RFK, Jr. is Killing the Same People His Father Worked Hard to Help.

Posted on December 15, 2021 by Steve

A Twitter Post by the John Birch Society and RFK, Jr.

The first time I saw Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, was in June, 1968, standing in front of his father’s coffin.

I waited in line for 3 hours to pay my respects to his father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, whose body lay in state inside NYC’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I had campaigned for his father for US Senator in 1964, and again for President in 1968, before RFK was shot in the head and murdered by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles.

When the long, serpentine line shifted just a bit, I could clearly see Senator Kennedy’s coffin, surrounded by six-foot high silver candleholders, each with a flame flickering inside. Directly behind the coffin, hands falling stiffly by his side, was the TV talk-show host Jack Paar, a close friend of the Kennedy family.

As I slowly inched forward, less than 10 feet away stood a boy who looked not more than 14 years old. His facial muscles quivered, fighting back tears; hands clasped tightly in front of his body. The sight of RFK’s son, so fragile and alone, and only five years younger than I, overwhelmed me with grief.

He had just lost his father, his hero and mine, and I worried of what might become of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., following such a terrible trauma. Never for a moment—then, nor years later– did I think he’d lose his mind over vaccines, become a conspiracy nut, and get co-opted by the John Birch Society—an ultra-extremist Right Wing, anti-government group which his father despised and battled for most of his public life.

Never did I imagine that RFK, Jr.’s junk-science and massive public misinformation campaigns over two decades would set back services for autistic children, and put tens of thousands of lives at risk–lives of the very vulnerable people his father worked hard to help.

The depth of RFK’ Jr.’s derangement over vaccines can be seen in last week’s release of a cringe-worthy book for which he wrote the forward, entitled, “The Real Anthony Fauci.” The book is being widely promoted all over social media by the John Birch Society, or “JBS” as the lunatic fringe’s new sanitized logo now bills itself. The Birch Society screams that “Fauci and Bill Gates are using the COVID Pandemic to put humanity under totalitarian rule,” and quote Kennedy as saying they “must be stopped.” Maybe the John Birchers think this is the Kennedy who should be Trump’s running mate in 2024.

Bill Gates, speaking to CNBC this week on the day when COVID deaths in the US surpassed 800,000, told the network that such scurrilous rumors and mountains of intentional misinformation are “keeping many Americans from getting vaccinated against COVID, and delaying the end of the pandemic by doing so.”

For RFK Jr’s part, he founded a bogus public health group called the “Children’s Health Defense,” to purposely sow confusion with the highly respected Children’s Defense Fund headed for years by Dr. Irwin Redliner—one of President Biden’s COVID-19 advisors, and a strong and consistent proponent of the COVID vaccine. But, such sleight-of-hand is nothing new for Kennedy, who has spent the last two decades spreading the scientifically discredited fabrications that vaccines caused autism—most of it after Andrew Wakefield, who first spread the lies linking autism to vaccines, was stripped of his medical license, the Lancet retracted Wakefield’s article, and the British Medical Journal in 2011 denounced Wakefield’s “studies” as an “elaborate fraud.” None of that mattered to RFK, Jr.

This week, The Craig Newmark Center’s Poynter Institute reported that “RFK, Jr. said the COVID-19 vaccine was the deadliest vaccine ever made.” His litany of flat-out falsehoods has earned Kennedy the title of “one of the biggest sources of anti-vaccine rhetoric today,” from the Poynter Institute.

McGill University’s Office of Science & Society is even more specific, citing statistics that Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense front-group, purchased some 54% of the anti-vaccine advertising on Facebook over the past year. In an article entitled the “Anti-Vaccine Propaganda of RFK,Jr,” McGill—one of Canada’s leading Medical university’s—called Kennedy “one of the princes of the anti-vaccine movement, if not its king.”

