Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used to impress me. In the early 2000s, he did excellent work as an environmental lawyer taking on industrial hog farms that were fouling creeks and rivers, and we talked about making a visit together to North Carolina to document the pollution.
But then Kennedy began to urge me to write about childhood vaccines, citing discredited arguments that they caused autism. I had read the vaccine research and considered his views uninformed, conspiratorial and dangerous, and his dogmatism soured me on his judgment in general. I decided it would be inappropriate to quote someone with such a mind-set.
And if a person isn’t qualified to be quoted in a column, he probably isn’t the best choice to run America’s health programs.
That’s particularly true because one of the biggest potential threats to this country — albeit one difficult to gauge — is an avian flu pandemic, for bird flu is mutating and spreading to cows and other mammals. If there is a pandemic, then vaccines will be essential. Perhaps the single best thing that President Trump did in his first term was to start Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership that accelerated the development of Covid-19 vaccines and saved many lives.
What would happen if there were a need for another Operation Warp Speed, but this time the point man on health was suspicious of vaccines — including those that arrested the last pandemic?
The coronavirus vaccine is “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” Kennedy falsely claimed, and in May 2021 he petitioned the government to revoke authorization for it — even though by then the vaccine already had saved 140,000 lives, one study found.
Kennedy has also claimed that the polio vaccine — one of the great triumphs of the 20th century — may have caused cancers “that killed many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.” The Times has reported that a lawyer close to Kennedy, Aaron Siri, who is helping him pick health officials for the Trump administration, has petitioned the government to revoke approval for the polio vaccine.
Siri has also petitioned the government to revoke approval for the hepatitis B vaccine and a pause in the distribution of about a dozen other vaccines.
Kennedy’s take? “I love Aaron Siri,” Kennedy has said.
Kennedy now insists to senators that he is not “anti-vaccine” and would not discourage their use. Really? In 2021 he said on a podcast that he actively discouraged parents from vaccinating children and urged others to do the same.
“Our job is to resist and to talk about it to everybody,” he said. “If you’re walking down the street — and I do this now myself, which is, you know, I don’t want to do — I’m not a busybody. I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’”
“Don’t keep your mouth shut anymore,” he advised. “Confront everybody on it.”
Kennedy has said that doctors “butchered all these children” by vaccinating them. The nonprofit that he founded, Children’s Health Defense, sells baby onesies with messages such as “No Vax No Problem.”
Even now that he is under great pressure, as he bobs and weaves in hopes of getting confirmed, Kennedy won’t renounce the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism.
The idea of Kennedy’s running health programs is particularly worrisome because the administration may not have much medical guidance. The White House science adviser isn’t actually a scientist. Trump is pulling out of the World Health Organization, whose global flu surveillance network helps develop flu vaccines, and the administration even directed employees from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention not to email contacts at the World Health Organization.
Kennedy has good ideas about promoting healthy school lunches and discouraging ultraprocessed foods. He’s right to ask questions about why there are increases in obesity, diabetes and autism (many scientists suspect that one factor may be environmental toxins such as endocrine disruptors). But Kennedy’s passion for many years has been hostility to vaccines, bundled in certitude and nastiness.
This is not simply a quest for vaccine safety, as Kennedy tries to suggest. It is a misguided and dangerous campaign to undermine confidence in vaccines. A woman dies every two hours in the United States from cervical cancer, which is almost entirely preventable with HPV vaccinations — yet Kennedy has backed a lawsuit against the maker of the vaccine.
The problems go beyond vaccines, of course. Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist who says he doesn’t “take sides” in the “debates” about who was behind 9/11, who argues that AIDS may not be caused by H.I.V., who suggested darkly that Covid-19 was engineered to spare Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews, who claimed that Lyme disease is likely a military bioweapon. Some of this is bigotry; all of it is nonsense.
On top of his ideological excesses, Kennedy doesn’t understand our health care system. In his hearings, he muddled Medicare and Medicaid. He represents the apotheosis of the politicization of science; he is our own Lysenko.
I hope senators will protect American kids from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
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