Mike the Mad Biologist

From the Washington Post, which still can occasionally do some good reporting (boldface mine):

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent years campaigning against vaccines, but with the flu shot, he’s suggested it’s personal. Kennedy has linked his strained, raspy speech to the vaccine, despite several medical experts saying there is no scientific evidence to support that claim.

Federal guidance revised under Kennedy last month, while the United States is experiencing a hard-hitting flu season, no longer recommends routine flu vaccines for children and adolescents. The day after he assumed office a year ago, he ordered the end of a government ad campaign encouraging flu vaccination.

Kennedy has repeatedly said he suspects the flu vaccine triggered his spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological voice disorder, and that he stopped getting flu shots in 2005.

Although he acknowledges he is unable to prove a connection, he said his eyes were opened to a link after reading vaccine inserts while he was engaged in litigation against flu vaccine manufacturers.

In a 2020 appearance on the web show run by the anti-vaccine group he founded, he said, “I got [spasmodic dysphonia]. That’s what’s wrong with my voice, and it is a listed side effect of the flu vaccine.” Now in his role as the most powerful public health official in the nation, he continues to say that the vaccination may have caused his condition. He told USA Today in mid-January: “It’s a potential culprit that I cannot rule out.”

It’s the sort of statement that alarms public health experts, who have protested Kennedy’s pattern of raising doubts about vaccines that they say have proved to be safe and effective with decades of evidence…

“Having seen over 300 patients with this condition over the course of my 30-year career, no one else has ever claimed or felt that they developed this condition due to a vaccination of any kind,” said Steven Bielamowicz, professor of surgery and director of the Voice Treatment Center at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

A type of dystonia, spasmodic dysphonia is a central nervous system and neurological condition of the brain that affects the muscles of the voice box and vocal cords.

It is distinct from dysphonia, which means an abnormal voice. A Washington Post review of 11 vaccine inserts for flu vaccines found dysphonia listed as a possible side effect on one type of flu shot, but not spasmodic dysphonia.

“Dysphonia just means abnormal voice. That’s all what dysphonia means,” said physician Michael Johns III, director of the University of Southern California Voice Center with Keck Medicine of USC. “So that’s a symptom. I’m hoarse: I have dysphonia. So it’s not the same thing.”

Yes, Plaguelord and HHS Secretary Kennedy is that fucking stupid. A vaccine that occasionally can result in mild flu-like symptoms also can result in a sore–and hoarse–throat.

Just fucking dumbassery all the way down.