Robert Boesch
January 22, 1933 – January 4, 2024
Robert Boesch passed away at home on January 4, 2024 following complications from lung disease.
Bob was born January 22, 1933 in Hartford, Connecticut, the second of seven children to George E. and Cecelia Reynolds Boesch. He attended local public schools and graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1955 with a ROTC commission in the US Air Force. Subsequently earning his wings as a navigator, Bob served in the Far East, which included flying support for the 1958 atomic test on Eniwetok.
After his tour of duty in 1959, Bob moved to San Francisco and began a successful career as a manufacturing executive and Professional Engineer at the Schlage Lock Company, and subsequently at Cornnuts, Inc. (In his own inimitable way, he referred to this transition as “from bolts to nuts!”). Dedicated to his family friends, career and community, he had many interests. While living in San Francisco, he joined the Guardsman, and after moving to the Peninsula in 1965, Bob was an active volunteer in the Children’s Health Home and served as president of the then San Mateo Park Improvement Association. In retirement, he spent 25 years as a pro bono business counselor for SCORE.
In what was to become one of the most enjoyable and meaningful activities in his life, Bob joined the Bohemian Club in 1973 as Librarian for the Concert Band. Active in Club leadership, he was a member of the Old Guard, List of Fifty, and served as its president from 2011 to 2013. Bob also deeply appreciated the friendships and camaraderie at the Burlingame Country Club, where he enjoyed tennis, played golf well into his 80’s, and could always be counted on for a serious domino game.
Bob was an ardent Niners and Huskies fan. Wood working was his special skill, and after moving to San Francisco, his first effort was to build a sailboat which he raced on the Bay. That hobby led him to build many beautiful pieces of furniture for members of his grateful family.
Above all else, Bob was deeply passionate about his family. He delighted at being a devoted and loving husband to his wife of 62 years, Patricia Ashby Boesch, father to son Tom and daughter Katy, father-in-law to Terri, and a very special PopPop to his grandchildren, Michael Boesch and Kendall Boesch. He remained a loving brother to his siblings, Mary Ann Ahearn, James Boesch (Diane), Paula Cohen and Joseph Boesch (Denise). He was preceded in death by his brother, George Boesch and sister, Edwina Bender.
Ever the New Englander, but seasoned by California, with a well-honed sense of humor, Bob was a man of principle and a gentleman who exhibited kindness, wisdom and humanity to all who knew him. Working behind the scenes, he was often sought out for his practical and insightful advice, which he offered in a low key and thoughtful way. With his generous soul, he had the ability to make everyone feel welcome, and he was a mentor to many. He will be sorely missed by his family and good friends.
A Celebration of Life will be held at the Episcopal Church of St. Matthew, 1 S. El Camino Real, San Mateo, on Saturday, March 2 at 2:00 PM.
In lieu of flowers, contributions in Bob’s memory may be made to the Dawn Redwood Trust, 1 Blackfield Drive, Suite 331, Tiburon CA 94920 or to the Guardsmen 1016 Lincoln Boulevard, No. 205, San Francisco, CA 94129.

Published by San Francisco Chronicle on Feb. 5, 2024.

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AT THE END of August Rob Harley released his album Big Tree. Previous singles include the title track Big Tree and Straight For Your Love which saw national coverage in the press and radio in Ireland.

Produced by Christian Best (Mick Flannery) in Cork, Big Tree was due to come out during Covid but lockdown pushed it back until now.

Big Tree – the album

What are you up to? 

I am promoting my album Big Tree, which was released at the end of of August.

Which piece of music always sends a shiver down your spine? 

A Day In The Life by The Beatles. It’s so unique, there’s no piece of music like it that captures so many genres in one song.

Which musician has most influenced you?

Lindsey Buckinham —an incredible guitarist using the Travis picking style which I try to incorporate into my own playing

Who would be in your ideal band? 

Rory Gallagher, Lindsey Buckingham, John Entwistle, John Bonham

How did you get started in music?

I listened to a lot of music growing up from classical to rock, my older brother showed me my first couple of chords on the guitar and I was addicted from that point on, I had to know more!

Where are you from in Ireland, and what are your roots? 

I was born in Croydon in London to Irish parents, we moved to San Francisco and then came back to Cork. My mother is from Cork and my father is from Donegal.

What’s on your smartphone playlist at the minute?

Bob Dylan, Ron Sexsmith and Beck

Football or art galleries?

Art galleries, I visit the Crawford art gallery in Cork a couple of times a year, lovely place for a sit down and a cup of coffee.

What is your favourite place in Ireland?

West Cork, I love going to Clonakilty there’s a great venue called DeBarras Folk Club there, then on to Connolly’s of Leap, another brilliant venue and then down to Baltimore.

What would be your motto? 

It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

Mozart or Martin Hayes? 

Martin Hayes all the way, I love the haunting Garrett Barry’s Jig on his latest album Peggy’s Dream.

Which living person do you most admire? 

Paul McCartney, he’s just unstoppable, going on tour at 81 and keeps churning out brilliant music and looks great for it.

Who will act you when they make a film of your life?

Cillian Murphy a fellow Corkman, although it would be a bit of a step down after playing Oppenheimer!

Rob Harley

Who will you thank in your Grammy award acceptance speech?

I would like to thank my lovely partner Léan and daughter Fiadh.

If you weren’t a musician what other job would you be really good at?

I think I would be good at electrical repairs or plumbing, I’m pretty handy around the house.

What’s the worst piece of advice you’ve been given this year?

“Always stay the same, never change”. I think we have to evolve, especially when you have kids.

Have you a favourite line from a song? 

“I ain’t a-saying you treated me unkind, you could have done better but I don’t mind, you just kinda wasted my precious time, but don’t think twice it’s alright” — Bob Dylan

In terms of inanimate objects, what is your most precious possession? 

My guitar, it’s not a very expensive one but I’ve had it for a long time, it’s my workhorse.

What’s the best thing about where you live?

Cork is a city that is relatively small, you always meet someone you know walking down Patrick Street, and stop for a chat. Also there’s West Cork, and loads of beaches nearby.

. . .  . and the worst?

The roads are in a pretty bad condition, and traffic in the city is awful.

What’s the greatest lesson life has taught you?

To always keep moving forward, as I say in my song When It’s Done, “you think on but don’t think back”.

What gives you the greatest laugh?

That would be my daughter Fiadh, she is the funniest little toddler and has the best laugh.

What do you believe in?

I believe in knowing your own value and believing in yourself.

What do you consider the greatest work of art?

The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, it’s such a spectacular alive watercolour that jumps off of the canvas.

Who/what is the greatest love of your life?

My daughter Fiadh is the greatest, she just gives me constant joy, happiness and I learn more about myself through her every day.

One moment please…

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is no stranger to FactCheck.org. He is a prominent anti-vaccine advocate who has been on our radar for years, primarily as the founder of Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit that spreads anti-vaccine misinformation.

We’ve written numerous stories about his claims and those made in posts appearing on his nonprofit’s website. In 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate named Kennedy and CHD one of the “Disinformation Dozen,” or top 12 spreaders of misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines online. 

In April, Kennedy — the son of a former attorney general and presidential candidate, and nephew of President John F. Kennedy, both of whom were assassinated in the 1960s — officially entered politics for the first time, announcing his bid for the presidency as a Democrat challenging President Joe Biden. He has virtually no chance of nabbing the nomination, but he has received more media attention in the following months that has allowed him to spread false and misleading health claims.

Many of these are about vaccines. Kennedy, who is also an environmental activist and lawyer, has been opposed to vaccines since at least 2005, when he published an error-laden story in Rolling Stone and Salon that pushed the false notion that certain vaccine ingredients cause autism. The publications later retracted or withdrew the story.

In many ways, Kennedy has not moved on. Today, he still refers to things he wrote in the article to bolster his bogus arguments against vaccines, even though he was wrong then and nearly two decades of additional research has continued to bear that out. Kennedy insists he’s not “anti-vaccine,” but many of his debunked arguments are straight from the anti-vaccine playbook, which he and his nonprofit have helped write.

