You may ask which member of the Trump administration I’m talking about, because they are all compulsive liars. I’m referring to the guy with the brainworm, the barely literate incompetent who has fundamentally shut down science research in this country, the fraud who has been vomiting up medical misinformation, the one, the only, RFK jr, the man who has poisoned the Kennedy name for all time.
In attempting to rewrite the history of the US Covid-19 response, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sunday pinned the blame for pandemic lockdowns on Dr. Anthony Fauci, while simultaneously reviving a string of debunked assertions about vaccines, RSV and measles.
Kennedy’s appearance came in the wake of a congressional hearing with Fauci last week, when the infections disease expert invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination more than 100 times, as Republicans lambasted him for his role in handling the pandemic.
In his frantic attempt to claim that Fauci was a murderous monster directly at fault for COVID, he made an exaggerated claim of special American victimhood, asserting that we were number one in deaths.
“We had the highest death rate from COVID of any nation on earth,” Kennedy said. When host Dana Bash challenged him, Kennedy doubled down: “What I said was accurate. We had the highest death rate from COVID.”
It was not accurate.
But during the pandemic’s height, 2020 to 2023, the U.S. did not lead the world in its overall rate of death from the illness. Peru did.
In its tracking of global COVID-19 cases and deaths through March 2023, Johns Hopkins University found that Peru’s population was hit hardest with a rate of 665.84 deaths per 100,000 people.
The U.S.’s per capita death rate was nearly half that with 341.11 deaths per 100,000 people. That is the 14th highest rate. Bulgaria, Hungary, Croatia, and Romania were a few of the countries with higher per capita death rates than the U.S.
He does not care about the numbers. Details schmetails. He’s just stirring up hatred in the mob. He did go on to lie about the origins of COVID, the growing measles epidemic, and vaccines and autism, and food policy, all debunked here. This is nothing new. Do you remember that he volleyed a similar barrage of lies a year ago? This is what he does, all the time, every time.
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made myriad false and misleading claims on Thursday as he fielded questions examining his seven-month tenure leading the nation’s health agencies at a contentious three-hour hearing.
Kennedy ignored government data, twisted legislation and pointed to unsubstantiated treatments while addressing topics such as COVID-19 vaccines, rural hospitals and school shootings.
He was still allowed to hold office last year. I predict that he’ll cling to power like a tick after this year. There will be no consequences for him…just for the scientists he torments, and for the children who will die.
I so very much really desperately WISH I could disagree with your last line and prediction, PZ .
I cannot though.
Roadkill Fracking Kennedy jr is just another dangerous screw worm parasite that should be eradicated for the safety of the public!
But, I’m afraid you are correct, these destructive, hateful magats will continue to murder with impunity.
One more important question. When will the sheople realize that empowering billionaires and their sycophant crackpots to destroy the nation is suicide?
Please don’t let time prove to us the answer is ‘they never will wise up’.
As PZ points out in the OP, this isn’t even remotely true.
The whole world Covid-19 pandemic response was mostly a disaster that showed just how unprepared the world is for a pandemic of a novel disease.
We don’t even know how many people died worldwide from the pandemic!!!
.1. One major part of the world that holds almost half the world’s population couldn’t really count the dead, which didn’t much matter because they just lied about the death rate anyway.
The Soviet Union (Russia these days) didn’t have a competent response to the pandemic. The death rate is anyone’s guess because they didn’t bother to count the dead and made up their numbers anyway.
China may or may not have counted their dead, probably they didn’t, but whatever numbers they released were made up.
India got hit hard, started out counting their dead, had a high death rate, and then just stopped counting.
No one knows how many died but it was high, a lot.
.2. A large proportion of the world couldn’t count their dead and didn’t even try.
African countries have underfunded health systems that weren’t even capable of keeping track of the pandemic and they didn’t even try.
Any numbers from Africa are just guesses. Their public health systems didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on.
.3. Europe and the USA at least had the systems to keep track of the death rate and mostly they did so.
If the US death rate seems high compared to many others there is a simple reason.
We counted the dead whereas most of the world couldn’t or didn’t.
It is an apples to nothing comparison.
.4. Even in the USA, at times and places, some states stopped counting the Covid-19 virus victims for political reasons. These were of course, all Red GOP areas.
These were Nebraska, parts of Ohio, parts of Missouri, and Florida.
.5. The 1.2 million dead number in the USA is a known undercount anyway.
The actual number of probably around 1.4 million.
A lot of people died at home and what was written down on a death certificate may or may not have anything to do with their Covid-19 virus infection.
A lot of people died after being released from the hospital.
We all read those heart warming stories of people on a vent for a month who survived and were released.
Half of those people were so sick they died within a year.
People are still dying from long covid and they usually aren’t classified as Covid-19 deaths even though they are. I’ve seen two of these and a third person has come close.
