US Senate Democrats to investigate Kennedy's firing of vaccine expert panel
Kennedy last month fired the 17 members of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which reviews vaccines approved by the Food and Drug Administration before making recommendations to the CDC on their use. Kennedy replaced them with hand-picked advisers including anti-vaccine activists.
"The harm your actions will cause is significant. As your new ACIP makes recommendations based on pseudoscience, fewer and fewer Americans will have access to fewer and fewer vaccines," Democrats on the Senate's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee wrote to Kennedy in a letter reviewed by Reuters.
A spokesperson for Senator Bernie Sanders said committee Democrats launched the investigation after Senator Bill Cassidy, the committee's Republican chairman, denied his call for a bipartisan investigation. Cassidy's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Democrats requested Kennedy provide information on the firings by August 12, including details of the alleged conflict of interest for each fired member and note how they differ from ones they previously disclosed.
Kennedy said at the time that he fired the committee because it was rife with conflicts, but provided no specific evidence of conflicts among any departing members.
They requested that Kennedy outline everyone involved in the firing decision within and out of government, asking about the role played by specific individuals, including Lyn Redwood, the former leader of an anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy.
Redwood led a presentation at the newly constituted ACIP's first meeting. The Democratic senators asked who approved the meeting agenda and who selected Redwood as presenter.
They asked for all communications and documents on the appointment of the new members, including selection criteria, the vetting process, and proof they complied with government ethics requirements.
"As you give a platform to conspiracy theorists, and even promote their theories yourself, Americans will continue to lose confidence in whatever vaccines are still available," the senators wrote.
Kennedy said the firings were to restore public confidence in vaccines.
"Millions more lives are at risk from vaccine-preventable diseases if you continue to undermine vaccine access through ACIP," said the letter, which in addition to Sanders was signed by Senators Tim Kaine, Maggie Hassan, John Hickenlooper, Ed Markey, Andy Kim, Lisa Blunt Rochester and Angela Alsobrooks.
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The Guardian
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Forged signatures listed on New York City mayor's re-election campaign petition
More than 50 signatures on New York mayor Eric Adams' petition to run as an independent candidate in November's election are fraudulent, according to a report published on Friday. The Gothamist said it had found 52 signatures from people who said their names were forged, including signatures of three people who turned out to be dead. The publication cited others who said they were deceived into signing the petitions. The discovery, if confirmed, is likely to be insignificant to Adams' independent campaign, which is required to produce 7,500 signatures to qualify him as a candidate. The Adams campaign has turned in nearly 50,000 signatures. Still, the finding adds complexity to a race to lead the nation's largest city that pits the incumbent mayor against Democratic party nominee Zohran Mamdani, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa and ex-prosecutor Jim Walden. Cuomo and Walden, like Adams, are running as independents. Flaws in the petition system to gain access to the ballot are likely to be tested in the future as candidates look for ways to circumvent the ranked-choice primary system, the publication said. Candidates typically employ outside contractors to harvest signatures. In the case of Adams' petition operation, the irregularities were attributed to at least nine workers who together submitted more than 5,000 signatures. A single campaign worker collected more than 700 signatures on a single day, the outlet said, adding that some appeared to be submitted in 'strikingly similar handwriting among many residents in a single building'. The Adam's campaign did not immediately respond to request for comment. But earlier it had told the Gothamist it expected the companies it hired to follow the law, and it would conduct its own review of the signatures. An attorney for Adams said the mayor did not direct anyone to break the law and that his campaign would 'determine whether any corrective action is warranted'. Veteran election law attorney Jerry Goldfeder told the publication it is not uncommon for invalid signatures to be collected. ' Every now and again, somebody tries to cut corners, and they're generally caught and sometimes those cases are referred to the district attorney or the US attorney, and there are prosecutions,' Goldfeder said. The report comes amid heightened tensions in the city after a gunman killed four people in a midtown office building on Monday, including off-duty New York City police officer Didarul Islam, Blackstone executive Wesley LePatner, security guard Aland Etienne and property manager Julia Hyman. The Adams administration has urged New Yorkers to seek help and support from mental health services if they find themselves struggling in the aftermath of the attack, while Mamdani is walking back past criticism of the city's police, saying his prior calls to defund the force were 'out of step' with his current thinking. 'I'm not defunding the police,' Mamdani said on Wednesday. 'I'm not running to defund the police. 'I am running as a candidate who is not fixed in time, one that learns and one that leads, and part of that means admitting as I have grown. And part of that means focusing on the people who deserve to be spoken about.' New York City's mayoral election is scheduled for 4 November.