Kennedy also played a part in one of the worst measles outbreaks in recent memory. In 2018, two infants in American Samoa died when nurses accidentally prepared the combined measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine with expired muscle relaxant rather than water. The Samoan government temporarily suspended the vaccination program, and anti-vaccine advocates — including Kennedy and his nonprofit — flooded the area with misinformation. The vaccination rate dropped to a dangerously low level. The next year, when a traveler brought measles to the islands, the disease tore through the population, sickening more than 5,700 people and killing 83, most of them young children.

But Kennedy’s unorthodox views aren’t limited to vaccines. He’s suggested that certain antidepressants are behind the rise in school shootings and that a particular herbicide might be part of why more young people are identifying as transgender, neither of which is backed by any science. And he’s stated that Wi-Fi radiation and 5G are dangerous and cause cancer, despite no good evidence that they do.

Kennedy also promotes conspiracy theories. He believes the CIA was behind the killing of his uncle, and likely his father. He’s alleged that the 2004 presidential election was stolen (it wasn’t). He’s written a book claiming that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was part of “a historic coup d’état against Western democracy.” And he has repeatedly questioned whether HIV is the true or only cause of AIDS (it unequivocally is).

An undercurrent to many of Kennedy’s science-based claims is that he is uniquely positioned to understand the science, whereas actual scientists are not. “I don’t necessarily believe all the scientists, because I can read science myself,” he told the New Yorker in July, just after misrepresenting the science of the COVID-19 vaccines. “That’s what I do for a living. I read science critically.”

But time and time again, a review of the evidence contradicts Kennedy’s views. He misrepresents major conclusions from papers and gets other details wrong. He conveniently ignores the scientific literature — often vast, and of higher quality — that runs counter to his beliefs. He misleads on vaccine law and misunderstands key governmental programs, consistently viewing them through a lens of conspiracy and corruption.

Our team of science writers has combed through his recent interviews to identify and correct some of his most common health claims in a three-part series. We’re focusing on some of his more plausible health claims because these are more likely to negatively influence people.

In this first installment, we address several of his key talking points about vaccines in general. In a second article, we go deep on some of his go-to arguments about vaccines and autism. Although these have long been debunked, the claims could be compelling to someone if they only hear from Kennedy, as they would in many podcast interviews. In a third and final part, we tackle his numerous claims about the COVID-19 pandemic, many of which we’ve written about before and may be familiar to readers already.

We reached out to his campaign with a list of questions about his claims, but we haven’t received a response.

False Claim About Vaccine Testing

One of Kennedy’s most common and pernicious false claims is that vaccines are not tested for safety in clinical trials. 

“Vaccines are the only medical product that is not safety-tested prior to licensure,” Kennedy said in a July 15 “Fox & Friends” interview.

“We should have the same kind of testing — placebo-controlled trials — that we have for every other medication,” he also said to Fox News’ Jesse Watters on July 10. “Vaccines are exempt from pre-licensing placebo-controlled trials.”

“None of the vaccines are ever subjected to true placebo-controlled trials,” Kennedy said in a June 15 episode of the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. “It’s the only medical product that is exempt from that prior to licensure.”

Kennedy’s line is a falsehood he’s been using since at least 2017, when he said much the same in a Q&A interview with STAT.

All vaccines undergo safety testing prior to authorization or approval. To claim that vaccines are not tested for safety is overtly false.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announces his candidacy for president on April 19 in Boston. Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images.

As one begins to unpack what Kennedy might mean by this, it becomes clear that Kennedy thinks the only appropriate safety trial is a placebo-controlled trial — and that the only legitimate placebo is water or saline. This is scientifically naive and misunderstands the purpose of a placebo in a trial.

First, many vaccines over the years have in fact been tested in randomized, placebo-controlled trials. Such trials are considered a gold-standard in medicine. Because the participants are randomly assigned to receive the vaccine or a placebo — which can be saline but doesn’t have to be — the results are less prone to bias, and differences between the groups can be attributed to the vaccine. Ideally, the trials are also double-blind, meaning neither the volunteers nor the people running the study are told who is in which group, which further reduces the possibility of bias.

The first polio vaccine, developed by Jonas Salk, was famously tested in a massive placebo-controlled trial with more than 600,000 children (more than a million other children participated in a non-placebo-controlled part of the trial). The COVID-19 vaccines and the newly approved RSV vaccines for older adults are recent examples of shots that were tested in placebo-controlled trials.

But placebo-controlled trials are not the only legitimate way to test vaccines. In fact, there are scenarios that scientifically and ethically require other methods — and it doesn’t mean that vaccines haven’t been tested for safety, as we and others have explained.

In certain circumstances, such as rolling out a new version of an existing vaccine, it would be both unethical and unhelpful to test the new product against a placebo. It’s better to test the new vaccine against whatever people have been using before.

Since most current vaccines aren’t the first version of a vaccine, or are part of a combination vaccine, most of these haven’t been tested in placebo-controlled trials. This includes the latest diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, or DTap, vaccines, and the latest pneumococcal vaccine.

Another reason not to give a saline placebo is to make sure vaccine recipients in a trial are blinded and don’t know if they received the vaccine or a control, which could skew the results. This sometimes means using a different vaccine as a control or a placebo that includes everything in a shot except for the part that will trigger immunity, as the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia explains.

The Food and Drug Administration, which evaluates and approves vaccines, told us in an email that vaccine studies typically include a control group, which can include “an FDA-approved vaccine (active control), a placebo or another substance.” (For more, see our chart “FDA Vaccine Approval Process.”)

“A placebo control, such as saline, is not required to determine the safety (or effectiveness) of a vaccine. In some cases, inclusion of placebo control groups is considered unethical,” the agency continued. “In cases where an active control is used, the adverse event profile of that control group is usually known and the findings of the study are reviewed in the context of that knowledge.”

Kennedy is also wrong to imply that vaccines are different from drugs because drugs are always tested in placebo-controlled trials. Similar to when there is an existing vaccine, it’s common for drugs to be tested against another treatment that’s the standard of care, rather than a sugar pill.

And contrary to Kennedy’s suggestion that drugs are more closely scrutinized for safety than vaccines, if anything, the opposite is true. “A higher standard of safety is generally expected of vaccines than of other medical interventions because, in contrast to most pharmaceutical products that are administered to ill persons for treatment purposes, vaccines are generally administered to healthy persons to prevent disease,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Pink Book, which is a guide to vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases, explains.

“Less tolerance of risk associated with vaccines requires close monitoring and timely assessment of vaccine adverse events to help distinguish true vaccine adverse reactions from coincidental unrelated events and to help maintain public confidence in vaccination,” the book continues.

Indeed, vaccines are arguably subjected to much more intensive post-marketing surveillance than drugs. Such monitoring is important because even the largest clinical trial cannot exclude very rare serious side effects. The FDA and CDC use several systems for this, including the ​​Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, but also the Vaccine Safety Datalink, or VSD, which analyzes electronic health data from sites across the country in near real-time to spot possible vaccine side effects. 

“I think those systems, if they were put in place for drugs, would pick up drug adverse events much more quickly,” Dr. Paul A. Offit, a vaccine expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told us in an interview for a previous story. “Vioxx being one example … that drug would have been found to be a rare cause of heart attacks much sooner.” Vioxx was a prescription anti-inflammatory drug that Merck voluntarily took off the market in 2004 after studies linked it to heart attacks and strokes.

Hepatitis B Vaccine

In multiple interviews, Kennedy misleads about the hepatitis B vaccine, falsely suggesting that the reason the vaccine is given to newborns is to boost profits for vaccine makers.

“The major vectors for [hepatitis B] are it’s sexually transmitted or by needles. Why would you give that to a one-day-old child?” Kennedy said in a town hall broadcast on NewsNation at the end of June. “It’s really a profit motive.”

