Vaccine advocates believe RFK Jr. will restore public trust in science agencies through open debate

Federal public health agencies must restore open scientific debate and halt noble lies to recover the trust they squandered through their response to COVID-19, a leading Republican lawmaker, former agency chief and vaccine-safety pioneer said at the Heritage Foundation's recent "Restoring American Wellness" event in Washington, D.C. 

They called Secretary of Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the person to restore trust by giving the public an honest review of the evidence for medical interventions, commissioning new studies and focusing on areas of common agreement through his Make America Healthy Again campaign.

Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield wants more debate on the tradeoffs of gain-of-function research in light of a new study suggesting a single mutation to H5N1 bird flu viruses could make them easily transmissible between humans.

An advocate for the COVID lab-leak theory and ending liability shields for vaccine makers, virologist Redfield called the University of Wisconsin's federally funded bird-flu research "really stupid," based on his view it could create the human-jump scenario feared by political leaders and public health officials.

Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency after the virus was found in dairy farms – a month after the state reported the first known child infection in the U.S. – and the CDC said the first severe case appeared in Louisiana.

The Department of Agriculture ordered dairy farms to test raw milk for the virus, and the dairy juggernaut of Wisconsin also reported its "first presumptive positive human case" last week, though the infectee was exposed to a poultry flock. 

UW told Just the News that Redfield was wrong about the nature and timeline of its bird-to-mammal flu research, saying its National Institutes of Health funding ended in 2020. 

"The researchers did not seek to renew the grant in 2020 and have not since pursued similar experiments on H5N1 or other viruses," science spokesperson Will Cushman wrote in an email, while acknowledging "the viruses picked up mutations that rendered some of them capable of improved transmission between the animals, suggesting the viruses had pandemic potential."

Such improved transmission, intentional or not, is the hallmark of gain-of-function research to critics, while former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and others use a more stringent definition. NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak told Congress this spring it funded GoF under a "generic" definition, not the official one.

Redfield faulted Fauci for his admitted habit of misrepresenting his views to the public so they are more likely to act as he wishes. Fauci told The New York Times four years ago he lowballed his estimate of COVID's herd immunity threshold based on polls showing hesitancy toward the soon-to-be-released vaccines.

"Don't try to package the information so that they will decide what you want them to decide," Redfield said, contrasting Fauci's approach with his own in publishing CDC data on hydroxychloroquine when the drug was considered for early COVID treatment. The agency was "very angry with me" but "I want them [physicians] to have all the knowledge we have."

Because Fauci controlled the largest source of infectious-disease research funding for nearly four decades, "academics would be very hard pressed to contradict him" on COVID, epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff said at the Heritage event last week. 

NIH's role is not policy but research, and officials "should have focused on doing the studies" such as the efficacy of generic drugs against COVID, he said. "Somehow it was Fauci who sort of took over" but didn't do such studies.

"We can never reach evidence-based medicine without an open discussion" of collateral damage from interventions including their social harm, said Kulldorff, who co-authored the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration.

His call for "focused protection" with NIH Director-nominee Jay Bhattacharya prompted then-Director Francis Collins to call them "fringe epidemiologists." Another epidemiologist recently urged Harvard Medical School to reinstate Kulldorff, whom it fired for refusing COVID vaccination based on his natural immunity and "immune deficiency."

Kulldorff marveled that the media "blacklisted" his writing on Sweden's success in keeping schools open without any children dying from COVID, building on early Icelandic data that found children are bad at spreading the virus.

Only CNN's Spanish-language website accepted his essay on the Swedish research – Kulldorff is a native Swedish speaker – and lockdowns' disproportionate harm on children in poor and working-class families, he said.

"I'm very excited about this MAHA movement" because Kennedy commissioning vaccine-safety studies would increase public confidence in them, said Kulldorff, referring to Kennedy's and now the incoming Trump administration's "Make America Heath Again" credo.

Kulldorff's first COVID deplatforming was the CDC kicking him off a vaccine-safety panel for questioning its recommended pause on the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine. He emphasized he never took money from vaccine makers, a rarity among researchers.

The obesity rate skyrocketed from 1-3% when Kennedy's uncle was president to 40% now, Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson told the event. 

Kennedy's MAHA vision is as "doable" as President Kennedy's vision for a man on the moon, Johnson said. "We've progressively built a disease system" instead of a health system, where "as long as you're sick, the system works," he said.

"We need to put doctors again at the top of the treatment pyramid" instead of the "hired hands" they've become under government-driven consolidation in healthcare through ever-larger hospitals funded by a third payer, and make consumers "sovereign" again through expanded health-savings accounts, Johnson said.

He praised Obamacare for high-deductible insurance that encourages consumers to pay for the vast majority of their healthcare, which makes them want better evidence for treatment.

Johnson also praised Kulldorff's recognition that family breakdown, especially among poor families, is a widely ignored public-health problem. 

Kulldorff said the "family court system" makes it worse through "mathematically flawed" child support guidelines that penalize fathers for spending more time with their children. "It's actually discouraging people from getting married" who see the effects in their families.

Years-long debate over what qualifies as 'gain-of-function' resurfaces with bird flu

Redfield made his comments on UW's bird-flu research, which the university vigorously contests, in a discussion of the greatest public health threats facing America.

"What led us to this COVID pandemic was not nature" but gain-of-function research teaching a virus how to transmit better, he said, mocking Fauci's "ludicrous" definition of GoF only applying to pathogens that are already pathogenic to humans.

"I was very disappointed" that NIH "just awarded" funding to UW to "help take bird flu and teach it how to infect humans," Redfield said. "These are the same scientists who were involved in teaching COVID how to infect humans" when the first SARS and MERS did not easily do so.

Redfield couldn't point to a specific grant when Just the News asked at the Heritage event. NIH's database returns dozens of UW grants related to avian-mammalian flu transmission studies going back 17 years, most recently awarded in 2021.

He said he believes NIH quietly lifted a moratorium a few months ago that unpaused UW research. The Heritage Foundation, where Redfield is a senior visiting fellow, did not respond to Just the News queries on whether Redfield had since identified what he was talking about.

UW virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka led many of the funded studies, telling STAT this month that further study would be needed to identify "additional mutations [that are] likely required for the virus to become fully transmissible between humans." He didn't answer Just the News queries.

The Gates Foundation gave UW $9.5 million in 2009 for Kawaoka to "identify virus mutations that would serve as early warnings of potential pandemic influenza viruses." 

COVID contrarian cardiologist Peter McCullough's foundation resurrected that grant this summer, describing it as modifying "H5N1 viruses to preferentially recognize human-type receptors and transmit efficiently in mammals." UW spokesperson Cushman rebutted McCullough's representation to PolitiFact at the time.

Cushman told Just the News last week that flagship UW Madison has "no research currently happening or planned" and "no recently awarded NIH grant for gain-of-function research," and that "no UW–Madison researchers have ever pursued gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses."

Its NIH grant for "Transmissibility of Avian Influenza Viruses in Mammals" ran for 14 years "through consecutive R01 grants, bridge funding and no-cost extensions," Cushman wrote. That research was "affected" by NIH's short-lived moratorium on GoF research but did not teach bird flu to infect mammals, in Redfield's phrasing, he said.

"Instead, the researchers infected ferrets with influenza virus and, when those ferrets passed the disease on to healthy ferrets, they re-collected virus from the previously healthy animals," Cushman said, which showed that some developed mutations that improved transmission.

"The researchers focused on understanding these mutations so that public health agencies could monitor nature for these mutations and help save lives," Cushman wrote.