Fact Check: RFK Jr.

Presidential candidate RFK Jr. suspended his campaign last week and endorsed Donald Trump.

I disagree with Kennedy about a lot. But at least he was willing to talk to people who disagree with him.

Kennedy complains that mainstream media won't have him on -- even to argue with him.

"I see why," I reply. "You get into the weeds of vaccine science and we feel not all of it's true."

"If it's not true," Kennedy responds, "then argue with me, or post something afterward."

No. 1: "I was in Dimock, Pennsylvania, watching fire come out of a faucet from fracking. Every home in that neighborhood, they can light up a cigarette lighter under their faucet, turn their faucet on and it'll flame like a lighter. That's from fracking."

A leftist documentary, "Gasland," publicized flaming faucets and claimed fracking is the cause.

Water is flammable in many places in America where no fracking is done. It happens because of naturally occurring gas, already in the ground.

Even the director of the EPA during Obama's presidency said, "In no case have we made a definitive determination that the fracking process has caused chemicals to enter groundwater."

I ask, "If your kids were young now, would you give them the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine?"

"No," he says, "Studies show that kids who get measles as a child are much healthier when they grow up ... resistant to cancers, atopic diseases ... "

I tell Kennedy, "You convinced people not to get the measles vaccine. An outbreak resulted in 83 deaths in Samoa."

"That story is not true," he says. "Nobody died in Samoa from measles."

But the Samoan government and the Lancet medical journal report there were 83 deaths.

Kennedy blames the deaths on bad vaccines, and two babies did die after being given incorrectly mixed vaccines.

But Samoa's response after years of anti-vax messages, was worse: They pulled the measles vaccine.

That's what caused the 83 deaths.

Now, Samoa vaccinates kids again.

No. 3: Kennedy ties vaccines to autism.

"You still say that autism is caused by vaccines?" I ask.

"Yeah," he replies firmly. "Autism is caused by vaccines."

He points to unpublished data presented decades ago by a researcher named Verstraeten.

"They looked at children who got the hepatitis B vaccine during their first 30 days and compared those to kids who got it later or didn't get it at all. There was a 1,350% elevated risk for autism!"

That was true, about the preliminary raw data. But in later analyses of the same data, Verstraeten made adjustments, and the vaccine-autism correlation went away. RFK doesn't trust the adjustments. Even if he were right, the chemical in the vaccines (thimerosal) that Verstraeten looked at was discontinued in vaccines, except flu shots, decades ago.

More thorough researchers have now studied the effects of modern vaccines and found no connection to autism.

One study even looked at every child born in Denmark over 10 years and concluded that the MMR vaccine "does not increase the risk for autism."

"You ignore the big studies," I tell him.

"You have this wrong," he insists.

Finally, Kennedy's critics claim he makes things up.

One told me, "Studies he cites won't show what he says they show. The web is full of detailed explanations of why nearly every study he has cited is bogus or wildly misinterpreted by him."

I didn't find that. I found that when Kennedy cites studies, he cites them accurately.

But he misleads by ignoring bigger, better, more reliable studies.

This does a grave disservice to his followers. Vaccines (most of them, anyway) reduce misery and save lives.

Although Kennedy and I disagree about a lot, I'm grateful that he will debate.

All my career, I've debated people for my TV shows. Debate is one of the best ways to get closer to the truth.

But today, activists and politicians hide from skeptical inquiry. Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy and Robert Kennedy are rare exceptions.

Good for them.

This is why Kamala hides.

If you hide, and say almost nothing, it’s hard to fact check you and it’s harder to tell the world: “She says crazy stuff!” Sure, there is some of that coverage, with her word salads, but the more she hides, the less bad coverage she is likely to get.

But a politicians who sits for an interview? Who debates? Who cites scientific studies backing up his contentions? Oh, you can attack that guy all day! You can refute him! You can say how crazy he is!

The end result is that politicians who hide, and who campaign without policies have a better shot at getting elected.

Stossel pretends to be an neutral journalist but he always strikes me as a secret Democrat. He’ll be voting for Harris.

Stossell exposed a lot of government misconduct. It is why he became a libertarian.

I beleive him when he says Kennedy cites some studies and ignores other which were better done.

It is a common practice. I see it all the time in medical journals, where they do very bad papers pushing for more regulation of firearms.

The problem is: How do you separate out the good from the bad science? It is not easy. The administrative state has used up all the credibility it had in order to push the agendas they want.

Just because you disagree with a paper's results does not mean the paper is wrong.

That is the problem. As a career scientist, now retired. I can say most papers published today are terrible. A huge number are politically motivated, agenda motivated.

There were standards.

1. Raw data must be published or available. Many papers on contentious issues (Climate for example) refuse to release the raw data. No one should give any credibility to any paper where they refuse to release the raw data.

2. The results should be repeatable. If the results are not repeatable, it is not science.

It has become the "norm" to rely heavily on "models". Many computer models are used to obfuscate rather than illuminate. Models make it easy to influence results by changing model parameters. Models, in general, are a bad way of testing hypothesis. It is much harder to challenge a model than a straightforward comparison of data.

Combine complex models with an unwillingness to publish raw data, and no one should find the results credible.

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