RFKJr and America's health

[Kraken]

Confirmation looks like a cinch so he's going to be in charge until trump wearies of him. I choose to lead with some rare good news: He wants major changes to Medicare payments.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his advisers are considering an overhaul of Medicare’s decades-old payment formula, a bid to shift the health system’s incentives toward primary care and prevention, said four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

The discussions are in their early stages, the people said, and have involved a plan to review the thousands of billing codes that determine how much physicians get paid for performing procedures and services.

The coding system tends to reward health-care providers for surgeries and other costly procedures. It has been accused of steering physicians to become specialists because they will be paid more, while financial incentives are different in other countries, where more physicians go into primary care — and health outcomes are better.

[Smoove_B]

I guess this goes here? I don't even know anymore. Anyway, apparently the answer to funding a movie about how the government created the COVID-19 pandemic is to get yourself to head the HSS:

“We have a film division at Children’s Health Defense,” Kennedy said in a clip from a virtual interview shared by the anti-extremism social media account PatriotTakes on Wednesday. A major source of vaccine misinformation, CHD is an activist nonprofit that was chaired by Kennedy until he took leave in 2023 to run for president. “We produced two films. One of them is Vaxxed II, which was, you know, a huge success,” Kennedy continued. “And then Plandemic, which we financed, which is now — by some metrics — the most successful documentary in history.”

...

Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind COVID-19 is a 26-minute propaganda film that gained wide attention in mid-2020, significantly contributing to the movement against health safety measures, including vaccination. Produced by Mikki Willis, a California filmmaker known for new age and conspiracist content, it features an uncritical interview with discredited former medical researcher and anti-vaxxer Judy Mikovits, and presents many false claims about Covid-19, including that wearing a face mask “activates your own virus” and that the flu vaccine contains coronaviruses. Plandemic also contends, without evidence, that the Covid-19 virus was artificially “manipulated,” and that vaccination programs are harmful for-profit schemes orchestrated by wealthy elites.

...

He went on to express the notion at the core of the Plandemic series, saying, “If you create these mechanisms for control, they become weapons of obedience for authoritarian regimes no matter how beneficial or innocent the people who created them.” In the same press conference, Kennedy likened government guidelines on combating Covid to Nazis testing “vaccines on Gypsies and Jews,” warning that these would “enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare.”

Maybe it's all part of his plan

In the meantime, if Kennedy still has questions about whether the U.S. government deliberately unleashed Covid on its own citizens, he can always ask the man who was president at the time: Donald Trump.

[Punisher]

Well Trump is a wealthy elite so that tracks.

[Pyperkub]

Well, if H5N1 wasn't enough, there may be something more immediately dangerous coming out of Africa...

Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dec 3 (Reuters) - An unknown disease killed 143 people in Democratic Republic of the Congo's southwestern province in November, local authorities told Reuters.
Infected people had flu-like symptoms, including high fever and severe headaches, Remy Saki, deputy governor of Kwango province, and Apollinaire Yumba, provincial minister of health, said on Monday.
A medical team has been sent to the Panzi health zone to collect samples and carry out an analysis in order to identify the disease.

the numbers seem to indicate that this has made a human-human transmission vector, whatever it is.

[Max Peck]

A story about how Jordan Peterson is helping RFKjr staff the enhealthening of America...

I Took the Test RFK Jr. Is Using to Determine Who Should Work at His Health Department

Donald Trump has promised to allow Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “go wild” in his new role as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The environmental lawyer, antivax conspiracist, and brainworm survivor chartered an oddly shaped coalition of COVID denialists and almond moms in his path to the White House, all of which was successfully marbled into the Trump platform during the waning months in the campaign. It’s hard to know exactly what Kennedy is cooking up for public health, or if some of his more radical ideas (like, say, removing fluoride from the water supply) will ever make it past the purgatory of “advisory boards.” But we do have at least one hint about how the man intends to structure his wing of the executive branch: a test ostensibly designed to locate potential employees for RFK’s reign at HHS. Among other things, Kennedy would like to know if you’ve ever experienced clairvoyance.

The whole assessment, which was first reported by Puck and was confirmed to be real by the Trump transition team, is available for anyone to take. Unlike more concrete examinations of one’s fitness to serve in a public health regime—like, for instance, any tangible background in medicine or health policy—the test reveals itself to be a free-associative chimera of IQ-ish logic puzzles and the sort of discredited Meyers-Briggs queries you used to take in Computer Lab. It would be a hilarious prank if its intentions weren’t seemingly dead serious.

And just like that, the test was over. I was presented no score or evaluation, just a terse “thank you” and the end of the line. I suppose I must live with the fact that the government now possesses a record of my darkest inclinations—an RFK-ified survey of my morality—but I don’t get the sense that he’s gotten any better sense of whether I’m a fit or not for Health and Human Services. Maybe that shouldn’t be too surprising, because when journalist Timothy Burke dug into who, exactly, is responsible for this deeply strange audit, he learned that the publishing company is called ExamCorp. ExamCorp’s president? None other than Jordan Peterson, the psychologist turned right-wing gadfly.

I know we’ve all grown numb to the outrageous stupidity of this political climate, but I don’t think we can hammer this point home hard enough. Robert F. Kennedy—a guy who dumped a bear carcass in Central Park—is set to take on a paramount role in the health policy of this country. Helping him round out his staff? Peterson, who is closer to the levers of power than ever before. What a horrific timeline. This carnival of MAGA grift will continue to blob out until it blocks out the sun. It can, and will, get worse from here. Hey, maybe I am clairvoyant after all.