RFK Jr.: It Would Be Better if ‘Everybody Got Measles’

Yes, the old strategy of overwhelming the hospital system with mouth breathers.
Amazing strategy, Raisinhead.
- I consider him more of an apple head.
  
  Pretty sure I stole this one from here on Lemmy.
- Hospitals should be able to refuse patients who get diseases that are preventable with vaccines. Problem solved.
  
  No. For multiple reasons:
  Vaccines are not 100% effective. They reduce the likelihood of infection if you are exposed. The whole point of trying to get everyone vaccinated is to reduce the infection rate so that there's less likely to be an outbreak. With a vaccinated population, the virus can't spread fast enough to maintain a pool of infected people to keep spreading it. But that doesn't mean nobody gets sick.
  Vaccines are not as effective on some people. There's a range of effectiveness.
  Not everyone can get vaccinated. People with certain allergies or compromised immune systems in particular.
  Some parts of the population have higher risk factors than others and when they get sick it can be much more serious. Usually the very old and the very young. And again, people with compromised immune systems, or other conditions that complicate the illness.
  Kids whose parents refuse to get them vaccinated are put at elevated risk through no fault of their own.
  I could probably keep going, but hopefully you get the idea why that's just not a viable approach.
  
  That's unfortunately an extremely slippery slope.
  If vaccines (or lack thereof) are enough to refuse "service", why treat lung cancer in smokers? What about type 2 diabetes?
  
  And what about my wife? She's allergic to the measles vaccination.
  
  They perhaps don't need to. The staff in hospitals only got a few token coins as reward for the previous pandemic, and didn't get much raise or better working conditions since then. People are already walking away because overworked and underpaid. It's likely a lot of them just quit when a new pandemic would start and the hospitals can barely function.
  
  Hospitals should be able to refuse RFK Jr and his immediate family.
  
  apparently its more contagious than most viruses, they will probably to try to prevent them from going into the hospital
- Hey now, my nose is always stuffy. That has nothing to do with my great stupidity.
- Shit — This week — I have a relative that had to wait 3 days in the ER to be transferred to a bigger hospital. The big hospital didn’t have a bed.
  The hospital system in America has been overwhelmed for over a month and a half straight now.
  Anymore stress beyond the current quademic (and whatever the unknown illness is — have we figured that out yet?) and we will have to bring back keeping people outside and firing up the refrigerator trucks again.
  these damn jackals

“The measles gave you lifetime protection against measles infection,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Sean Hannity on Fox News.
Wouldn't it be great if there was something else that gave you protection against measles infection, without you actually having to have measles? If only ...
- The measles vaccine is literally a weakened version of the measles virus. It’s just an attenuated measles infection that allows your body to build antibodies against it without a full on infection.
  This guy should have stayed off the raw meat.
  
  As I said in a different thread recently, the only issue is that the name "vaccine" has been tainted in the minds of idiots. Rebrand it as "natural immune system therapy" or something, and market it as something the establishment is firmly against, and they'd be lining up to get it.
  None of these people understand what vaccines actually do.
  
  Some vaccines use target antigen production instead of the actual virus itself. This can be accomplished in a number of ways such as the bait and switch of using a specialized strain of a similar virus or by using a target antigen carrier to provide it. In the case of measles, Hemagglutinin protein is the target antigen.
- Also, factually incorrect. Measles is known to cause immune amnesia, wiping out immunities gained from other infections (and measles).

Fuck this assclown, my wife is allergic to the measles vaccination and will likely die if she gets the disease.
- Oh, he is absolutely vaccinated.
  
  I cannot believe the absolute fucking retards who got into power. What the fuck timeline is this? And don't say Idiocracy - at least they had the sense to bring in the smartest person in the world of their time.

We did that, we gave everyone a very mild, usually symptomless, case of the measles. We called it vaccination.

- The sacrifice: Republican voters are declining
  Democratic voters remain unchanged
  Red State goes to Purple State

Measles also resets your immune system for every other thing your body already learned to deal with. No, it would not be fucking better.