In his appearance on Rogan’s podcast, Kennedy made the same argument, saying that people get hepatitis B from sharing needles, “going to a really seasoned prostitute,” or participating in “sort of compulsive homosexual behavior.” He acknowledged that babies can get hepatitis B from their mothers, but said that every pregnant woman is tested for it, “so the baby doesn’t need this.”

“Why would you give it to a one-day-old baby, you know, or a three-hour-old baby, and then four more times, when that baby’s not going to be even subject to it for 16 years?” he asked, erroneously stating the number of vaccine doses (it’s three in childhood).

Kennedy then suggested that the CDC recommended the vaccine for children to ensure revenue for Merck, because the vaccine had originally been given only to high-risk groups that weren’t buying enough vaccines.

Kennedy is distorting what happened — and omitting the fact that hepatitis B can be spread in ways that do leave infants and young kids susceptible to the virus.

As the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia explains, the hepatitis B vaccine was first licensed in 1981 and recommended for high-risk people, including certain adults but also infants born to mothers with hepatitis B, since vaccination can prevent mother-to-infant transmission. 

“However, immunization of these groups didn’t effectively stop transmission of hepatitis B virus. That’s because about one-third of patients with acute disease were not in identifiable risk groups,” CHOP’s website says. “The change of recommendation to immunize all infants in 1991 was the result of these failed attempts to control hepatitis B by only immunizing high-risk groups. Following this recommendation, hepatitis B disease was virtually eliminated in children less than 18 years of age in the United States.”

After initially advising that infants be vaccinated “preferably” before hospital discharge, but no later than 2 months of age, the U.S. changed its guidance in 2018 to have babies vaccinated within 24 hours of birth. This is slightly different from some countries, including the U.K., which give the first dose at 8 weeks unless a mother is hepatitis B-positive. But it’s in line with what the World Health Organization advises. There is no safety reason to delay the dose; Kennedy’s implication that giving newborns a vaccine is somehow risky is not based on any evidence.

Also contrary to Kennedy’s statements, there are good reasons to give infants hepatitis B vaccines. While most cases of hepatitis B in the U.S. occur in adults, the viral disease is especially dangerous to young children because infection early in life is more likely to lead to chronic hepatitis B, which can cause cirrhosis, liver cancer or liver failure. 

More than 90% of babies and up to half of children ages 1 to 5 infected with the virus develop chronic infection, compared with less than 5% of older children and adults, according to the CDC’s Yellow Book, which provides health information for international travelers. A quarter of children who are chronically infected will prematurely die of a liver problem. As a result, protecting babies and young kids from hepatitis B has an outsized impact on reducing the burden of the disease.

As for how young children get hepatitis B, babies can contract the infection from their mothers during birth, since the virus is spread via blood. American hospitals test pregnant people for hepatitis B, but as the CDC explains, there can be errors or delays in testing or reporting of results. So giving all infants the vaccine soon after birth “acts as a safety net” for reducing mother-to-infant transmission. Studies also show that vaccination at birth increases the chance that a child will complete the three-shot series.

Kids, though, can also pick up hepatitis B later, especially if they live with or are cared for by someone with the disease. Many people with hepatitis B may not have symptoms and don’t know they are infected. Hepatitis B virus is highly contagious, so minute amounts of blood can spread the virus. The virus is also hardy and remains infectious on objects for at least a week. This means children can get hepatitis B from washcloths, a shared toothbrush or nail clippers, or through pre-chewed food given to a baby — no drug use or sexual activity required. Vaccination at birth protects children right away from any household exposures they might have.

Distorted, Illogical Historical Argument About Vaccination

On multiple recent occasions, Kennedy has cast doubt on vaccines by saying that sanitation and nutrition were more important than vaccination in driving down mortality in the 20th century.

This may be true to some extent, but it doesn’t mean that vaccination is not important.

“There was this huge decline in infection, in mortalities from infectious diseases that took place in the 20th century, an 80% drop in deaths from infectious disease. And what caused that wasn’t vaccines,” Kennedy said in his interview with Rogan, describing a study published in Pediatrics in 2000. “The real drop happened because of really, engineering solutions: refrigerators, you could store food … better housing, sanitation, the invention of chlorine, sewage treatment. But mainly nutrition. Nutrition is absolutely critical to building immune systems. And so and what was really killing these children was malnutrition.”

The study Kennedy references does say some of this, including noting that “nearly 90% of the decline in infectious disease mortality among US children occurred before 1940, when few antibiotics or vaccines were available.” But it doesn’t mention malnutrition at all. And the paper is still pro-vaccine.

According to the study, the large drops in child mortality in the first third of the last century were likely due to “improved socioeconomic conditions” and things such as water treatment, food safety and waste disposal. That dramatically cut down on diarrheal diseases. Better housing and less crowding in cities also greatly cut the number of deaths from tuberculosis and other airborne diseases.

Vaccination, the study notes, could not have contributed to a decline in deaths during this time because most vaccines were not widely implemented yet. 

“Vaccines against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis became available during the late 1920s but only widely used in routine pediatric practice after World War II. Thus vaccination does not account for the impressive declines in mortality seen in the first half of the century,” the paper reads. 

But, the article continues, the reductions in vaccine-preventable diseases “are impressive. In the early 1920s, diphtheria accounted for about 175 000 cases annually and pertussis for nearly 150 000 cases; measles accounted for about half a million annual cases before the introduction of vaccine in the 1960s. Deaths from these diseases have been virtually eliminated, as have deaths from Haemophilus influenzae, tetanus, and poliomyelitis.”

Kennedy also has a habit of citing a sociology paper from 1977, which noted that death rates from many infectious diseases had already begun to fall well before the arrival of vaccines or effective drugs. The authors estimated that only 3.5% of the total decline in mortality between 1900 and 1973 was due to medical measures of any kind.

But just because people were able to reduce the burden of disease by having access to clean water, indoor plumbing, and better food and housing doesn’t imply that vaccines were not needed or helpful to further reduce disease. Few people would decline a life-saving antibiotic today just because antibiotics weren’t a dominant force in lowering American mortality rates in the 20th century. The same should be true of vaccines.

In response to anti-vaccine advocates citing their work, the authors of the 1977 paper have said that they “consider this an egregious misinterpretation of our research,” adding that “[e]ffective vaccines clearly have an important role in the ongoing containment of a disease after its prevalence has been reduced.”

It’s worth noting that plenty of data indicate that vaccines have prevented many deaths, hospitalizations and illnesses over the years. Globally, measles vaccination alone is estimated to have saved 56 million lives between 2000 and 2021.

‘Lazarus Study’ and Alleged ‘Vaccine Injuries’

As supposed evidence of vaccine harm, Kennedy frequently refers to what he calls the “Lazarus study.”

“Fewer than 1 in 100 vaccine injuries are ever reported because it’s voluntary,” he said in his interview with Rogan, referring to reports to the ​​Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. “You can find support for this in the Lazarus study. Lazarus actually looked and said, how many injuries are actually happening, how many are reported? And they said fewer than 1 in 100 are ever reported.”

He again referenced the work in an interview with Bill Maher on the podcast “Club Random with Bill Maher.” “What they found is that the actual rate of injury was about, I think, 2.3%, which is 1 out of every 37 people,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy’s nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, also frequently cites the analysis, as we’ve written. But several aspects of these claims are incorrect or misleading.

First, the document is not formally a published study; it’s a 2010 final report by researchers with the nonprofit health insurance company Harvard Pilgrim Health Care for a project funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a governmental agency under the Department of Health and Human Services. (The lead investigator’s name was Dr. Ross Lazarus.)

A screen capture of the VAERS website.

Second, what Kennedy is calling “vaccine injuries” are in fact adverse events, which are health issues that occur after vaccination but aren’t necessarily due to a vaccine. Many of them are coincidental. This is a prevailing misunderstanding about VAERS. (For more, see our article “What VAERS Can and Can’t Do, and How Anti-Vaccination Groups Habitually Misuse Its Data.”)

