What America’s ‘health chief’ is doing is not only moronic – it is reprehensible
Of all Donald Trump’s cabinet picks, Robert F Kennedy Jr was always in the running to be the most controversial.
Known for his anti-vaccine views and espousal of conspiracy theories, selecting Kennedy (RFK Jr) to be the US health secretary was like putting a Moon landing denier in charge of space exploration.
But only now, six months into his term, are we really seeing the damage that Kennedy is causing to America’s health.
Despite pledging to “Make America Healthy Again”, a pun on the President’s slogan “Make America Great Again”, Kennedy is distorting policy and sacking dissenters in order to promote junk science.
This week Kennedy sparked carnage at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which oversees the US response to infectious diseases, when he fired its leader, Susan Monarez, just a month into her tenure after she refused to sign off on his changes to vaccine policy.
The spark was when Kennedy announced that the new Covid-19 shots would be authorised but with severe restrictions limiting them to people 65 and older or who had risk factors for severe coronavirus disease, instead of everyone over six months old.
Monarez is refusing to leave her post and has filed a lawsuit which claims that Kennedy is “weaponising public health for political gain and putting millions of American lives at risk”.
Her lawyers, Mark Zaid and Abbe David Lowell, said in a blistering statement: “When Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts, she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda. For that, she has been targeted.”
A top aide to Kennedy, Jim O’Neill, a former investment executive who has no medical or scientific background, has been parachuted in to temporarily take over Monarez’s role.
Four other top CDC officials quit including the chief medical officer, Debra Houry and Demetre Daskalakis, the director of the National Centre for Immunis ation and Respiratory Diseases.
Daskalakis accused Kennedy of putting a “dark cloud over the agency”, while Houry called his actions a “violent attack” on the CDC.
They aren’t quite right. What he is doing is far bigger than that.
Kennedy is waging a violent attack on science itself: just look at what he’s already done to the CDC.
Since he took office he has stuffed a critical vaccine approval panel with sceptics who have criticised coronavirus policies in the past.
During the worst outbreak of measles in the US in a generation – the disease was declared eradicated in the US in 2000 – Kennedy ordered the CDC to promote a vitamin as treatment instead of vaccines even though it was an unproven cure.
During his tenure, the Department of Health and Human Services has haemorrhaged thousands of employees amid a brutal job cull that has drained morale and caused a brain drain that will hamper health policy for decades to come.
This week Kennedy also waded into furore around the Catholic school shooting in Minneapolis that left two pupils dead and 17 injured, making the unproven claim that antidepressants could be the cause of such attacks.
Those comments led Minnesota Senator Tina Smith, a Democrat, to say: “Just shut up. Stop peddling b*******. You should be fired.”
Next month promises the biggest bombshell of them all: Kennedy will make an announcement in the coming weeks that will reveal – he claims – the causes of autism.
Scientists have spent decades looking for the answer but after just six months of work, Kennedy claims to have beaten them to it.
Spoiler alert: the cause will be vaccines.
As a parent of a child with special needs, I can tell you that parents I know with autistic children are utterly terrified about what this will mean.
They are scrambling to limit the amount of data about their children that is available to the US Government out of fear that their children will be blacklisted or marked out in some way.
And they fear their children will shun vaccines after hearing baseless stories that they caused their autism.
On a broader point, it will be unbelievably damaging to have America’s most senior health officer telling the nation – and indeed the world – a bogus cause for autism.
Because of his platform, his nonsense will reach far beyond America and embolden vaccine sceptics and conspiracy theorists everywhere.
That includes the UK where figures this week from the Health Security Agency revealed that none of the main childhood vaccines in England had reached their uptake targets.
As children return to school, without vaccines they will be at greater risk of measles and whooping cough as well as other potentially fatal conditions.
And further erosion in the vaccine rate will be celebrated by nobody more than Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced British former doctor whose infamous 1998 paper in the medical journal The Lancet falsely claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Though the paper was withdrawn, Wakefield became a martyr for anti-vaccine lunatics like Kennedy, who see him as a hero.
For Wakefield, the health secretary’s work isn’t unhinged, which is how sensible-minded people see it: instead it will be the crowning glory of his life’s appalling work.
