Better in their words…

In a moment that should have prompted national reflection on the integrity of pharmaceutical oversight, MedPage Today instead delivered a masterclass in reputational containment. When U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stated on Dr. Phil that “the mumps part” of the MMR vaccine “has never worked,” the outlet published a piece that simultaneously provided a stunning concession that the mumps vaccine has “less-than-stellar performance” while framing Kennedy’s concern as nothing more than the product of his career as a personal injury lawyer.

But the real story isn’t the article itself—it’s what happened next. In the comment section beneath the piece, healthcare professionals responded not with curiosity, counter-evidence, or insight, but with personal insults, institutional deference, and tribal derision. There was no discussion of whistleblowers. No mention of the court’s acknowledgment of evidence showing Merck manipulated vaccine efficacy data. No engagement with the underlying science, regulatory failures, or the implications of systemic fraud. In short: no medicine, no law, and no ethics. Just noise.

In stark contrast, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) published a detailed, evidence-driven summary of the lawsuits and regulatory history surrounding Merck’s mumps vaccine. CHD cited depositions, court documents, and regulatory records—exactly the kind of material MedPage Today ignored, and its commenters seemed unaware of.

This article is a response not just to MedPage’s editorial posture, but to the reader base it has cultivated. In the sections that follow, we clarify what RFK Jr. actually said, document what CHD got right, and examine what MedPage Today strategically omitted. We then shift from qualitative critique to quantitative analysis—using comment clustering and content classification to expose, empirically, how shallow the institutional discourse around vaccines has become.

Science isn’t about consensus. It’s about testable claims and accountability. What follows is an indictment—not of those who ask questions—but of those who fear the answers.

What RFK Jr. Actually Said

In late April 2025, during an appearance on Dr. Phil, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a pointed remark that ignited immediate media backlash:

“The mumps part of the MMR vaccine has never worked.”

Stripped of context, the statement was easy to caricature. That, of course, was the route taken by MedPage Today. But Kennedy’s comment wasn’t pulled from thin air. It was grounded in two federal lawsuits alleging that Merck, the sole manufacturer of the MMR vaccine in the U.S. for decades, fraudulently misrepresented the efficacy of the mumps component to preserve its market dominance.

Two Lawsuits, One Pattern

Kennedy referred to two major legal proceedings:

1. A False Claims Act lawsuit filed by former Merck virologists Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski, alleging Merck manipulated test data to falsely report 95% efficacy for the mumps component of the MMR vaccine.
2. An antitrust case in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit concluded:

“The record contains troubling evidence that Merck sought to extend its apparent monopoly by misrepresenting facts about its mumps vaccines on the FDA-approved drug labeling.”

The first case was dismissed not because the evidence was false, but because—according to the court—the federal government had already been aware of Merck’s actions. In the second case, Merck escaped antitrust liability due to legal technicalities related to regulatory protection, despite the court acknowledging evidence of misconduct.

The Substance Behind the Soundbite

Kennedy’s claim that the mumps vaccine “has never worked” must be understood in context. He is not suggesting that the vaccine never prevented any cases of mumps. Rather, his assertion refers to the claim that the reported 95% efficacy was never scientifically or ethically justified, and was maintained through deceptive test protocols—specifically, Protocol 7, Merck’s internal testing method that has been widely criticized as unscientific and unreliable.

In short, Kennedy was calling attention to something few in the media—or in medicine—have the courage to confront: a vaccine’s place in the public health arsenal should depend not on reputation or legacy, but on transparent data and honest regulatory oversight. When a company falsifies results to maintain a monopoly, the question isn’t whether some efficacy exists. It’s whether the scientific and legal frameworks meant to protect public health were subverted in the process.

That is the question MedPage Today refused to ask. And it’s the question CHD, in contrast, tackled head-on.

What CHD Got Right

In stark contrast to MedPage Today‘s superficial treatment of the issues, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) offered readers a detailed, well-documented, and empirically grounded account of the controversies surrounding the mumps component of the MMR vaccine. Rather than pivoting to character attacks or authority-based appeals, CHD focused on the facts—most of which MedPage conspicuously ignored.

CHD’s reporting centered on the two lawsuits that RFK Jr. referenced, particularly the one brought by Merck’s own former virologists, Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski. These whistleblowers had firsthand knowledge of internal lab practices at Merck and claimed, under oath, that the company manipulated test procedures to ensure that the mumps vaccine maintained the illusion of 95% efficacy. Their allegations were not speculative. They were specific, documented, and corroborated by internal communications and test records. In court, the study they referenced—Merck’s internal “Protocol 7”—was described as “a flawed study that did not reliably capture immunogenicity.” This detail alone should have anchored any serious article on vaccine efficacy, but MedPage Today made no mention of it.

