Camelot Revisited

Back in the days of yore, the knights of Camelot solved their differences through jousting, which often ended up in serious injury, and even death. Today, we are a lot more civilized, and in a democratic society, we solve differences by debating various solutions to commonly acknowledged problems - or, then again, maybe not.

This past week, a liberal Democrat, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced that he would challenge President Biden in the Democratic primaries, and that he would run for President. There is quite a parallel here. His father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, challenged the sitting Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, during the height of the Vietnam War. Tragically, he was assassinated in the middle of his campaign. Robert Jr.’s uncle, John F. Kennedy, served this country honorably as its President before he was also assassinated in 1963. We are not predicting anything like that in regard to Robert Jr., but we do note that he is sure being savaged by the liberal press and fellow Democratic politicians.

The Associated Press immediately joined the fray after his announcement, stating that “his push against the COVID-19 vaccine has linked him at times with anti-democratic figures and groups... Kennedy has appeared at events pushing the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.” As far as we could see, the AP didn’t name the “anti-democratic figures and groups” it was referring to. Perhaps it meant Instagram, which banned Kennedy permanently from its site, or Twitter, which censored him at the urging of the US government. Certainly, censorship is anti-democratic, for it is widely practice by the despotic regimes in China and Russia. We also checked further to see if the AP made similar comments about Hillary Clinton, who pushed the lie that the 2016 election was stolen from her. We found nothing. Imagine that!

The biggest broadside, however, came from CNN’s Jake Tapper: "Anti-vaccine quack RFK Jr. has filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run for president as a Democrat... Kennedy is such a healthcare menace, in 2019, even his cousins wrote an op-ed criticizing his anti-science views on life-saving vaccines."

We like and heartily agree with RFK’s measured response to Mr. Tapper. “The way to resolve differences is not name-calling, censorship or silencing debate. “We both feel passionate about our views on vaccine mandates. Let’s have a debate for the benefit of Americans... We can debate your enthusiastic support of censorship and our divergent opinions on Dr. Fauci’s effectiveness as the covid pandemic manager. We are in perilous times; we can be an example of how the American people with different opinions can learn to speak to each other". Mr. Tapper was not so gracious. He called Kennedy’s proposal to debate “truly embarrassing” and said he’s “not going to lend credence to a conspiracy theorist whose views are so false, unhinged, and dangerous to public health his own siblings feel the need [to] publish op-eds against him.” Embarrassing? What is truly embarrassing is stating the fact that his siblings publicly disagreed with him somehow shows the falsity of his statements. That is patently ridiculous. How many people on the left and the right have close relatives that vehemently disagree with them? Most of us, probably.

In our view, before we demean people by name-shaming, calling them quacks, unhinged, dangerous and other derogatory names, before we rush to censor people on social media, we should consider the other point of view, for maybe it’s our belief, that, in fact, is the one that constitutes dangerous misinformation. As we showed in our previous article, Getting Better, the President and other critics who championed censorship weren’t exactly speaking the truth, for there is plenty of evidence that the covid vaccines, the vaccine mandates, the masking, the social distancing did not work as its proponents claimed, and, in fact, often produced many negative results. Drs. Fauci and Collins demeaned the medical doctors who authored the Great Barrington Declaration by calling them “fringe". That’s surprising. We did not realize that Harvard, Oxford and Stanford were in the habit of hiring fringe professors in the medical field. You have to wonder how these “fringe” doctors could persuade a Nobel prize winner to agree with them and sign the Declaration.

Jake Tapper was correct in painting Robert Kennedy Jr. as a vaccine skeptic; for his ”unhinged views” definitely run counter to the latest CDC recommendation, which suggests one updated COVID-19 vaccine dose for everyone aged 6 months and older. Contrast the CDC current viewpoint to Moderna’s CEO, who said in October 2022: "I think it's going to be like the flu. If you're a 25-year-old, do you need an annual booster every year if you're healthy? You might want to ... but I think it's going to be similar to flu where it's going to be people at high risk, people above 50 years of age, people with co-morbidities." .

Switzerland’s Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) has gone even further. This month it announced that COVID vaccines are no longer recommended—even for people at high risk. The central European country’s health authorities have decided that having a large number of people who have already been “vaccinated” against the disease or have achieved natural immunity makes further recommendations to get the controversial jabs pointless.

So, who do you trust? Do you trust “experts” like Tapper who want to avoid an open debate? Do you trust our President who falsely proclaimed that the vaccine would prevent you from getting covid, and who at the same time wanted social media companies to censor opposing opinions? Or, would you like to hear both sides of the story in an open debate, and make up your own mind? We agree with Kennedy – “let’s have a debate for the benefit of Americans!”