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What do you think of the medical claims of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an American environmental attorney and activist, has recently announced his candidacy for the presidency and appeared on the Jordan B Peterson Podcast, where I encountered him for the first time. He makes the, um, interesting claim that endocrine disruptors are "everywhere to be found" in our daily lives, and that because they can sexually feminize frogs, they must be responsible for the apparent explosion of gender dysphoria and transgender identity that has taken place over the last 5-10 years.
Some more claims I did a double-take on, having never heard them before: He claims also that a Cochraine collaboration report has declared Pharma drugs are the third leading cause of death in the US after cancer and heart attacks, and that masks are entirely ineffective in preventing the transmission of COVID-19? 70% of advertising on the news is from pharmaceutical companies? Big Pharma gives twice as much as the next biggest industry to congress in lobbying efforts? Most drug research has been corrupted by bad incentives and cannot be trusted?
If you don't know Kennedy, Chat GPT summarizes his "distinctive policy positions and views" as:
Environmental Advocacy: Kennedy is well-known for his advocacy and activism on environmental issues. He has been a strong proponent of environmental conservation, fighting against pollution, climate change, and the use of harmful chemicals. He has advocated for sustainable energy solutions, conservation of natural resources, and protection of ecosystems.
Vaccine Safety Concerns: Kennedy has been vocal about his concerns regarding vaccine safety, particularly the potential risks associated with certain vaccine ingredients. He has criticized the vaccine industry and called for further research into the safety and efficacy of vaccines, emphasizing the importance of informed consent and transparency.
Opposition to Industrial Agriculture: Kennedy has expressed opposition to industrial agriculture practices and the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). He has advocated for organic farming methods, sustainable agriculture, and the promotion of healthier food options.
Corporate Influence in Politics: Kennedy has been critical of the influence of corporations on politics and policy-making. He has highlighted the need for campaign finance reform and has called for increased transparency in political donations to reduce the impact of corporate interests on policy decisions.
Energy Policy and Fossil Fuels: Kennedy has been a strong advocate for renewable energy sources and a critic of fossil fuel dependence. He has supported the development and implementation of clean energy technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change.
Civil Liberties and Privacy: Kennedy has expressed concerns about the erosion of civil liberties and privacy rights. He has opposed government surveillance programs and the infringement of individual rights in the name of national security.
He has a lot of "big if true" claims and I would be grateful to know if there is any substance to them or what I need to say in order to efficiently discredit him in the future to anyone who may believe what he says.
What part of this is "um, interesting" and not just regular "interesting?"
Sounds pretty accurate to me. This is the only claim you mentioned that I'm certain about, and I'm certain it's true. This makes me more inclined to view his other claims are similarly true. Where's your point?
Please don't show me AI dreck, I'd rather grapple with your biases, not the biases of an inhuman conglomerations of predictions carefully tortured into compliance by the worst sort of people. If you can't summarize his positions yourself, simply don't.
Why bother saying anything? You clearly have already decided that he's full of shit. If that's good enough for you, why wouldn't you try it out on others?
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Not to peddle a conspiracy theory here and claim any kind of knowledge here. Also I haven't watched the podcast either. Is it plausible that chemical companies that produce endocrine disruptors could be funding trans activism to supress any narrative that gender dysphoria can be because of environmental factors? Is it plausible that research into endocrine disruptors has been defunded at universitys because the line of research is deemed "transphobic"?
To reiterate, I'm not claiming that I have documents/references to any kind of evidence that this is happening. I'm just entertaining the thought that it is possible that it is something that is happening. This is just an idea knowing how the tobacco industry behaved when a link between smoking and lungcancer showed up and how much hard work they put in to discredit any research into it.
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By the best standards of evidence available, masks do nothing for covid-19. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6
Some people caveat this by saying the evidence against is weak. My response to this is that if you're going to force billions of people to do so, you should have strong evidence in favour, not weak evidence against it. The default position for medical interventions should be that they don't work until proven otherwise. Others argue against the findings on the basis that masks necessarily must work because physics, on the grounds you don't need to do a scientific study to determine if a parachute works. This is called unfalsifiability, and is the classic sign of pseudoscience. Regardless if we did do a study on parachutes and got a null result that would actually be very good evidence against parachutes.