Dumb son of a bitch doesn’t even understand that a vaccine is “giving someone the disease” without killing them. God damn are we devolving that fast?
- Brain worms: not even once.
- He's a drug addict. While I'm all for people overcoming addiction, it should disqualify them from this very specific job.
- We ever evolved? It's just one case where you see it.

Conspiracy theorists for the last few decades: "The government is trying to murder us!"
The actual government in 2025: "Yes, we would like it if a grand majority of you were to die"
Conspiracy theorists: crickets
- Conspiracy theorists: crickets
  Agreed, FACTUAL EVIDENCE of a conspiracy theory is collected by reputable Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University and crickets. People flock to conspiracies with no evidence, but once one appears with authentic validation... nothing.
   
  Troll accounts that had attempted to influence the US election had also been tweeting about vaccines, a study says. Many posted both pro- and anti-vaccination messages to create "false equivalency", the study found. It examined thousands of tweets sent between 2014 and 2017. Vaccination was being used by trolls and sophisticated bots as a "wedge issue", said Mark Dredze from Johns Hopkins University. "A significant portion of the online discourse about vaccines may be generated by malicious actors with a range of hidden agendas," said David Broniatowski from George Washington University. The researchers reviewed more than 250 tweets about vaccination from accounts linked to the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA). In February the agency was named in a US indictment over alleged election meddling.
  source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45294192
  
  It's because people love feeling like they're privvy to a secret. The second it's validated and becomes public knowledge, it's no longer "privileged" knowledge and no longer makes them feel special for "knowing" a "secret truth"
  
  Yes, covid was very potent tool enrolling those people to disinformation channels and groups.
- Cause now it's no longer a conspiracy, they're just coming right out and saying a bunch of people dying is fine.
  
  Well, to be fair, it is still a conspiracy. It becomes a known criminal conspiracy. Criminal Conspiracy is still a crime. :)
  but you’re right, it’s no longer a conspiracy theory.
  (Unfortunately for all Americans, social murder by policy isn't usually a crimey crime. They might be more careful about killing us if they paid the cost personally)

Measles estimated case-fatality rate: 1.3%
Estimated US population: 346,715,067
Measles deaths if everyone in the US got measles: 4,507,295
Upper limit on estimated MMR vaccine caused anaphylaxis: 0.000066%
Anaphylaxis case-fatality rate: 0.3%
Estimated vaccine-caused fatality rate: 1.98 * 10^-7 %
Estimate vaccine-caused fatalities avoided by not vaccinating US population: 0.69
Net increase in fatalities from switching to measles natural immunity for everyone in the US: 4,507,294
So it would only be better if he wants an extra 4.5 million Americans to die.
- Measles also resets your immune system, making other illnesses deadly again.
  Back in the day you'd survive Smallpox, then get Measles, then get Smallpox again.
  These days, I guess it will be Covid and the Flu killing most people.
  
  Beat me to it. People forget that that is one of the worst aspects of surviving measels. Your immune system is fucked. Meaning you will die from some disease you HAD immunity to previously. This is why measels was effectively a death sentence if you got it as an adult.
  
  its more or less immunosuppression rather than resetting it, measles infect the dendritic cells which tells your t-cells to attack, so when those are destroyed your body cant react to new diseases, its also a form "acquired immunodeficiency", your body still can fight, it just takes a lot longer, since b-cells takes a while to pump out enough antibodies.
- his worms are willing to make that sacrifice.
- that's only 1500 or so 9/11s... who cares, right?
- Are there any other complications from contracting measles that you haven't factored in?
  
  I was about to say, the collapse of the hospital system under the burden of both measles and all the other reasons people will still need hospitals will multiply that percentage.
- Well I was told that deporting people would solve the housing crisis. Since that isn't working out killing 4.5 million Americans seems like their fallback position.
- It would solve America's antivax issue at least.
- Hey at least we saved that (1.98 * 10^-7)th person!

Remember the conspiracy theorists who though "the government" was using Covid-19 to cull the population? I wonder what they're up to right now.
- Probably hosting measles parties.
  
