Rfk Jr. Must Go
Key topics
The article argues that RFK Jr, known for his anti-vaccine views, should be removed from his position, sparking a discussion about the legitimacy of medical science, trust in the medical community, and the role of politics in health policy.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
20m
Peak period
38
0-2h
Avg / period
8
Based on 56 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Oct 14, 2025 at 11:18 AM EDT
3 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Oct 14, 2025 at 11:38 AM EDT
20m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
38 comments in 0-2h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Oct 15, 2025 at 2:43 PM EDT
3 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
For example, credible thinkers, including many people reading this, likely believe psilocybin and ketamine are credible treatments for mental illness when the evidence is incredibly thin and low quality and these are clearly dangerous substances in many regards.
The temptation to think there are suppressed secrets in the world (there are, in fact, suppressed secrets) is near infinite.
It's because human beings are messy! If you feed a person a peanut, they might think it's tasty. If you feed a different person a peanut that person may die, quickly. If a god damn peanut can illicit that range of responses in a healthy human being, imagine literally anything else. Of course there is corruption because so much money is on the line and humans in aggregate are a selfish bunch. One thing I always like to point out is that people who try to follow the science and the latest guidance aren't the ones speaking in absolutes. I'm aware the CDC or FDA have gotten things wrong in the past and will get things wrong in the future, but it's the best system we have. It's the anti-science people who speak in absolutes but then the second the cancer diagnosis comes in they come running back begging big pharma for treatment, they'll even bankrupt their entire family trying to get that treatment. It can't be both ways. This is why it's hard to take skeptics seriously. Not only do they throw a thousand things out there, and maybe one or two is right, they conveniently ignore the other 998 things they got way wrong, but when push comes to shove, they love big pharma and beg for it's treatments.
It doesn't mean I believe every skeptic over science, but it does mean that I'm willing to ask questions. In so many cases on the topics RFK Jr goes after, there are significant gaps in the questions that science has answered. People want those gaps filled and have for many, many years.
The answer is always more questions and therefore, more science.
Right now, there's an information vacuum and until that vacuum is filled people will continue to speculate. It's human nature, especially when somebody you care about has been affected and nobody can give you answers other than "this is life now".
https://www.propublica.org/article/rfk-jr-autism-environment...
> Third, NIH today is announcing the recipients of the Autism Data Science Initiative (ADSI), funding 13 projects totaling more than $50 million to transform autism research. ADSI integrates large-scale biological, clinical, and behavioral data with an exposomics approach that examines environmental, nutritional, medical, and social factors alongside genetics.
> Projects employ advanced methods such as machine learning and organoid models, address both children and adults across the lifespan, and establish replication hubs to ensure rigor. Each project includes community engagement to align research with the needs of autistic individuals, families, and clinicians.
https://www.propublica.org/article/rfk-jr-autism-environment...
So they cut funding then put it back for possibly fewer studies, but with new press release?
This is the crux of my argument. Of course we don't stop asking questions and you know it. It really bothers me when people argue like this in bad faith. What needs to be pointed out is there is a difference between educated people doing research (aka 'askign questions') and people with no experience spouting nonsense. 99.99% of what I hear from "skeptics" is the latter. Millions of Americans now listen to podcasts, comedians, youtubers, and other sources who lack the basic education to even understand a medical study, let alone conduct actual research. Actual science is 'asking questions'. Modern skepticism is 99.99% of the time not actual science.
I think this goes for many Americans.
That’s so vague and disingenuous. Should you take psychedelics if you have schizophrenia or something similar? Absolutely not but there is hard science research proving that they do help with depression and other issues.
I lost all my faith in the medical industry when I went through it. I entered with a minor problem and left with a much worse chronic pain. The doctor who did it to me had the gall to say it was in my head. Fortunately I went to another doctor and the CT scan proved it was in fact not in my head but in my intestines. I’m dealing with this drama, but I learned a lot of doctors are actually really bad and just want to prescribe you stuff and get you out of the door. Ironically the stuff this so called specialist was only making me feel worse and when I told her that she didn’t believe me.
Thankfully I have found some good doctors after much efforts and many references but I lost a lot of respect for the medical industry and came to understand that it’s a business and they just want to see you as many medications as possible and don’t really care about solving your problem.
Again, the research exists but is thin and low quality. I'm sorry you went through issues, I know this is common, which is why I addressed readers looking to self-diagnose but thumb their noses at people doing exactly what they're doing.
My mother was also bullshitted by a doctor until she got angry and told him what specific test to do and a week later when the test came back surprise surprise, she was right.
My best friend had an intense pain on her side, she went to a doctor and he said it was in her head, she went to another doctor and surprise surprise she had a hernia.
Another friend had constant intestinal pain and digestive issues, the doctor refused to do a colonoscopy and just gave her medication for IBS, she went to another doctor and finally got a colonoscopy and surprise surprise she had a tumor, thankfully they were able to cut it out but it would have been better if they had found it sooner.
Also when I was young I broke my arm and the doctor set it wrong and now my angle of mobility in it is offset.
I have way more stories like this and barely any positive medical stories. If I could go back in time I would have never gone to the doctor and let my body deal with the issue itself. I would be in a lot less pain right now. I hate how righteously arrogant and head up the ass most of the medical industry seems to be.
The entire medical industry has problems, needs to be revamped and the incentives have to be changed.
