RFK Jr’s anti-science agenda will be catastrophic for the United States
As I wrote for The Guardian, the CDC – the federal agency in charge of protecting the health of Americans – is in shambles. And that is all thanks to one man.
Things seem to be going well at the CDC, the federal agency charged with protecting US public health. By “well” I mean terrible, thanks to the leadership of the health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr. Not only is the agency in complete disarray under his leadership, but the secretary’s fringe agenda is now also putting the lives of everyone in the country at risk.
Let me recount a few of Kennedy’s stellar accomplishments. He is, after all, a man labeled “a crown jewel of this administration” by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. In June, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the CDC’s advisory committee on immunization practices (ACIP), a panel that has long developed scientifically based recommendations on the use of vaccines. Kennedy dropped them like a hot beaker and replaced them with new members, several of whom share his anti-vaccine views and half-baked skepticism of the most common mRNA Covid-19 vaccines.
ovid is still with us, unfortunately, and the vaccines are helping us survive a dangerous reality. In fact, 14,660 people have died of Covid as an underlying or contributing cause so far this year alone. Yet, at his Senate hearing on Thursday, Kennedy was asked by Senator Jeff Merkley if he accepted the statistic that a million Americans had died of Covid since the outbreak began. “I don’t know how many died,” Kennedy responded. Meanwhile, the CDC’s own website, an agency he’s responsible for, tabulates the number of deaths as 1,234,371. At the same hearing, Kennedy also said he agreed with the statement made by one of his appointees to ACIP that “mRNA vaccines cause serious harm, including death, especially among young people”. Never mind that numerous studies have repeatedly shown the vaccines to be safe and effective.
That’s not all. Getting that Covid booster shot will probably become significantly harder in the future. In late August, the Food and Drug Administration, also overseen by Kennedy, approved some updated Covid vaccines, but at the same time severely restricted who would be authorized to receive boosters. Last year, anyone over the age of six months was eligible. But this year, you must be over 65 years of age or have an underlying health condition that increases the risk of severe Covid-19 infection.
We should have seen something like this coming. In May, Kennedy took the unprecedented unilateral move to remove Covid-19 booster shots from its recommended immunization schedule for pregnant women and healthy children. “Our healthcare system is now solidly anti-children and anti-science,” Fatima Khan, co-founder of the Protect Their Future group, which advocates for vaccine access for children, told CNN.
Booster shots will still be available, Kennedy says. But what he’s not saying is that they will probably be a lot harder to find and afford. Private insurance companies generally base their decisions on covering the costs of vaccines by following government recommendations, and many states limit which vaccines pharmacists can administer based on those same recommendations. (California, Oregon and Washington recently announced an alliance to safeguard vaccine access.)
The long and the short of it is that Kennedy is behind “a deliberate effort to weaken America’s public-health system and vaccine protections”…
Read the rest here.