  At this point I certainly hope they just fucking die. I can't handle this shit anymore.
- Probably ranting about how the shadow government is out to get Trump and Elon after they started saving America
  
  shadow govt under the control of the gop.
- These were the same ding-a-lings that couldn't seem to make up their mind whether it was "just like the flu" (people were only dying "with" Covid, not from it) and any concern about it was just drummed up by "the media" and Fauci to ruin little d's chances of re-election and kill all of our freedoms to go vaxless and maskless to super-spreader events, OR an intentional thing from Fauci/Soros/Gates working with the Chinese to kill everyone.
  I mean, even in their own bullshit fictional universe, things don't fit together. I have no idea how so many of these people manage to conduct the rest of their lives, but I cannot imagine living in those heads of theirs.

Measles is capable of resetting the immune system's memory of other vaccines. This sack of shit is so incredibly dangerous.
- It's also capable of sterilizing victims, which would lead to a population decline if everybody got it.
  
  Rare measles win? The earth could use a little vacation from humans.
  
  actually infertility, many of the viruses can do that, chickenpox, mumps, rubella all can cause orchitis in men, adult infections are much more dangerous.
  
  Honestly population decline is our best hope for preventing global warming. Can't consume too much if there's no one to consume.
- That's probably part of why he said this.

I'm still optimistic the lifers at HHS who stood firm and didn't resign are just slowly teaching Lil Bobby what a vaccine is:
While RFK Jr. recently shifted his stance to concede that vaccinations are actually pretty useful, he has still stopped short of urging skeptics to go and get it. And in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity that aired Tuesday night, he appeared to still favor natural immunity through exposure to the virus.
"It used to be, when I were a kid, that everybody got measles. And the measles gave you lifetime protection against measles infection,” he said, then taking a swipe at the vaccine. “The vaccine doesn’t do that. The vaccine is effective for some people for life, but for many people it wanes.”
Like, he is damn close to understanding a measles vaccine is measles, just a hindered version that won't be able to reproduce and cause harm. And real close to understanding the need for booster shots.
He's still not there, and it seems to be taking weeks for what can be covered in depth in 15 minutes.
But eventually I hope they'll win him over.
- This is how I feel RFK jr has always operated. He does/proposes/thinks progressive things right up until it really goes off the rails. Like, he argued there are medical biases against Black Americans (very much true and well researched), but then segued into the COVID-19 vaccines being medical experiments on minorities and tried to discourage vaccination that way. He usually starts with a good cause but inevitably drags it into conspiracy territory. Also someone is sanewashing his Wikipedia article because there’s a lot of his bullshit missing from a few months ago.
- I'm really confused about his statement.
  I mean, let's assume he's right, and let's assume that a vaccine only protects you for, say, 20 years. Just measles induced encephalitis alone has a lethality of 0.1%. How many cases of anything more than a mild fever did any vaccine ever cause? He's not even claiming it's causing autism or death or transformation into Space Godzilla. So why not just vaccinate? It's stupid even in his own world.
- Sadly, scientists at HHS are overwhelmed by DOGE to organize any effective push back to rfk jr.
  
  That is not true.
  It's not all sunshine and rainbows anywhere in the fed right now, but there's always ways to fight and this is the biggest

Luckily most people have sane parents so they can't get measles
- The measles vaccine isn't 100% effective for everyone and can lose effectiveness as you get older.

"A bunch of kids should die in pain so many more may live in fear."
-- RFKjr
- he knows, he got 86 children killed from measles in SAMOA.

No RFK, things would be much better if YOU got measles
With you gone, people could vaccinate again and then they wouldn't get sick, you worm for brains
- he has worms which wont be affected by measles.

I think RFK is the Horseman of Plague. Guess the role of Famine goes to Musk, and War belongs to Trump. I am not yet sure who is Death, but they will reveal themselves soon enough.
- Putin is death
- I’d not considered this before. Damn.

Uhhhhhh doesn’t measles reset your immune system or something like that?
- it suppreses the immune system, apparently the virus can infect dendritic cells, which is the part where it activates T cells, which attacks cells infected with viruses.
  