It’s no wonder than, that RFK, Jr., was welcomed like a conquering hero by anti-vaxxers in Louisiana earlier this month when he testified before the Louisiana House Oversight Committee, opposing a proposal requiring public school students to be vaccinated. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine screed led to the full Louisiana’s House Committee on Health and Welfare rejecting vaccine mandates for public school students by a 13-2 vote.

What makes this damaging, demagogic action by RFK, Jr., especially chilling, and a stab in the heart of his fathers’ legacy of helping underserved communities, is that more than 50% of the public school students in Louisiana are students of color—precisely the demographic with the highest rates of COVID infections, and death. In fact, since the Pandemic began, Louisiana’s public school population of 720,000 students, has decreased by two-percent. White Supremacist groups like the John Birch Society, Q-Anon, or the KKK, could have hardly conducted a more effective campaign of racial genocide—only this time, it’s whitewashed with the Kennedy name attached to it.

Kennedy’s, “scientifically inaccurate, misleading and irresponsible lies,” as the CDC has called his dangerous misuse of the agency’s data, is reinforcing vaccine hesitancy among the poorest populations, which have, historically, had higher rates of death from ALL major diseases, because of poverty, pre-existing conditions, and lack of access to affordable healthcare.

I worked at two public Academic Medical Centers in New York—SUNY Stony Brook Medical Center, and SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn—and our priorities were to improve community health outcomes in our most underserved communities, in the areas of prostate and breast cancer, cardiac disease, HIV/AIDS, high blood pressure & diabetes.

We struggled mightily to build trust–along with clinics, dialysis centers and emergency rooms– among those very communities to save lives with early mammograms, PSA exams, blood pressure tests, and HIV tests. Now, RFK, Jr. and the rabid right-wing groups who have always opposed more funding for health care for the poor and working families, are harming the little progress made in public health, and are costing lives.

RFK, Jr. is destroying the good name his father built, and the respect his Uncles John and Teddy Kennedy earned over decades, in Black, Latino, & Indigenous communities around the country. His crazed crusade linking vaccines to autism, and his outright lies about the COVID vaccine, are poisoning peoples minds, creating a hard-core cadre of unvaccinated human petri dishes in which more mutant viruses can multiply, and disproportionately killing the very populations his father dedicated his life to serving.

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Pennsylvania Bracing Itself for the Evil Wizardry of Oz.

Posted on December 1, 2021 by Steve

Dr. Oz reviews the medical records of Donald Trump in 2016, and, without physically examining Trump, declares the records, and Trump, to be sound.

The mere thought of the synthetic, slippery Dr. Mehmet Oz, Donald Trump’s hyper Hydroxychloroquine cheerleader, running for the open US Senate seat in Pennsylvania and turning that cradle of American Democracy into its crypt, is enough to make me want to swallow some of Oz’ ostracized Green Coffee Beans.

Last year (April 8, 2020) in a scathing New York Times column entitled “The Unholy Alliance of Trump & Dr. Oz,” Frank Bruni reminded us that Dr. Oz was “not a virologist; not an epidemiologist,” even though he plays one on TV. Throughout all of 2020, the Wizard of Oz appeared regularly on Fox News, disseminating misinformation about COVID like Johnny Appleseed.

While advising Donald Trump and White House staff during the early, deadly days of the Pandemic, Oz relentlessly promoted Hydroxychloroquine as a “wonder drug” for COVID, much as he hawked “green coffee beans” as a “miracle cure” for obesity (they weren’t), and told millions of mothers that their childrens’ apple juice had “dangerous levels of arsenic” (it didn’t). Columbia University’s Institute of Human Nutrition has called many of Dr. Oz’s ideas about food “just plain nutty.”

Six years earlier, the Great & Powerful Oz’s carnival barker cures—spoonfed to his four millions daily viewers—got him hauled before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation, chaired by then-Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill. Senator McCaskill blasted Dr. Oz for spreading lies and misinformation: “I don’t get why you have to say this stuff because you know it’s not true.” Oz promised the Senate he wouldn’t do it anymore. But, with his hyperbole and hypocrisy increasing his personal wealth to $100 million, Oz just couldn’t resist.

