Once all the votes are counted, whoever wins, Donald Trump's empowerment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be one of the most regrettable legacies of the 2024 election cycle.
I had hoped that Trump was simply following Kennedy's lead to get his supporters' votes. As a third-party candidate, Kennedy may not have had a huge slice of the pie, but in a close race, every crumb counts.
However, after Kennedy withdrew and endorsed Trump, the former president said Kennedy would have an important role in his potential new administration.
“I'm going to let you go crazy on health,” Trump told the crowd at his recent hate party at Madison Square Garden. “I'm going to let him go crazy with the food. “I’m going to let him go crazy on the meds.”
The Washington Post reported that Kennedy could be given “significant control over health and food safety… with discussions over some Cabinet and agency officials who report to him.”
What a joke. Kennedy is an anti-vax conspiracy theorist who promotes implausible health claims. He once wrote that “COVID injections are a crime against humanity.”
My friend and fellow journalist Roy Rivenburg says that putting Kennedy in charge of American 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 criticizes Americans' poor eating habits and the links between diet and chronic disease. I can't disagree with him on that. But I do remember a certain first lady who was fiercely attacked by Republicans for planting a garden in the White House and urging children to eat healthy and move more.
Kennedy's post last weekend about X is more in line with his wild ideas. He said fluoride, which strengthens teeth and reduces cavities, should be removed from the public water supply. When I was growing up, the far-right John Birch Society, which saw communist threats around every corner, peddled the lie that fluoridating the water supply was a rosy plot to poison American brains.
Trump's response to Kennedy's suggestion? “That seems fine 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 removed from the market. Although he has denied it, Kennedy was responsible for helping push anti-vax theories that contributed to a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa. Most of the 83 deaths were children.
Despite the millions of lives saved over decades by vaccines that prevent all types of once-widespread childhood diseases (polio, measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, chickenpox, whooping cough), Kennedy has suggested that the government is withholding data. prove that vaccines are not safe.
“Why do you think vaccines are safe?” Trump transition team co-chair Howard Lutnick asked CNN's Kaitlan Collins last week. “They are not proven.”
Lutnick came to his unscientific view of vaccines after spending a couple of hours with Kennedy, who no doubt threw him a lot of ahistorical and unscientific garbage.
“He says, 'If you give me the data, all I want is the data, and I'll take it and show it's not safe,'” Lutnick said. “'And then if you remove product liability, companies will take these vaccines off the market.'”
The data will show that the 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 into law, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. The law, which limits manufacturers' liability in such lawsuits, also created the National Compensation Program. for Vaccine Injuries, which provides money to people who claim to have experienced injuries such as allergic reactions. Since its inception, the program has paid out about $5.3 billion for 11,399 cases.
As with any medication, including aspirin, vaccines negatively affect an increasingly small number of children. But certainly not enough to sacrifice the lives of so many people who have been spared unnecessary illness and suffering. Also, I can't believe I need to say this: vaccines do not cause autism.
Lutnick, president and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, is another arrogant billionaire swept up in Trump's wake of conspiracy theories, grievances and distrust. If you had spent two minutes on Wikipedia, you would have realized how lucky we are to have vaccines.
What other ways could the Trump administration and Kennedy's health czar endanger American lives?
In addition to ruining the country's response to COVID-19 in 2020, Trump is responsible for one of the country's current indefensible health crises: lack of access to reproductive health care, which is killing women in states with bans on the abortion. He also chairs a party that has launched a war on gender-affirming healthcare for trans people. Kennedy has been inconsistent in her support of abortion and opposes gender-affirming child care.
Last month, at one of his rallies, Trump called on Kennedy to “make America healthy again.” Slightly slurring his words, Trump said, “Come on, Bobby. Bobby is going to do it. Cop. Come on Bobby. Are you going to make us healthy, Bobby?
The only possible answer is a resounding no.
Rags: @rabcarian