VAERS works by collecting reports of possible vaccine side effects. Because these are voluntarily submitted, the database doesn’t include every real side effect that does occur. Anti-vaccine advocates often complain about this “underreporting.” At the same time, not all reported events were caused by vaccines, so there is also “overreporting.”

This issue is relevant to understanding the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care report’s findings. The scientists wrote a computer program to analyze electronic medical records, looking for certain prescriptions, lab tests and diagnostic codes that occurred within 30 days of a vaccine to identify possible vaccine side effects. The original plan was to then use this automated system to help medical professionals submit reports to VAERS.

The group identified, in data described as “preliminary,” 35,570 possible side effects after 1.4 million vaccine doses, or possible side effects occurring after 2.6% of vaccinations.

The key word here is possible. Although Kennedy presents these events as being caused by vaccines, that is not necessarily the case. (Later, in the Rogan interview, Kennedy does say they might not be vaccine-caused, but by that point, he had already repeatedly called them “vaccine injuries.”)

And while Kennedy’s language could suggest that such “injuries” are all serious, that’s also not the case. Elsewhere in the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care report, the authors state that “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported.” This is the sentence Kennedy and others have long latched onto, using it to misleadingly argue that the problems reported in VAERS are only the tip of the iceberg.

It’s unclear how this was calculated, but Dr. Michael Klompas, a public health surveillance researcher at Harvard Medical School and one of the authors of the report, told us in an email for an earlier story that the 1% number “takes into account that many adverse effects of vaccines are mild and expected so not worth reporting (sore arm, fatigue, local redness, etc.).” It’s misleading to refer to this number without noting that it includes mild, expected side effects that people would rarely bother reporting to VAERS.

Other research has shown that VAERS more completely captures adverse events that are serious rather than mild.

The report, then, is not evidence that vaccines are dangerous, as Kennedy tries to claim. Instead, it describes one approach that could be used to improve reporting to VAERS, essentially changing it from a purely passive system. 

Other government vaccine safety monitoring systems, it should be noted, are active systems that automatically collect data and do not rely on reporting, including the Vaccine Safety Datalink. The CDC and FDA purposely use multiple passive and active systems together for vaccine safety surveillance.

Misleading Claim About the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act

In at least three different recent interviews, Kennedy has spun a misleading tale about the origin of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 to incorrectly suggest that vaccines are irredeemably unsafe.

In the 1970s and 1980s, vaccine makers were increasingly being sued for millions of dollars by parents for alleged harm to their children, many for certain neurological health issues claimed to be due to the diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, or DTP, vaccine. Although studies would later show that there was no link to the vaccine, vaccine companies sometimes lost these cases in court. This led some companies to stop making vaccines altogether, running up the cost of vaccines and also increasing the risk of vaccine shortages. 

In recognition that vaccines are highly beneficial, but do rarely cause serious side effects, such as allergic reactions, the government stepped in and decided to give immunity in most cases to vaccine makers — and set up an alternate compensation system for people with reasonable claims of harm. The law also required vaccine recipients to receive fact sheets about each vaccine and spawned VAERS to function as an early warning system for detecting possible safety problems due to vaccines.

Kennedy’s version of the story, however, plays up the risks of vaccines.

“The reason the Vaccine Act was passed that gave immunity from liability to these companies is because they said the vaccines could not be produced — that they were unavoidably unsafe,” he said in the podcast interview with Maher. “And that phrase is in the 1986 statute, and it’s in the Supreme Court Bruesewitz case, which upheld that statute.”

“Anybody who tells you vaccines are safe and effective, the industry itself got immunity from liability by convincing the president and Congress that vaccines are unavoidably unsafe,” he also said in his interview with Rogan.

This is misleading — and also wrong on the specifics. “Unavoidably unsafe” doesn’t mean, as Kennedy implies, that a product is really dangerous and shouldn’t be used. As University of California Law San Francisco professor Dorit Reiss has explained in a blog post, the legal term actually refers to a product that is considered to be highly beneficial, but that cannot be made entirely risk-free. (Safe and effective, it should be said, doesn’t mean perfectly safe and perfectly effective, either — a standard that no medical product would be able to meet.)

“Unavoidably unsafe” also doesn’t appear in the 1986 law, as Kennedy claims. Instead, what the law says is that no vaccine manufacturer “shall be liable … if the injury or death resulted from side effects that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions and warnings.”

In the majority opinion for the Bruesewitz case, the phrase is only mentioned because it was part of an argument that was rejected. The issue before that court, Reiss explains, was whether a plaintiff could sue for an alleged vaccine injury for a vaccine design defect in state court. This hinged on whether the 1986 law meant to invoke tort law’s “unavoidably unsafe” language. Most justices said no. “In other words,” Reiss told us in an email, “the majority of the court mentioned the phrase only to say it’s not a correct interpretation of the law.”

This brings us to Kennedy’s claim in his interview with Maher that vaccine companies get immunity “no matter how negligent they are … no matter how reckless the behavior, no matter how shoddy their manufacturing and testing process is.”

This is false. Reiss told us that while the Bruesewitz case determined that someone cannot sue for a vaccine design defect, one can bring other claims against vaccine makers, including for manufacturing defects, negligence and fraud. Claims can be taken to state court, she said, if one first goes through the vaccine compensation program and it either takes more than 240 days for a response or one rejects the decision.

This is in fact exactly what Kennedy himself has done in lawsuits against Merck over its HPV vaccines. “[T]hat shows that his point is untrue — and that he knows it,” Reiss said.

Editor’s note: SciCheck’s articles providing accurate health information and correcting health misinformation are made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control over FactCheck.org’s editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.

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Robert (Bob) Howard Edwards, a longtime member of the Quincy community, passed away on May 16, 2023. He was born on July 2, 1937 in San Francisco, California. In 1946, Bob and his parents, Von and Connie Edwards, moved to Quincy. Bob has touched the lives of many with his kind-hearted manner, unwavering dedication and zest for life.

From a young age, Bob demonstrated an insatiable curiosity and an innate interest in the outdoors. He attended Quincy High School where he excelled both academically and athletically (soccer) and demonstrated his natural leadership qualities. Bob’s love of learning continued as he pursued higher education at Chico State, where he earned a business degree, played football, served as a fraternity officer, was a member of the Lambda Pi fraternity, and met his wife, Mary. This knowledge would serve as the basis for his successful career as owner of Plumas General Insurance Agency and partner of Murray and Edwards Insurance – serving 43 years in Plumas and Lassen Counties.

A devoted family man, Bob valued his role as a loving husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. He married the love of his life, Mary Humphreys, and together they built a beautiful life of love, joy, travel and treasured memories over the next 64 years. Their children Sharon, Joanne and Bill (Christina) were the pride and joy of his life and it brought him great joy to support their dreams and achievements. His grandchildren loved their papa very much (Eric, Erin, Austin, Owen, Tyler, Melanie and his two great granddaughters Riley and Everleigh).

Outside of his professional pursuits, Bob had a passion for the outdoors. He found solace and inspiration in the natural beauty of Northern California and beyond. Bob was an avid fisherman and his love of the great outdoors led him on countless jeep adventures in his beloved bright red Willy’s Jeep. Whether he was exploring, camping, or casting a line into a quiet mountain stream or lake, Bob enjoyed being in the great outdoors.

Throughout his life, Bob has been an active member of the Quincy community, giving his time and talent to various organizations and causes. He demonstrated leadership for over 50 years at Plumas Historic Masonic Lodge, Ben Ali Shrine, Plumas County Chamber of Commerce, Plumas County Museum Board of Trustees and the Quincy Rotary Club. While serving on the board of directors of the Feather River College Foundation, he served as chairman of the Student Housing Business Management Committee and the Quincy Racquet Ball Club. He has also served on the Plumas Health Care Foundation of the Plumas District Hospital Board and on the California State Board of Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of California. He has always been involved in community activities, such as refereeing, timekeeping at QHS and FRC football games, and the National Ski Patrol. He served Rotary International selflessly and was deeply committed to making a positive difference in the lives of others. Not only was Bob a perfect 62-year Rotary fellow, he was a sustaining member of the Paul Harris Rotary Foundation and led the Northern CalVada Rotary District 519 youth exchange program, which made a lasting impression on over 2,000 exchange students for more than 30 years. Many of these former students still refer to Bob as “dad” and have stayed in touch with him. Bob’s genuine compassion, warm smile, and helpfulness left an indelible mark on all who had the privilege of knowing him.

