RFK Jr. is a massive public health threat
Dems like Jared Polis shouldn't pretend otherwise.
Also in this edition: A Q&A with authoritarian scholar Jason Stanley about Trump’s victory and what it means. Scroll below the RFK Jr. piece to check it out.
By Noah Berlatsky
Donald Trump, in his vacuous orange wisdom, has nominated vaccine denier, crank, and champion of disease Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Inevitably, some in the mainstream media and Democratic Party have rushed to placate Trump and ease the way for this assault on public health. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said he approved of a coming “major shake-up in institutions like the FDA” under a Kennedy HHS. Sen. Cory Booker posted a video on X expressing RFK Jr.-coded concerns about the food system that Politico interpreted as signaling an openness to his nomination. The New York Times did its usual patented both sides thing and ran an article under the headline, “What RFK Jr. Gets Right — And Wrong — About Nutrition.” The Washington Post used RFK’s bonkers fluoride conspiracy theories as a launching pad to argue against the value of water fluoridation.
We shouldn’t be surprised by people complying in advance and rushing to debase themselves to assuage Trump and his movement. But we should also be very clear: anyone who suggests that RFK Jr. running HHS is anything but a monumental, catastrophic disaster is a liar, a fool, or quite possibly both.
Many of Trump’s nominations are horrific; many of his policies are terrifying. Kennedy is something special even with that baseline though. He has articulated a vision that will, if enacted, lead to the deaths of untold numbers of people, many of whom have not even been born. It is difficult to overstate the long-term danger he poses to the country and world.
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Vaccines are really good, actually
It really should go without saying by now, but despite what RFK Jr. claims, vaccines are in fact one of the most transformative medical advances in human history.
The smallpox vaccine eradicated a 3,000 year old disease that killed 300 million people just in the two decades between 1900 and 1920. Before the measles vaccine became available in 1963, 400 to 500 Americans died of the disease every year, and some 48,000 a year were hospitalized. In the early 1900s, polio paralyzed hundreds of thousands of people a year; a devastating 1952 outbreak in the US killed 3,000.
And then of course there’s covid. Researchers believe that in the first year after covid vaccines were introduced, they prevented 19.8 million deaths globally. They could have prevented even more with better vaccine coverage.
It’s no exaggeration to say that vaccines have saved billions of lives and even more people from devastating disabilities and long-term illness. These vast gains have been enabled by government programs to ensure coverage and increase vaccination rates. No vaccine is 100 percent effective, but when vaccine rates are high, deadly diseases can’t get a foothold in communities. When vaccine rates fall, diseases that were largely thought to be eradicated can surge back.
This is what happened just five years ago in American Samoa. After two nurses mixed measles vaccine with the wrong liquid, two infants died, sparking a widespread panic. Vaccines were suspended. The result was a massive 2019 epidemic, in which, of Samoa’s 200,000 people, more than 5,700 were infected. A total of 83 people died, including many infants.
A leading figure who encouraged Samoans to stop vaccinating? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He met with anti-vax groups in Samoa months before the deadly outbreak. After measles infected and killed people across the island, he wrote a irresponsible and dangerous op-ed in which he falsely characterized the outbreak as “mild.”
The obscenity of “Make America Healthy Again”
Most people are aware that measles and polio outbreaks are bad and recognize that vaccines have been a huge boon. That’s why vaccine deniers like Kennedy insist they are not vaccine deniers. Instead, he shuffles and equivocates.
“If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away. People ought to have choice, and that choice ought to be informed by the best information,” Kennedy said in a recent interview. (Watch below.)
This sounds reasonable, right? After all, who can argue with choice?
The problem is that, again, vaccines are only effective when vaccination rates are high. Deniers like Kennedy work hard to break apart the consensus for uptake by (a) insisting vaccination should be an individual choice rather than a civic duty, and then by (b) lying about the dangers of vaccination.
