Once all the votes are counted, regardless of who wins, Donald Trump’s empowerment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be one of the saddest legacies of the 2024 election cycle.
I had hoped that Trump was just humoring Kennedy to get his supporters’ votes. As a third-party candidate, Kennedy may not have had a very big piece of the pie, but in an extremely close race, every crumb counts.
Yet after Kennedy abandoned and supported Trump, the former president said: Kennedy would have an important role in his potential new administration.
“I’m going to let him rant about health care,” Trump told the crowd at his recent hate fest at Madison Square Garden. “I’m going to let him go wild with the food. I’m going to let him run wild with the meds.
The Washington Post reported that Kennedy could be given “significant control over health and food safety…with discussions about some Cabinet and agency officials reporting to him.”
What a joke. Kennedy is an anti-vax conspiracy theorist which promotes outlandish health claims. He once wrote that “COVID shots are a crime against humanity.”
My friend and fellow journalist Roy Rivenburg says that putting Kennedy in charge of America’s public health would be like putting Fox News in charge of a journalism school, Exxon in charge of the Sierra Club, or PETA in charge of McDonald’s.
In addition to promoting wild medical theories, Kennedy denounces Americans’ poor eating habits and the links between diet and chronic diseases. I can’t disagree with him on this. But I remember a certain first lady who was savagely attacked by the Republicans for planting a vegetable garden at the White House and urging children to eat healthily and move more.
Kennedy’s post last weekend on X is more in line with his outlandish ideas. He stated that fluoride, which strengthens teeth and reduces cavitiesmust be removed from public water supplies. When I was a child, the John Birch Society, a far-right group, which saw communist threats on every corner, propagated the lie that fluoridation of the water supply was a pinko plot to poison the American brains.
Trump’s response to Kennedy’s suggestion? “Sounds good to me.”
Kennedy has repeatedly suggested that vaccines, which some experts consider the most important public health achievement of the 20th century – more important than the discovery of antibiotics – should be taken off the market. Although he denied it, Kennedy was responsible for help advance anti-vax theories who contributed to a deadly measles epidemic in 2019 in Samoa. Most of the 83 deaths were among children.
Despite the millions of lives that have been saved over the decades by vaccines that prevent all manner of once-common childhood illnesses — polio, measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, chickenpox, whooping cough — Kennedy suggested the government was withholding the data. showing that vaccines are not safe.
“Why do you think vaccines are safe? » Co-chair of the Trump transition team Howard Lutnick asked CNN’s Kaitlan Collins last week. “They are not proven.”
Lutnick arrived at his unscientific view of vaccines after spending a few hours with Kennedy, who undoubtedly spewed a load of unscientific and ahistorical garbage at him.
“He says, ‘If you give me the data, all I want is the data, and I’m going to take it and show that it’s not safe,'” Lutnick said. “And then if you remove product liability, companies will pull these vaccines off the market. »
The data will show that vaccines are safe. However, if vaccine manufacturers are no longer immune from liability lawsuits, they will effectively remove their products from the market because they will be sued into oblivion. They would have no financial incentive to continue manufacturing vaccines.
This is exactly why Congress passed, and President Reagan signed the law into law, THE National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. The law, which limits manufacturers’ liability in such lawsuits, also created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which provides money to people who claim to have suffered injuries such as allergic reactions. Since its creation, the program paid off approximately $5.3 billion for 11,399 cases.
As with any medication, including aspirina tiny number of children experience harmful effects from vaccines. But certainly not enough to sacrifice the lives of so many people who have been spared from unnecessary illness and suffering. Also, I can’t believe I need to say this: Vaccines don’t cause autism.
Lutnick, chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, is another arrogant billionaire swept up in the wake of conspiracy theories, grievances and distrust of Trump. If he had spent two minutes on Wikipedia he would have realized how lucky we are to have vaccines.
In what other ways could the Trump administration and health czar Kennedy endanger American lives?
In addition to botch the country’s response Because of COVID-19 in 2020, Trump is responsible for one of the nation’s current indefensible health crises: lack of access to reproductive health care, which is killing women in states that ban abortion. He also chairs a party that has launched a war on gender-affirming medical care for trans people. Kennedy has been inconsistent in his support for abortionand he opposes gender affirming care for minors.
Last month, at one of his rallies, Trump called on Kennedy to “make America good again.” By articulating slightly, Trump said, “Come on Bobby. Bobby will do it. Policeman. Let’s go Bobby. Are you going to make us healthy, Bobby?
The only possible answer is a resounding no.
Topics: @rabcarian