Stuff like this means we need to caveat any claim that Kennedy has wacky beliefs / conspiracy theories with the fact that his political opponents hold the similarly wacky (but in practice far more destructive) belief / conspiracy theory that masks work for covid.
The Cochrane meta-review contains 12 studies, only 2 of which are covid-specific. Those 2 studies are https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069 which says
and https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817, reporting that
That's 1 positive and 1 neutral study, with the positive study having a much, much larger sample size; based on https://www.stat.ubc.ca/~rollin/stats/ssize/b2.html the neutral study is only about 30% powered to detect a decrease from 2% to 1.5% infection rate.
In addition, all of these studies are really testing the combined effectiveness of masks against COVID, and whether various measures to get people to wear masks actually do so, and the baseline level of mask wearing. For example, the latter study I quoted above says
and the former has the adherence levels in the passage I quoted.
Obviously you can't do a meta-analysis with 2 studies, which is why Cochrane grouped these 2 in with the other 10, but "By the best standards of evidence available, masks do nothing for covid-19." is simply not true. In some cases an individual study is more reliable evidence than a meta-analysis, and this is probably one of those cases.
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The physics argument is also wrong. It would be akin to saying that a chain link fence can stop a mosquito. Once we understood that aerosol transmission was how covid spread and not droplets the logic for masking was over.
Also, masking was not low cost but high cost. It retarded development in kids, caused psychological issues for all who wore them (ie reinforced the idea one should panic), and seemed to create build up of CO2.
It is also funny because masks have been studied in a lot of other situations and they routinely don’t demonstrate efficacy. Thus the prior should’ve heavily been “masks don’t work.”
This is not how N95 masks work. Their filtering efficiency is better for very small and very large particles than for medium ones. This is why people wear N95s (or better) when dealing with much more serious diseases than covid.
Cloth and surgical masks were always dubious though.
I am making this stat up, but I’d wager that at least 90% of masks used were cloth on surgical. Focusing on N95 (which have increased costs) isn’t talking about the primary or even secondary form of mask. It was always a
Motte and Bailey where people would talk about masking has used and people would respond with N95s. Yet when they spoke about costs, the costs were the masks actually used.
The motte and bailey goes both ways, because people on the other side of the issue claim that masks don't work, period, and then inevitably walk it back (not all masks!)
In practice, N95s don't work either. It's just not as obvious a priori that they wouldn't.
Again, N95s do work, and have kept people from contracting diseases much worse than covid many times.
The linked meta analysis has a null result for N95 masks. If you're going to argue that there's a mask out there known to work you'd probably need to point to some kind of respirator.
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N95s in practice failed to work against COVID. Whether they worked against diseases "worse than COVID" is immaterial.
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Yeah but they're wearing them with utmost attention to hygiene, regular replacements and full mask discipline for short periods of time
It's important to not spread made up facts to counter made up facts. It's true both that some masks work and that most mask wearing is theater.
Some masks work*
Yep, you need a phd to wear an n95, it's not like blue collar workers manage it on a day to day basis.
You don't need a PhD to wear it, but it looks like - according to the current research - you need something like a PhD to wear it in a way that protects you from covid by a measurable degree. Either we say "experimental evidence is king, we are rationalists rooted in reality" and then recognize the fact that whatever the reasons are, mass masking is not doing what it promised to do, or we go "we should do it anyway because that sends a message and makes people feel blah blah blah" and then stop pretending we are following The Science (TM) and The Experts (TM) and recognize we just had one more weird social ritual among many weird social rituals we used to have over the history and stop trying to rationalize it.
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It was quite strange seeing industries that should have very strong familiarity with how masks work or don't work (painting with aerosols, asbestos removal etc) suddenly jettison that when covid came along. Thankfully I'm yet to witness anyone decide a surgical mask is good enough for those.
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I don't know if it has been studied but I suspect they also greatly increased crime.
