By John Klar, Contributor, The MAHA Report
Add The Wall Street Journal to the list of legacy media that have placed a target on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s back.
Despite publishing an opinion piece by Kennedy (“We’re Restoring Public Trust in the CDC”) on September 2, two days later, following Secretary Kennedy’s contentious hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, the WSJ allowed its coverage of the hearing to devolve into empty tropes and pejorative ‘reporting’ just as so many other media hacks have done.
Photo by Sipa USA via AP
The executioners in this exhibit of media editorializing in the place of ethically balanced reporting were reporters Liz Essley Whyte, Sabrina Siddiqui, and Jennifer Calfas. What they ‘reported’ in the WSJ reveals much about Kennedy’s truths and the extent to which some sources will go to misrepresent them.
The article’s title frames the key issues of the hearing: “RFK Jr. Questioned Over CDC Turmoil, Vaccines in Senate Hearing.” These issues – the CDC shake-up and mRNA vaccine efficacy – are interrelated. They were also the predominant subjects of most Democratic senatorial disquisitions throughout the theatrical hearing.
In their WSJ write-up, the chief narrative strains the authors employ are that, 1) Kennedy fired acting CDC director Susan Monarez for refusing to remove mRNA Covid-19 vaccines from the agency’s list of recommended vaccines for children; and 2) this action deprived people of life-saving mRNA vaccines.
The real story is more nuanced.
The core questions both Senate Finance Committee Democrats and the three reporters from the WSJ avoided were whether mRNA vaccines effectively prevent infection, and whether they are safe. To recommend vaccination with an intervention that was neither safe nor effective would be a breach of ethics and public trust. As Secretary Kennedy asked Senator Elizabeth Warren during the hearing: “I’m not going to recommend a product for which there’s no clinical data for that indication… Is that what I should be doing?”
If the mRNA vaccines are not safe or are ineffective, they should not be recommended. If they should not be recommended, Susan Monarez was doubly wrong to commit insubordination in her refusal. But is that really what Monarez was fired for, or was it because she joined other CDC officials who sought to restrict Kennedy’s new, independent ACIP members from fully investigating the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines?
In an interview, ACIP Board member Dr. Robert Malone opined that the real battle concerned an effort by the CDC to control the recommendations of the ACIP board rather than permit it to operate independently. Dr. Malone emphasized that, under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, the ACIP subcommittee is supposed to be independent of the agency, but that a group of CDC employees (now resigned) had worked to prevent a full review of mRNA vaccines by the new ACIP committee.
According to Dr. Malone, these individuals believed “that The CDC had gathered all the necessary data concerning adverse events and effectiveness of these products, and that those data from the CDC were available for the ACIP to evaluate, and that it was out of [the] scope for the ACIP to consider other sources of information.” Dr. Malone contends this was “a perverse interpretation of the charter [and] the clearest indication of how we got to this point where the ACIP had basically become a mouthpiece for the interests of both the CDC bureaucracy and the pharmaceutical industry.”
If Dr. Malone’s contention is accurate, Monarez had worked not to protect the public with safer vaccine recommendations, but to thwart laws designed to ensure that recommended vaccines were safe for the public.
In its coverage of the hearing, The Wall Street Journal defended Monarez without access to the reasons why she was dismissed, writing that “Monarez objected to some of Kennedy’s desired changes. When asked to remove certain CDC officials and to sign off on future recommendations that Kennedy’s new slate of immunization advisers would issue, she said she refused.”
In an opinion piece of her own, ironically also in The Wall Street Journal, Monarez opined that “[w]e should always demand evidence – exactly what I was doing when I insisted all CDC recommendations be based on credible data, not ideology or preordained outcomes….”
According to ACIP member Dr. Malone, ACIP demanded evidence that CDC employees refused to provide, and Monarez presumably shared their view. If this is the truth, then both of the issues that dominated the Senate Finance Committee hearing vindicate Kennedy’s actions.
