Should RFK Jr.’s Government Anti-Vaxx ‘Expert’ Encourage People To Shoot The Government? Or Would That Be Wrong?

Last Friday, 30-year-old Patrick Joseph White took a little trip to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, whereupon he fired 200 rounds into several buildings, ultimately killing DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose and then himself. Why? Because he was obsessed by the idea that the COVID vaccine had harmed him and made him depressed.

THIS RIGHT HERE.

Congratulations To RFK Jr. On Fishing Trip, Ability To Inspire People To Shoot Up CDC

A number of rather disturbing details have so far emerged, starting with the fact that his own father, upon seeing the news, called up the police because he thought it was his son. If you’ll recall, White used his father’s guns in the attack. Call me crazy, but I just don’t think it’s a great idea to have guns in your home when you have a kid you would immediately suspect of being a mass shooter around.

Another thing that’s not so great to have around are people who are encouraging both violence and anti-vaccine hysteria working for the actual government. Unfortunately, we do have such people, and one of them is Dr. Robert Malone.

You may recall Malone from the time he played the role of “inventor of mRNA vaccines [he wasn’t] who learned the error of his ways and turned into an anti-vaccine whistleblower” back during the pandemic. Well, now he’s actually working for the government, having recently been appointed — by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., natch — to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). You know, the very necessary committee that advised the CDC on vaccines in a sane and normal way until RFK Jr. purged it of non-cranks?

LIKE SO.

Goodbye, Entire CDC Vaccine Advisory Committee!

Well! Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut is now demanding that Kennedy purge Malone from the committee as well, and not just because he believes insane things about vaccines, but because he believes insane things about vaccines and has a tendency towards the kind of violent rhetoric that just might inspire someone to commit a similar act.

In a letter to Kennedy, Blumenthal wrote:

“Just hours before a police officer was brutally murdered and CDC headquarters would be scarred with bullets, forcing hundreds employees into lockdown, Dr. Robert Malone, whom you recently appointed to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), uploaded a post to his personal blog that included an image of a revolver loaded with a single bullet and the words ‘Five out of six scientists have proven that Russian roulette is harmless.’ Less than 48 hours after the attack, Dr. Malone issued a meme-filled post that included violent and threatening images that appeared to be directed at government officials, writing, ‘if you need a disarmed society to govern, you suck at governing.’”

Here is that meme, by the way.

Ah yes, who among us can forget that famous debate between Elizabeth Warren and Tommy Lee Jones’s character from No Country For Old Men?

Here’s another in that same vein, shared on the same day — because of course Malone couldn’t have known before the shooting that violence against CDC officials and scientists was in the air, but he certainly knew it after:

A man is dead — one of the police officers that Republicans are supposed to care so very deeply about — because some nut thought that the CDC “turned against him.” A man who, let us note, shared the same feelings about vaccines as Robert Malone. A man who probably believed everything Robert Malone said about them.

Blumenthal’s letter continued:

“Dr. Malone has displayed an unfathomable failure of judgment and heartlessness for the family of slain Officer Rose, and for the thousands of CDC staff on whom the work of ACIP depends. Dr. Malone’s escalating and violent rhetoric—including in the aftermath of this tragic incident—has no place on a panel responsible for determining immunization recommendations for children and adults throughout our country. I therefore call on you to immediately fire Dr. Malone from his role on ACIP.”

The Connecticut senator also called on Kennedy to bring back all of the people he fired from ACIP in the first place.

“Your response must begin with the immediate firing of Dr. Malone, but should rightly include restoring the entire ACIP panel that existed before it was decimated last June. At that time, you replaced 17 sitting members, whose qualifications and expertise were unchallengeable, with conspiracy theorists and purveyors of misinformation. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about these firings, you lamented that, without your actions, ‘the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028.’ Your comment shows how thoroughly the Trump Administration has confused independent scientific guidance with its own whims, and betrays a fundamental ignorance of ACIP’s role as an apolitical panel with members appointed by multiple Presidents for overlapping terms. Indeed, for most of the Biden Administration, a majority of ACIP members were appointed during the first Trump Administration. As the 17 members you fired noted in an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, ACIP’s commitment to transparency and scientific independence have historically made ‘the decisions and deliberations of this committee a beacon for immunization programs globally.’ Unfortunately, because of your actions, its credibility has been shredded.”

I suppose we don’t know the rest of the panel’s stance on whether or not it’s acceptable to murder public officials if you don’t like what they’re doing, but we do know that practically all of them are just as incredibly unqualified as Malone is.

“The previous ACIP was made up of technical experts who have spent their lives studying vaccines,” Abram Wagner of the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health told the Associated Press after Kennedy announced eight new appointments to the panel, adding that they “don’t have the technical capacity that we would expect out of people who would have to make really complicated decisions involving interpreting complicated scientific data.”

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To be fair, not all of Malone’s memes were about vaccines or guns, some were also about how vegetables are bad …

While others seemed a little more like your traditional Nazi propaganda.

Still, others encouraged Americans to more fully embrace careers in manual labor …

While also trashing higher education (and being painfully unfunny).

Though it’s not entirely surprising that someone whose entire career is based on people believing stupid things about vaccines would not want people to be all that educated.

It would, of course, be lovely if Kennedy actually would fire this guy (and himself), but it’s also highly, highly unlikely. Far less likely, frankly, than another person (perhaps inspired by Malone’s memes, even) attempting to shoot up the CDC again.

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