  Oh I swear I read it “rewrites” it. So like you can end up allergic to things you never were allergic to and unallergic to things you were allergic to. I’ll have to try to find where I saw that

As a bonus for contracting measles, you'll get all your previous vaccines and earned immunities deleted by the measles virus attacking your immune cells dedicated to remembering how to effectively fight past pathogens.
So you can think of measles as THE antivaccine. No wonder the antivaxxers love it so much!
- basically it "unvaccinates" people.

What a stupid motherfucker. Anyone who voted for these venal clowns ought to be ashamed of themselves.
- Most of them have no moral compass and/or have zero awareness of just how fucking stupid all of them look.

The dems really need to appoint a shadow cabinet and hold press conferences with fact checks and useful advice about how to get vaccinated.
I'm glad that I am science literate and live close to the canadian border.

Not supporting this dude, but I watched the whole video and he never once said it would be better if everyone got measles. Maybe I missed it; if so, please correct me. He mentioned a waning effect with the vaccine vs full-blown infection, which I highly doubt is accurate (I'll research it later), but that's a massive stretch to get to the headline. He even recommended vaccines and said they will be available for free to anyone that needs them. I've gotten a little lazy in fact checking left leaning stuff because I always felt it was a little more trustworthy. I'm just starting to wonder how much I've been blindly accepting because it conforms to my biases.
- Thanks for watching it and writing this. Good to know it's not as stupid as it's made out to be.
  I've actually got fed up with left-leaning outrage news because any time I check it it's twisted out of shape or plain wrong. I'm sure there's plenty the same in right-leaning-outrage-news, I just don't see it in the first place!
  I wish people who want a world of truth and science wouldn't lie to get support.
  
  The written article also doesn’t say it would be better if everyone got measles. I listened to the interview long enough to see the article is quoting him accurately and fairly. At least for that.
  Then he spent probably too much time talking about vitamin A, and I didn’t listen to the rest
  It’s really just a lying outrage headline - from the written article
  
  as opposed to right wing news? which just makes things entirely up, thats where interview came from fox, the site was just reposted on that site.
- Goat comment lmfao

Damn. If only there was a way to get protection against measles without having to get measles. Some sort of injection. That'd be useful.
- Maybe an infusion

United States Secretary of Health and Human Services here everybody.

We are in such a crazy timeline.
This is the kind of shit you'd see on some forum. If the forum was moderated, they'd eventually get booted.
When I was debating fucking morons like this, I never suspected that one of these assholes would be put in charge of our fucking health. It's just so insane.

It’d be better if you were an obscure and unimportant member of the Kennedy family and stayed that way.
- dint know he existed til he announced his run.
  
  I heard about him from a Behind the Bastards podcast a few years back. I knew he was a dumpster fire and was really surprised/not surprised he got a position.
  Surprised because he’s an idiot. Not surprised because it’s par for this administration.

Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

Any sane person already had measles Rob. We were smart enough to get the vaccine.

My father had measles when he was a little boy, sometime in the 1940s. It nearly killed him. Measles is no joke. Anyone trying to spread it around on purpose should get a bullet in the brain before they have a chance to harm others.
- Here's hoping that RFK suffers a hunting accident.
  
  I never thought I’d miss Dick this much 🥹
  
  if it involves fresh supply of worm-infected meat.

You first fuckface
- He got the vacc

Hand picked by the president to be the best person for the job for leading the dept of health.
- Thank goodness we are finally hiring based on merit!

And polio too, right.

The only way to stop a bad guy with measles is a good guy with measles, I guess.

The best defense against measles is to not have Republican parents.

That would remove a lot of vaccine skepticism
- Never fail to underestimate how much failures cause people to become more dug in than realize something is off.
  I remember in the early 2000s atheist sites would often pose questions about how believers could continue to believe when natural disasters and disease go rampant.
  The facts? Natural disasters, when they happen to believers, make them MORE entrenched in their beliefs and not less.

Heroin really makes you focus too, it’s great for long study sessions.
- also convinced govt of somoa to stop MEASLES VACCINATION, resulting in 86 children deaths. also drove his former wife to suicide.
  
  No, in Samoa there were vaccines administered incorrectly and people died. Their hesitancy was well-founded.

