is back to Kennedy's attribution to Tapper. Quote, all my career I've never had a piece killed by corporate and I'm so mad. End quote.

Back to Tapper here. I hadn't. I had been at ABC News for two years. I had plenty of pieces killed. Not once did corporate play a role in killing any of them. This is more Tapper here. RFK has been misrepresenting the content of this call for years. I told him we were holding

the story for a day. Now in his retelling, a two-minute piece was, quote, an incredible documentary. A few days of work was three weeks. One remote interview was me working intensely with him. And a piece that got delayed one day so we could interview some actual experts is a piece that got killed. For the record, the piece aired June 22, 2005. But the important point is, there's no way for Jordan Peterson or any other podcast host to know this in advance. And this kind of thing just trips off Kennedy's tongue and again creates a mood of suspicion. This anecdote is perfect for seeming to shine light on the bad incentives that govern the behavior of the pharmaceutical industry.

He's just exposing the corruption and the conflicts of interests. Everybody's just trying to get rich. They're just trying to sell you medicine, dangerous, ineffective medicine. And again, the problem is there is some truth to this bad incentive story, which I've discussed previously on this podcast. But the further truth is the drug approval story is quite mixed.

Half the time it's a story not of dangerous and ineffective drugs being rushed to market so that pharmaceutical companies can profit off the ignorance and vulnerability of a trusting public. Again, there may be some of that, and wherever it exists, we should stamp it out. But rather often, the opposite happens, right? There's a galling sluggishness in the drug approval process. There are sick people who are desperate for new medications. You know, there are drugs that are approved in Europe that are not approved in the U.S. And this is really frustrating. That is the opposite problem.

That is not people rushing to get rich. That is regulators being too cautious or seeming to be too cautious. So while Kennedy says many things that are demonstrably false about vaccines and science. His account of why he's getting so much traction strikes me as absolutely correct. Again, he is speaking to this pervasive mistrust of institutions and so-called elites. He is consciously pandering to the cynicism that has taken hold in so much of this country. And he's raising real concerns about things like wealth inequality. And the stuff he says about U.S. foreign policy

is, in a similar way, a very mixed story, right? There's no question he's capable of spouting Kremlin propaganda, but it is also totally valid to criticize the last 20 years of U.S. foreign policy. And if I've changed my mind about anything in this space, I have grown much more skeptical of the very idea of nation-building. Many people have drawn the same lesson from our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. The fact that we spent trillions of dollars over there trying to change cultures that were powerfully resistant to change, there's no question that that's worth rethinking. But again, he does not show the kind of concern for facts that one wants when talking about this sort of thing or about anything else. or about anything else. Anyway, that's all I have to say about RFK for the moment. Concern about platforming people is, in my view, still totally valid. And there are certain people that one

shouldn't talk to unless one is going to do the work to fully calibrate one's bullshit detector in advance and expose the pattern of sloppiness with the facts and even outright lying that has preceded that interview. And if you're not going to do that work, you are being irresponsible. You're not just exposing the reasons why many in your audience distrust science and the scientific establishment and public health organizations. You've become part of the reasons why they distrust these sources of information. And that is moving all of us in the wrong direction. Again, we need institutions that work. And so far as they don't, we have to figure that out. Spreading obvious lies and misinformation and fear is not a method of doing that. To move this to an entirely different topic for a moment.

Yes, racism is a real problem in society, and inequality is highly correlated with race for obvious historical reasons in America. There are problems that really have to be sorted out there, but spreading false information about racism, anti-racist lies, activist bullshit, is not a method of solving those problems. The Robin DiAngelos of the world, the Ibram Kendi's of the world, are not helping. To platform them and have them bloviate about fake examples of racism doesn't help. It's a very similar problem.