> Blame NYTimes for leaking the internal memo.

Blame them for what, exactly?

We have no information about how highly motivated anti-vaxxers in positions of power over the FDA arrived at this conclusion except "the team has performed an initial analysis"[1]. That's literally it. Your claim that "FDA career scientists" conducted the follow-up can't even be based on this flimsy a statement. Moreover, these deaths have already been investigated by FDA career scientists and found these conclusions unwarranted.

Prasad spends the rest of the memo politically grandstanding (including claiming it was the FDA commissioner that was the hero here, forcing this issue, not FDA career scientists) and dismissing any objections to very obvious arguments against his claim (that have been made and published multiple times over the past five years) without any evidence, while providing no evidence of his own, in a memo addressing FDA career scientists.

Seriously, everyone should go read his memo. It's basically just a shitty antivax substack post, yet will apparently be FDA policy going forward. Another win for meritocracy.

> The detailed FDA analysis still isn't public. That's exactly why we should demand it instead of dismissing the claim.

The only "claim" here just sounds more official because RFKjr got a bunch of his best antivax buddies to be in charge of the FDA (same with the ACIP). There's no way to even consider it without evidence, so there's nothing to dismiss. Come back when you have something real.

[1] https://www.biocentury.com/article/657740

> That's why FDA's OBPV did the follow-up review of those 96 child deaths and concluded >10 were causal from vaccine myocarditis.

We don't actually know who at the OBPV did the review (Prasad only referred to the results coming from "the team") and the causal ranking they used included any case where causality was subjectively rated between "certain" and "possible/likely".

We also know that two orders of magnitude more children died from covid than that, and we have strong studies suggesting that myocarditis from covid is both more common and more severe than the observed cases tied to the covid vaccines, two inconvenient stances that Prasad waves away as insufficiently studied, even as he bases his entire position on a subjective review of something by someone, and doesn't bother filling in those blanks.

> If the conclusion was fake or flimsy, this blows up in their face and RFK looks like a clown

He beclowns himself all the time. He himself walked back the Tylenol claim after convincing Trump to talk about it so publicly and standing by him while he did it. Clearly he's not bothered by it.

> That's why FDA's OBPV did the follow-up review of those 96 child deaths and concluded >10 were causal from vaccine myocarditis.

And we're back at the "Hitler provided free things to Jews" technical truth again. This is likely an accurate statement!

But it'd deeply missing important context.

> If the conclusion was fake or flimsy, this blows up in their face and RFK looks like a clown.

This is likely meaningless to the guy who leaves dead bears in Central Park. The biggest political innovation in the last 50 years or so is the discovery that you can look like a clown without much consequence.

> Edit: as for the Tylenol, see this https://x.com/HHSGov/status/1970868168995536978

I don't recommend eating poop, but that doesn't mean it causes autism.