Telegraph
an hour ago
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How bull---t took over our lives
'One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bull---t.' So begins American philosopher Harry Frankfurt's unexpectedly delightful essay, On Bull---t, first published in an academic journal in 1986 and later as a bestselling book in 2005. Today its message is even more resonant. Greta Thunberg may think we are living in a climate emergency, but what is clearer, if less trumpeted, is that we are living in a bulls--- emergency. Thanks to – among other things – the democratising effect of the internet, the resultant decline in deference to 'experts', rising scorn for the political establishment, online echo chambers, the blurring of fact and fiction online – a problem recognised in 1995, by the journalist John Diamond: 'The problem with the internet is everything is true'' – we live in a post-truth era. All these factors favour the liar, but they favour the bull---ter even more. How astute then of Princeton University Press to reissue Frankfurt's essay, in a 20th-anniversary edition the neat size and colour of Mao 's little red book. (You might carry it around in your pocket so that you too can become a bull---t detector.) Heaven knows that it's the superpower we need today: Frankfurt perhaps didn't know when he wrote those words how high the tide of bull---t would rise in the ensuing two decades. And he surely had no inkling that the defecatory business model of Thames Water would provide an obvious parallel for his subject. But what is bull---t and how is it different from lies? Frankfurt draws on philosopher Max Black's 1983 essay, The Prevalence of Humbug, to help make that distinction: 'humbug' is 'deceptive information, misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody's own thoughts, feelings and attitudes'. For Frankfurt, bull---t is humbug's vulgar bastard sibling but somehow worse. That Frankfurt never really defines his key term beyond 'humbug' may seem a shortcoming. Or maybe not. Maybe bull---t is like what pornography was for the US Supreme Court Judge Potter Stewart who famously failed to define the term but added: 'I know it when I see it.' Likewise, we often sense bull---t. We recognise it when the government minister, asked about a policy about-turn, begins their reply: 'The prime minister has been very clear about this…', only to continue with some sub-Chat GPT dross that doesn't even start to address the question. Or when a police officer tells the media in tone-deaf boilerplate, 'Our thoughts and prayers are with the friends and family…'. We see it thriving in greenwashing ads for oil companies; virtue-signalling gender fluid sign-offs in flyers from estate agents; why the AI Overview at the top of your Google search is plausible but on closer examination obviously wrong. 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In his sub-Machiavellian 1998 bestseller, The 48 Laws of Power, for instance, pop psychologist Robert Greene might have heralded bull---t. I imagine the 49th law of power should read as follows: any human seeking airtime, status and, in extremis, the big chair in the Oval Office, better become a bull---t artist. Frankfurt also quotes a passage from Eric Ambler's spy novel Dirty Story, in which a character relates the sage advice he got from his father: 'Never tell a lie when you can bull---t your way through.' Bull---t was certainly part of Trump's skill set before he was elected president. His butler, Anthony Senecal, related in a 2016 interview a particularly summative anecdote about the US president's relationship to truth: one day, Senecal was reading Trump's book The Art of the Deal, and was puzzled by a passage in which Trump mentioned that the tiles in the nursery of Mar-a-Lago, West Palm Beach club, had been personally made by Walt Disney. 'Is that really true?' the butler asked the billionaire. Trump replied: 'Who cares?' The great virtue of Frankfurt's book is that he called out such bull---t long before Trump and other populist bull---t artists got elected. That said, perhaps even Frankfurt, who died in 2023, might not have foreseen how central the art of bull---t would be to his president's second term. Consider more recent Trumpisms: during last year's presidential race, he claimed illegal immigrants were eating pets. In March this year, speaking at a joint session of Congress, he alleged that the Biden administration had spent '$8m for making mice transgender'. The claims had journalists scurrying around like, well, transgender mice (if such rodents exist) to debunk or substantiate the claims. But, in a sense they missed the point. The truths of these matters – most likely that there are no transgender mice nor pet-eating illegal immigrants – didn't matter. What Trump did here was apply his former adviser Steve Bannon's notion of 'flooding the zone' with bull---t, in order to occupy the media's time and effort, which in itself takes a kind of genius. Since he wrote On Bull---t, other intellectuals have extended Frankfurt's analysis. Among them was the late American anarchist anthropologist David Graeber who, in his jolly 2013 piece, 'On the Phenomenon of Bull---t Jobs', paid tribute to Frankfurt's essay. Graeber's all-too-convincing argument was that many of us are working in jobs that are bull---t: 'A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble. But it's not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.' (When I interviewed him, Graeber conceded that some might argue that his own work is bull---t. He didn't include book reviewers like me as bull---t artists, but he could have done.) In 2018, philosopher George Lakoff proposed an anti-bull---t remedy for journalists called the truth sandwich. Confronted by the quotidian pump of Trumpian bull---t, the thing