He gets some data from different reports, adds, subtracts, turn sideways and then just lies to get to a conclusion that he wants.
Sorry for the long read below but this is a transcript of a conversation between Malcom Gladwell and Dr Bhutta on rfk's dishonest statements and how he fudges numbers to look legit.
This is Dr. Zulfiqar Bhutta, co-director for the Center of Global Child Health at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto. He spent years as a pediatrician in his native Pakistan. We went down from 10 million child deaths under five in the year 2000, by 2015 to just under six million deaths. Today, they are down to around three million deaths in children under five. It's the fastest rate of reduction in child deaths in the history of mankind. And it hasn't just happened by happenstance.
And this is the vaccine that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hates. I have to confess that I knew very little about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. before he ran for president in 2024. But as he loomed larger and larger in the news, I realized I had his most recent book, The Real Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and The Global War on Democracy and Public Health. His publicist must have sent me a review copy when it came out in 2021. I found it in a big pile of books on the porch. So I decided to read it, all 492 pages. And it was there in chapter three that I discovered the particular loathing that RFK Jr. has for the rotavirus vaccines.
I couldn't make head nor tails of it, which is why I had to call my friend Safi Bakalab. We were going over the package insert, which you thought was clean as a whistle. Yeah. Right. And so I was trying to figure out why if it was as clean as a whistle, does Kennedy have such a problem with rototech and rotavirus vaccines in general. And I want to read to you the key paragraph in his book, which, and we're going to try and solve this puzzle together because I have a vague idea, but I think I'm, I can't, my ideas so reflects so poorly on him that I, part of me thinks it can't be the right idea.
This is the key paragraph. Reported adverse reactions from Dr. Offit's Rototec vaccinerange from 953 to 1,689 per year. These included fever, diarrhea, vomiting, irritability, intersusception, SIDS, severe combined immunodeficiency. Kennedy lists 20 different really bad things he thinks are associated with rototech, ending with gastroenteritis, pneumonia, and death. Then he writes the paragraph that I read to Safi at the beginning of this episode, that the list of adverse reactions is so long that rototech, quote, almost certainly kills and injures more children in the United States than the rotavirus disease killed and injured prior to the vaccine's introduction.
Now I have to say that at this point things get deeply confusing because I couldn't figure out where that number 953 to 1689 adverse reactions a year comes from. In the real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy lists as his source the package insert, but those numbers aren't in the package insert. We hired a fact checker with a PhD in biology, and she couldn't figure out where Kennedy's numbers come from either. Then we thought, oh, he got the numbers from VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which is the government-run database where anyone can report a side effect that they think is associated with a vaccine. Keyword, think. But VAERS isn't Kennedy's source either.
We found the numbers. VAERS only has 344 reports of side effects over 15 years for all rotavirus vaccines, of which only 32 are serious, which is like miles and miles away from the massive number of problems that Kennedy's talking about. And even if he just made a typo and read the numbers wrong, it still doesn't prove his case because, as the CDC says, quote, a report to VAERS does not mean a vaccine caused an adverse event, end quote. So just because a baby vomited after getting his Rototech doesn't mean Rototech caused the vomiting.
Babies vomit all the time. To prove the vaccine was the cause of the side effect, you really have to dig into the data, look for patterns, or better yet, go back to the original clinical trial and see if there were any clues when the vaccine was first tested for side effects. In the case of Rototec, the clinical trial was enormous. 12 countries, 34,000 infants were given the vaccine. 34,000 were given a placebo. The babies were followed for a full year and absolutely every medical event that happened to them was recorded and analyzed. 68,000 babies. If in the course of a year, the babies who got the vaccine had more complications than the babies who got the placebo, then that would raise a red flag.
It would suggest, wait, maybe the vomiting was the result of the vaccine. But if there was no difference in the experience of those two groups, it would suggest any associated problems were just the kind of health problems that you'd expect to see as a matter of course in a very large group of babies. All of this data is laid out in the package insert. Page five, the SAE, Serious Adverse Events, and you would just look at that table and you would say, no difference. The table is a comparison of side effects in the kids who got the vaccine and the kids who didn't.
Numerically, if anything, there were more SAEs on the placebo than the control arm, but it's insignificant. It's like the difference between eating a banana or an apple. Yeah, no difference together We went through every one of the medical problems listed on the chart Castro and I don't even run colitis point six percent fever point one point two treatment treatment What's that placebo? He would just use it. Is that where we are now? We kept finding the same thing No difference no different in any difference Let's6, 0.6. No, no difference. And seizures? Let's see, where are you? Next page. Yeah, seizures. Numerically, maybe a little higher, but
the SAEs were exactly the same.
But somehow Kennedy reached the opposite conclusion. In his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy writes, quote, since its approval, Dr. Offit's rotavirus vaccine has caused a wave of catastrophic illnesses and agonizing death. I mean, that's just. Astonishingly, it just makes it just astonishing. Yeah.
So wait, what's he doing? He looked at the same thing you looked at. And decided that the rotavirus vaccine was causing this enormous burden of adverse reactions. I have to say, I got completely obsessed with this. Where is RFK Jr. getting his information? And what about the data from the clinical trial? Did he not read it?
Did he read it and not understand it? Or did he read it and understand it and just say, eh. You have a simple chart that has two columns, one column is called placebo and one column is called treatment. And he decided to completely ignore the column called placebo, right? Exactly. He decided to reach a conclusion about the vaccine by fundamentally, not just misinterpreting, he's 180 degrees wrong in his interpretation of the data.
And he had to place, it's as if he took his hand and placed it over the side of the chart that says placebo. Like there has to be some agency here that allows you to look at something that has two rows and only see one row. Well, firstly, I doubt that he actually looked at this source. I'm sure he's a pretty busy guy and you know. But Safi, he writes half of an entire chapter denouncing the rotavirus vaccine.
It's not like this is, this is not a, he's not making this observation in passing. He's going after at length, one of the most significant public health advances of the last 25 years, right? Something that has saved millions of lives. This is not trivial stakes here, right? He's big game hunting here. Yeah. Wasn't he trained as a lawyer?
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