Fear and hatred of experts is how we got into this mess. If pharmaceutical executives aren't all cartoon mustache-twirling villains (and they're not: many actually want to help sick people), then maybe not every employee is either?
(But seriously - corruption is an equal opportunity employer, assuming any industry is exempt is dangerous. Take Pfizer - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer#Legal_issues)
Of course it is. Anecdotally however, in my career I've spent a lot of time among people like the author of the article. I've yet to meet a single one who did not present as genuine in their desire to help people. Might it be the case that they are aware of market dynamics within the process? Yes of course. But tropes like Big Pharma intentionally not providing cures or only looking at treatments that require constant application are bollocks. At least to the extent of my hands on experience in the industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Flier
He's not some lefty opposed to RFK out of spite for the Trump admin either.. he's written about how ineffective DEI is, against 'cancel culture', and he's writing this essay in Quillete, which is a very right-of-center publication. You'll find that the vast majority of people involved in research, medicine, or public health oppose RFK.
If one thing was learned last term, it was that it’s impossible to staff your administration with competent people if you also expect them to blindly follow the whims and urges of a demented reality show host.
To think we went from Mattis to this guy…
The actual solution is that Trump must go. But America voted for this. Get RFK Jr removed, and Trump will put someone just as bad, or worse, there. And the cycle continues, until Trump and the Republican Party are finally dismantled.
But I don't see that happening for quite a few years yet. The economy hasn't crashed hard enough for that to happen.
Loyalty is the only test with Trump and his sychophants in Congress will confirm whoever he nominates.
Okay but surely we can agree that the appropriate response to "legitimate medical community"'s failings shouldn't be RFK, nor should opposition to RFK be conditional on "look in the mirror, reflect on how he happened ..."? I agree such reflection should happen, but the "but before that happens ..." wording is bizarre. It's like having some domestic terrorist kill a CEO, and then responding to that with "before we can stop domestic terrorism, corporate america must look in the mirror about how it failed rural white blue collar workers in appalachia or whatever"
> but the "but before that happens ..." wording is bizarre
Biden was very much a status quo president who didn't do much to fix underlying problems. The result was the protest vote winning again.
Building things takes time, destruction does not. The protest vote was in favor of destruction.
I don’t think Biden was status quo so much as he led a deliberate and traditional administration.
In my opinion, 2nd term Trump is at least 10x worse than the first term.
Also, this is usually the case with any president because they are only focused on doing doing things in their first term that will get them reelected. Then all bets are off on the second term because who cares about ratings.
Agreed.
Furthermore, the CDC under both parties of capital interests has blood on their hands from the blatant COVID mishandling under multiple administrations, among other things:
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
Until the root causes of this rot are targeted, symptoms like rotating-villain RFK Jrs are going to keep grabbing headlines while societal conditions continue to deteriorate.
TheGauntlet.news here has several well-written articles about what went wrong with the US’s response to COVID.
It’s like someone swept their arm across the kitchen table, tossing of all the junk, and said “let’s just lay out everything we know about how COVID went/is going, but only put down the science based and common sense stuff.”
I was trying to convince people to use real masks instead of surgical masks since basically day 1. I understand that at first there was a shortage of N95s, but not for that long. I totally agree with the article that it quickly became “I don’t wanna”.
But I never thought fully about what it would have been like, to be a parent that HAD to take a sick child to the hospital for treatment unrelated to Covid, and see lots of doctors and nurses wearing surgical masks when they could have been wearing 95s. That would have been infuriating.
And one of the articles also had great info on the fallacy that “getting COVID multiple times is good for children’s immune systems” type messages. It is becoming clear that is not true at all.
Really great, critically important journalism there!
Keep RFK in place until the entire health sector completes an excercise in introspection?
“ Along with being more educated and reporting poorer health status, the majority of alternative medicine users appear to be doing so not so much as a result of being dissatisfied with conventional medicine but largely because they find these health care alternatives to be more congruent with their own values, beliefs, and philosophical orientations toward health and life.”
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/187543
This! The amount of clinicians I know who simply read the abstract of a case study, with no real statistical interpretation of results, is a non-zero number.
Whenever I see some hyped up popular press article about a scientific study, my immediate reaction is to go to the primary literature. First, I read the study design and analysis methods, then I determine if its even worth continuing to read the rest. Study pre-registration should be a must and papers need to be more explicit about being exploratory when the sample size dictates it.
Yes and no. You might need specific causes if you want to solve this with a pill or at a 100% level. You could very well solve this for 90% of people with lifestyle changes. Just look at the Amish for obesity and type 2 diabetes. But being more active and eating less ultraprocessed stuff is too burdensome - we all want to eat our cake and have it too.
Food is a readily accessible drug, and everyone is self medicating.
No that doesn't happen. This MAHA statement has become a thing on its own. So much so that RFK is doing exactly what you seem to have an issue with the medical community:
https://youtu.be/WBllzAb_vAk
RFK jr doesn’t like vaccines and now the Health department doesn’t like vaccines, regardless of medical science
Hegseth doesn’t like women or trans service members serving and now the Defense department doesn’t like them either, regardless of military science
McMahon doesn’t like government schools and now the Education department doesn’t like public schools, regardless of Educational science
It won’t stand de facto
What other mechanisms is the author suggesting? Democrat sweep in the midterms followed by impeachment?
Something else?
31 more comments available on Hacker News