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He points to some true things and may quote worthwhile science in the manner of a broken clock being right twice a day, but he is just another grifter.
The better question is why people who apply razor skepticism to anything approaching a mainstream view would be so inanely credulous of random shit grifters say on the internet is beyond me. There are people who would lie down in traffic or give their first born to such heroes without having the ability to do the first-person epistemics needed to find out how true any of the claims are. It's hard to know why people are so gullible in certain directions, it's probably a cult thing.
The current social media environment incentivises this of course and COVID was peak grift. Don't get me wrong the establishment got a lot wrong, but that doesn't mean you just trust random people on the internet cause they have a suck it to the man attitude and a cosy supportive audience you can cult-out with. I'll inflame a few people here but Brett Weinstein and most of his COVID guests were also in this camp.
I think the answer is that these are people who can’t, because of lack of access to data or lack of ability to interpret it, evaluate claims for themselves. So they’re stuck picking which set of experts they’re going to trust.
You might disagree that RFK is more trustworthy than the mainstream, but clearly his supporters don’t.
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I happen to agree with a lot of what he says, but it's tough to debate you on this topic, because you didn't actually say anything. Your post is a lot of heat, and very little light.
Why do you consider him a grifter? What's his grift? Why do you consider a presidential candidate with the name Kennedy to be a "random person on the internet"? From my point of view, he identifies corporate and government corruption with great accuracy, and speaks well against it.
If you have the ability to do the "first-person epistemics", then please enlighten the rest of us, so we can be less "gullible". But you've made no claims, contradicted no claims, and only asserted your perceived superiority to the kind of people who may agree with the things that RFK says.
If you have anything of value to say, I encourage you to say it.
Yes fair call, it was an opinion and I don't spend any time justifying my belief. Part of it is weariness, I forget the name of the rule but it's a lot more effort to rebut systematically someones claims which they can just throw out relentlessly.
Also, I can do this work and highlight exaggerated claims but I will be proxying my trust to others, researchers etc. I haven't overseen large clinical trials or analysed the statistical evidence first hand. I have to eventually accept that large vaccine trials are done authentically and with sufficient power to detect higher rates of adverse events, or that the knowledge of mercury in the body is sufficiently progressed to give some assurance of safety. I acknowledge various incentive structures within medicine and assign priors that aren't 100% belief for any source. But the point is not how I can know I'm 100% right, it is that among the epistemic challenge I can assign likelihood to consensus view and RKJ view and because RKJ does a lot of sophistry (selective quoting), insufficient statement of details of statistics, study design etc, it's easy for me to weigh up that he seems not to be oriented to truth and so the things he says get low trust.
In short, RKJ doesn't do all the things I try to do myself in terms of epistemics (mainly acknowledging limits of his knowledge and expertise), so I apply a Kantian rational skepticism for alternative explanations. The one that fits very well is conspiratorial thinker and grifter.
Also, the grift is precisely by occupying a place that is already popular and additionally has some merit. Anti-establishment is nothing new, he just harvests it for clicks. There's nothing even controversial or courageous about stating these things in your bubble. The courageous thing to do would be to acknowledge the limits of your knowledge but the incentive landscape doesn't encourage it.
I'm happy to examine some of his claims if you have any you'd like to interrogate.
There's a long history of studies showing that tobacco products are perfectly safe. Those studies had a critical flaw however, they were funded by the same industry that stood to profit from the sale of tobacco.
If you apply this logic to the modern pharmaceutical complex, including the lobbying and legal apparatus, as well as the research and publication apparatus, I think some concern is at least warranted. Why exactly do we trust the pharma companies not to corrupt the science in the name of their own profit?
Oh I agree the pharmaceutical industry is corrupt in many ways and increasingly suspect but there's a lot of good stuff written on this already. I don't think RKJ adds to this scholarship because he makes unsupported claims.
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In my case it's quite simple. The mainstream had the power to falsely imprison me with lockdowns and did so repeatedly through 2020 and 2021. The random shit grifters did not and largely wouldn't want to. To make things slightly less personal, the amount of damage the failings of the mainstream does is orders of magnitude greater than anything their opponents can do.
