RFK Shows JFK Doc Dump Futile

Apparently, Donald Trump has ordered the release of 80,000 pages of unredacted documents related to the assassination of President Kennedy, a subject that has busied conspiracy nuts for decades.

Spoiler Alert: No matter what those papers say, it won't make a damned bit of difference for a certain type of person, whose archetype is Trump's head of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

I have no patience with the many predictable excuses conspiracy nuts spew for ignoring and evading documentary evidence, so we won't wallow in them here, but there is still a fair question for me: How do you know these documents won't make a difference?

Image by the HHS, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Kennedy's nephew, Bobby, has graciously provided the answer already, in the form of the recent announcement that his CDC is going to waste our money studying the long-discredited "link" between vaccinations and autism:

The possibility of a link between vaccines and autism has been repeatedly debunked by hundreds of scientific studies. But Kennedy made a profile for himself as an anti-vaccine crusader, criticizing the Covid-19 vaccine and claiming childhood immunizations are linked to autism. He also founded Children's Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group. [links omitted]

Interestingly, the scientific literature already consists of a number of pages comparable to the Kennedy papers about this very subject:

When crossing the terms "vaccination" and "autism" on Google Scholar, there are 38,200 results with the leading topic being MMR (measles, mumps, & rubella) and the repeated evidence in many thousands of articles against its association with autism.

That was four years ago: I got 77,000 just now for "vaccine AND autism".

Even if only a third of the cited number are papers are primarily about this subject, if each is only four pages long, that's still over 50,000 pages!

Does Bobby Kennedy not know about this literature? Does he not care about it? Is he unable to process it rationally? Is he deliberately ignoring it? He happily imputes bad motives to vaccine makers: Is this a case of the pot calling a spotless chalice a black kettle?

I don't know and I don't care why this unqualified non-scientist won't see or admit the truth, but I'd say he proves my point.

-- CAV