Best-Ever Headline About RFKJr

Usually headlines are just annoying, but once in a great while they’re perfect.

It’s All Summed Up in 4 Words

On 1935-Jul-17, the Hollywood-focused newspaper Variety wrote one of its most famous headlines, traditionally repetitive rhyming slang words rendering the meaning almost inscrutable. In saying that rural filmgoers of the day had no interest in films about rural life, they memorably wrote ^[1]:

Sticks Nix Hick Pix

Meaning: people who live in rural areas (“the sticks”) say no to (“nix”) rural-focused movies (“hick pix”). It manages to be completely insulting, both to rural people as well as reflexively to the Variety headline editors themselves (“we’re so dumb we actually said this, in writing”).

A couple days ago, Maureen Dowd writing at The New York Times has achieved a similar degree of perspicuity, summing up the pig-headed ignorance of RFKJr around vaccines in just 4 words ^[2]:

Vax Quack Lacks Facts

(Be sure to click through to see the archival picture of a polio victim in an iron lung. It’s hard to convey to people today how terrifying polio was to my elders when I was a kid in the 50s and 60s. As a little kid, I only understood that if I got the polio vaccine, then it would be possible to go to the beach in August, which was the best beach month. Since then, I’ve grown to realize what a monster we dodged with the polio vaccines.)

This is personal for Dowd, since she almost died of rubella when she was 3 years old. It’s a bit personal for me as well, since I also had rubella at the beginning of first grade (though in that time and place it was called “German measles”). It meant that when I went back to school, everybody else understood “how school works”, and I did not.

And last spring, here at Château Weekend, we got MMR boosters (measles/mumps/rubella) along with COVID-19 boosters. ^[3] That was because the anti-vax knuckleheads have loosed again the most contagious disease known to humanity, measles, which has no treatment but is easily preventable. (Given the high $R_0$ for measles, you need about 95% of the population to be vaccinated to prevent outbreaks. It really is just that bad a disease, and we don’t have to get it!)

Dowd points out that we are bringing needless dangers down upon our children’s heads:

Between school shooters and R.F.K. Jr., children in America are vulnerable in ways they don’t have to be. Officials are endangering children instead of shielding them.

• Kennedy has impounded $500 million in grants for mRNA vaccine research and manufacturing of mRNA vaccines.
• Then Kennedy impounded a $600 million grant for vaccines for bird flu, which looks to be quite deadly if it ever hops to human hosts.
• In a measles outbreak in Texas, Kennedy promoted vitamin A and cod liver oil on Fox news; subsequently, several unvaccinated children were hospitalized for liver damage from overdosing on those.
• In 2019, Kennedy claimed to Samoans that the MMR vaccine caused the deaths of infants. The subsequent measles outbreak killed 83 Samoans and 500 Tongans.
• Before testifying before Congress last week, he did not bother to be briefed by CDC experts, especially on COVID-19 and measles. He got his ideas from other cranks, instead.

Yes, he lacks facts.

No, he does not lack for blood on his hands. (Children’s blood, in case that matters to you.)

It’s Not Just RFKJr

Of course, it’s not just RFKJr. He’s got a whole posse of anti-vax weirdos in local positions of power. Whether he inspires them & sets them loose or whether they are just as a group committed to death is not particularly important.

Case in point: the Florida surgeon general Joseph Ladapo has announced his intent to end all school vaccination requirements. ^[4] This includes even the obviously important ones like Hib, pertussis, diphtheria, measles, tetanus, RSV, and even polio.

He thinks, and I am using the verb ‘think’ here very loosely, that vaccine mandates are like slavery:

Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.

Defining down slavery is an… interesting position for a Black man in the US to take!

He’s got a long history of being anti-vaccine and spreading misinformation. He was previously smacked down by the FDA and CDC, before Republicans neutered them. For example, he pushed the de-worming drug ivermectin against COVID-19. He’s also been credibly accused of altering data, to make analyses show mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 did various bad things.

And yet… this is what Republicans want: ignorant policies, dishonestly presented, which will only cause deaths. One wonders if the political virtue signaling will be worth it to them.

The Weekend Conclusion

Honestly, we’re in such a bad place I barely even know how to describe it. The correct solution, of course, is a change of government and very many criminal trials and convictions of the band of grifters in power.

In the meantime… “Vax Quack Lacks Facts” is a regrettably accurate summary.

(Ceterum censeo, Trump incarcerandam esse.)

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Notes & References

1: G McCall, “Sticks Nix Hick Pix”, Variety 119:5, 1935-Jul-17.

The corresponding Wikipedia page is informative. ↩

2: M Dowd, “Vax Quack Lacks Facts”, New York Times 2025-Aug-30.

NB: Link goes to an archival site, because the original is regrettably paywalled. ↩

3: Weekend Editor, “Getting Vaccinated Because… Knuckleheads!”, Some Weekend Reading blog, 2025-Mar-17. ↩

4: B Mole, “In win for infectious diseases, Florida to end all school vaccine requirements”, Ars Technica, 2025-Sep-03. ↩