RFK Jr. Now Secretary of Health and Human Services
Another piece of an appalling cabinet is now in place.
Rolling Stone has the most accurate headline describing the news: Republicans Confirm Anti-Vax Conspiracy Theorist To Run Nation’s Health Systems.
The Senate confirmed Kennedy in a 52-48 vote, with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) joining every Democrat in opposing the nomination. McConnell was also the only Republican to vote against confirming Tulsi Gabbard as director of National Intelligence on Wednesday.
I continue to find McConnell’s minuscule protests galling.
Regardless, Kennedy’s confirmation is just another example of the power of partisanship. We are seeing Republican Senators (including a medical doctor who knows better) vote the party line because it is their team. Yes, I do think that there is fear about primary and other attacks, but this is mostly just plain tribal.
Less than a year ago, most of these Senators would have gladly said that Kennedy was a kook. But now he is fit to run HHS as far as they are concerned. It is nakedly partisan.
Trump’s cabinet is quite the assortment of inexperienced hacks. Sort of the anti-Avengers of governance.
So far the only one who couldn’t make the cut was credibly accused of sex with minors and illegal drug use.
Quite the low bar.
The man is a conspiracy theorist who does not believe in the efficacy of vaccines and, indeed, will help spread doubt about them to the public. He has no experience running a large organization and now he oversees, among other things, the CDC, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Heckuva job, GOP.
Kennedy’s nomination was opposed by Democrats in Congress, 75 Nobel Prize winners, and thousands of doctors, as well as his cousin, former U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, who wrote in a letter to senators that he is a “predator” who is “addicted to attention and power.” Various Kennedy relatives had urged RFK Jr. to drop his 2024 presidential bid at the time and denounced him when he backed Trump.
[…]
When questioned during his Senate confirmation hearing, Kennedy did not entirely disavow some of his bizarre and unfounded medical conspiracy theories. He agreed, for example, that he had “probably said” at one point that Lyme disease is likely a militarily engineered bioweapon. However, he lied about past statements, including suggesting that pesticides cause children to become transgender, and insisted he played no role in a deadly outbreak of measles in Samoa in 2019 after Children’s Health Defense allegedly promoted anti-vaccine sentiment in the island nation. (A total of 83 people died of the preventable disease, most of them young children.)
Among the other unscientific notions spread by RFK Jr. are that prescription antidepressants may cause school shootings, that Americans are being “poisoned” by seed oils, that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are effective treatments for Covid-19, that HIV might not cause AIDS, that Wi-Fi exposure leads to brain cancer, and that fluoridated drinking water is harmful. Kennedy himself has experienced some unusual medical issues, from mercury poisoning attributed to a fish-heavy diet to the discovery of a dead parasitic worm lodged in his brain, most likely a pork tapeworm. Accounts of his strange behavior — like the time he removed a dead bear cub from a road to butcher for meat but later dumped it in Central Park — have raised doubts as to his suitability for government (to say nothing of his alleged inappropriate relationship with a journalist who profiled him during his campaign).
A recovering heroin addict, Kennedy wants to battle addiction in the U.S. with “healing farms,” though drug policy experts say this is a risky planfocused on moral redemption rather than clinical health care. He has suggested pausing all infection disease research in the country — a proposal that could be effectively enacted by DOGE-imposed cuts at the NIH, where Kennedy has said he would fire hundreds of employees. Another potential item on his agenda is the prosecution of leading medical journals if they don’t start publishing what he calls “real science,” which presumably encompasses the many debunked conspiracy theories he repeats. He has been especially critical of the FDA, accusing the agency of waging a “war on public health” and vowing to eliminate entire departments of the agency.
But, you know, the best person for the job.
What could possibly go wrong?
It is one thing to have a government formed with differing policy preferences and priorities. It is yet another for it to be stocked with inexperienced cranks and charlatans.
Pesticides cause children to become transgender?????
Yowza.
I feel like this, like the other cabinet members, is mostly about the 25th Amendment and an octogenarian POTUS.
Even if you set aside all of his weird beliefs and conspiracy ideas, this article forgets that he questions the validity of the germ theory of disease, he has no actual expertise in health care or running large health care organizations. He makes money do environmental lawsuits and running an anti-vax organization. At best, he has the same level of qualitifications as any random lawyer off the street.
Steve
@steve:
Come on man, I know you’ve been a doctor for years, but even you should be able to admit that expertise and competency don’t matter that much in running HHS. You’d agree if you were not in the pockets of big autism/pharma.
/s if it wasn’t obvious.
I was talking with someone from HHS today and the mood in their area, unsurprisingly, isn’t great.