Bob Edwards will be fondly remembered and greatly missed by his family, friends and all who had the pleasure of meeting him and enjoying his “big smile” and caring heart. His legacy of kindness, integrity, generosity and resilience will continue to inspire generations to come.

Bob’s Celebration of Life will be held on Thursday, June 15, 2023 from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. at the Quincy Junction Barn, 1843 Quincy Junction Road, Quincy, CA. At 2:00 p.m., there will be a toast in Bob’s honor

In lieu of flowers, the family is asking for donations to the Quincy Rotary Club, 2056 E. Main St. Quincy, CA 95971 or the Plumas Health Care Foundation of Plumas District Hospital 1065 Bucks Lake Road, Quincy, CA 95971 or the Plumas County Museum Association. 500 Jackson Street, Quincy, CA 95971 … in memory of Bob Edwards.

May his soul rest in everlasting peace.

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Robert (Bob) Eugene Mosher Sr.

It is with great love, respect and sadness that the family of Robert (Bob) Eugene Mosher Sr. announces his passing on April 19, 2023. He died peacefully after a long life well lived. They would like to express their sincere gratitude and appreciation to all the professional, caring staff at The Village Health and Rehabilitation Center in Missoula, MT, the loving caregivers at Home Instead, as well as the staff at the Providence St. Joseph Assisted Living Facility in Polson, MT, all caregivers have changed our lives.

Bob was born on February 17, 1934 at Beloit Memorial Hospital to Raymond George Mosher and Pearl Lottie Lamb. Bob’s siblings were Dorothy E. Tamulis and William M. Mosher, all of whom preceded his death. His cousin Donald Lamb from Beloit passed away, like a brother to him, at a young age in his 20s from a sudden brain hemorrhage that shaped Bob’s early attitude to living each day with respect and love for life.

Bob’s fondest early memories are of summers spent on his grandparents Martin and Minnie Mosher’s farm in Hancock, WI, where he learned the fundamentals of hard work and appreciation for life that made him the man he became. Bob was a loving, quiet gentleman and a good listener when we needed his unconditional ear, but he was also full of fun and laughter. Bob’s motto was “stay true to yourself” which is etched into our minds forever.

After graduating from Beloit Memorial High School in 1952, he joined the Naval Reserve for three years and has many fond memories of the various ports he has had the opportunity to visit around the world. He married Phyllis Arlene McMillan in 1953, they were high school sweethearts and began their beautiful journey together. After completing his naval service, Bob began his plumbing apprenticeship with the Town and Country of Beloit and continued with Quigley Smart Plumbing and Heating. Bob earned his journeyman and masters degrees in plumbing which enabled him to start his own business, Mosher Plumbing. Bob was a member of the South Beloit Businessmen’s Association for many years. He joined the Plumbers/Pipe Fitters Union Local 214, and his eldest son, Bob Jr., followed in his footsteps, where they commuted together to jobs near and far and spent long hours working together as father and son .

Bob and Phyllis lived in Beloit and spent many summers camping on Petenwell Lake in Arkdale, WI, eventually moving into their own family lakeside cabin. Raising their family alongside two other loving families Harold and Jackie Oldenburg and Larry and Nancy Williams from Beloit made for lots of fun and fond memories at the cottage and in Beloit. Bob was a very good Euchre card player and enjoyed a good game with his family and friends. He was very proud and enjoyed teaching his children and grandchildren, although it was a bit intimidating for all of us, we enjoyed every round. For many years, children, grandchildren and now great-grandchildren have enjoyed the Seehütte as the hub of family love. The cabin was a cozy and welcoming place for us all to gather. We made do with one bathroom, a couple of bedrooms, and extra sleeping beds that were part of the fun and crazy times we shared together. The Fourth of July was a motley mix of dragonfly-sized mosquito fights, fireworks (thank goodness no one was hurt) and potluck dinners, with all three families sharing in the love, fun and memories that were made forever .

Bob and Phyllis enjoyed their retirement together, spending winters in Lakeland FL and summers at the cabin in Petenwell Lake, WI. They enjoyed traveling together which included many cruises and some trips visiting her son Mike and daughter-in-law Mirjam when they lived in California and then to Bottmingen in Switzerland and visiting her daughter Julie and son-in-law Jeff in Montana. Bob was a devoted and loving husband to Phyllis for 53 years and took wonderful care of her while she was battling scleroderma until her passing in 2007. Their marriage was a true inspiration for all of us to hold each other close and cherish each day.

Bob is survived by his three sons Robert Jr./Sue Mosher Whitefish Bay WI, Michael/Mirjam Mosher Bottmingen Switzerland, Jeffery/Cindy Mosher Janesville, WI and daughter Julie/Jeffrey Stephenson Polson, MT. Grandchildren: Lindsay/Mike Christensen Whitefish Bay WI (Gr. Grans Cole, Claire, Harrison, Evan and Noah), Ryan Mosher San Diego, CA, Angela Mosher Martin Marion, IN (Gr grans Henry, Emily, Liam) Bottmingen, Switzerland, Michael Mosher Jr., Luke Mosher, Basel, Switzerland, Ashley Mosher, Holmen, WI (Gr. grans Jude, Hugh, Deacon), Mallory/ Dan Box, Crystal MN (Gr. gran Ruby ) Sara Mosher Sun Prairie, WI, Kent Kroll San Francisco, CA Austin Stephenson/Autumn Gear Nokemis, MI (Gr gran Averie) and Lauren Stephenson Brooklyn, NY.

Bob’s dear friends in Lakeland FL have given Bob, Phyllis and our entire family so much support and love, we are truly grateful…Judy Hargrove, Phil Meyers and his beautiful late companion of eight years, Donna Getman.

A celebration is planned this summer in Petenwell Lake, WI

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to www.partnershopefoundation.org, Residential Hospice Unit Missoula, MT.

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It is with great love, respect and sadness that the family of Robert (Bob) Eugene Mosher Sr. announces his passing on April 19, 2023. He died peacefully after a long life well lived. They would like to express their sincere gratitude and appreciation to all the professional, caring staff at The Village Health and Rehabilitation Center in Missoula, MT, the loving caregivers at Home Instead, as well as the staff at the Providence St. Joseph Assisted Living Facility in Polson, MT, all caregivers have changed our lives.

Bob was born on February 17, 1934 at Beloit Memorial Hospital to Raymond George Mosher and Pearl Lottie Lamb. Bob’s siblings were Dorothy E. Tamulis and William M. Mosher, all of whom preceded his death. His cousin Donald Lamb from Beloit passed away, like a brother to him, at a young age in his 20s from a sudden brain hemorrhage that shaped Bob’s early attitude to living each day with respect and love for life.

Bob’s fondest early memories are of summers spent on his grandparents Martin and Minnie Mosher’s farm in Hancock, WI, where he learned the fundamentals of hard work and appreciation for life that made him the man he became. Bob was a loving, quiet gentleman and a good listener when we needed his unconditional ear, but he was also full of fun and laughter. Bob’s motto was “stay true to yourself” which is etched into our minds forever.

After graduating from Beloit Memorial High School in 1952, he joined the Naval Reserve for three years and has many fond memories of the various ports he has had the opportunity to visit around the world. He married Phyllis Arlene McMillan in 1953, they were high school sweethearts and began their beautiful journey together. After completing his naval service, Bob began his plumbing apprenticeship with the Town and Country of Beloit and continued with Quigley Smart Plumbing and Heating. Bob earned his journeyman and masters degrees in plumbing which enabled him to start his own business, Mosher Plumbing. Bob was a member of the South Beloit Businessmen’s Association for many years. He joined the Plumbers/Pipe Fitters Union Local 214, and his eldest son, Bob Jr., followed in his footsteps, where they commuted together to jobs near and far and spent long hours working together as father and son .

