"And Yet, It Still Moves"
One story about Galileo is probably apocryphal. But, in the wake of RFK Jr.’s appointment to head Health and Human Services, it’s too good to resist.
Galileo was an Italian astronomer, physicist, and engineer. In 1610, he published his first treatise, The Starry Messenger, which described lunar craters, stars of the Milky Way, phases of Venus, moons of Jupiter, rings around Saturn, and spots on the surface of the sun. Using his new and improved telescope, he was considered the father of observational astronomy.
In 1632, Galileo published another treatise. This one got him into trouble. Titled Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo supported Nicholas Copernicus’s claim that the earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around. This contradicted the biblical notion that the earth was the center of the firmament. Galileo was immediately charged with disobeying the Catholic Church’s injunction to dismiss Copernican astronomy.
One year later, in 1633, the Roman Inquisition forced Galileo to recant. Legend has it that after bowing to his inquisitors, he looked back and said, Eppur si muovo, “And yet, it still moves.” In other words, the Roman Inquisition can force me to say that the earth doesn’t revolve around the sun, but that doesn’t change the fact that it does.
The same is true today. No matter how many times Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says that vaccines cause autism, or that “no vaccine is safe and effective”, or that the “polio vaccine killed many, many, many more people than it saved”, or that the Covid-19 vaccine was the “deadliest vaccine ever made,” or that SARS-CoV-2 was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese, or that Blacks should receive a different vaccine schedule than Whites because “their immune system is better than ours”, or that unpasteurized milk is safe, or that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, or that the measles outbreak in Samoa was caused by a defective measles vaccine, or that the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 was caused by the influenza vaccine (which wasn’t invented until the late 1940s), it doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter how many sycophants, reporters, fringe scientists, congressmen, and social media followers rise to support him. The only thing that matters is that none of it is true. And scientific truths win out in the end.
Unfortunately, it might take a while. In October 1992, Pope John Paul II appeared before the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences to hear the report of a commission asked to examine the Inquisition’s mistreatment of Galileo. The Pope accepted the commission’s findings. A headline in the New York Times, read, “After 350 Years, Vatican Says Galileo Was Right: It Moves.” One can only hope that it won’t take that long to undo the harms of an anti-vaccine, science-denying, conspiracy theorist who is now setting policy for the largest public health agency in the United States.
Maybe eppur si muovo should be the rallying cry for the resistance.
Paul, what fascinates me the most about you is that I still have not been able to tell if you actually believe what you are writing and saying or whether you are using increasingly desperate arguments to hide what is in plain sight.
In this very interesting historical analogy, which I agree offers fascinating insight into what is happening on the planet right now, you have gotten it completely backwards. Galileo was encouraging the powers that be, the Papacy, to reconsider their axiom that the Earth was the center of the solar system. By using his rudimentary telescope it was obvious (to anyone who bothered to look) that the moons of Jupiter orbited the giant planet and not the Earth. It was also very clear that the phases of Venus could only be explained by the fact that our sister planet orbited the Sun and not Earth.
The Catholic church, who commanded immense influence and power, was threatened by his simple observations. They were able to cling to their power and their status as the sole arbiter of truth by simply dismissing his proof as inconsequential. Do you really expect that four tiny dots circling a pale disc, the planet Jupiter, would be enough to relegate the Earth in its exalted place as the center of Gd’s creation to just another rock tumbling around the Sun like other planets? Of course not! These were mere exceptions to the rule. Framing it otherwise was heretical.
There were other anomalies as well. The retrograde motion of the planets. Stellar parallax. The mysterious appearance and disappearance of constellations on an annual cycle. All of these observations could be easily explained by Galileo’s model. Yet they were all dismissed. Why? Because Occam’s Razor is not a method of proof. All the weirdness was a feature of Gd’s mysterious creation. Stop questioning authority!
The point here is that one could never prove the Church wrong from observations from the surface of the Earth alone. The world was stuck. It took another amazing insight which came by way of Sir Isaac Newton five decades later. Newton showed the world that we could reliably predict the motions of objects with mass. His theory of gravitational attraction fit perfectly with Galileo’s model and exposed the Church’s position for what it was: wishful thinking.
So in your analogy, RFK Jr. is the Galileo figure and you are the agent of the papacy, who must use misdirection and frank mendacity to keep the world looking away from the obvious. The power and influence have been on your side for decades. Mr. Kennedy refuses to recant, and yet the so-called “anti-vax” movement advances.
Eppur si muovo, if you will.