In 2016, only two years after the he pledged to the Senate that he would stop his medical charlatanry, he was at it again. This time, it happened during the heat of the Clinton/Trump presidential campaign when the public was demanding that Trump release his medical records, Dr. Oz—“America’s Doctor” as he billed himself—came to the Mar-A-Lago Liar’s rescue. On Oz’s nationally televised show, Trump dramatically reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out two pages he claimed were his medical records and handed them over to Oz. Using his best bedside manner, Dr. Oz—who never physically examined Trump– deemed the records—and Trump’s health–to be sound. So much for the truth.

Vox, in it’s September 15, 2016, review of the two men in front of the curtain of the Oz show, said: “ These men (Oz & Trump) are the personification of not just bullshitting to the public, but getting away with bullshitting—and profiting from it.”

Now, the Great and Powerful Oz wants to take his Traveling Elixir Show to the US Senate, where, if successful, he’ll join that medical genius, Senator Rand Paul, an eye doctor with absolutely zero expertise in virology or immunology, and a penchant for picking fights with his next door neighbor in Kentucky and Dr. Anthony Fauci in hearings– both of which he embarrassingly lost. Imagine Oz and Rand Paul, in a GOP-controlled Senate, as the leading Republican “medical” experts on a pandemic which has killed more than 780,000 Americans, since Dr. Oz began touting Hydroxycholoquine as another miracle cure he advocated.

Perhaps Dr. Oz figures that one way to escape another Senate grilling, under oath, for his latest massively false—and possibly fatal—misinformation during the final year of Trump’s toxic term, is to spend millions of the dollars he amassed with his monumental medical mendacity, and sit side-by-side with Senator Paul, to compare notes, magical thinking, and conspiracy theories.

Just think of the even greater damage these fountainheads of falsehoods and myths can do, when they can somberly spout more medical misinformation with impunity, under the protection of Congressional immunity.

Where’s Toto, when we desperately need to yank the curtain down on these frauds in the land of Oz?

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No Longer My Brother’s Keeper.

Posted on November 18, 2021 by Steve

My Brother Vinny and I, in 2008, on the way to a Yankee Game.

When I watched Jennifer Gosar talk about her brother, Congressman Paul Gosar, on MSNBC, and heard Tim Gosar call his brother one of Trump’s “Fascist Footsoldiers,” who ought to be expelled from Congress, I thought of my brother Vinny.

Not that my sole-surviving brother is a Member of Congress — God forbid. Not that he graphically depicted using Samurai Swords to kill Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of NY and threatened the life of the President of the US — although, over the years, he’s wished for similar gruesome deaths for many Democrats, including me.

Like Jennifer Gosar, there was a time when, as a child, I looked up to my older brother. He was an outstanding baseball player, who could run, hit and field like the Detroit Tigers Hall-of-Famer, Al Kaline, and, like me, was a fanatical and knowledgeable New York Yankee fan.

Vinny was so bright, he skipped two grades and graduated high school at the age of 16. He ran as fast and hard as he could to catch up to our oldest brother, Michael, the apple of our mother’s eye.

As I got older and could do a spot-on imitation of Howard Cosell, my brother was so proud of my abilities he wanted me to perform for his friends at a local bar where he was frequently found — Anna Jean’s, located in a run-down strip mall in North Babylon, our working class community on Long Island’s south shore.

Family folklore was that Vinny had a genius IQ, and his earlier financial successes in businesses — first on Long Island and then in Southern California, were seen as concrete proof of his superior intelligence — to others, and to him. He put up my parents in his big home in El Toro, CA, when they moved out west, and gave my father a part-time job at the electronic parts company he headed. Then, something — or maybe several things — happened.

