The National Embarrassment: RFK Jr

The dark side of scientific history is that it has been used by bigots to justify racial discrimination, eugenics, and gas chambers. RFK Jr is trying to bring that back.

Sen. Alsobrooks (Maryland) Calls Out RFK Jr for Controversial Vaccine Statement (Credit: Now This)

Before we start debating vaccine efficacy among different groups of people let’s revisit the point of vaccines:

• To elicit memory immunity such that it is protective from infection, severe disease, or death when the subject encounters the pathogen again.

The studies RFK Jr cited today were used at such an abstract level, that his statement regarding creating race-tailored vaccines and vaccine schedules, would have the opposite effect, leading to more deadly outbreaks.

Below I will go over the science of how what he said would actually lead to a form of passive, virus induced eugenics. But first, let’s start with a few questions you might already have.

Question: Do different people have different immune responses?

Answer:

Yes. Immune system responses are highly variable, even between family members. We all know that one person in our family who never seems to get sick, while someone else in the family seems to get knocked out by every infection.

This is because even within a family there is very high diversity among a gene set called HLA. The HLA gene set is the highest diversity gene set in the human genetic code. It controls how the immune system ‘sees’ pathogens. Beyond this there are different responses driven by hormones, nutrition, weight, age, other genes, and infection history… the list goes on.

Question: Is there an ethnic or racial component to how the immune system responds?

Answer: Not in a way consistent enough to be clinically relevant for public health. Your immune response has nothing to do with ethnicity or skin color. However, some groups of people have higher frequencies of the same HLA genes (how the immune system sees pathogens) which may change on average how people might respond to a pathogen. This is because some populations have little intermixing of their genetics with outside groups for hundreds to thousands of years, combined with something we call the ‘founder effect’ in biology which can increase the frequency of certain HLA genes.

An example of the founder effect: a small group of people survive a plague and they have a certain HLA genotype, they prosper and multiply in the same region for a few hundred years. This would lead to that group having a higher HLA frequency. But, the HLA gene set is the most variable in the entire human genome and even when a founder effect is present the HLA gene set remains highly diverse.

Additionally, these populations aren’t really representative of the most of the world which is far more diverse. And attempting to determine someone’s HLA from their ethnicity or skin color is almost a joke.

For example, I certainly look like a white woman. My ancestry can be traced back to about 10 countries and three continents. Whose HLA set do I have? You could never tell by looking at me, or anyone else for that matter. Even IF their family hasn’t left their homeland for 1,000 years. HLA diversity is still relatively high even in less genetically distinct populations and the diverse response it drives to pathogens is what keeps humans alive.

The immune system is highly logical, and within a population high immune system diversity is a strength, this is how the human species has survived when we face infections.

And as an immunologist I think the immune system has some beautiful lessons to teach us. Diversity is a gift, it is the underpinning of strength and resilience.

What About The Study He Mentioned?

No, it wasn’t done in Poland. Buckle up, we’re going to go through the study he cited in his questioning it was Haralambieva, I.H et al 2015 - with Gregory A Poland as the corresponding author.

Let’s cut to the chase, broad average differences found in the study are NOT meaningful for protection against rubella infection, here’s a direct quote from the study:

“However, since the lowest serum dilution in our assay was 1:25, the rubella neutralizing antibody titers in our study cannot be related to the recognized rubella-specific protective neutralization titer of 1/8 and/or to the international correlate of protection of 10 IU/mL.”

Good news, despite variance in antibody levels it turns out everyone was protected from infection. This is what a good vaccine does. They went on to state they could not claim any clinically relevant difference between different racial groups.

Our population is highly variable (sex, age, weight, health status, HLA type, smoking status, etc.) and a good vaccines protects as many people as possible within an acceptable safety range.

In the meat of the study the authors found no difference in cytokines (proteins that show immune cell activity). In one of the studies they cited the authors found that one of these cytokines IFN-y was directly correlated to high antibody titers. Oddly the authors of this study cited by RFK Jr found no change between groups in IFN-y but attempted to say a significant difference was seen in antibody levels. This is a direct scientific conflict between the two studies that used the same population, that was not resolved.

What they did report is a non-clinically relevant median difference in neutralizing antibodies among a small population with 25% to 75% quartile overlap.

But it’s important to note that in the study, the upper 25% of Caucasian responders fully overlapped or exceeded the bottom half (50%) of African American responders.