Yeah. I wish I could die of a preventable disease. Totally the way I want to go.

If only there was some way we could train our immune systems to fight off Measles without having to actually infect ourselves with it. That way an immediate immune response could keep the disease from ever taking root to begin with! I blame those fucking scientists for not thinking of this already, they're probably too busy making fake climate change scare articles. ^/s
- What if we only get, like, a little bit of measles? Like if I touch someone with measles very quickly. Just enough to get a small non-dangerous amount that is hardly noticeable by me but enough for my immune system to learn to fight it? Is there a possibility that that would work?
  
  What if we just, like, gave you a little part of the measles? Like whatever's on the outside of the virus, so your immune system can just know to attack that?

At what point do we get to demand hazard pay from our employers for going into the office?

I fucking can't with the news anymore. Holy shit.

I get it. By giving everyone a measles infection, their immune system will be trained on the pathogen, and learn how to fight it in the future so you don't get infected again. That's a brilliant idea, but maybe we can play it safe by giving them just a little bit of measles so they don't have to deal with the associated risks?
- People who subscribe to this approach toward immunity acquisition REALLY need to read Chapter 41 (Hygiene Hypothesis) in Immune by Philipp Dettmer. Also, here's a fun and terrifying excerpt specifically about measles:
  
  Oh shit. Why is it the first time I’m hearing about this? More people should know this.
- Man, the worm in that man's brain is a genious indeed.
- I think this is a legitimate route our medical community needs to take. Stupid people are instantly turned off by the word vaccine because of bullshit associations with the word.
  Like how idiots hated Obamacare but loved the ACA.
  Vaccines just need a re-brand. Something like, "Brawndo, it's got what T-cells need!"

"Dont trust the medical institutions until you're sick" is just the self-harm logical extension version of the plague of right-wing myopia of broke self-reliance americanism and detriment individualism. American culture is completely unsalvageable

The only correct answer to RFK saying that is: "No it wouldn't."
There is zero scientific evidence that supports his claim. Him saying this is about akin to someone saying that we should build only brick houses because the sky hates the color red which is why it is blue. It makes no sense and so does his argument. But that's to be expected from someone who quite literally has zero formal training in medicine.
- hes the guy that has been seen dripping methlyene blue in his drink on a flight as a treatment for "diseases:

Roald Dahl's wight, kill this man.
- a goauld symbiote ate his brain.
  
  This is far more plausible than I'm comfortable with.

What if we were to somehow make the virus inert first, and then give it to everyone? Maybe he's onto something there...
Oh wait that's a vaccine

Goodness, this guy is a fucking charlatan. Perfect man for the current administration.

rfk is a terrorist who wants to use biological weapons.

Louis Pasteur is rolling over in his grave.

He’s so gross.

Let the entirety of the US have measles, and a good percentage will die, another good part will be scarred for life and have disabilities from it and the country will collapse
- And being an American cop will be more the lieu of people who want to murder legally than serve their community.

How to kill a lot of children.

Brainworms like measles.

That's exactly how a vaccine works you dummy it just uses an inert version of the virus that isn't as dangerous.
Looks like it is really hard for onion to make a parody: https://theonion.com/rfk-jr-vows-to-make-measles-deaths-so-common-they-wont-be-upsetting-anymore/
Edit: and you know what's crazy? He is advocating that everyone should get measles, because when he was young that was normal.
His voice is caused by disease called spasmodic dysphonia, which is also linked to childhood measles or mumps:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spasmodic_dysphonia#Cause

It can be better if only Republicans got measles. They're the ones that like them right? Why don't they all get them?

Measles is the mot infections virus we know of. If not for the vaccine, we would all get infected. I guess that's what he means.
- No, don't interpret the Pubelicans words. They mean exactly what they say. There is no hidden meaning or "what he really means". For years the news and media did the "what he probably means" with Trump and it was not true, he literally meant what he said. Don't do that for this piece of shit, if he can't speak clearly and truthfully then he's unfit for his position. We as a people should not have to read between the lines.
- chickenpox while is milder in children, like measles is, its severe in adults which requires hospital treatment.