In this piece, you are once again distorting Kennedy’s position. In his letter to the PM of Samoa in 2019 he called for a deeper investigation. How many of the measles cases were of vaccine strain and not the wild-type? What were the ages of the sick? If they were infants, why did they succumb if their mothers’ had been vaccinated? How many of the cases happened in people who were fully vaccinated?
Why aren’t scientists like you interested in such questions?
The HIV/AIDS connection is very thin. The HIV hypothesis fails Koch’s postulates frequently. In other words, there are many people who die of AIDS-like syndromes who don’t have HIV in their bodies. There are many people who are completely healthy who do have HIV. This has been hidden by the way we diagnose AIDS, which was done arbitrarily. To be diagnosed with AIDS one has to have a certain opportunistic infection or malignancy, have a low CD4+ T-Cell count AND test positive for HIV.
This is not some crazy idea peddled by Kennedy. His position is supported by renowned virologist, Peter Duesberg and Nobel Laureate Luc Montaigner. Even Robert Gallo, the purported discoverer of the HIV/AIDS connection conceded that there was a more likely suspect: Human Herpes Virus 6 (HHV6) which, unlike HIV was known to be cytotoxic to CD4+, CD8+ lymphocytes as well as other elements in our immune systems.
We both know that the spike protein of SARS-COV2 has different affinity for the ACE2 receptor across ethnicities. Kennedy was specifically citing this research but you are framing him as a racist for pointing this out. What does it take for someone of your stature to stoop so low? Are you really doing all of this to protect children, or do you have something else to protect?
Kennedy isn’t saying that vaccines are the sole cause of autism as you insinuate. He is saying that it could be the cause in some cases. Why? Because there are many, many children who receive a series of vaccinations at around two years of age and suffer an immediate deterioration of their physical and mental capacities within hours.
Package inserts for many vaccines list encephalopathy as a rare but known side effect. It isn’t referring to a brain infection. It’s an inflammatory encephalopathy. Vaccines are pro-inflammatory. It is incredibly short-sighted to ignore the reality that this will happen when you give these products to tens of millions of children yearly.
Over 20 medical associations wrote, in a joint amicus briefing to the SCOTUS, that we needed a National Vaccine Injury Compensation fund because many vaccine injured children were falling through the cracks because they didn’t have the means to hold vaccine manufacturers accountable. Your work was specifically cited.
You yourself have candidly admitted that one can never say that vaccines can’t cause autism but, “you have to get used to saying that when talking to the media”.
Just as the peasants and ruling class looked to the skies and scratched their heads at the strange motions of certain celestial bodies and wondered why the Church was so intransigent in their position, going so far as to confine Galileo, a brilliant mathematician who held professorships at major Italian universities to house arrest, today the public is also puzzled at the explosion of chronic diseases which occurred concomitantly with the expansion of the CDC’s immunization schedule and the frenzied attacks leveled at anyone who points out the obvious connection between the two.
While Kennedy is not a doctor or expert in vaccine science, he is pointing out the obvious. We need to look harder at the science. If it is too expensive for vaccine manufacturers to pay for the damages their products can cause, they need to make better products. At the very least, we shouldn’t be mandating vaccination to receive a public education if the people making these vaccines have no skin in the game but a profit motive.
Despite the clear evidence that their axiom was wrong, it took the papacy nearly two centuries to excise all mention of their Earth-centered notion from their communiques to their following. How long will it take for the medical orthodoxy and the immensely powerful and connected Pharmaceutical complex to relent with their attacks on people who want better studies and accountability?
As a person who has devoted his professional life to ensuring children’s health, you should be on Mr. Kennedy’s side. At the very least you ought to desist from these kinds attacks on him. Point out where he could be more effective in his role as Secretary of DHHS and stop lying about what his position is and has been.
Kennedy’s commitment to leave no stone unturned can only have two outcomes. It will expose safety concerns that many have had around the vaccine schedule which will result in safer products and more rigorous testing or it will confirm what you have been saying all along.
Either way, the public interest will be served.
The only people who obstruct greater transparency are the ones that have something to hide. That’s what the Galileo story told us.
You have a chance to play an important role here. Please don’t squander it.
Madhava Setty, MD
Thanks for fighting the good fight . I love this Galileo story . The antivaxxers are winning . I say that in part as many more of my patients openly express all the anti vax talking points . ( BTW I am Univ MD Med ‘83) It appears that society and culture will need to meander through some sort of dark, lost period to eventually regain the knowledge and benefit of vaccines.