A breathtakingly loose connection to the truth
Even among the chaos generated by Donald Trump’s recent cabinet picks, one stands out for the extensive suffering and lasting institutional damage it may cause: his choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Health and Human Services Department.
Modern public health is one of civilization’s great achievements. In 1900, up to 30 percent of infants in some U.S. cities never made it to their first birthday.
But that’s 124 years ago. Nobody has a personal memory of it. There are probably some people who have sorrowful memories of parents who never got over an infant death (or two or more) but none who held the dying baby themselves.
The danger isn’t merely that Kennedy — who has almost no experience in government or large-scale administration, and who has shown a sometimes breathtakingly loose connection to the truth — would be incompetent or misleading. At the helm of a department with over 80,000 employees and a $3 trillion budget, one that oversees key agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, he would have control over the nation’s medicines, food safety, vaccines and medical research. With that power he could inflict significant harm to the public health system — and to the public trust that would be needed to rebuild it once he’s gone.
And the trouble is, he’s like Trump in being supremely convinced of his own sagacity. Two stupid ignorant men who think they know better than those pesky nerds who actually studied disease and disease control.
Outside of the medical community, few people still know about all the diseases whose safe and effective vaccines he is lying about, so let me remind you about one of them: diphtheria. Once known as “the strangling angel of children,” it causes its young victims to slowly and painfully suffocate, turn blue and gasp as a thick film fills their throat. They lie dying for many agonizing days. The disease has been all but wiped out, but in Spain a few years ago, it cost the life of an unvaccinated boy of 6. His distraught antivax parents promptly vaccinated their surviving child.
Kennedy doesn’t mention those gruesome realities. The core of his method is to mislead and confuse with selective citations that overlook key, even overwhelming evidence. He has falsely suggested that AIDS isn’t caused by H.I.V. With no evidence, he once mused that Covid was deliberately made to target Black and Caucasian people, while ensuring that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
So naturally Trump put him in charge of public health. If it ain’t broke, smash it to pieces.
It looks like the entire administration may be filled with that sort. People with egos bigger than their accomplishments…I mean, after all, being born the son of Robert Kennedy or Fred Trump? Hardly what I would think would look good on a resume.
I read one of RFK Jrs books one time. I think he may have gone wacko after he wrote it; it was an almost sane discussion of cleaning up river water, though as a non-scientist, he should have run it by some water scientists before he published. There were some errors, but not as egregious as some he’s made since.
I live near a cemetery… there are a LOT of tiny lamb headstones. I had a teacher in high school who wore leg braces from childhood polio, my mother lost 2 friends (this in a small, rural village) to polio. That vaccine was greeted with universal joy. And these people are idiots.
Dear Rubella;
The gates are open again.
Seriously, no one remembers that one either. The wellness industry resists “Western Science,” and it is an article of faith that the FDA is notoriously corrupt. But the supplements and nutrients are not subject to approval, not even the ones that we find in our modern drug stores. I was dating someone who told me I should rely on Chaga and Mullein teas to take care of the conditions for which I now take actual medicines. I can’t wait until the NiH publishes an alkaline diet recommendation pamphlet.
RFK jr has influential friends in the wellness industry.
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/11/15/nx-s1-5191947/trump-rfk-health-hhs
Takshak, I think tours of old cemeteries should be part of HS biology classes. I ended up temping in the office of a very old catholic cemetery one summer, and after a few weeks I asked the Superintendent what all the beige lumps throughout the cemetery were. He took me on a walk to a section that was better protected from wind and the elements and showed me the little lamb headstones. He explained that they were made of limestone because it was inexpensive, but it was soft so it wore down over time. There were family plots that had over half a dozen little lambs. I am eternally grateful that I live in a time when I did not have to worry whether any of my children would live to see their fifth birthday. I cannot imagine the grief parents went through, bur for them it was normal, even expected, for us the thought of our child dying is a nightmare.
And too many people want to bring those nightmares back.
It is little different from putting a fox in charge of a henhouse. Except for the fact that foxes are highly intelligent animals.
Eava @#4:
My own maternal grandmother was a refugee from the Irish Potato Famine, and the sole surviving child of 11 children. The other ten died of whatever in infancy and early childhood; probably of TB. So my maternal great-grandparents had to go through that grieving process ten times, and I regard myself as having come from a long, long line of survivors.
There is a vast improbability of any of us being here at all. For each of us to be conceived, the right sperm cell (out of 80-300 million in each paternal ejaculation) has to meet the right ovum (out of the 300,000 – 400,000 or so stored in each mother’s ovaries and released at random in each ovulation.) And that huge improbability operates for each of our two parents, four grandparents and so on down the ancestral lines, beyond early Homo sapiens into Homo erectus and far, far further down each of our ancestral trees, beyond the earliest vertebrates and through the invertebrates until we reach the bacteria, who really kicked the evolutionary process along by inventing sex.
But I doubt any of that would occur to the likes of Trump and Kennedy.