RFK Jr.: Banning Boosters While Antidepressants Carry Suicidality Warnings—and OTC Fat-Blockers Warn of Fecal Incontinence

By Brian Hews, Publisher and Editor

So RFK Jr. is busy restricting vaccines—what’s next, a permit to buy Band-Aids? Vaccines aren’t the problem. Politics is. 

We’ve reached the absurd point where lifesaving COVID shots are treated like contraband while the drug aisle cheerfully offers products that can, quite literally, cause you to shit your pants and kill you.

The math isn’t close: severe allergic reactions to mRNA COVID vaccines run about five per million doses, and rare myocarditis clusters are measured in the tens per million in young men after a second dose. 

That’s not nothing, but it’s the statistical equivalent of finding a parking spot at the Cerritos Mall on Christmas Eve.

Meanwhile, our “no big deal” over-the-counter culture shrugs at real-life medical issues.

Start with the obvious: every antidepressant (Zoloft, Prozac, Lexapro, Celexa, and Paxil) carries the FDA’s boxed warning about increased suicidal thoughts and behaviors in children, teens, and young adults, especially early in treatment or after dose changes. 

Bleeding is another quiet risk. SSRIs can increase bleeding, and the danger climbs when patients also pop daily ibuprofen, aspirin, or blood thinners. If you’re on an SSRI and your medicine cabinet looks like a sports trainer’s, that’s a conversation, not a guess.

Weight-loss medications,  Wegovy, Zepbound, Saxenda, read like a sitcom prop: oily spotting, gas with discharge, fecal urgency, even fecal incontinence… a.k.a. explosive diarrhea.

You don’t need a subcommittee to restrict that—you need darker pants. And when people abuse a common anti-diarrheal, the FDA has to step in because it can trigger deadly heart rhythms. Still on the shelf, still legal. 

Skin creams? Use high-potency steroids for too long and you can thin your skin and suppress your adrenal system—real, documented risks, especially in kids. Yet somehow, a vaccine with vanishingly rare severe reactions is the “controversial” one. Politics over pharmacology. Theater over science.

Here’s the plain truth: COVID vaccines carry small, well-characterized risks that clinicians know how to monitor and treat. The benefits—preventing severe disease, hospitalization, and death—are orders of magnitude larger than those risks. If we’re going to panic about medicine, start where the bodies actually are: liver failure from everyday pills, heart arrhythmias from “harmless” misuse, and GI disasters sold right next to the cough drops. 

Let’s be clear: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isn’t a doctor or a public-health professional—he’s an environmental lawyer and long-time anti-vaccine crusader now presiding over vaccine policy like it’s a talk-radio segment. He has openly described his past heroin addiction, swims in polluted streams, eats roadkill, and has been arrested; recovery is admirable, but it doesn’t confer medical expertise or license him to gamble with other people’s health. Meanwhile, under his watch and influence, allies are moving to scrap bedrock school immunization rules—exactly when we need steadier hands, not culture-war experiments.