It's amazing the credulity with which people were willing to accept very questionable science coming from official government groups. And yet, if some random person disagreed, that was considered "irresponsible".
People with real power and authority need to be held to a higher standard. During the pandemic, we seemed to do the opposite: Chastising dissenters while granting the authorities near universal forgiveness for the errors that were made.
I can forgive random internet anti-vaxxers for being wrong.
I can't forgive the people who should have known better: the people in power who greatly exaggerated the dangers of Covid while ignoring the suffering caused by our massive overreaction to the disease.
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Well he's got some scientific backing there - one meta-analysis found no effect for masks in any setting: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/full
The report has low confidence and gives the standard 'more research needed' yet one can imagine that all the external pressure the writers would face is on the pro-mask side.
Between the replication crisis and Scott's many stories of perverse incentives in drug research and production, is this unreasonable? What about the opiate crisis?
Well, that might be true depending on how you define Big Pharma and industry: https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders
If you decide that the Chamber of Commerce and Retailers aren't an industry and throw in a few of the other medicine-related lobbyists, you could make that figure work. Going purely by sectors ranked, 'Health' is highest, even above finance/real estate/insurance.
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/ranked-sectors
Kennedy might have an ideology that leads to many incorrect conclusions but there are also true elements in it, or things that are sort of true.
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While I believe that RFK Jr has many inaccurate beliefs, some of his claims that you mention in your post are at least arguably correct, including a couple that may sound outlandish at first. However, after briefly going through all the claims you mention, I have concluded that RFK Jr makes a number of claims that are either false or hard to believe without a lot of strong supporting evidence. Also, his most explosive claims seem the most fishy. I don't think he is someone who is rigorously seeking truth, but rather someone who is prone to believe shocking claims and occasional conspiracy theories but for this reason also occasionally entertains plausible ideas that are somewhat verboten in polite discourse. Overall, I think you should be very skeptical of him but remain open to the possibility that some of his hard-to-believe claims are correct.
Let me now go through his claims one by one.
Endocrine disruptors are "everywhere to be found" in our daily lives. This is hard to evaluate since the phrase "everywhere to be found is vague, but it's at least arguably true. Endocrine disrupters are found in a number of products which it is possible to encounter in everyday life, such as pesticides (though note that some products containing endocrine disrupters have been banned, e.g. DDT was banned in the US in the 1970s). I wasn't able to quickly find information about the precise prevalence of endocrine disrupters in human environments, but see here for a very long report commissioned by the EU which claims (among other things) that current tests for the presence of endocrine disrupters are insufficiently sensitive. See here for some basic information about endocrine disrupters from the NIH.
[Endocrine disrupters] can sexually feminize frogs. This seems to be true. See here for one study claiming this. Tyrone Hayes at UC Berkeley has studied this extensively and claims to have subsequently been harassed by the pesticide company Syngenta who (he claims) are trying to cover up the negative effects of their products. He was recently inducted to the National Academy of Sciences, so he seems to be well respected. Here's another study claiming that exposure to endocrine disrupters present in some paint can cause masculinization in mollusks.
[Endocrine disrupters] must be responsible for the apparent explosion of gender dysphoria and transgender identity that has taken place over the last 5-10 years. This claim is hard for me to evaluate. I was not able to quickly find any strong evidence in support of it. On the one hand, it does not seem totally implausible. On the other hand, some things don't quite fit. Endocrine disrupters have been around for many decades and perhaps were even more prevalent in the past (before things like DDT were banned), but the explosion in the number of cases of gender dysphoria is very recent. Also, the feminization/masculinization effects of endocrine disrupters observed in frogs and mollusks were at the level of gross anatomy whereas gender dysphoria is a (purely?) psychological phenomenon. There may have been an increase in sexual developmental disorders caused by endocrine disrupters in the environment but I'm not sure to what extent this has occurred nor to what extent this can be connected with increases in gender dysphoria. I'd be happy for someone more knowledgeable about any of this to weigh in. Also, the number of exclusively homosexual men does not seem to have seen a significant increase from the Kinsey report until today (the number of bisexual men has increased a lot, but this seems much more contingent on social facts: it is easy to imagine mildly bisexual men opting to identify as purely straight in a homophobic environment but as bisexual in a homophilic environment). At the very least, this seems like a very bold claim for someone like RFK Jr to make without strong supporting evidence.
