In the first moments of @kasie's @CNN interview yesterday, RFK explained that his high poll numbers are driven by voters demanding a leader who hears their suffering and offers a plan to make their lives affordable again. Instead of exploring that crucial issue, Kasie changed the subject to vaccines and spent the remainder of the interview demanding he not talk about the economy.
This at a moment when 13 million American children — one in every five — face hunger in our country. At a moment when the White House is openly admitting to working with TikTok to censor young people who can no longer afford to buy a burger. At a moment when our forever wars have cost over $8 trillion and 900,000 lives, according to Brown University. All while gutting our middle class and transferring our national wealth from millions of working people to political donors and the 1%.
@kasie, I wonder if you could explain what drove your judgement that vaccines are a more important issue than poverty, war-funding, education, hunger, wealth inequality, and access to the American Dream?
These issues affect hundreds of millions of lives every day. And yet you swept them aside without a thought.
As a mom, I understand prioritizing a discussion of children’s health above almost everything else, intertwined though it is with questions of economic suffering, war, education, and hunger. But if that was your motivation, then why not discuss the most pressing threats to the health of our kids?
43% of US children (32 million) now have a chronic health condition, according to NIH. That number rises to 54% for those who are obese, which 22% of our young people now are. Our childhood mortality rate in this country rose 20% in the three years between 2019 and 2021, due to domestic abuse, suicide, overdose and accidental death. These numbers are horrifying. They lay bare our leaders’ failure to protect the lives of our children.
Given your focus on kids’ health, are you asking other presidential candidates about these issues? Have you considered them yourself? Or can you possibly believe that vaccines are the only — or even the most — urgent issue affecting the well-being of our children?
If the latter, then I urge you to read the attached article on our soaring childhood mortality rates and to review the NIH data on trends in childhood chronic disease. I also invite you to consider that RFK’s twin demands — (1) childhood vaccines must be subject to standard product liability and (2) must be tested by scientists with no financial interest in the outcome — are hardly radical.
In our free market system, product liability is a crucial check on the fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. Johnson & Johnson has been subject to such liability for their intentional forging and withholding of data related to both the opioid crisis and carcinogenic baby powder. Does it make sense to shield the same company from the same kind of science-based liability in the case of vaccines required for all healthy children who want to get an education?
Over $5 billion has been paid out by the US Government through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, indemnifying the manufacturers from paying for their own mistakes. The Program is funded by a tax on every dose of vaccine administered in the US, meaning that harm caused by a single manufacturer's product is paid for, not by that manufacturer, but instead by every vaccinated American, their insurance, and US taxpayer-funded Medicare/Medicaid. This system removes our society's standard check on profit-driven appetite for risk, ensuring vaccine manufacturers internalize gains while externalizing costs. Ask any economist how that ends.
It's not an attack on science to expect standard liability should apply to substances that we introduce to the bodies of our children. Courtrooms assess damages based on science. And damages deter private corporations from selling products before being certain that they will cause no harm.
If we did not know this to be so, we would abolish liability altogether. Imagine if the opioid makers and chemical plants and tobacco giants all learned that tomorrow, the government would pay any future damages caused by their products. Do you think it would make their products more or less safe?
These are responsible and sober questions. If you want to spend an entire interview talking about vaccines, I encourage you to ask them.
More broadly, I ask you to remember that American voters face many crushing challenges today. Allocation of CNN’s air time between these different issues is a moral responsibility. Yesterday, at your desk, RFK broached the pressing topics of poverty, war, and wealth inequality, only to be rail-roaded by you on vaccines for the remainder of the interview. You did not mention our skyrocketing childhood mortality, our kids’ rates of chronic disease, our pediatric mental health crisis, our battle with childhood hunger, or our working families’ pervasive economic despair.
I hope that you and your editorial board will reflect privately on whether your decision to focus exclusively on the promotion of your advertisers’ interests fulfilled your commitment to journalism and to the American people.
news.vcu.edu/article/2023/0…
#Kennedy24 #CNN #KasieHunt #journalism #Bidenomics #FreeSpeech #RFKJr @kasie @CNN @EarlyStart
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