Whether it was his business wizardry and the whirlwind financial windfalls which dazzled a kid who grew up poor and never went to college, or a costly cocaine habit at the peak of his power, something started to come between my brother and reality. Living in Orange County, CA — then, the home of the Right Wing Extremist John Birch Society in the 1970’s and 1980’s and birthplace of conspiracy theories, didn’t help.

Despite our widening political differences, I became one of the few family members who could tolerate my brother. He was consistently mean and nasty to our sister Vera, a smart, independent woman who refused to put up with his insults. The fact that I was a white, Italian male and had an education, probably gave me some runway with him.

My mother would plead with us to avoid talking politics, but neither Vinny nor I could resist, and, in truth, we enjoyed the sparring to see who could one-up the other. I ridiculed his extremist beliefs, mocked the right wing loonies he listened to like Limbaugh and Larry Elder, and generally gave back to him as tough as he dished out. In retrospect, by engaging him, I may have actually enabled and emboldened my brother. After our mother’s death in 2007, all “guardrails” on Vinny’s behavior came down.

I struggled to look behind his intentionally outrageous, attention-getting behavior and listen to him, in a vain attempt to keep him connected to his own, and our, humanity. Sometimes it worked, but would often backfire if he felt I was getting too close, or, when his racist or homophobic rantings would set me off.

After Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012, I cut off Vinny’s vicious attacks on the nation’s first black President — whom he knew I supported from early 2007 — -by snarling back at him that he hated Obama because the President’s success forced him to face his own failures, and he just couldn’t get over the fact that a Black man was smarter and more successful than he was. My brother’s response was uncharacteristic silence, and I knew I had scored a painful hit, and regretted it immediately. I detested his unbridled hatred and racism, but disliked my hurtful response almost as much. He was, after all, still my mother’s son.

As Donald Trump’s deranged “Birther” campaign grew, and meanness, hatred and lies became normalized on Fox News — the only network my brother watched — Vinny’s views became more and more extreme. As a Nevada resident, he owned a legally registered gun, and kept it handy, in case the “illegals” tried to break into his apartment. Ironically, if any did — and they saw how little he had — they’d have left a contribution.

Finally, in 2016, after it was clear it would be Hillary
Clinton vs. Trump for the Presidency, I told Vinny I was going to North Carolina — a key, swing state with 15 electoral votes — to do voter protection, since NC was an open-carry State, and I was not easily intimidated. Furious, he wished I would be shot, and then when he saw that threat wouldn’t dissuade me, hoped my plane would crash, and called me an anti-Semitic slur, knowing I converted to Judaism some 36 years earlier, and my wife and son were Jewish.

I wasn’t as offended by his death wish for me as I was by his expressed hatred against Jews — eventhose in his own family. For me, it was the last straw. I told him that I was done with him, that I didn’t want such toxic hate in my life, nor have my granddaughters exposed to it. That was 5 years ago, and we haven’t spoken since.

So, I understand the pain that the Gosar siblings are feeling as they watch their brother set fire to himself, and endanger others. What’s hard, is witnessing what’s happened to someone you once loved, and knowing that, in the end, much more than his own life is at risk.

“They Need To Spend A Few Days In An Iron Lung.”

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Steve

My mother Margaret Julia Villano, praying at my father’s grave in Riverside National Cemetery, Riverside, CA.

“You know what these people need?” my mother said to me, without a hint of bitterness. “They need to spend a few days in an Iron Lung.”

I looked at her, into her deep, kind, hazel-colored eyes. Her large circular eyeglasses seemed to magnify her eyes into large, pristine, comforting pools.

Short, plump, diminutive in her housedress, my mother was a Polio survivor for 92 years, paralyzed on one side of her body as an infant, during the Polio pandemic of 1915–16. She felt blessed to be alive, even if, decades later, she still couldn’t use her right arm, and spent her final years in a wheelchair.

In 1916, the year my mother contracted Polio during her first few months of life, 27,000 cases of paralysis were registered, with over 2,000 deaths being reported in NYC alone. Most of those cases were among children under five years old.