A Cochraine [sic] collaboration report has declared Pharma drugs are the third leading cause of death in the US after cancer and heart attacks. There are really two claims here: first that a Cochrane review has made this claim and second, that the claim is true. I am unable to find any Cochrane review claiming this, but I didn't look very hard and I'm open to being proved wrong. The second claim seems straightforwardly incorrect. This page from the CDC claims that the third leading cause of death in the US is covid, with about 400,000 deaths per year. Excluding covid, the third leading cause of death is accidents, with about 225,000 per year. I don't really see how drugs could be the third leading cause of death unless you split up several other causes in unnatural ways (e.g. splitting "accidents" into several smaller categories). By the way, I'm not sure why the CDC page I linked to leaves out drug-related causes, but this document claims that in 2019, there were 75,000 drug related deaths. However, about 95% of these were deaths from drug overdose, mostly illegal opiods. So even if RFK Jr's claim is true, it's only by breaking down several categories in unnatural ways and lumping all drug overdose deaths together into a single "Pharma drugs" category, which seems unreasonable.
Masks are entirely ineffective in preventing the transmission of COVID-19. I'm going to skip this one because it has been written about a lot already, both on this forum and elsewhere. My personal opinion is that saying masks are "entirely ineffective" is much too strong a claim, though I'm on board with a more limited claim that their effectiveness was exaggerated in popular media, especially the effectiveness of cloth masks.
70% of advertising on the news is from pharmaceutical companies. I'm highly skeptical of this, but had trouble finding concrete data. Also it's a bit vague: what does "news" entail? Does it include news websites? Newspapers like the NYT? Weighted by viewers, spending or something else? In any case, it just defies my own personal experience. I agree there are a lot of drug ads, but I don't feel like I've ever watched TV and seen almost 3 out of every 4 ads be about drugs.
Big Pharma gives twice as much as the next biggest industry to congress in lobbying efforts. This seems to not be literally true, but close enough that it's not worth the quibble. This chart by Statista shows that the pharmaceuticals/health products industry spends about $370,000,000 on lobbying in the US per year and the next leading industry, Electronics manufacturing and equipment, spends about $220,000,000. Now 370 is not quite twice 220 and I'm sure "health products" includes a number of non-pharmaceutical companies, but the claim was reasonably close to correct and violated my intuition so I'll give it to him.
On 4) I haven't delved deeper into this but the claim that medical mistakes is one of the leading causes of death requires proper context. My intuitive understanding is that technically it could be true. And yet it is only because people live much longer with the help of the modern medical system. Everyone should read Scott's article “By very slow decay...”. People who are barely alive survive only because of constant medical care, requiring 10 or more concomitant medications, constant care and procedures etc. The likelihood that overworked staff makes a fatal mistake increases exponentially and then that mistake kills the patient who was already literary on the death-bed.
Without that medical care and 10 different medications he would be already dead from natural causes but now he is dead because a nurse overdosed his insulin or pushed too much morphine into his vein or whatever. This doesn't mean much, only that medicines helps to live longer albeit with a poor quality of life and with a better care that minimises medical errors we could extend their lives even more while seriously questioning whether such efforts are worth it.
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On 3) aren’t endocrine disrupters linked pretty strongly to messing with hormone profiles of the sort that dictate almost everything about human sexual expression?
Yes, but doesn't this imply that if endocrine disrupters are the main cause of the explosion in gender dysphoria cases then we should also see an explosion in sexual development disorders (with e.g. changes to anatomy) that are also linked to endocrine disrupters? I'm open to being convinced that either (1) this is wrong or (2) such an explosion is occurring. Absent such an explanation, it at least seems like a potential inconsistency in the story.
