Judge To RFK Jr: Vaccine Policy Has To Be Reality-Based

That thing happened again where right-wing unreality ran headlong into the reality of a courtroom and had its teeth kicked in.

A federal judge in Massachusetts on Monday reviewed the Trump regime's haphazard changes to the recommended vaccine schedule and the appointment of the people in charge of such recommendations and said no, absolutely not. That's not how any of this works.

U.S. District Court Judge Brian Murphy blocked all of RFK Jr.'s vaccine policy bullshit. The ruling won't allow the Avengers of anti-vaxx broken brains to convene this month because, as Murphy said in a terse opinions, they lacked the basic qualifications to recommend vaccinations and their decisions – based on the logic of a surgically-altered Instagram health influencer urging you to get de-wormed – had endangered the health of Americans.

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The manifestation of the backlash to Woke 1.0, RFK, Jr. – a classic bad faith operator by any standard – last year disband the advisory panel in charge of recommending vaccinations in the United States and replaced highly qualified members with folks who might think the masks worn during the worst of the COVID pandemic caused permanent harm to children and the COVID vaccine contained miniature robots and caused "turbo-cancer." Think of vaccine recommendations made by the terminally online recluse Aaron Rodgers.

Judge Murphy pointed out to the anti-vaccine eugenicists making the country's vaccine recommendations that the U.S. government has traditionally been focused on vaccine policy that eradicates and reduces diseases and uses "a method scientific in nature and codified into law through procedural requirements" to develop said policies.

“Unfortunately," Murphy said, "the government has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions.”

This, as Bad Faith Times readers know, is just the latest in a series of defeats for the American right's unreality, an alternate version of the world in which their preferred policies are not just viable but essential. Last month a judge nixed the Education Department's unreality-based directive outlawing diversity initiatives in American public schools because, as the judge said, DEI does not constitute discrimination against white men. There are dozens of examples of federal judges becoming irate at the regime's anti-constitutional immigration policies steeped in the unreality created by right-wing media and perpetuated on the X platform, where reporters and editors at mainstream media outlets happily baste in the rot of that unreality and accept it as actual real-life reality.

Almost every time the regime's lawyers have introduced unreality-based legal arguments in a courtroom, a judge has looked at them sideways and asked what the fuck they're talking about. That shit doesn't fly in a courtroom. There is no oxygen for it, so it dies a quick death.

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The regime argued in court last year that any and all government changes to vaccine recommendations were "absolute" – or "unreviewable," as one regime lawyer blurted out in court – and immune from legal challenges. It was a claim Judge Murphy dismissed with prejudice. That seems to be the foundation of all legal arguments deployed by the regime over the past 13 months in defense of their intentional and open destruction of the American government as spelled out in Project 2025: That no person or organization or institution in the US has legal standing to challenge their policy changes, as Donald Trump alone represents the will of the people, or the Volkswille, as it was once described in Germany.

This, naturally, is contrary to the way the right operates when Democrats are power. They "judge shop" until they find a corrupt jurist operating within the right wing's unreality who will make it impossible for a Democrat to govern like a Democrat, just as they did when they assigned a far-right judge in Texas to undo Joe Biden's plainly constitutional student loan forgiveness program.

To give you a rough idea of the kind of blackpilled freaks controlling the federal government's Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, one of the members, a cardiologist named Kirk Milhoan – who, like other panel members, likely scrolled during COVID until he lost his mind – says the polio and measles vaccines should be optional because measles and polio are no longer prevalent in the United States. How those diseases have been eradicated never factors into this argument because it would force the arguer to operate in good faith. So it goes.

Milhoan says this as pro-disease governors like Ron DeSantis create the conditions for the re-emergence of measles in the US. It's a clarifying look into how the American conservative movement views personal liberty: As a god-given right to spread deadly diseases.

More than another (temporary?) court-based defeat for the right wing's unreality and the fascist regime that slithered out of its womb, I think a ruling like Murphy's is a reminder of what we could have if the U.S. Supreme Court were reformed and brought in line with traditional constitutional governance (putting a couple SCOTUS justices behind bars wouldn't be the worst idea either). With a majority of jurists who do not work for the democracy-hating billionaires who fund the nation's fascist movement, SCOTUS would regularly make rulings like the one Murphy made against RFK Jr.'s attempt to play eugenics-based games with the country's vaccine policies.

A constitutional Supreme Court would not operate deep within the right wing's unreality and would not wage constant war against the country's reality-based judiciary. It would call out that unreality and swiftly smack down efforts to enforce government policies based on the unreal version of life in 21st century America.

We are where we are today because of John Roberts and the Supreme Court. It is that simple. None of what we see today on our TVs and laptops and phones was possible without the Court's far-right majority clearing the way for Trump and his assault against the United States. A captured SCOTUS, led by lifelong enemies of the country, is swallowing everything, including democracy itself. Until that's fixed – until Roberts and Thomas and Alito and Gorsuch and the rest no longer determine the fate of the country – this weaponized institution will loom over reality-based rulings like the one handed down by Judge Murphy in Massachusetts, and the right's unreality will continue to take precedence.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.