Like I said, the immune system is variable, on purpose, and it ensures survival of the human species. So you would expect a wide range of variability. These populations are also relatively small comparing 61 African Americans to 889 Caucasians.

There were several other issues with the study.

For example, the median time for looking at antibody titers was 2 to 6 years after vaccination. I could not find the maximum or minimum times listed anywhere in the study. Also the age range of the different cohorts spanned from ages 11 to 22 in one and ages 18 to 40 in another. You don’t need a degree in science to understand that a 40 year old does not have the same immune system as an 18 year old, and any pediatrician will tell you that an 11 year old typically has a very different immune system from a 22 year old. The studied cohorts were not age matched.

Their genotyping of ethnic groups showed that there may be more similarities than differences between several people from different ethnic groups (this is actually known in science). Below is the highest resolution of the figure they published (sloppy) showing genetic similarities between their ethnic group classifications. The further away dots are from each other the more 'genetically distinct’ the ethnic groups are from each other. The different colors are for different ethnic groups. It isn’t hard to see that several of the different colored dots in their study seem more closely related to each other (are closer together in the plots) than they are to others within the ethnic group they were assigned.

This makes the inference of RFK Jr that you would tailor a vaccine to someone’s ethnic group wildly preposterous, as evidenced in the paper he cited. It’s also extremely dangerous (more on why below).

Finally, several studies were cited in the the discussion section of the article. I have gone through each one this evening and the same variability within each ethnic population exists. This makes the concept of tailoring a vaccine to an ethnic group clinically irrelevant. This is not a surprise, Immunologist know this. This is the reason why one family member could be a candidate to donate a kidney to another family member while no one else in the family is a match. Even within the same family our immune systems maintain high variability.

But would it matter if it was true?

No.

Here’s why.

The entire point of vaccines as a public health measure is to ensure that the vast majority of people who receive the vaccine are protected, providing herd immunity. This is what our clinical trials for vaccines are designed to investigate. The people in this study were all protected.

To attempt to tailor a vaccine to a specific population would not only increase the likelihood of failure, but it would be an incredibly expensive and completely unnecessary health care measure.

Imagine you have a group of people who on average have a strong immune response to a particular, but 25% of them don’t (per the study reviewed above). So you attenuate (reduce the potency) of your vaccine formulation or schedule, as RFK Jr suggested today, to be different and tailored to that population mean.

Suddenly 25% of that population is not developing good immunity. For many viruses you need 70%+ of the population to be immune to have herd immunity. Outbreaks would be rampant, the vaccine programs would be ineffective.

So not only were RFK Jr’s claims based on a total misunderstanding of the research but would in fact lead to less effective vaccine coverage in our populations and loss of herd immunity.

What is RFK Jr’s End Game?

Does he really believe vaccines are a threat to public health?

If he’s “just asking questions” perhaps he should turn his attention to Tylenol. More people go to the hospital and die from Tylenol than all vaccines given in the United States combined.

Attacking vaccines for two decades seems to have just been the more profitable path, easier to scare people, and it has made him tens of millions every year.

To this day he refuses to give up the lawsuit against the HPV vaccine from which he stands to profit handsomely.

RFK Jr has no qualms about endangering children and embracing conflict of interest while doing so, he has no place as a public servant.

RFK Jr’s Purported Intentions Don’t Matter

I won’t speculate if he is willfully ignorant, or attempting to reintroduce eugenics. His intent doesn’t matter. If he carried out the suggestion he made today, he would introduce passive eugenics by ensuring higher rates of disease spread in certain communities and ensuring loss of herd immunity.

His ‘asking questions’ doesn’t matter. If someone trips over their own feet and sets off a nuclear warhead by accident, they still set off a nuclear warhead. Loss of effective public health measures like vaccines, however would actually kill far more people over time.

If he has questions he can re-enroll in some freshman level science college courses and ask his questions there, that is the level of his thinking at best, he does not need to waste American’s time or tax dollars.

In short, RFK Jr is not just a bumbling idiot, he’s actively dangerous to health and human safety.

So Senators, do you want an functioning HHS?

Unlike the military that will be forced to listen to the drunken ramblings of a weekend Fox News host, scientists are not trained to take orders. Successful science must stand up to challenge and scrutiny wherever it comes from.

This means that scientists make their careers in a pressure cooker of fighting each other and exposing anyone blocking, bastardizing, or abusing the truth.

Scientist were built to buck the status quo and expose fraud.

So when the brightest Scientific minds of the United States encounter the idiocy foisted upon them in a position of power, what do you think will happen?