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Vaccine Conspiracy Theorist and Current Health Secretary RFK Jr Does Not Believe in Germ Theory. [1]

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Date: 2025-05-05

If you’ve never heard of Miasma Theory, don’t worry, until recently no one had spoken of it since the late nineteenth century. At that time, thanks to the work of Louis Pasteur and, especially, Robert Koch, germ theory became ascendent.

Miasma theory posits that diseases, including the plague, cholera, typhoid, smallpox and all other transmittable diseases, are caused by “bad air” or poisonous vapours. They traced cholera outbreaks, for example, to the air emanating from rotting matter that was almost everywhere in nineteenth century cities. “The miasmatic position was that diseases were the product of environmental factors such as contaminated water, foul air, and poor hygienic conditions” (en.wikipedia.org/...). Diseases could not be spread through human contact, in other words, but are the products of poor hygiene and poor sanitation.

Although the theory proved to be deficient in describing how diseases spread, it did result in the construction of buildings with better ventilation and cleaning up the sewage and organic detritus that littered the streets and created the hellish odours to which city residents were exposed. So, some good came from it, I suppose, but thankfully germ theory superseded it. Miasma theory then joined the Humours and bloodletting in the museum of forgotten medical theories.

Further research, based on the reasearch conducted by Pasteur and Koch, resulted in scientists discovering specific viruses, bacteria, fungi, parasites and other pathogens that caused the most well known diseases.

Germ Theory has driven research, driven treatment, and driven public health policy for over a century. From this knowledge scientists developed the vaccines, anti-biotics such as penicillin, and other treatments that allowed society to eliminate diseases that had been a scourge on the health of people, especially children, as little as 75 years ago. Talk to your parents or grandparents about polio, whooping cough, measles, and other diseases that vaccines have eradicated about how scary life could be for kids growing up prior to the seventies.

Then along comes Robert F Kennedy Jr. and the antivaxxer community. Backed by pseudo-science, research long since debunked, and theories for which no proof is ever provided, these individuals want us to treat diseases as if it was 1899.

Robert F Kennedy Jr’s belief in miasma theory hasn’t been spoken of to any great degree. In fact, our understanding of his beliefs come largely from just four pages from his 2021 diatribe, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.”.

In those four pages, RFK Jr. wrote that, “Anthony Fauci [said that] vaccines have already saved millions and millions of lives. Most Americans accept the claim as dogma. It will therefore come as a surprise to learn that it is simply untrue” (pauloffit.substack.com/...). When asked why the incidence of measles dropped dramatically after the introduction of the vaccine, RFK Jr, of course, falls back on miasma theory and says, “improvements in sanitation and nutrition had eliminated 98 percent of measles deaths”( pauloffit.substack.com/...). In other words, miasma theory explains this success, not germ theory.

His anti-vax hysteria, even his raw milk fetish, all arise out of this complete misunderstanding of the science. “The ubiquity of pasteurization and vaccinations are only two of the many indicators of the dominating ascendancy of germ theory as the cornerstone of contemporary public health policy. A $1 trillion pharmaceutical industry pushing patented pills, powders, pricks, potions, and poisons and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology…The miasmist approach to public health is to boost individual immune responses.” (pauloffit.substack.com/...).

RFK Jr goes farther, however, adding a eugenicist twist to the miasma theory. If people get sick, he believes, its because people weren’t taking proper care of themselves or are somehow otherwise unfit. Essentially, if you die of measles, it’s not the fault of the measles, it’s your own damn fault. So when two children died of measles earlier this year, he lied and said that these children were malnourished and suffering from other health problems. When Samoa suffered a measles outbreak in 2019 that resulted in the death 83 people, primarily children under four who weren’t vaccinated, he suggested Vitamin A rather than vaccines proven to eradicate the disease. In 2021, he even declared, “Measles outbreaks have been fabricated to create fear that in turn forces government officials to ‘do something.’ They then inflict unnecessary and risky vaccines on millions of children for the sole purpose of fattening industry profits” (pauloffit.substack.com/...)

RFK Jr, like his boss Trump, likes to talk about genes and race, not just to promote his anti-vaccine agenda but to promote anti-Black racism and antisemitism. He famously said that Covid-19 was designed to cause much less harm to the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jewish people (www.brookings.edu/...) In 2021, he produced a film called “Medical Racism: The New Apartheid”, which used the real history of medical racism in the United States to peddle conspiracy theories that Covid vaccines were created to specifically harm Black communities (www.nbcnews.com/...). It is not surprising that the Trump administration ended a program, PEPFARS, that helped save millions of lives in Africa. The Health Secretary’s statement that, “the number of people diagnosed with AIDS in Africa had been inaccurately inflated to enrich virologists and aid organizations” (www.brookings.edu/...) no doubt influenced this decision.

With RFK Jr, we’re not just seeing a man put in a position of great power whose beliefs are tragically out of date, but someone who uses these beliefs to engage in a sort of social darwinism in which people who are healthy will always be fine and if you get sick or require hospitalization, as I said, it’s your own damn fault.

When current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asserted that he hadn’t washed his hands in ten years because he didn't believe in germs, www.google.ca/... people laughed and rightly thought he was out of his mind. Turns out, he has an ally in the Trump administration who also doesn’t believe in germ theory. Unfortunately, that man is the Secretary of Health.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/5/5/2320734/-Vaccine-Conspiracy-Nut-and-current-Health-Secretary-RFK-Jr-Does-Not-Believe-in-Germ-Theory?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web

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