She pointed at the crazed, screaming men and women she saw on television, veins close to bursting out of their necks, mouths, if not eyes, wide open, opposing vaccines for themselves or their children.

“They need to have a machine breathe for them; breath-for-breath, up and down, up and down. They don’t know how good they have it,” she said. “They need to know what it’s like to suffer day after day after day — with no hope of getting better.”

She recalled the hours she spent at the Crippled Children’s Home, undergoing physical therapy on her limp right arm, walking past the rows of half-open steel pods which looked like open caskets — Iron Lungs — each of which held a young child gasping for air, their breathing muscles immobilized by the disease. Many of them died.

“Everytime I saw them, and heard the loud up-and-down noises those machines made, I felt so lucky that I was only paralyzed in my right arm; I learned to write and play with my other arm, “ she said. “Those poor kids couldn’t come out of those dark tunnels, or they wouldn’t be able to breathe. They couldn’t even hug their mothers and fathers.”

She shook her head in disbelief.

“ I was so lucky,” she said. “ Even though they wouldn’t let us Polio kids into the public swimming pools in New York City, I taught myself to swim as best I could, on the beaches of Coney Island. I thank God to this day that all I had was one bad arm.”

A devout Catholic, who later went on to teach Sunday school for the Children of Mary, my mother spent hours praying for those she knew were not as fortunate.

“I remember riding on the school bus Upstate with the Fresh Air Fund,” she said, referring to the program promoted by New York City and The New York Times which took underprivileged kids from urban areas and gave them a week of camp in “the country.”

“On our ride up through the Catskills, we’d pass camp after camp along the way with big giant hand-written signs, “NO POLIO KIDS ALLOWED, “ she recalled, looking off to the side, as if looking out a school bus window at the foreboding message.

“NO POLIO KIDS ALLOWED,” she repeated. “You would have thought they’d be nicer to us since President Roosevelt had Polio, too. Still, I was so grateful just to have a place to go that would let us play outside.”

Despite leadership from FDR, the full-throated support of entertainers like Eddie Cantor, and a widely-supported national campaign named the “March of Dimes” to raise tens of millions of small contributions for vaccine research, it took some 60 years from the time the Polio virus was first identified in 1894 to when Dr. Jonas Salk discovered the first mass distribution Polio vaccine.

People danced in the streets, hugging and kissing one another with joy and relief when the announcement was made in 1955, that there was finally a vaccine to protect their children from paralysis and death. The Centers for Disease Control estimated that the Polio vaccines, and their near universal acceptance in the US and around the world, saved some 17 million people — mostly children under 5 — from paralysis, and thousands more from death.

My mother, raising 4 children on Long Island, believed her prayers were finally answered, and that her parade of dimes religiously slipped into “March of Dimes” coin holders for almost 15 years, contributed to making life much safer for her children.

There was never any question that we would be vaccinated. To do any less would have been immoral and inexcusable, especially since this one, grateful Polio survivor witnessed what life was like for some children, less lucky than she, through the long, lightless lens of an Iron Lung.

A Breakthrough View of Mortality.

Posted on September 30, 2021 by Steve

Photo by Steve Villano, off the Sonoma Coast.

I knew all the statistics about COVID, kind of like how I memorized every baseball batting and pitching record when I was a kid.

I knew that we were doing real well in Northern California, and that the rate of new infections in NYC was low, compared to communities throughout the South. I knew that the odds of contracting that devious Delta Variant were greatly reduced since Carol and I were double-vaxxed, and would be triple masked.

To give us an extra level of protection for our upcoming cross-country flight in the weeks before booster shots were available, and proof of vaccination was required everywhere in NYC, we got our seasonal SuperFlu vaccine, a little earlier than usual. We were pumped, and, we thought, as safe as we could possibly be. Now, even the most careless unvaccinated Trumpholes would not be a threat to us.