Bob and Phyllis lived in Beloit and spent many summers camping on Petenwell Lake in Arkdale, WI, eventually moving into their own family lakeside cabin. Raising their family alongside two other loving families Harold and Jackie Oldenburg and Larry and Nancy Williams from Beloit made for lots of fun and fond memories at the cottage and in Beloit. Bob was a very good Euchre card player and enjoyed a good game with his family and friends. He was very proud and enjoyed teaching his children and grandchildren, although it was a bit intimidating for all of us, we enjoyed every round. For many years, children, grandchildren and now great-grandchildren have enjoyed the Seehütte as the hub of family love. The cabin was a cozy and welcoming place for us all to gather. We made do with one bathroom, a couple of bedrooms, and extra sleeping beds that were part of the fun and crazy times we shared together. The Fourth of July was a motley mix of dragonfly-sized mosquito fights, fireworks (thank goodness no one was hurt) and potluck dinners, with all three families sharing in the love, fun and memories that were made forever .

Bob and Phyllis enjoyed their retirement together, spending winters in Lakeland FL and summers at the cabin in Petenwell Lake, WI. They enjoyed traveling together which included many cruises and some trips visiting her son Mike and daughter-in-law Mirjam when they lived in California and then to Bottmingen in Switzerland and visiting her daughter Julie and son-in-law Jeff in Montana. Bob was a devoted and loving husband to Phyllis for 53 years and took wonderful care of her while she was battling scleroderma until her passing in 2007. Their marriage was a true inspiration for all of us to hold each other close and cherish each day.

Bob is survived by his three sons Robert Jr./Sue Mosher Whitefish Bay WI, Michael/Mirjam Mosher Bottmingen Switzerland, Jeffery/Cindy Mosher Janesville, WI and daughter Julie/Jeffrey Stephenson Polson, MT. Grandchildren: Lindsay/Mike Christensen Whitefish Bay WI (Gr. Grans Cole, Claire, Harrison, Evan and Noah), Ryan Mosher San Diego, CA, Angela Mosher Martin Marion, IN (Gr grans Henry, Emily, Liam) Bottmingen, Switzerland, Michael Mosher Jr., Luke Mosher, Basel, Switzerland, Ashley Mosher, Holmen, WI (Gr. grans Jude, Hugh, Deacon), Mallory/ Dan Box, Crystal MN (Gr. gran Ruby ) Sara Mosher Sun Prairie, WI, Kent Kroll San Francisco, CA Austin Stephenson/Autumn Gear Nokemis, MI (Gr gran Averie) and Lauren Stephenson Brooklyn, NY.

Bob’s dear friends in Lakeland FL have given Bob, Phyllis and our entire family so much support and love, we are truly grateful…Judy Hargrove, Phil Meyers and his beautiful late companion of eight years, Donna Getman.

A celebration is planned this summer in Petenwell Lake, WI

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to www.partnershopefoundation.org, Residential Hospice Unit Missoula, MT.

Published by Beloit Daily News on April 21, 2023.

34465541-95D0-45B0-BEEB-B9E0361A315ATo plant trees in memory, please visit the Sympathy Store.

The post Robert Mosher Obituary (1934 – 2023) – Missoula, WI appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

The great poet Robert Lee Frost was born on this day in history, March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, California.

Frost spent the first 11 years of his life in San Francisco until his father, journalist William Prescott Frost, Jr., died of tuberculosis, according to Biography.com.

After his death, Frost, his mother, and sister moved to live with his grandparents in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, MARCH 25, 1911, A FIRE AT THE TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST FACTORY KILLED 146

The move was actually a homecoming for the Frosts, as their ancestors were originally from New England, according to the Poetry Foundation.

In 1892, Frost graduated from Lawrence High School. He was made “class poet” and served as co-valedictorian, along with his future wife Elinor White.

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Portrait of Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Robert Frost in the 1960s. When he was 86, Frost was asked to write and recite a poem for the inauguration of John F. Kennedy on January 20, 1961.

Two years after graduating high school, Frost’s poem “My Butterfly” was accepted by the New York Independent.

He received $15.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, MARCH 14, 1879, ALBERT EINSTEIN WAS BORN IN GERMANY

To celebrate, Frost printed two copies of a book of six poems called “Twilight” — one for himself and one for his wife.

Over the next eight years, Frost published just 13 more poems, according to Biography.com.

Portrait of Robert L. Frost, American poet who wrote North of Boston and A Boy’s Will circa 1910.

The poet attended Dartmouth College for several months before returning home to work at a series of “unfulfilling jobs,” the site reports.

In 1897 Frost attended Harvard University. He broke off his studies after two years for health reasons and returned to his wife in Lawrence.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, MARCH 14, 1869, CINCINNATI RED STOCKINGS BECAME THE FIRST PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL TEAM

Frost moved to Derry, New Hampshire, with his wife and two children in 1900 on property purchased from Frost’s grandfather.

Frost’s firstborn, Elliot, died of cholera in 1900. White gave birth to four more children.

The youngest Frost child, Elinor, born in 1907, tragically died just weeks after birth.

The Frosts attempted to make a living on the farm in New England for the next 12 years and pursued a number of unsuccessful ventures, including raising poultry, reports Biography.com.

The story goes on

Frost had two poems – The Tuft of Flowers and The Trial by Existence – that were published in 1906.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, MARCH 1, 1872, MAJESTIC YELLOWSTONE BECOMES AMERICA’S FIRST NATIONAL PARK

In 1912, Frost moved to Britain with his family after American magazines consistently rejected his work, reports the Poetry Foundation.

While Frost continued to write about New England, even while living across the pond, he published two volumes of poetry, A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914).

The poem “Mending Wall” (1914) by Robert Frost as featured in Barnes & Noble’s “A Treasury of Classic Poetry”.

“North of Boston” contained two of Frost’s most notable poems, “Mending Wall” (1914) and “After Apple-Picking” (1914).

These publications allowed Frost to return to the United States in 1915 – where he was celebrated as a literary figure.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, FEB. ON JANUARY 18, 1931 AMERICAN AUTHOR TONI MORRISON WAS BORN IN OHIO

Frost met fellow poets Ezra Pound and Edward Thomas during this period.

They reportedly influenced Frost to write The Road Not Taken (1916).

This poem and Birches (1915) were published in his 1916 book Mountain Interval.

Robert Frost, poet, taught at Amherst College until 1938 when his wife died of cancer.

Frost’s reputation for writing poetry about nature grew while he was praised for his traditional poetry and meter, reports the Poetry Foundation.

His next book, New Hampshire (1923), contained classic poems such as Stopping by Woods on a Snowing Evening, which earned him his first Pulitzer Prize.

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In addition to writing, the poet has pursued a teaching career at several colleges, including Dartmouth College, the University of Michigan, and Amherst College in Massachusetts, according to Biography.com.

He taught in Amherst until 1938 when his wife died of cancer. The college’s main library is named after Frost.

Poet Robert Frost (center) reads one of his poems during the inauguration ceremony of John F. Kennedy at the Capitol in Washington, DC on January 20, 1961.

Frost has won four Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry and 40 honorary degrees.

In 1960 he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by Congress.

At the age of 86, Frost was asked to write and recite a poem for the inauguration of John F. Kennedy on January 20, 1961.

On January 29, 1963, Frost died as a result of a previous prostate operation.

He was survived by two daughters, Lesley and Irma.

The post On this present day in historical past, March 26, 1874, American poet Robert Frost is born in San Francisco appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Shortly after exiting a Prince George’s County dealership for the third time in two weeks, Robert Krughoff found that his car was still unrepaired. Soon, he knew, he’d have to go back a fourth time—or, better yet, find another store.

“There should be a way to find out who is doing good service work, not just what the good products are,” he later recalled.

