What the frickle frackle?

12.1 million people, aka 3.54% of the country

btw

and

“Anakin was taught right from wrong from a young age, first by his mother and then by Kenobi, but any time he was presented with a choice, actively CHOSE WRONG EVERY SINGLE TIME”

I was trying to think of a way to explain why this is stupid and also ghoulish. I think I came up with something.

Imagine you are an engineer designing body armor. You are tasked with making sure the body armor can stop 10 different types of bullets. In your first attempt, you create body armor that stops 6 of the 10 bullets. You start selling those because that's pretty good protection. You can save some lives while you continue to improve things.

You already know how to stop 6 bullets, but you really want to figure out how to stop the last 4. So you do exactly what you did before, but add a few more layers of Kevlar and a steel plate.

Your boss, RFK Jr., says he wants a test of the new and improved body armor. But he says you have to give one test subject the real thing and the other test subject fake body armor that does nothing.

And you're like, "Hey, can I at least give them the body armor that stops 6 bullets? We already know that gives some protection. We only need to compare the new armor to what we already accomplished."

All studies involving human or animal participants have to pass a certain threshold of safety for all involved (this is done by the IRB for human trials and the IACUC for animal trials.) if you wanted to do a control group for parachutes, the only way to make it safe would be to have everyone jump out of the plane while it was still on the ground. in which case the people with parachutes and the people without parachutes would have the same survival rate, making it look like having a parachute is not an improvement over no parachute.

so while the theoretical outcome of RFK's bullshit is this "kill people for science" thing, the IRB still exists; it wasn't just made up by the FDA or DHS, its existence is directly required by the US Legal Code (Title 42, §289. Institutional review boards; ethics guidance program, elaborated on more in Title 45 CFR 46). Studies that get federal funding still need ethics boards, per federal law, and the composition of ethics boards is controlled by federal law as well. RFK Jr can't wipe that away as easily as he can wipe away other things.

What that means in practice is that RFK Jr will say "let's do a randomized controlled study where we lie to parents about whether or not their children are actually getting vaccinated" and the ethics board will say "that's unethical, you can't do that" and RFK Jr will say "fine, then we won't do any research at all!" and now there's no research proving the new vaccines are safe and effective.