to do is not to repeat it. Or if one did repeat it, envelope it in – as it were – the nourishing bread of truth. As you may have noticed, that hasn't happened: the hopeful notion that we might have reached peak bull---t has been disproved by politicians ever since – from Boris Johnson's stints at the No 10 Covid lectern to risibly gaudy yet impotent threats against Israel and the US from Iran's supreme leader. The foregoing may seem to suggest only men do bull---t. Not so. Think of Liz Truss who, in her hilariously self-serving memoir, wrote of her battles with proponents of trans rights: 'I am not prepared to leave the field until the battle is won.' Pure bull---t, especially from someone who left the battlefield as prime minister after 49 days of chaos at Number 10. Meanwhile, journalist Matthew d'Ancona has argued that the post-truth era was only made possible by Sigmund Freud. In psychoanalysis, he claimed, the imperative is to treat the patient successfully, irrespective of the facts. 'Sharing your innermost feelings, shaping your life-drama, speaking from the heart: these pursuits are increasingly in competition with traditional forensic values.' Truth, in other words, is the leading victim in the spread of therapeutic culture. Frankfurt's essay concludes similarly: we have given up the ideal of correctness for that of sincerity, he claimed. He wrote: 'Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, [the individual] devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the fact, he must therefore be true to himself.' In that sense, Trump is the Humpty Dumpty of politics. Consider Alice Through the Looking Glass, where Lewis Carroll has Alice observe: 'The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.' Humpty Dumpty retorts: 'The question is, which is to be master – that's all.' Power and mastery are all. Truth is beside the bull---ter's point. It's a sign of our cynical jaded times that even some of the president's fans know not to expect truth from him. No wonder, then, what happened in Selma, North Carolina in April 2022: 'I think I'm the most honest human being, perhaps, that God ever created,' Trump told a rally. His remark was greeted with laughter in the crowd. An equally valid reaction would have been: 'Bull---t!'
Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
India to maintain Russian oil imports despite Trump threats, government sources say
NEW DELHI, Aug 2 (Reuters) - India will keep purchasing oil from Russia despite U.S. President Donald Trump's threats of penalties, two Indian government sources told Reuters on Saturday, not wishing to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter. On top of a new 25% tariff on India's exports to the U.S., Trump indicated in a Truth Social post last month that India would face additional penalties for purchases of Russian arms and oil. On Friday, Trump told reporters he had heard that India would no longer be buying oil from Russia. But the sources said there would be no immediate changes. "These are long-term oil contracts," one of the sources said. "It is not so simple to just stop buying overnight." Justifying India's oil purchases from Russia, a second source said India's imports of Russian grades had helped avoid a global surge in oil prices, which have remained subdued despite Western curbs on the Russian oil sector. Unlike Iranian and Venezuelan oil, Russian crude is not subject to direct sanctions, and India is buying it below the current price cap fixed by the European Union, the source said. The New York Times also quoted two unnamed senior Indian officials on Saturday as saying there had been no change in Indian government policy. Indian government authorities did not respond to Reuters' request for official comment on its oil purchasing intentions. However, during a regular press briefing on Friday, foreign ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said India has a "steady and time-tested partnership" with Russia. "On our energy sourcing requirements ... we look at what is there available in the markets, what is there on offer, and also what is the prevailing global situation or circumstances," he said. The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Trump, who has made ending Russia's war in Ukraine a priority of his administration since returning to office this year, has expressed growing impatience with Russian President Vladimir Putin in recent weeks. He has threatened 100% tariffs on U.S. imports from countries that buy Russian oil unless Moscow reaches a major peace deal with Ukraine. Russia is the leading supplier to India, the world's third-largest oil importer and consumer, accounting for about 35% of its overall supplies. India imported about 1.75 million barrels per day of Russian oil from January to June this year, up 1% from a year ago, according to data provided to Reuters by sources. But while the Indian government may not be deterred by Trump's threats, sources told Reuters this week that Indian state refiners stopped buying Russian oil after July discounts narrowed to their lowest since 2022 - when sanctions were first imposed on Moscow - due to lower Russian exports and steady demand. Indian Oil Corp ( opens new tab, Hindustan Petroleum Corp ( opens new tab, Bharat Petroleum Corp ( opens new tab and Mangalore Refinery Petrochemical Ltd ( opens new tab have not sought Russian crude in the past week or so, four sources told Reuters. Nayara Energy - a refinery majority-owned by Russian entities, including oil major Rosneft ( opens new tab, and major buyer of Russian oil - was recently sanctioned by the EU. Nayara's chief executive resigned following the sanctions, and three vessels laden with oil products from Nayara Energy have yet to discharge their cargoes, hindered by the new EU sanctions, Reuters reported last week.
