Earlier this week, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. used a Zoom name to inform his supporters that Donald Trump had promised him “management” of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the federal company that features the Centers for Disease Control, Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, in addition to the Department of Agriculture. Given Kennedy’s help for debunked anti-vaccine nonsense, this represents a possible public well being nightmare.
A number of days after, Howard Lutnick, a co-chair of Trump’s transition team, appeared on CNN to disclaim that RFK Jr. could be put in cost of HHS. But he adopted that with a protracted rant in which he echoed Kennedy’s spurious claims about vaccines. This supplies one more indication of how anti-vaccine activism has turn out to be deeply enmeshed with Republican politics, to the purpose the place it might be simply as unhealthy even when Kennedy is not appointed.
Trump as Kennedy’s path to energy
Kennedy has a protracted historical past of misinformation relating to well being, with a particular concentrate on vaccines. This consists of the extensively debunked suggestion that there’s a correlation between vaccinations and autism incidence, and it extends to a basic skepticism about vaccine security. That’s blended with conspiracy theories relating to collusion between federal regulators and pharmaceutical corporations.
While there isn’t any proof for any of this, and a few of it’s clearly fallacious, the conspiracies have real-world penalties. An anti-vaccine activist in Samoa, aided by a go to from RFK Jr., helped pave the best way for a measles outbreak that shut down the federal government and in the end led to over 80 deaths.
Kennedy has lengthy been in gaining access to the companies that regulate vaccines and different pursuits of his, resembling meals security, below the belief they’re hiding the information that will vindicate his views. And, lengthy earlier than his current presidential run, he seen Trump because the path to that entry. Shortly earlier than Trump’s inauguration in 2017, Kennedy claimed that he could be appointed to go a vaccine security fee that Trump would supposedly create as soon as in workplace. Nothing ever got here of that, and it was by no means clear whether or not that was because of Trump mendacity to him, Kennedy exaggerating his significance, or Trump merely telling him what he needed to listen to on the time and by no means following up.