You probably read the headline this week that said Bobby Jr. endorsed the measles vaccine and encouraged people to get them. According to jonathan Cohn at the The Bulwark, there’s more to the story:
If you clicked through and actually watched the full interview, you quickly discovered he was giving his endorsement grudgingly, following repeated prompts from interviewer Dr. Jon LaPook. And when he was eventually unable to avoid answering, Kennedy framed his endorsement as a description of official HHS posture rather than a personal belief. “The federal government’s position, my position, is that people should get the measles vaccine,” he said.
Kennedy then proceeded to claim, as he had so many times before, that “we don’t know the risks of many of these products because they’re not safety tested.” That’s not true; vaccines go through extensive safety testing. And in the case of the MMR vaccine, there is now also more than a half-century of widespread clinical use—amounting to a real-world track record of several hundred million doses, giving a very clear safety picture.
Kennedy also claimed that a particular type of vaccine, those that target one rather than multiple proteins on a germ, have “never worked” for respiratory disease. That’s also not true; multiple vaccines work that way.
All of this was after an extended exchange in which RFK suggested that the second Texas girl who died may have been a victim of some other illness: “She had extreme tonsillectomy . . . she was graph positive for bacteria in her bloodstream.”
“All of those are medical words,” Brown University professor Dr. Craig Spencer told me in an interview, referring to Kennedy’s invocation of an “extreme tonsillectomy” (which is not a standard medical term; it’s unclear whether he meant “radical tonsillectomy” or “an extreme case of tonsillitis”) and “graph positive” (the actual term is “Gram positive”). “It doesn’t mean that they actually reflect the reality of the medical case.”
He’s one of those fools who doesn’t understand that if you get pneumonia as a result of measles/COVID/whatever and die it still means you died of the disease. And he’s like a little kid playing doctor, throwing around terms he clearly doesn’t understand.
Cohn notes that Kennedy is promoting his “Make America Healthy Again” program touting diet and exercise and “and ridding the air, water, and food supplies of toxins” which I’m fairly sure his boss Donald “beautiful clean coal” Trump isn’t exactly on board with. But as he’s doing his health tour, he’s literally destroying the HHS. And the destruction is overwhelming.
Starting with the overall 25% reduction in force, it only gets worse. Research grants are down 60 percent from last year. And it’s so chaotic that it’s almost impossible to know exactly where and how it’s happening because there’s no transparency. The only way we know any of it is through various news stories making it hard to see the whole picture.
Cohn points out that this isn’t just Kennedy but rather a truly unfortunate combination of DOGE, the assault on universities and the lingering effects of the backlash against public health from both right and left in the wake of the pandemic (which is just plain infuriating.) But there literally couldn’t be a worse choice to head HHS than Kennedy and his henchmen at the various agencies appear to be just as fringe. The loss of expertise that’s happening in staggering.
I heard Cory Booker, a politician I have always admired, on Stephen Colbert last week and he talked a lot about how we had to forgive and make “good trouble” and his whole schtick is inspiring. But when asked about what’s happening under the Trump administration he’s clearly gotten the memo that Democrats need to focus intently on the kitchen table issues of the economy and health care by which they obviously mean mainly jobs and health insurance.
As I listened to it, I closed my eyes and could have sworn it was an indictment of the GOP from 2007. It sounded so stale even my eyes glazed over. And he’s not the only one. It’s all tired old Democratic talking points we’ve heard a million times.
If they want to talk about kitchen table issues, how about getting a little bit specific? The fact that Trump and Kennedy are destroying cancer and Alzheimer’s research? Demonizing vaccines so that kids are dying? Ending HIV and other communicable disease programs around the world? How Trump wants to raise the price of imported drugs? I don’t know about you but those are things that hit the kitchen table pretty hard when you or someone in your family gets sick.
This is a massive, national disaster, one of the worst things Trump is doing, and I don’t think most people know about it. The Democrats haven’t started to talk about it in a way that will register the scope of the horror. They need to start now because it takes a while for anything to penetrate through the cacophony of the Trump hellscape.