Senate must reject Kennedy as health secretary
When children die of measles, their lungs inflame and fill with fluid. They die gasping for air. It’s a tragedy all the more awful for being preventable.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. consigned scores of children to this death in 2019. On tour in Samoa for his anti-vax road show, he spread enough fear and confusion to derail its vaccination campaign. What happened next is history — and biology. Measles infected thousands. Eighty-three people, the majority of them children, died in pain. Kennedy called it a “natural experiment.”
He moved on to COVID-19. Using his famous last name as a platform, Kennedy claimed the virus was “ethnically targeted” to protect the Jews and Chinese and harm white and Black Americans. This kind of conspiracy theorizing was not new for him — he’s a 9/11 skeptic who doesn’t believe AIDS is caused by a virus — but the notoriety was. He cashed in with a bestselling book while the pandemic killed millions.
Now Donald Trump is setting Kennedy up to “go wild” as secretary of health and human services. Kennedy is not just unqualified, he is dangerous — particularly for children. The Senate must reject him.
The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions will vet Kennedy, and it must provide cover for reasonable Senate Republicans to vote him down on the floor. The next chair, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, is a physician and a respected health care policy maker. Americans need Cassidy to look at the evidence, not the politics.
Kennedy claims that “no vaccine is safe and effective.” The evidence indicates that vaccines have saved the lives of 146 million young children in the past half-century. Measles, smallpox, diphtheria, mumps, pertussis, rubella, and polio used to infect hundreds of thousands of American children every year. Polio, in particular, haunted families, and mid-century hospitals filled up with children enclosed inside metal ventilators. Today, iron lungs are displayed in museums. Science triumphed.
For now.
If Kennedy is charged with overseeing the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he will fuse his personal brand with organs of state to pump out quackery and conspiracy. Kennedy won’t only attack vaccines. Other targets include fluoride, which he pledges to “remove from public water” although it has drastically improved children’s dental health; new medicines for cancer and Alzheimer’s, which he impugns as pharmaceutical poison; and high-speed internet, which he speculates causes “leaky brain.”
Kennedy tries to mask this agenda with hand-waving about holistic health. Healthier school lunches and less ultraprocessed foods were good ideas when former First Lady Michelle Obama promoted them, and they’re good ideas now. There are thousands of respected health experts, though, who could execute that agenda without also bringing back polio.
His defenders claim Kennedy is speaking truth to the power of special interests. As the author of bipartisan legislation to take on both Fortune 20 drug-pricing middlemen and social media platforms, I find that risible. His campaign for president was the most cynical example yet of dark money in politics. Tellingly, his donors wanted him to “sow chaos.”
Chaos is what America will get unless Senate Republicans actually do speak truth to power. They must tell Trump that Kennedy is dangerous, and reject his Cabinet nomination.
By: Jake Auchincloss
Source: The Boston Globe