The question of whether such explosion is occurring seems pretty relevant- have sexual development disorders increased? I’d thought at least precocious puberty was more common.
This is something I'd be really interested to learn more about. I had trouble quickly finding data about sexual development disorders, especially of the sort that cause opposite gender anatomical features. You do seem to be correct that there has been an increase in cases of precocious puberty and that fact does seem relevant (and I appreciate you mentioning it). On the other hand, precocious puberty is almost the opposite of changing gender. On the other other hand, it seems at least plausible to think that endocrine disrupters would just cause an increase in all kinds of disorders including disorders that increase sexual differentiation and those that decrease it. So I think overall I take this as mild evidence for the endocrine disrupters -> gender dysphoria theory but I'm also way out of my depth on the biology knowledge needed to know how plausible all this is and what would be good supporting or contradicting evidence.
One minor point of data is that I believe precocious puberty has risen most in girls, while sexual disorders are fairly male(I believe that most trans men are psychosomatic cases driven by fear of sexualization). It’s not implausible that the same set of mutagens could cause precocious puberty in girls and brain feminization in boys.
There seems to be some tension between this idea and the fact that the increase in reported gender dysphoria cases has been driven more by gender dysphoria in biological females rather than biological males.
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I think the source of the 3rd leading cause of death quip is Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime, it's a book though by Peter C. Gøtzsche. He summarizes the point in this letter to the editors of the BMJ. Oddly I can't find any reviews about that topic from him even though he's written many others.
He's attributing the underlying cause of many other immediate causes so they're not going to show up in the statistics. I tend to agree with him that drugs are overused in the medical system, but that's a personal value decision on my part, not a researched conclusion.
Thanks for digging up a plausible source for RFK Jr's claim. I agree with you that drugs are likely overused (though in part for cost-benefit reasons rather than because I think the drugs themselves are super harmful). Having said that, I don't think RFK Jr's claim is really justified. Most deaths are multi-causal, especially when you consider second and third order effects and counting every death where over-medication was plausibly involved as a "drug death" while not doing so for other causes of deaths is dishonest.
Yeah, it's at best something like Coffee/Wine/Butter gives/prevents cancer/heart disease level reporting.
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I think you're being too charitable. "Unexceptional idea, therefore absurd idea" shouldn't count as having 50% of his claims right.
I never said 50% of his claims were right and I'm not sure why you think I did. In fact, I said "some of his claims are at least arguably correct" which I think is true and "I think you should be very skeptical of him." I don't think RFK Jr is a good source of information nor do I think most of his most extreme claims are correct. I do think that some of his claims are correct or partly correct, but that's a much weaker statement.
Also, I don't really understand what you mean by "unexceptional idea, therefore absurd idea."
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Thank you for this thoughtful point-by-point response. It's exactly what I was looking for. About 2: even if these effects are real in humans, who is to say the dosages we are exposed to make a difference? I take your point that the "suddenness" and recency of the increase in transgender ID is not consistent with the endocrine disruptor hypothesis.
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Yeah this seems like it's some subset of TV news that skews old, it's certainly close in my experience watching Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune which I assume also skew old. Perhaps local TV news or cable TV news?
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What you say seems plausible. However, for Hulu I think ads are targeted based on demographics. For example, I have never seen a drug ad on Hulu. It does seem plausible that RFK Jr sees a large number of drug ads online because he's relatively old and the ad targeting software has identified him as a possible major customer for pharmaceuticals.
In any case, I stand by my original comment that this claim of RFK Jr's feels very unlikely but I'm also still open to evidence that I'm wrong.
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The history of masking (especially cloth) showed very little ability to slow aerosols.
Thus the default should’ve been masking doesn’t work until proven otherwise.
The CDC studies to support masking were absurd (hair dresser anyone). The closest they came was the Bangladesh study which had some problems that likely put a thumb on the scale for masking. There they found cloth masks did nothing whereas surgical masks reduced the spread by about 10% but only in the very old.
Some people took that analysis and re-examined it and found even that claim was stretching.