It’s possible that he doesn’t, sad to say. The clinic I used to go to in Longview, Washington doesn’t do vaccinations. The doctor who owns it was discussing my COPD issues, and asked, during the discussion, if I’d gotten a flu shot.
I replied that I hadn’t. Given that I was allergic to early flu vaccine, I’d never gotten into the habit of getting them. To which he replied that it really doesn’t matter much given that flu shots don’t work.
In passing before I slink away, I’ll note that he stocked some ivermectin for Covid patients and was a force in the community of the retroviral infusion treatment for people who had contracted Covid and one other steroid treatment, but didn’t advocate getting vaccinated in his “intro to the phone tree messages” when people called the office: “Covid vaccine? Well, get it if you want it, I guess.” (In his defense, he was really good at hiring competent practitioners for the clinic even though, at about 5-10 years older than me, he’s a spent volcano as doctors go.)
@CSK: Yowza, indeed!
I have no doubt that The Penguin, The Riddler, Catwoman and The Joker would be appointed to this administration.
And honestly, they would likely be more qualified for the jobs.
I mean seriously: if this was 1966, wouldn’t Elon Musk easily be one of the villans in Batman? Isn’t Kennedy just someone that gets put there to take the fall for some massive heist?
We are now, what… In the 3rd week of every AM hate radio talking head’s wet dream of the last 30 years?
The dog has caught the car and is biting the tire while doing 55. What happens when they all realize that it’s gone completely to shit, and they did it? What communist socialist transgender gay married war mongerer in government will they blame THEN?
Will Trump finally be painter as NOT a real scotsman? Will Musk then be elected president by acclimation?
Will they call it the Biden revolution in 2026…. just like Biden is getting blamed for inflation TODAY?
Tune in next week… same bat time… same bat station.
With his background EPA would have made some sense. HHS makes zero sense, but confirmed with nary a pin drop. Weird $hit.
Because confirming outright loons to cabinet positions is something that used to happen all the time?
At some point you have to admit that a new paradigm is needed to adequately discuss the current situation.
Yeah, if competence at the top matters, they are cruising for disaster. I guess they figure they can always find someone else to blame for it.
And yeah, the covid vaccine has political vulnerabilities. For instance, I got it and two boosters. I have since had Covid twice. It wasn’t the worse illness I’ve had, but I was pretty much couch bound for several days both times, unable to do much of anything.
So if I were so inclined, I might claim that the vaccine did nothing at all, it was useless.
However, I tend to think, “How bad would that have been without the vaccine?” I’m thinking really bad.
And “flu shots don’t work” is a statistical thing. A flu shot contains the best guess at which versions of the viruses will be most common this season. Predicting the future is tricky work, and it isn’t perfect. I just got over a very nasty flu, and I wish I had had a flu shot.
However, measles is not the flu. Mumps are not the flu. Scarlet fever is not the flu. Polio and smallpox are not the flu. The vaccines against these are highly effective. But not perhaps 100% effective, because this is biology and nothing, and I do mean nothing, is 100%.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
@Jay L Gischer:
Flu shots have two issues:
1) The 3 to 4 strains picked for this year’s vaccine are a guess based on the dominant strains observed the prior year. Often the guess is wrong, and some other variants dominate. IN such cases, the shot is of limited effectiveness.
2) The uptake is very low. To be sure flu is a mild disease, but can be dangerous to the elderly and to some with certain conditions. So only the latter are really urged to take it (and few do). We’ve known for about as long as there have been vaccines, that a highly contagious disease requires herd immunity to contain it.
As to COVID, we have the same variant issue as with flu. Except there seems to be better cross-protection between variants than there is with flu. I’m not sure whether this means B cells recognize the variant but can’t produce effective antibodies, or whether only T cells recognize it and act while the rest of the immune system figures out antibodies for it.
Although the latter Omicron variants are less virulent than the original, and far less than Delta, people still die of COVID. So even if you can’t avoid disease by taking a booster, you are more likely to avoid death.
BTW, I recommend getting a booster for all childhood vaccines, including MMR and polio*. I suspect immunity isn’t lifelong when herd immunity drops. In any case, they’re unlikely to do any harm.
*Preferably the dead virus shot and not the attenuated virus oral vax.
@drj: The behavior being exhibited by co-partisans in the Senate fits the paradigm quite nicely. Indeed, the extreme nature of RFK rather reinforces the point.
I would suggest you confuse the severity of the outcome with it being a different kind of behavior.
If you leave the gate open for years and only a few stray dogs wander in but then, one day, a rabid badger comes in, the problem of the gate being open has not changed.
Gamble long enough and permissive conditions can lead to really negative outcomes, even if they had not previously.
