One of the many catastrophic decisions made by Donald Trump was the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Anyone with a brain and a modicum of knowledge about Kennedy could see he was a crank and a conspiracy theorist. Recognizing that Trump himself cares not one whit about science and evidence, it was incumbent on the Senate, which is not entirely filled with dummies (see, e.g., Tuberville), to stop the nonsense.
There are, I should note, currently four MDs in the Senate. They are all in the Republican Party: Roger Marshall (KS) has an MD from the University of Kansas, Rand Paul (KY) has an MD from Duke University, Bill Cassidy (LA) has an MD from LSU, and John Barrasso (WY) has an MD from Georgetown.
These men all knew better about Kennedy, but let partisan considerations overshadow their own knowledge.
I would go a step further and note that since the median age of the Senate is 64.7, almost all of them are old enough to remember when measles, mumps, whooping cough, and chicken pox were a regular and ongoing concern for families with small children. Many are old enough to remember when polio was a real threat.
And yet, they rolled the dice. How bad could it be? Surely, it wouldn’t be as bad as the critics were predicting?
Right?
Right!?
Well, the Grand Old Party fucked around,* and they are finding out (as are we all) that yes, it is as bad as the critics predicted; indeed, it is worse.
Here is Dr. Barrasso, Senator from Wyoming, and one of the fools who voted to confirm RFK, Jr. from the hearing this week.
Barrasso is right in this rant. But at this point, it is too late. Kennedy just spouts lies, nonsense, and half-truths (at best) in his response, exactly what one would expect from a known conspiracy theorist.
Again, like Taylor at the end of Planet of the Apes, all we can do now is fall to my knees and scream to the heavens, “You maniacs! You blew it up!”
Anyone who voted to confirm Kennedy and is surprised he is behaving this way was a fool when they cast the vote. This was a knowable, indeed highly likely, outcome.
And yes, Dr. Cassidy, the Senator from Louisiana, does lay a clever trap for Kennedy, insofar as the only line of attack now is to get Trump mad at Bobby, but this is another dice roll, and it wouldn’t have been necessary if Cassidy and a couple of other Senators had voted the obvious way.
If you watch the clip, you will hear Kennedy also extol ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, two “therapeutics” of choice of the conspiracy-minded during the COVID pandemic.
One thing is clear in all of the coverage I have heard and read about this hearing: when arguing with a person who has no fidelity to reality and the truth, he can answer questions in what sounds like a forthright way, even with “facts” to support his position, but in such a torrent of utter bullshit that it is impossible to treat the questions and the answers as existing in the same universe. When Kennedy says, for example, he trusts science, he clearly does not. He trusts his own beliefs and arguably does not even know what the word “science” means.
I cannot overstate how much Republican Senators, especially those with MDs, let us all down here. I would throw in Senator Concerned (R-ME), Alaska’s Murkowski, and freaking Thom Tillis, who isn’t even running for re-election. There should have been a sufficient coalition of GOP Senators to block this nomination.
And let me stress: they can harangue Kennedy all they want in these hearings, but the reality is, he is there to stay. I cannot see him quitting, and Trump has already demonstrated (see Hegseth and SignalGate) that he is more likely to dig his heels in even if an appointee demonstrates gross incompetence. Plus, Kennedy’s position at HHS (and the whole MAHA “movement”) has become part of the MAGA coalition and helps channel anger over COVID mandates and policies that linger in some circles.**
By the way, Kennedy might have a point about food dyes, and yes, Americans are not as healthy as they could and should be. But stopped clocks (at least the old school types) are right twice a day, and blind squirrels occasionally find nuts. But speaking of nuts, note that Kennedy has doubts about the germ theory as a means of understanding disease. See NPR, Ancient miasma theory may help explain Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine moves.
HHS and CDC are being gravely damaged, if not destroyed, before our eyes, and fixing it will not be easy (if it is even possible in the short-to-medium term, as the drainage of trust will be hard to restore). This is not to say that these institutions were perfect, or that COVID policies weren’t flawed.*** But the first Trump administration, despite Warp Speed, started politicizing public health at the start of the pandemic in a very dangerous way, and it has brought us to this point.****
I think it is fair to say that there would be no Warp Speed II in the current administration, and that if the first Trump term functioned like the current one, there would have been no original Warp Speed at all.
More reading for those who are interested.
- Via the AP: FACT FOCUS: A look at false and misleading claims made by RFK Jr. during Senate hearing.
- Via PBS: Examining RFK Jr.’s claims about vaccines, COVID and the health of Americans.
- Via ABC News: Fact-checking RFK Jr.’s testimony during Thursday’s hearing.
- Via The Telegraph: No RFK Jr, America isn’t the sickest country in the world – but it’s far from the healthiest.
Also:
*Which, I hate to say, may, in fact, be the only proper political science term I can think of at this point.
**See the removal of any vaccine mandates for school-age children in Florida.
***The notion that in a pandemic that every choice would be perfect is absurd. The smart thing to do would be to learn from the experience, instead of making it such a deep political issue that people are now questioning vaccines that have curtailed, if not eliminated, a series of potentially deadly diseases.
****See the following, for example.
- From March 2020: Coronavirus Has Been Politicized to Dangerous Effect. (I remember some of the interchange on this post, and others at the time, to include skepticism by some commenters that there really was a partisan divide on COVID response–but there was ,and it started with Trump and has helped bring us to this point in time).
- Coronavirus Has Been Politicized to Dangerous Effect II
- Trump Speaks on Coronavirus…
- Look at the vaccination intentions by party in 2021: Partisanship is Real.
- The Consequences of Partisanship