There just is so little evidence supporting the efficacy of masks I don’t see why anyone would start with the default you’re asserting.
It seems to me there are two different claims here. First, did the evidence for the effectiveness of masks in reducing spread of covid warrant government mandated masking? Second, is the evidence against the effectiveness of masks strong enough to warrant the claim that they are "entirely ineffective"? I am not interested in arguing about the first claim. For the second claim, which is specifically the claim OP reported RFK Jr making and therefore the claim that is relevant to this discussion, I do not think you have provided strong evidence. For example, you only mention cloth and surgical masks and do not discuss other masks such as N95. I realize that the efficacy of cloth and surgical masks is relevant to the policy question, but leaving out N95 and the like is unconvincing if you want to argue that masks are "entirely ineffective" (and note that in my original comment I specifically mentioned that cloth masks are not very effective). Also, citing a single study that claims surgical masks reduce covid spread by 10% in the old and then vaguely hand-waving about people being skeptical of that study does not convince me that masks are entirely ineffective. It might convince me that surgical masks are not very effective or that the costs of requiring masks are not worth the benefits, but that was not the question at hand.
My point is you’ve reversed the question. There is no reason to expect cloth or surgical masks do anything. It is on you to prove that; not the other way around. Has nothing to do with mandates.
I'm not sure why you keep insisting on specifying "cloth or surgical masks" when the OP just said "masks." Also, there is a major societal dispute about whether masks (including N95 and the like) are effective. It seems reasonable to expect someone who claims they are "entirely ineffective" to have decent supporting evidence.
Let me just ask you directly: do you think it's true that N95 masks are entirely ineffective at reducing the spread of covid? If so, do you think the evidence for this is so obvious that no reasonable person should question it? If not, then I'm not sure what we're arguing about.
Because that’s how language works. Focusing on an entirely non central case (ie N95) obfuscates the issue. When people say they believe in God, I don’t assume them to be talking about Odin.
But to answer your question no I don’t think N95 as used did shit
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RFK Jr. has been publicly known as a crackpot for several years now, and everything he says should be taken with a huge grain of salt. He's essentially a left-wing version of Alex Jones, but with a smaller audience that would be nonexistent but for his family legacy. I can't comment on specific claims, but I'm sure a little poking around online will answer your questions.
I don't agree with the claim that RFK Jr is "essentially a left-wing version of Alex Jones." While both seem prone to spreading conspiracy theories and to hold many false beliefs, Jones has much crazier beliefs (at least comparing the beliefs that both have expressed in public). For example, Jones has claimed that globalists built the LHC to create a portal to let in evil elves/demons to ensalve humans. That's a whole different disconnection from reality compared to anything I've heard RFK Jr claim.
Also see my comment above for my attempt to briefly fact check the claims that the OP mentions RFK Jr making. While overall they don't inspire great confidence in RFK Jr's accuracy, at least a couple of the claims are correct or arguably correct and also fairly surprising.
The classic insane Jones belief was "chemicals in the water are turning the frogs gay". RFK Jr. holds a similar belief.
(of course, it's not actually insane in a factual sense; what makes a belief insane in the social sense is the status of the holder, not the factual basis of the belief)
But before they can eliminate RFK Jr by obtaining a default judgement against him for One Billion Dollars, they're going to need to break any remaining associations with "left-wing". Shouldn't take long; I've seen a lot of right-wing COVID vaccine skeptic support for him.
It may be that the classic "insane Jones belief" was "chemicals in the water are turning the frogs gay" however I don't think that's close to his actual craziest (publicly stated) belief. In general, it is possible that someone is known for being crazy and is crazy, but is not crazy for the reasons for which they are generally believed to be crazy.
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For what it is worth, Alex is also right a decent amount of the time. He is also bat shit crazy some of the time. More importantly he is always entertaining. If you think of Alex as a court jester who occasionally tells truth but often is just a crazy clown, then he is a fine chap
My point was basically that Alex Jones's peaks of "bat shit crazy" are much more extreme than RFK Jr's. I agree that Alex Jones is entertaining, but that's very distinct from the question of his level of craziness.
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