The US response could have been better but compared to the rest of the world, we come off looking pretty good.
There is an interview with Amanda Marcotte today that explains Robert Kennedy jr.
Authoritarian dictatorships reward loyalty not competence.
So they attract the incompetents and losers while driving away the smart and hard working people.
He is an incompetent, delusional lunatic fringe nutcase.
In any sort of meritocracy, RFK jr. would be nobody, some guy coasting through life on family wealth and connections.
He is where he is now solely at the discretion of the wannabe dictator Trump, and solely because of his loyalty to a fascist regime that fronts for the ultra-rich oligarchy.
Dictatorships reward loyalty not merit or competence and that is why they never really do all that well.
Recent reports have it that RFKJr hasn’t lied about vaccines and autism enough for Trump – quite possibly a major motivation for the current frenzy of falsehoods from the worst Kennedy.
But wait, there’s more.
Report: White House drafting executive order linking vaccines and autism
raven @ #4 — I suspect the US count is at least somewhat lower because of mis-reported cases. During the pandemic a man named Matt Willis was the Public Health Officer in Marin county and he started an informative weekly podcast about the COVID pandemic as well as other public health matters. He noted several times that numbers were probably low because when a person died in the many nursing homes and hospices in Marin, the “cause of death” might be put down as something the person already had such as cancer, dementia, heart failure and so forth, rather than the immediate cause of death: COVID. “Cause of death” can be a complex of factors, particularly in older people.
@7 Reginald Selkirk — Sure, why not? Why stop at ignoring reality when we can order reality what to do?
The U.S. suffered 1.2 million deaths, which was indeed the highest number in any country. But blaming Dr. Fauci is just plain nuts, because Americans (primarily conservatives and Republicans) were led astray by Trump and his fellow anti-vaccine cabal. The infection rate would have quickly dropped if Americans had listened to doctors and scientists and taken the suggested precautions.
The aversion to masking, social distancing and vaccinations (when they became available) was made much worse by the politicization of the pandemic crisis. Trump’s insane talk about injecting bleach and using internal UV radiation was also to blame. Bottom line: Americans are idiots.
tRUMP and Roadkill Fracking Kennedy jr and the entire magat crowd are succeeding in their war on science by destroying records and the ability to generate accurate records. This country is so fracked!
I quite agree in these regards, and I do hope that certain older postings of mine have not appeared somewhat overzealous.
Holding politicians whose disastrous policies have cost very many lives to account is perhaps a mechanism that might in the long run be helpful for preventing disasters.
I have to say though that RFK Jr appears to be somewhat more literate than your president, who may be able to read upper-case letters to some extent, but appears to completely fail to write anything except for his signature. If your country is able to elect such a person, the level of political literacy of your country appears to be at rock bottom.
Kennedy would probably recommend ticks as a way to show off one’s capacity for parasite load. No wait, that’s not dumb enough.
SciAm – Trump is expected to sign a defense bill this week that orders an investigation into whether the U.S. military bioengineered Lyme disease (2025-12)
A US bioweapon made to thrive in… Washington DC and deployed before humans arrived on the continent.
Interesting that RFK Jr. would pull out per-capita statistics to try to prove his point, because he works for a president who, when presented with the U.S.’s per-capita infection rate in 2020, blew up and ranted, “you can’t do that! You can’t do that!” As if per-capita statistics were somehow invalid mathematically.
The U.S.’s per capita death rate was nearly half that …
Sorry, poynter.org, your own numbers show that the US per cap death rate was more than half that.
How could a fact-checking operation fumble such a basic usage?
@Pierce #15: Idunno. Doesn’t the origin matter? The claim reduces the value from “highest” to “nearly half”, not from “low” to “more than half”.
and
Nothing in the definition of the word “nearly” requires that “nearly” be less. Just slightly more than half still counts as nearly.
Actually in going from a high estimate down, “nearly half of that” really does mean “almost but not quite half as small as that”.
Poynter.org usage is correct, I’d say.
It’s Fauci’s fault now that Trump opposed the policies that Fauci was proposing, and ended up getting a lot of people killed?
Sure, I guess that’s how the US works now.
This is what Wikiperia has to sat about the Black Death or bubonic plague:
The advantage we had over those facing the Black Death was that we knew about disease-causing microorganisms and that there were drugs and vaccines which could treat them But, in the beginning, there were no drugs or vaccines which could treat the disease, just the basic protective measures of masks, isolation and quarantine.
We were lucky in the sense that. in the first Trump Presidency, the moron had not become so paranoid as to fully implement the policy of only appointing to positions of authority people loyal to him personally, that quality being prized over competence or expertise. Imagine what would have happened if RFK Jr had been appointed to head our pandemic response instead of Fauci,
seversky @20: “Imagine what would have happened if RFK Jr had been appointed to head our pandemic response instead of Fauci”
President Pelosi.