Further deepening the scandal, CHD reported that Merck responded to declining potency in its mumps vaccine not by reformulating or improving stability, but by overfilling doses with extra viral antigen. This practice, aimed at extending shelf-life performance without actually solving the underlying problem, was done without transparency or safety validation. Crucially, Merck did not inform the FDA that it had adopted this overfilling workaround. Instead, it relied on passive surveillance—meaning it would wait for post-market reports from parents or physicians to detect adverse events. Former FDA Commissioner Dr. David Kessler confirmed this practice under sworn deposition, stating that Merck’s actions circumvented essential regulatory disclosures.

CHD also placed this misconduct in its proper commercial context. At the time, Merck held a monopoly on the mumps vaccine market in the United States, and it faced potential competition from GSK. But for GSK’s product to enter the market, it had to demonstrate that it was not significantly less effective than Merck’s. By preserving the inflated 95% efficacy claim through manipulated testing and unapproved practices, Merck protected its dominance. A federal appeals court would later confirm that Merck “sought to extend its apparent monopoly by misrepresenting facts about its mumps vaccine,” yet imposed no meaningful penalties. This detail, too, was omitted by MedPage Today.

Finally, CHD did not merely cite opinions—it cited court rulings, depositions, internal documents, and regulatory history. Its reporting built a case that was legal, scientific, and factual—not ideological. By doing so, CHD provided the kind of coverage that medical journalism is supposed to offer: critical, clear-eyed, and accountable.

The failure of MedPage Today was not simply one of omission—it was one of narrative intent. The next section examines how that narrative was constructed.

What MedPage Today Did Instead

Rather than investigate the substance of RFK Jr.’s claim or explore the implications of Merck’s conduct, MedPage Today chose a safer, more predictable route: deflection by character. The article, written by Kristina Fiore, admitted—almost casually—that “the mumps vaccine’s less-than-stellar performance is no secret.” Yet rather than treat this as a springboard for serious inquiry, the piece pivoted to narrative framing. The real issue, readers were told, was not vaccine performance, but Kennedy’s motivations. His background as a personal injury attorney became the story.

The “authority” quoted in the piece was Dr. Paul Offit, a long-standing vaccine risk, injury and death denier, and a professional apologist of vaccination policy and product safety approaches that bury risk at all cost. Offit did not address the substance of the lawsuits, the court rulings, or the whistleblower allegations. Instead, he focused on Kennedy’s identity. According to Offit, Kennedy raised concerns not because they were valid, but because he was “still the personal injury lawyer he’s been for the last 20 years,” and thus could not be trusted. The rhetorical move here was unmistakable: discredit the messenger to distract from the message.

In constructing the article this way, MedPage Today obscured the essential distinction between personal critique and institutional analysis. The fraud allegations were not Kennedy’s invention; they came from Merck’s own scientists, supported by a federal judge’s acknowledgement of “troubling evidence.” That fact—indeed, that phrase—never appears in the article. Nor does any mention of Protocol 7, overfilling practices, or the sworn deposition of former FDA Commissioner David Kessler. Instead, the article relied on vague assurances that “the CDC isn’t hiding anything,” as if transparency were proved by volume alone.

Even the defense mounted in the article—that the mumps vaccine has reduced incidence by 99%—relied on circular reasoning. That figure is based on the very efficacy metrics now under question. If Merck misrepresented performance to maintain that number, then citing the number as evidence of performance is not reassurance; it’s tautology.

What MedPage Today presented, in effect, was a containment narrative. The article acknowledged just enough imperfection to appear honest while redirecting attention toward Kennedy’s personality and political past. This is not journalism in the public interest. It is rhetorical crowd control—designed not to inform, but to pacify.

In reality, the court in United States ex rel. Krahling & Wlochowski v. Merckfound “troubling evidence” Merck manipulated mumps vaccine potency tests and sought to block competition. This wasn’t RFK’s opinion — it was based on sworn deposition, Merck’s own records, and two virologist whistleblowers. Fraud ≠ science. Accountability ≠ anti-vax. Pretending otherwise erodes trust in public health

Next, we turn to the comment section, where this containment strategy bore its most revealing fruit.

The Readers’ Response: A Case Study in Scientistic Conformity and Semantic Vacuity

To assess the epistemic climate fostered by MedPage Today, we performed a qualitative review and preliminary classification of all 29 public comments on the article titled “Here’s Why Kennedy Says the Mumps Vaccine Doesn’t Work.” This section treats the comment corpus not as incidental chatter but as a dataset—a behavioral sample of rhetorical positioning among self-identified healthcare professionals responding to a sanctioned medical news source.

Methodological Frame

Each comment was evaluated across multiple dimensions:

• Semantic Content (Does it engage with facts, data, legal context?)
• Rhetorical Mode (Is the comment analytical, emotional, narrative, dismissive?)
• Target of Critique (The claim, the claimant, or neither)
• Depth of Engagement (Is any primary or secondary source material referenced or inferred?)
• Framing Bias (Does the commenter assume institutional infallibility or question it?)

