RFK Jr. has been a total anti-vaxxer for decades.
He pretended not to be one in order to gain Senate approval to the cabinet position that oversees the healthcare of Americans.
Now his true colors, and true danger to public health, have been made appallingly clear.
He lied to Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a physician who made it clear he was not going to vote for him if Kennedy was going to go after the miracle vaccines, childhood and otherwise, that have led to the most dramatic increase in human health and ability to fight the most dangerous diseases in world history.
He told Cassidy that the rumors of his being a nutball anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist were mere political propaganda from his enemies, and that as secretary he would only be concerned with ensuring that vaccines are safe.
He is a liar. He’s a total anti-vaxxer. But the terrible thing is that it’s far worse than that. He’s now going after the most promising anti-cancer research in America’s research laboratories.
It’s one thing to believe in the entirely made-up story that childhood vaccines cause autism, as Kennedy and some rich, entitled moms in Marin County do. I suppose it’s even another thing to call the miracle medicine that kept us safer from COVID “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” even though actual medical experts say the vaccines saved on the order of 20 million lives.
But last week the non-medically trained whack job canceled nearly $500 million of grants and contracts for developing other mRNA vaccines, which both Pfizer and Moderna used in the pandemic to battle COVID. Such vaccines tell the body to produce a fragment of a virus, which then sets off the body’s immune response.
Kennedy apparently favors the century-old whole-virus vaccines, which can make recipients feel as if they were hit by a Mack truck. The U.S. hasn’t used a whole-cell vaccine for whooping cough for over 30 years, for example, because, while it could be effective, it often created high fevers and even seizures as side effects.
“But the greatest potential of new mRNA vaccines may be as a monumental breakthrough in cancer treatments,” writes actual physician Brian Boench in the Utah News Dispatch. “This technology could offer personalized treatment by training a patient’s immune system to read and then destroy individually unique cancer cells.”
And so the health secretary pulls the plug on half a billion dollars worth of funding for mRNA. “This will also discourage private investment, prompt key scientists to leave the country, and set back cancer research for decades,” Boench concludes.
Many of us have been trying to eat healthier, unprocessed meals since Bobby Kennedy Jr. was a rich-kid junkie for all those years. That’s swell that he now wants to take the red dye out of your M&Ms. But how did we get to the point at which the person in charge of health policy in this nation, with the power to pull the plug on cancer research, on a disease that will affect one of two American women and one of three men in their lifetimes, can endanger us all by exercising his eccentric whims?
“The cruel farce of Kennedy’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ is animated in real time, in the faces of the people I love and see every day,” writes Dr. Boench, himself a cancer survivor.
Chris Meekins, an assistant secretary for pandemic preparedness in the first Trump administration, told The New York Times that ending mRNA research creates a “national security vulnerability. … These tools serve as a deterrent to prevent other nations from using certain biological agents.” Meekins said on social media: “The speed of the technology to create new biodefense capabilities is a national security asset.”
But under the current administration, we are not a secure nation. We are vulnerable to the untutored opinions of an aberrant character in the cabinet who literally doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about. That’s a disease for which, in our present weirdo world, we don’t have anything like a fix.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.