Mr. Krughoff, then a 29-year-old federal official, had always been keen to find a deal. He was, he admitted, the kind of person who would get estimates from half a dozen companies before buying lumber, installing carpet, or waterproofing the basement of his Capitol Hill townhouse.

If Consumer Reports could test and rate products nationwide, he thought, there was no reason why a local publication couldn’t rate local businesses and services to help readers avoid the kind of fiasco he encountered. when he tried to get the engine of his Opel Kadett Coupé Fest.

Four years later, in 1976, Mr. Krughoff brought his shopping guide to life and published the first issue of Washington Consumers’ Checkbook, an ad-free semi-annual magazine published by a non-profit organization he ran on K Street NW.

Long before the creation of sites like Yelp and Angie’s List, the publication served as an essential resource for readers looking for recommendations on service providers ranging from plumbers to funeral directors to dentists.

Mr. Krughoff, who was 80 when he died at his home in Washington on February 26, spent the next half century building his organization into a force for readers across the country.

Checkbook, as it is known, now covers seven regions from Boston to Seattle and claims to attract more than 190,000 unique visitors to its website each month. The organization is still trying to prevent customers from being ripped off, an issue which Mr Krughoff believed was “as big a problem as it was” when it started.

“Amazingly, there is very little correlation between quality and price,” he told the Washington Post in 2022, a few months after retiring as president of Checkbook’s parent organization, the Center for the Study of Services.

Before founding Checkbook, Mr. Krughoff had little experience in publishing other than helping out a student newspaper in the Bronx during a brief stint as a junior high school teacher. Nevertheless, he knew something about the evaluation of services. At the US Department of Health, Education and Human Services, he was director of the newly formed Office of Research and Evaluation Planning, which, among other things, examined the effectiveness of community health centers and child education programs.

“I didn’t know exactly what I was getting myself into,” he told The Post in 1979, looking back on the transition from government work to a simple, not-for-profit enterprise, in which he and his staff sometimes resorted to salvaging office furniture off the street. “It’s a bit of a switch from having two secretaries waiting to take dictations from you to carrying your own mailbags to the post office.”

Within a few years of its founding, Checkbook had 20,000 subscribers in the Washington area and six full-time employees. His guides were based on reader polls as well as independent research, with employees “buying undercover,” as Mr. Krughoff put it, to compare prices at local companies. The publication also spoke to those in the know and interviewed ministers for a guide for funeral homes and paramedics for a report on emergency room care.

Some companies complained about the results, questioned Mr. Krughoff’s review process, or complained that their valuations were too low. But subscribers remained loyal, and Checkbook eventually expanded to launch a car buying service, CarBargains, and a guide for top doctors and other healthcare providers.

Checkbook’s work has been widely cited by mainstream news outlets, and Mr. Krughoff has been cited by publications such as The Post and New York Times for giving advice designed to help readers choose a retirement account, health insurance plan, or long-distance phone connection. Eager to share his insights, he was even willing to talk to people on the phone—perhaps through car dealerships or exterminators or tailors—regardless of whether they subscribed to Checkbook.

“I’d rather talk to them all day,” he told The Post in 2006, “than not let them use this resource.”

Robert Merrill Krughoff, the younger of two children, was born on October 11, 1942 in Dallas. He grew up in White Plains, New York, where his mother was a high school English teacher. His father worked for the Community Chest non-profit charity network, now known as the United Way.

Mr Krughoff said he learned the importance of finding a good service provider as a teenager when he went to the dentist and had what he later described as the worst consumer experience of his life. “There should have been a picture of my bottom teeth in the newspaper saying, ‘This is the work of Dr. …'”, he said.

In 1964 he received a bachelor’s degree from Amherst College in Massachusetts. He graduated from the University of Chicago Law School three years later, but found that he was more interested in legal theory than practice and gave up his legal career to try his hand at teaching. In 1969 he moved to HEW, today’s Department of Health and Human Services.

Five years later, he founded the Center for the Study of Services and started the organization with the help of approximately $50,000 in grant money from the Cafritz Foundation, the US Office of Consumer Affairs, and the Consumers Union, which allowed him to expand the Washington area measure subscribers via an ad in Consumer Reports magazine.

“That was a huge boost,” said Mr. Krughoff. “All we had to do was pay for the questionnaire to be printed ourselves, but the whole trip, in and out, was free.”

The first issue of Checkbook, dedicated exclusively to healthcare, ran 112 pages and sold at newsstands and bookstores for $4.95. The next few issues were also organized around a single theme: cars, home maintenance, finance. Checkbook expanded into the San Francisco region in 1981 and added five more regions in 2003.

Due to his temperament alone, Mr. Krughoff was perhaps ideally suited to lead the organization. Obsessed with research and extremely skeptical of “too good to be true” business claims, he devoted himself to finding the best service or product, regardless of convenience. “He’s going to Philadelphia for a used car,” the Post reported. “His employees joke that he would travel five times further than average to save $10.”

Checkbook made headlines after it sued the federal government in 2006 for access to Medicare claims data as part of an attempt to scrutinize physician performance nationwide. The group hoped the records would allow it to identify medical providers with particular expertise and uncover fraud and abuse while analyzing which doctors ordered unnecessary testing or hospitalizations. Medical groups said the disclosure would violate doctors’ privacy and result in an inaccurate picture of their work.

A lengthy legal battle ensued. A federal judge in Washington sided with Checkbook, but his ruling was overturned by an appeals court in 2009. Five years later, Medicare officials announced they were changing their data policy and began releasing statistics that offered insight into physician billing practices.

Mr. Krughoff’s death was confirmed by his wife, the former Gayle Gehring, whom he married in 1966. She said his health had deteriorated since late December, when he suffered a fall. In addition to his wife from Washington, survivors include two children, Alex from Washington and Anna from San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua; a sister; and three grandchildren.

Before the fall, Mr. Krughoff was still playing tennis and working in the house and in the neighborhood. According to his wife, he established a municipal pickleball court on Capitol Hill; poured his own concrete in the backyard; and painted myself.

He prefers to do the work himself, he said, although Checkbook recommended many people to hire.

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Robert Edward Jargoyhen
August 19, 1941 – September 7, 2022
Robert, a native of San Francisco, was born to Henry and Edna on August 19,1941. growing up
in the Excelsior district he attended Monroe, James Denman and Balboa High School class of Spring 1959. He continued his education and attended City College before he was drafted into the Army. First he went to Basic training at Fort Ord, then to Alabama, followed by a stint in Hawaii. He then entered his career as a Civilian employee working for the Federal Government.
He worked at the Presidio for over twenty five years as a maintenance engineer/medical technician. Bob could fix anything, a great craftsman. He loved to tinker and always took on the challenge to fix anything that was broken.
Bob made many friends through work. Especially his best friends, Ric and Valerie Coppes.
As a car and motorcycle enthusiast he was always buying, selling, or rebuilding Fiats, Bentleys, Porsches, Triumphs, or BMW’s. One of his favorite things was to go for a Sunday ride with his brothers. From the Great Highway to the Santa Cruz mountains, if he was not on the road you could find him in the garage. He was the family’s Handyman, his friend’s Handyman and the Neighborhood Handyman too. Known to some as Mr Fix It.
Our beloved Brother, Uncle and Friend will be missed but never forgotten. He was preceded in death by his older brothers, Frank and Arthur; sister, Barbara; and brother-in-law, Pete.
He is survived by his sister, Vickie. He also leaves behind his sister-in-law, Barbara J, his three nieces, one nephew, and their families.
A special thanks to Rose and Staff for their compassion and dedication over the last few months. Also, thanks to nurse Arland and the Sutter Hospice team.
Graveside service will be held on Wednesday, September 14 at 10:00am at Holy Cross Cemetery, Colma.
In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Sutter Hospice or your favorite charity.

Published by San Francisco Chronicle on Sep. 8, 2022.

34465541-95D0-45B0-BEEB-B9E0361A315ATo plant trees in memory, please visit the Sympathy Store.