The WSJ continued to spin hearing testimony in ways that discredited Kennedy. The authors write, “He [Kennedy] rejected assertions that he was taking vaccines away, even as senators pointed to examples of immunocompromised people being denied Covid vaccines under new federal limits on who can get them.” But, as Kennedy explained, the Secretary has not taken vaccines away from a single American, only eliminated CDC recommendations for young, healthy people consistent with the available science. Most Americans can also get them for free.
The WSJ further manipulated the secretary’s testimony by suggesting he sought to “justify” his mRNA decision based on unrelated dietary health crises, writing: “Kennedy also pointed to what he described as a crisis of chronic disease in the U.S. to further justify his actions.”
Photo by Sipa USA via AP
“We are the sickest country in the world,” Kennedy said during the hearing. “That’s why we have to fire people at CDC. They did not do their job.”
Yet this statement was made in the specific context of CDC failures to properly handle the Covid crisis, including masking, school closures, and vaccine regulation – Kennedy never intimated that he fired anyone for failures to address obesity, diabetes, or cancer.
The WSJ acknowledged that Kennedy said he didn’t “anticipate a change” to the MMR vaccine, but then cited Sen. Michael Bennet’s exchange with the Secretary, “Still, he was berated by Bennet, who said parents and children ‘deserve’ so much better than your leadership. A frustrated Kennedy retorted, ‘They deserve the truth and that’s what we’re going to give them for the first time in the history of that agency,’ a frustrated Kennedy retorted.”
The truth appears to be that the CDC is reviewing the safety and effectiveness of mRNA vaccines, for sound scientific reasons; that it has outraged a community of outsiders who are determined to demand that the CDC recommend the vaccines even to infants without regard to the scientific data; and that anyone who still wants an mRNA vaccine can still obtain one.
Photo by Sipa USA via AP
Senator Ron Johnson recounted evidence that the CDC was aware of mRNA vaccine harms including myocarditis but deliberately failed to warn patients or their doctors. Yet the WSJ news coverage of the hearing omitted that and other important testimony.
As a comprehensive analysis emerges of “what did the CDC know about mRNA vaccine safety and efficacy, and when did they know it,” the truth Americans deserve will come out.
In its slanted coverage of Kennedy’s hearing, The Wall Street Journal perpetuated a narrative that presents Kennedy as a threat to Americans’ health based on a blind faith in the vaccines he has every right to question.
Takeaways:
– The Wall Street Journal published an article criticizing Secretary Kennedy that relied on a narrative that does not appear to comport with the facts about mRNA vaccines and efforts to better review them.
– If mRNA vaccines are not “safe and effective,” Kennedy is quite right to remove them from the list of CDC-recommended vaccines, and was more than justified in firing Susan Monarez for insubordination.
 | A guest post by
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We are now living in "1984." At least as demonstrated by George Orwell in his prescient book of that title.
“What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself; who gives your arguments a fair hearing and simply persists in his lunacy?”
We see this same dynamic today.
Debates where facts are acknowledged — but then casually dismissed because they don’t fit the “approved” narrative.
Officials or experts who publicly admit contradictions — then double down anyway because “the greater good” demands it.
Ordinary people who recognize the inconsistencies in what they are told — but choose to believe anyway because it’s easier than facing the chaos of uncertainty.
As RFK fights valiantly to present the truth to the American people, so many of them merely do not want to know it. At least, yet.
Our "uniparty" is merely presenting the most vital part of that which is used to control us all:
"The Party told you to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
Vaccine policy is the literal act of leading sheep to the slaughter.
The removal of your due process rights does not even motivate enough Americans to see the lunacy being thrust upon us.
Americans are too addicted to myths and fairly tales to admit otherwise.
For those who are are mistrustful of RFK, it may not be such a happy ending you'll get when you allow teenager pseudo-journalists of the WSJ, political hacks and Phrma shills to get you the best inforrnation that impacts your health and well-being.
No one with a brain believes anything mainstream media says. Trust in media is in the 20% range. Their Biases and agendas are blatantly clear.