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Kennedy and his Children’s Health Defense organization have for years pushed completely debunked lies claiming that vaccines cause autism in children. Kennedy has also lied by claiming that a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal, which used to be used in some vaccines, causes adverse health effects. Kennedy insists the negative effects of vaccines have never been studied or fully revealed — which, again, is simply untrue. Vaccines are considered safe because studies have repeatedly found them to be very safe, not because officials are keeping the truth from the public.
As head of HHS, Kennedy would be in a unique position to spread vaccine misinformation and downplay the dangers of refusing vaccination, as he did with the Samoa outbreak. He could block the CDC from making vaccine recommendations, undermining school vaccine mandates that help keep vaccine rates up and prevent deadly outbreaks. He could slow vaccine production, creating shortages. He could prevent the approval of new vaccines — an especially dangerous prospect considering the ongoing threat of covid and the need for better protection. (Some 650 people a week are still dying of covid globally.)
Not just vaccines
Kennedy can kill huge numbers of people, nationally and even globally, by undermining trust in vaccines. But he’s interested in promoting other public health disasters as well.
RFK Jr. wants to roll back regulations on raw milk — even though increased consumption of raw milk this year led to a salmonella outbreak which caused 171 people to fall ill. Kennedy also wants to remove fluoride from drinking water, claiming (falsely, of course) that it causes serious health problems. Water fluoridation has reduced tooth decay by some 25 percent in adults and children.
Kennedy is also dangerous because he often links his nonsense conspiracy theories and lies to open bigotry. He’s claimed that vaccine-caused autism (again, not a real thing) is comparable to the Holocaust — a comment that is insulting to people with autism, to Jews, and not least to neurodivergent Jews (like, for example, me).
Even worse, arguably, during the height of the covid pandemic, Kennedy told a private gathering that “covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
The implication of this completely false and unsupported claim is that Chinese people and/or Jews created the virus. It’s a conspiracy theory designed to promote anti-Asian and antisemitic violence and harassment. Imagine if the chief health officer in the United States began pushing this sort of ugly nonsense during a health emergency. Or just look at what happened during the pandemic when comments by Trump officials like Mike Pompeo and Trump himself helped to spark a wave of anti-Asian hate crimes.
You do not under any circumstances have to hand it to him
People like Polis have been arguing that Kennedy could lead a helpful change in FDA policies towards food additives or could challenge Big Pharma. But this is like arguing that Trump may do good because he will take on the deep state and curb the power of the FBI or CIA.
It’s true that many government institutions are inefficient or unjust or do ugly and bad things. But fascists, grifters, fools, and bigots will not make things better. Quite the opposite.
Kennedy has devoted his life to destroying public health. He’s obsessed with a confused, quasi-fascist idea of purity, which leads him to attack medical interventions like fluoride, pasteurization, and vaccines, as well as perceived outsiders like Asians and Jewish people. That makes him a good fit for Trump and Trumpism. It also makes him a massive danger to the US and to the world.
There are no upsides to a Kennedy-led HHS. He’s a disreputable person (to put it mildly) who wants to cause great harm in the name of multiple delusions. Those who care about public health, and who do not want children to die in large numbers for no reason, should oppose his nomination unequivocally.
Jason Stanley on MAGA’s triumph and the looming fight against fascism
By Aaron Rupar
Back in September, when we all hoped Trump would be getting sentenced for his crimes this month instead of preparing to return to the White House, we spoke with Jason Stanley about his new book, “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.”
The Q&A was meant in part as a warning — one that ultimately wasn’t heeded by voters. Now we have little choice but to see what Trump and his enablers have in store for us.
Following Trump’s victory, we connected with Stanley once again to get his take on the campaign and what we should expect over the next four years.
“Republicans used what has long been known to be a very successful strategy, which is finding a scapegoat, tying your enemy to it and representing the scapegoat as an existential danger,” Stanley said.
“They’re going to do the hate thing and it will be remorseless and frightening,” he added. “There will be concentration camps. We’ll normalize other things, like Trump going after student protestors. Journalists, politicians, and prosecutors seem to be on the list as well. I would look for banning protest.”
“A lot of people think it’s not going to be as bad as it is. It’s wishful thinking.”
A full transcript of Stanley’s conversation with Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
Thor Benson