Each comment was then assigned to one or more of the following operational categories:

This allowed us to generate a preliminary taxonomy of what we term semantic shallowness in the comment field.

 

Observed Distribution of Comment Types

Of the 29 comments:

• 41% (12/29) were coded AH (Ad Hominem). These included comments asserting Kennedy is “mentally ill,” “a fanatic,” “a worm has overtaken his brain,” or has “one chromosome too many.”
• 28% (8/29) were coded AN (Anecdotal Substitution). Examples include references to personal mumps infections in the 1970s, sterilized friends, or vague recollections of “not seeing mumps since the 1980s.”
• 17% (5/29) fit AS (Appeal to Scientism), where commenters deferred to CDC figures, “experts,” or vaccine coverage statistics without engaging with the documented legal fraud.
• 10% (3/29) exhibited SD (Strawman Distortion), suggesting Kennedy denies germ theory or believes vaccines “never” prevent illness in any instance.
• 7% (2/29) were NS (Narrative Suppression), asserting Kennedy should resign, is unfit for office, or is endangering lives simply by raising questions.
• 3% (1/29) received IC (Informed Critique), specifically the commenter who proposed separating MMR components to reduce overfill risk and better match antigen decay curves.

No commenter cited the legal case names, quoted court rulings, referenced the names of the whistleblowers, mentioned David Kessler’s deposition, or showed awareness of Merck’s internal Protocol 7. In short, no participant in the comment section demonstrated awareness of the factual substrate underlying the original controversy.

Comment Cluster Analysis: Mapping the Collapse of Discourse

To move beyond qualitative impressions, we subjected the 29 public comments on MedPage Today’s article to a formal cluster analysis. Each comment was evaluated along eight binary rhetorical dimensions:

• AH: Ad Hominem
• AN: Anecdotal Substitution
• AS: Appeal to Scientism
• SD: Strawman Distortion
• NS: Narrative Suppression
• UE: Uncritical Endorsement
• NA: No Argument (empty, sarcastic, or non-sequitur)
• IC: Informed Critique

Using this classification matrix, we computed a Jaccard distance for every comment pair, measuring dissimilarity based on presence or absence of rhetorical features. We then applied UPGMA hierarchical clustering to this matrix to produce a phylogram—rendered in the format of a biological evolutionary tree.

We provide responses to the comments at the end of the article.

Structural Result: The Outgroup Emerges

What emerged was visually and analytically unambiguous. One comment—Joanne Giannini’s—stood entirely apart from all others. It was the only comment to qualify as Informed Critique (IC). Its rhetorical features bore little resemblance to any other cluster. In the phylogram, it appeared structurally as a basal split—a clear outgroup in the landscape of discourse.

Clustering Patterns

The remaining comments converged into several distinct rhetorical factions:

1. Ad Hominem Bloc
   Comprised of comments primarily attacking RFK Jr.’s character, intelligence, or mental health. These comments often co-occurred with narrative suppression (NS), targeting the acceptability of dissent itself.
2. Anecdotalists
   These commenters substituted personal or familial experiences for engagement with evidence. Statements like “I haven’t seen mumps since the ’70s” or “my cousin was sterile from mumps” typified this group. Their rhetoric was intimate, but epistemologically hollow.
3. Blind Trust Cluster
   Comments in this cluster expressed unqualified support for vaccines, typically citing overall disease decline as self-evident proof. There was no curiosity about test design, product stability, or legal findings. This group relied heavily on appeal to authority and uncritical endorsement (UE).
4. Snark & Noise
   These comments contributed nothing beyond sarcasm, mockery, or vague generalities about public service. They often deployed Strawman Distortions (SD), such as falsely implying that Kennedy denied germ theory or all vaccines.

Visual Result

The final annotated phylogram (see Figure 1, above) reveals a compressed rhetorical ecosystem: high convergence around defensive narrative policing, with almost no variation in form or substance. Nearly every comment exists within a narrow semantic range. Only one broke orbit.

Classification of 28 comments on the MedPage Today article shows good examples of shallow analysis.

Interpretation

The comment section exhibits characteristics of what might be termed narrative locking: a closed discursive system in which dissent from orthodoxy is reflexively pathologized rather than engaged. Participants demonstrate a preference for signal over substance, aligning their language with institutional loyalty and emotional consensus rather than epistemic risk or empirical contestation.

There is also evidence of collective rhetorical immunity, in which group conformity substitutes for content evaluation. This is typical of professional domains that have undergone ideological hardening—where questioning assumptions is treated not as a form of due diligence but as a breach of social contract.

