Thanks anti-vaxxers: Child flu deaths soar as vaccination tanks

Congratulations, RFK Jr! Your anti-vax propaganda has managed to kill more kids than any time since 2009.

The CDC dropped its latest report card Friday, and surprise – 216 children are dead from the flu this season. That's more tiny coffins than we've seen since the swine flu pandemic, as reported by NBC News.

That's more tiny coffins than we've seen since the swine flu pandemic, as reported by NBC News.

Dr. Sean O'Leary from the American Academy of Pediatrics points out this death count is "almost certainly an undercount."

Remember when getting your kid a flu shot was just something responsible parents did, like making them wear seat belts or not feeding them tide pods? Those were the days. Now we're rocking a 49% vaccination rate, down from 64% five years ago.

The flu's also putting adults through the wringer, with 47,000,000 illnesses and 26,000 deaths.

For anyone who still thinks RFK Jr knows what he's talking about when it comes to vaccines, here's a video that should put that misconception to rest (provided you aren't a MAGA fascist).

The video has a clip from RFK Jr on Joe Rogan's podcast where he cites a study where a scientist "gave tuna sandwiches that were mercury-contaminated to children, and then measured their blood, and the mercury from the tuna sandwich was there — a half-life 64 days later — so it was still there 64 days."

The debunker in the video read the 2002 study, and said "no one was given tuna sandwiches, or tuna fish, or even methylmercury at all."

RFK Jr also told Rogan that the scientist who conducted the study "injected the children with mercury from a vaccine, and that mercury disappeared from their blood within a week. But what happened to the mercury? Because [the scientist] couldn't find it in the children's urine, or in their feces, or in their hair, or sweat, or nails. So where is it?" (RFK Jr is implying that the mercury remained in the childrens' bodies.)

The mercury "was in fact found in their feces at high levels," says the debunker in the video. As reported in the abstract in the study, "Ethylmercury seems to be eliminated from blood rapidly via the stools after parenteral administration of thiomersal in vaccines."

"Joe Rogan's live fact checker apparently couldn't catch that," said the debunker, "despite this being his one job on the largest podcast in the world."

This means Rogan's fact checker is complicit or incompetent, and RFK Jr is an idiot or a liar but probably both.