I knew that only .33 of one-percent—less than ½ of one percent—of vaccinated New Yorkers had contracted the new strain of COVID. Yes, we’d be visiting the crowded 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan, and we’d be riding on NYC’s subways, but as long as we kept our triple layers of mask covering our noses and mouths, sanitized ourselves regularly, and didn’t get too close to other people, we could reduce the risk of being mugged by a COVID-carrying criminal.

What I underestimated was how extreme mental and emotional stress and a weakened immune system, would make my otherwise well-protected body a ripe target for an errant viral variant, propelled at many times the intensity of the original virus. Delta’s heightened danger, never really dawned on us.

The tension of traveling in an airport for the first time in 2 years, and crowding into an airplane with strangers—all of whom were masked—was palpable. My body was on high alert, looking for mask mockers, who flipped their noses over the tops of their masks as if they were middle-fingers, or wore ratty, loose material over their smug faces—breeding grounds for disease, as well as disdain.

I consciously chose to ignore these slovenly public health sluts, kept to myself, and kept my masks on during the entire 5-hour flight, refusing to eat or drink on board the plane, and visiting the bathroom only once, out of dire necessity. Tense, very tense. This was not my idea of having fun through travel.

In New York, we visited a few ailing friends, contemporaries of ours, and the jolt of our own mortality lingered just outside the door, just beyond the safety of our masks. Despite our fame, we weren’t going to live forever.

My emotional reserves were already running on fumes, when we worked our way through the 9/11 Memorial museum, at the site of Tower # 2—the South Tower, as it was now called—where six years of my life and my soul were imbedded in the concrete. I was struggling to stay afloat in this sea of sorrow—in the shadow of the giant Slurry Wall– when I spotted the tomb that held the still unidentified remains of World Trade Center workers. The massive mausoleum was adorned with squares of shades of blue, capturing how many memories of the color of the sky were obliterated on that crystalline morning in September. Memory, and mortality, had pierced my masks, and against that, I had no defense.

Somewhere over the course of the next few days, our paths crossed with one or two unmasked, unvaxxed fellow tourists, or First Responders, many of whom zeroed in on Ground Zero to pay respects to fallen colleagues. On the evening of 9/11, we followed the two columns of light down to what we thought was their source—the Eternal Fountains of Remembrance, where the footprints of each Tower once stood. It was bad enough that the area around the fountains was mobbed, mostly with a younger, unmasked, partying crowd, but I could not believe the shafts of light were no longer there.

With my mask pulled tight around my face, to hide my hurt, I walked up to a small huddle of Police Officers, none of whom were wearing masks.

“Where are the light columns coming from, Officers?” I asked. “I thought they were right here, shining up from the fountains, on into infinity?”

A young cop, probably in grade school when the Towers fell, could see I was visibly upset.

“They had to move them a few years ago, when it got too crowded down here,” he said. “They moved them to a parking lot a few blocks down. Sorry sir.”

I was crushed, dropping my guard, my shell of self-defense dissolved, and allowing the Delta devil to dance right in. Depression and lethargy had already set in, days before a COVID test at a hospital confirmed the diagnosis.

It’s taken me about two weeks to come through quarantine; my cough is subsiding, and I haven’t had a temperature or headaches for a few days running. I’ve been sleeping long nights, and, little-by-little, my strength is returning: a few hours of gardening here, a few minutes of walking there. I soak up the sun for part of the day, mainlining Vitamin D, remembering the hours I would spend sitting in the California sunshine, chatting with my mother, in the years before she died. It felt the same now, as it did then. Timeless. Gentle. Healing.

Unlike hundreds of thousand of other COVID sufferers, we were fortunate to have been fully-vaccinated, and to be healthy enough to manage our own illness, and stay out of the hospital. We isolated ourselves from our son and granddaughters, and have slowly, steadily, regained our strength.

But, what lingers deep within me, sometimes deeper than I can fathom, is a feeling that I am walking on egg shells, waiting for the next breakthrough vision of my own mortality, another reminder of the fragility of life.