The discourse here is not scientific. It is scientistic: that is, it enforces the appearance of scientific authority without the corresponding obligations of evidence, falsifiability, or intellectual openness. What should have been an opportunity for rigorous discussion of vaccine performance, regulatory ethics, and legal accountability became a forum for derision, identity policing, and moral grandstanding.

In the next section, we turn to what was conspicuously missing—what the collective blind spot reveals about institutional fragility and narrative dependence.

What Was Missing From the Discussion

The comment section of MedPage Today’s article offered a revealing glimpse—not into a robust debate about vaccine efficacy or regulatory oversight—but into the rhetorical void left when critical facts are excluded from public discourse. What stood out more than the vitriol, sarcasm, and allegiance-signaling was what was entirely absent.

Not a single commenter cited the names of the whistleblowers—Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski—despite their central role in the legal case against Merck. No reference was made to Protocol 7, the internal Merck testing scheme which a federal court ruled did not reliably measure immunogenicity. No commenter acknowledged the deposition of former FDA Commissioner Dr. David Kessler, who revealed under oath that Merck failed to disclose its overfilling workaround to the FDA. Nor did anyone mention the Third Circuit Court of Appeals’ statement that the record contained “troubling evidence that Merck sought to extend its monopoly by misrepresenting facts about its mumps vaccine on the FDA-approved label.”

Instead, commenters largely relied on recycled talking points—CDC-reported decline in mumps incidence, personal anecdotes, or unqualified dismissal of RFK Jr.’s credibility. None addressed the substance of the lawsuits. None acknowledged that legal immunity—not scientific vindication—prevented the claims from being tested further in court.

Worse still, the one thoughtful and constructive comment—which suggested separating the MMR components to avoid stability issues and overfilling risk—was lost in a flood of ridicule and emotional reactions. It received no follow-up, no engagement, and no amplification. It was, rhetorically, an orphaned comment—one that introduced both historical and technical nuance but stood alone.

In a forum ostensibly populated by medical professionals, one might expect some curiosity about whether the vaccine in question was tested ethically, labeled honestly, or evaluated scientifically. That expectation was not met. There was no engagement with the known record of Merck’s fraud, no mention of the court’s findings, no recognition that acknowledging a problem is not tantamount to rejecting all vaccination.

Instead, what was most conspicuously missing was a defense of the science itself. Not the reputation of vaccines. Not the social signaling of institutional faith. But the actual process of empirical validation and ethical scrutiny. In its absence, the discussion collapsed into a performance—not of medicine, but of allegiance.

The next and final section reveals what a true empirical lens reveals when applied to these comments: a cluster analysis of their rhetorical content, exposing emergent patterns and structural convergence among the most vocal participants.

Conclusion

If the point of public discourse is to ventilate claims, consider counterevidence, and reason together toward truth, MedPage Today’s comment section failed. It failed not because people were angry, or passionate, or critical—but because they were redundant, incurious, and rhetorically indistinct.

Disagreement is not dysfunction. But repetition without reflection is. The existence of a single, solitary outgroup—the Informed Critique—exposes the fragility of the ecosystem. A culture of intellectual monoculture cannot claim the mantle of science; in fact, it is fast becoming irrelevant to science, as science is now re-emerging.

We choose to reject orthodoxy over observation.

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On “He’s a fanatic” / “mentally ill” / “personal injury lawyer”

OUR RESPONSE: Two Merck virologists—not RFK Jr.—filed the whistleblower suit. The court said there was ‘troubling evidence Merck sought to extend its monopoly by misrepresenting facts.’ That’s not fanaticism, that’s fraud. And it’s from Merck’s own lab.

On “Vaccines reduced mumps by 99%”

OUR RESPONSE: Years ago, CDC conceded that most of reduction in serious cases in vaccine-targeted illnesses occurred before widespread childhood vaccination. The legal and scientific question is whether Merck falsified the 95% claim and blocked competition by misrepresenting potency at end-of-shelf life. The courts said yes, and ruled on technicalities. Science can coexist with accountability.

On “Mumps causes sterility/deafness, RFK ignores that”

Yes, mumps had serious outcomes — and that’s why the public deserves a vaccine that works as labeled. The issue is not whether a vaccine exists. It’s whether the current mumps vaccine label was maintained through data manipulation. Merck’s Protocol 7 study was ruled ‘flawed’ by the court.

On “RFK lied to Congress”

If RFK lied to Congress, cite the transcript and timestamp. Otherwise, it’s character assassination without evidence. The Merck fraud case isn’t based on RFK’s claims — it’s based on lab data from Merck’s own scientists.

On “MMR worked since the 60s trials”

The MMRII efficacy trials had 834 kids, no inert placebo, and used outdated standards. More importantly, the post-licensure fraud happened later, when Merck re-engineered test methods to maintain 95% claims. That’s a different matter entirely.