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Robert L Green
March 20, 1931 – December 14, 2021
A VISIONARY ENTREPRENEUR IN HEALTH CARE AND EDUCATION
by Nicole V. Gagné
“In the many organizations Bob launched during his lifetime, the focus was always the element of community service, seeking to make the world a better place,” says attorney Raymond P. Haas of his friend Robert L. Green, entrepreneur, educator, and Philanthropist, who passed away on December 14, 2021, at the age of 90. Known as a pioneer in social entrepreneurship, Green devoted his life to expanding the fields of health care and education in the US and abroad, founding Community Psychiatric Centers, the largest chain of investor-owned psychiatric hospitals in the United States, as well as Vivra Inc., the nation’s second-largest provider of dialysis services. Green was a co-founder of both San Francisco University High School, one of the city’s premiere private college preparatory high schools, and Education Partners, which improved reading and math outcomes for upwards of one million elementary school students from marginalized communities across the country. Green was also an active supporter of numerous creative and educational institutions throughout the Bay Area, including KQED, SFMOMA, Stanford University, and University of California, Berkeley.
Green’s lifetime of entrepreneurial creativity was fueled by his optimism and positivity, which served as an inspiration to his colleagues and students as well as his daughters and grandchildren. His hard work produced not just success but also profound innovation, and all who knew him took his example to heart. A visionary thinker who proved to be ahead of his time in numerous fields, Green launched Sutter Capital Corporation, one of the Bay Area’s first venture capital firms, in the early 1960s. With Sutter Capital he explored a wide range of business opportunities, from nursing homes to trout farms and donut shops; ultimately he turned his energies toward health care and founded Community Psychiatric Centers (CPC) in 1968.
Under Green’s leadership, CPC developed an expanding network of psychiatric hospitals, in which the costs for patients were significantly reduced. Government-run hospitals had ordinarily involved long stays for patients, which could last for years. The development of tranquilizers and psychotropic drugs allowed for shorter hospital stays, and CPC rose to the occasion of this new demand for acute short-stay hospitals, providing placements for shorter hospitalizations. Green led CPC to achieve eighty consecutive quarters of growth in the two decades from 1969 to 1989. CPC went public and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in 1978, and Forbes magazine described the firm as “the class act of the country’s psychiatric hospital chains.” CPC went on to purchase Priory Hospital, the oldest and largest private psychiatric hospital in London. That expansion in turn formed the basis of England’s Priory Hospitals Group, which grew into England’s largest provider of private acute psychiatric care.
A further outgrowth of CPC was the establishment of Vivra Inc., which also went public under Green’s leadership. The roots of Vivra (French for “will live”) can be traced back to 1973, when CPC purchased a trio of medical units specializing in hemodialysis treatments. CPC expanded this dialysis division to over 170 dialysis centers throughout the United States, serving some 12,000 patients, in independent facilities as well as in hospitals nationwide. In 1989 it became the independent company Vivra, with Green as President, CEO, and Chairman of the Board of Directors.
While still engaged with CPC in the early 1970s, Green followed his equally strong commitment to education and became a co-founder, along with Haas, of San Francisco University High School (UHS), a private college preparatory high school that opened in 1975. Green served on the UHS board until the late 1970s. “It couldn’t have happened without Bob,” Haas recalls. “He was essential in the financial planning and management of UHS. Bob had outstanding business acumen and knew how to get to the essence of things. His approach to analysis was to simplify matters – without over-simplifying them. He could focus on the key drivers and get to the heart of what was important.”
Green’s most far-reaching contribution to American education came in 1995, when he teamed with educator and entrepreneur Adam Berman to create Education Partners (EP), with Green serving as Chairman and Berman as President and CEO. “Bob was a social-impact entrepreneur who was thoroughly passionate about health care and education,” Berman explains, “and he was eager to raise the level of academic achievement for financially disadvantaged children. I had learned about Johns Hopkins’ evidence-based reading program through a friend of Bob’s, and Education Partners brought that reading program into schools Title 1. The aim was to help schools rethink what was being taught and how students were being taught, assessed, and tutored, so that each child could reach their potential .”
EP brought these programs to 200 schools, training principals in providing leadership as well as teachers in the skills to implement evidence-based reading programs. EP also published materials for the program, developed by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, in another 1600 schools. Teachers and principals proved eager to implement these programs and embraced the new possibilities. As a result, students in the programs excelled, jumping ahead in reading by more than a year in comparison to their peers at similar schools.
“Through both our training and publishing divisions, we impacted one million children in over 1800 schools across the United States,” notes Berman. “Bob was a wonderful, remarkable person – one of my dearest mentors in life as well as business. He was a role model for me. I am truly indebted to him and so grateful for the opportunity he provided to develop myself, not only as an entrepreneur but also as a person.”
Another facet of Green’s commitment to education and community can be seen in the time he spent teaching a popular class in entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley; there were also the numerous talks and public speaking engagements he gave during the CPC years, bringing humor and insight to the business and financial topics that were his specialty. Always learning and evolving even after his retirement, Green was in his seventies when he returned to UC Berkeley and earned his master’s degree in creative writing.
An important supporter of San Francisco’s non-profit public media outlet KQED, Green served as a trustee and vice-chairman. When KQED was pressed financially, he arranged for EP to rent office space there, creating a workplace for upwards of 100 EP employees. The broader range of Green’s philanthropic activities included his work as a supporter of both the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and “The Next Generation Campaign” of American Conservatory Theater; he also served as a trustee of Mount Zion Hospital and was a donor to the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.
Born on March 20, 1931, in Los Angeles, Green experienced the loss of his father, Dr. Leonard Green, when young Robert was 12 years old. An only child, he demonstrated his innate ambition and entrepreneurial instincts at an early age, selling bottles of Coca-Cola on the beaches of Santa Monica. He eventually went on to attend Stanford University, and after a stint in the US Army, Green attended Stanford Law School. Later in life he would establish two endowments at Stanford, the Robert L. Green Undergraduate Scholarship Fund and the Robert L. Green Athletic Scholarship Fund.
During his years at Stanford Law School, Green renewed his boyhood friendship with Alan Sieroty, who would become a Democratic politician and California State Assemblyman and State Senator. “Bob had a degree in accounting as well as law,” Sieroty recalls, “and very few students do that.” After marrying Susan Wolf of San Francisco, Green joined the San Francisco law firm of Heller, Ehrman, White, and McAuliffe. While working there, as Sieroty relates, “he would get up early in the morning and investigate other businesses, which finally grew into starting his own business.” Green’s creative outlook and entrepreneurial spirit led him to quip to his fellow lawyers, “I’d rather be the client,” and he left the firm to found Sutter Capital Corporation. A quintessential self-made man, Green founded Community Psychiatric Centers later in the decade, initiating a lifetime commitment to putting his business skills to work in the furtherance of community service.
Green’s restless creativity envisioned numerous other enterprises over the years, ranging from a chain of burrito stores to a new cologne line. One new business he oversaw in his last years brought him into the field of viticulture, with the 12-acre green vineyard purchased along with a home in the Napa Valley. There he established Green Vineyard, adding another dimension to his creative expression and entrepreneurial drive. With Green Vineyard, he found great satisfaction in sitting outdoors and looking at the gardens with the love of his life, Susan. It was in his Napa home, near his garden and the lush vineyard which inspired him, that Green passed away at the end of last year, surrounded by his family.
Green’s lifelong impulse was always to see the possibilities and potentials of life’s circumstances. These were the qualities that informed his talent as a mentor to so many others, which kept him active long into his retirement and which vitalized his urge to continue learning from the people around him. His attitude was perhaps best characterized by the witty poem of Florence McLandburgh, which he adopted as a personal motto:
Twixt optimist and pessimist,
The difference is droll.
The optimist sees the donut;
The pessimist, the hole.
Robert L. Green is survived by Susan, his wife of 64 years; his daughters Wendy DeWald and Julie Green; and his grandsons Noah DeWald, Joshua DeWald, and Dylan Smith.

Published by San Francisco Chronicle on Jun. 8, 2022.

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