And, for that mater, there may be some other elements that lead to the rabid badger being in the area, but again, that still doesn’t change the fundamental issue with the gate being open.
Partisanship is part of the problem. I never said it was the only problem.
Reason #1 million why we don’t want to become the 51st state. Our health system up here may be far from perfect but none of our health ministers seem to be dedicated to actually making people sicker. Yikes
@drj: For my money, the sort of partisanship that we have now is different than in the days when Republican Senators told Nixon they would vote to convict if he didn’t resign. As always YMMV.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I wonder about that, too. How did we get from there to here?
I think the media structure is really important. Walter Cronkite was not really pushing a line of “It’s all fake news!” nor was Huntley-Brinkley. I wonder what the polls were saying about Nixon’s popularity with Republican voters on that day.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: One thing that has definitely changed since Nixon: the media environment.
The party environment itself has also changed, and in a way that reinforces partisanship.
@Steven L. Taylor:
By that logic, both Obama on the campaign trail and Goebbels at the Berlin Sportpalast succeeded in delivering rousing speeches.
Technically true, but obfuscating rather than enlightening, I would say.
So, we now have a Secretary of Disease, Poverty, and Neglect. Awesome.
@drj: I’m really not following your logic. Steven is making a point about structure, and how the structure has long been bad. I’m not so sure this is completely accurate, but I understand the point.
It’s rather like how if you build a roof inadequately so that it leaks, but you live in California, you might go a long time before discovering that it leaks. But it was leaky the whole time.
——-
Meanwhile, I would be fascinated by a list of presidential nominees that have been declined by the Senate (or withdrawn in the face of opposition) over the years. My sense is that this group, this year, is particularly compliant, and I would very much like to know why. I think they are more compliant than they were during Trump’s first term. Have you heard anything at all from Mr Lindsay “I want to be relevant” Graham? WTF is going on? Are anonymous men in trench coats knocking on doors after midnight? Is it the debt ceiling? What is it?
@drj:
Gotta admit: that doesn’t fit what I am saying at all.
@Steven L. Taylor:
drj lost me with the whole Obama/Goebbels thing too, but I have to say, I also bristled at you using Kennedy’s cabinet seating as an example of partisanship. Doing so implies symmetry, because undoubtedly partisanship leads to dubious choices on the Left as well as the Right.
But, a difference of degree is a difference in kind and Trump’s dumpster fire of a Cabinet (and the Republican obeisance that Advised and Consented it into existence) surely indicates a difference in degree to a level significant enough to leave our traditional understanding of partisan behavior inadequate as a descriptor.
Yeah, no. I’m not listening to health directives from a fruitcake nepo baby who sounds like a dying frog — having blown out his vocal cords with substance abuse. Fat chance. RFK Jr. is a legacy hire with zero medical credentials and no credible healthcare background. Totally unqualified for this.
With the CDC and NIH now compromised by incompetent MAGA nutbaggery for Lord knows how long, the American Medical Association is stepping up to plug the gap; it has a bird flu resource center on its website and has also been uploading relevant videos to YouTube.
Folks have signing-up for AMA newsletter updates and following the AMA across social media. We should always be crowdsouring knowledge from the non-kooks anyway.
I doubt that was the reason he withdrew. Enough Republican senators hate him with such a passion they informed Trump they refused even to consider him.
@Kathy:
Definitely picking my PCP’s mind next month.
Minor note:
There are four physicians in the Senate.
All Republicans.
I’m also not sure that “knowing better” matters to them.
Is it unfair to wonder whether they consider the Hippocratic Oath to be subject to market forces?
Maybe it’s simpler to just assume they don’t take oaths seriously.
@Pete S:
The whole thing is ridiculous, as Canada is way too big to be merely one state. To begin with, the 51st state can’t be bigger than the country it’s joining, right?
No. So what Canada could propose is to join as a number of states. What number? Divide Canada’s population by the population of the least populous US State (Wyoming). I don’t have the figures handy, but that would give you like 60-65 states.
And then you should join, because you’d own the whole fucking country.
@Kurtz: Sadly, the Hippocratic Oath has no legal force.
@Fog:
Not sure that legal enforcement of it would matter to them either.
The Samoa episode is telling. Over 80 people dead because of Jr’s bullshit. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/rfk-jr-samoa-measles-vaccine-crisis-rcna187787
How many dead Americans will be enough, now?
Legitimate studies say Trump’s incompetence is responsible for 400,000 excessive deaths from Covid.
Shutter to think what lies ahead.
RFK?
JFC.
@Tony W: in this cabinet, 25th Amendment status is a prerequisite, not a crisis.