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.