This editorial was originally published by The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and was distributed by The Associated Press.Â
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How many times is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. going to be allowed to lie right to U.S. senators’ faces about his deliberate dismantling of America’s vaccine shields before they finally insist that President Donald Trump remove this dangerous anti-science zealot from the nation’s top medical post?
Kennedy, who never should have been but is Trump’s secretary for Health and Human Services, was at it again earlier this month. In unhinged, ranting testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, the nation’s foremost anti-vaccination conspiracy theorist repeatedly claimed to be rescuing the very health infrastructure he has been busily destroying.
Predictably true to form, Kennedy lobbed lie after lie at senators — about the documented success of COVID vaccines in saving millions of lives; about the efficacy of vaccination science generally; about his own public crusade to discredit and limit access to vaccines; and about the reliability of mainstream medical organizations that represent the combined expertise of hundreds of thousands of physicians and other medical experts.
Significantly, even some Republican senators seemed to have had enough.
Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo. — who, unlike RFK, is an actual physician with actual medical training — noted that vaccines have saved more than 150 million lives worldwide in the past half-century. Barrasso asked Kennedy if he supported the kind of “clear, evidence-based and trustworthy†vaccine guidance that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has long provided.
“We’re going to make it clear, evidence-based and trustworthy for the first time in history,†Kennedy responded, breezily slandering the tireless work of generations of federal medical experts.
That comment perfectly encapsulates the upside-down universe in which Kennedy operates. It’s a place in which the truly astonishing accomplishments of mainstream medical science over the past century — much of it spearheaded by the CDC and related federal agencies — are to be diminished, denied or even condemned in favor of quack science and conspiracy theories that impugn the motives of some of the most accomplished and selfless medical professionals in the world.
The hearing unfolded against a backdrop of Kennedy’s determined sabotage of the CDC and other mainstream entities.
He has used his pulpit as the nation’s health czar to downplay the effectiveness of measles vaccines even amid fresh outbreaks in anti-vax enclaves in Texas and elsewhere. He has canceled almost $500 million in federal funding for mRNA technology, the most promising weapon in the arsenal against future pandemics.
He has removed respected top medical experts, including CDC Director Susan Monarez, and replaced them with vaccination skeptics like himself. Most damning, he has presided over the restriction of COVID vaccine availability to young people against the advice of the best minds in medicine.
This was all predictable. When Kennedy sat before senators in January for confirmation to his current post, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who also is a physician, extracted from RFK a promise that he wouldn’t limit access to vaccines. That he has so clearly violated that promise shouldn’t have surprised anyone, given his history.
Cassidy called him out at this month's hearing: “We’re denying people vaccines,†he said.
“You’re wrong,†retorted Kennedy — another lie. In fact, the move under Kennedy to narrow COVID vaccine recommendations to exclude healthy children and pregnant women (in complete defiance of expert medical advice) will inevitably limit access, because health insurance providers use CDC guidance to determine what treatments their policies will cover.
In the past, Kennedy has promoted the debunked claim of a link between vaccination and autism. He once called the miracle of COVID vaccines “a crime against humanity.â€
And, no, he hasn’t climbed out of that rabbit hole. During the hearing, he continued to claim — falsely — that there’s some mystery regarding just how effective the initial COVID vaccines were because “they didn’t have the data.†Wrong again. The National Institutes of Health and many other respected entities, using various scientific models, put the numbers of lives saved in the U.S. alone in the millions.
The most illuminating part of the hearing was when Kennedy was asked whether Trump deserves a Nobel Prize for his first administration’s “Operation Warp Speed†COVID vaccine development. In fact, that unprecedented success will stand as that administration’s best accomplishment, despite Trump’s current refusal to play it up to his anti-vax base.
RFK, having already cast unsupported doubt on the efficacy of that success, nonetheless had to declare that, yes, his boss deserves a Nobel Prize for it. This is Trump we’re talking about; had Kennedy been asked whether the president can walk on water, he likely would have had to find a diplomatic way to answer in order to keep his job.
Still, the logical disconnect there is illuminating. Like most presidents, Trump is no doubt obsessed with how history will view him — and his COVID vaccine success could balance out a lot of much darker narratives. He should consider whether it’s in the interest of his own legacy to continue employing a top health official who seems determined to do as much or more damage to America’s health than those vaccines mitigated.
