It’s not good
This guy is nuts and he’s leading a small army of nuts. We just have to hope that if he gets on the ballot that more right wing nuts than left wing nuts vote for him:
At an anti-vaccine conference in Georgia on Friday, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. confirmed his commitment to the cause and spoke to his base about how he, as president, would serve the movement he built.
“I feel like I’ve come home today,” he said to a standing ovation, crediting the assembled audience with his candidacy.
He then laid out his vision for a Kennedy presidency, which would include telling the National Institutes of Health to take “a break” from studying infectious diseases, like Covid-19 and measles, and pivoting the agency to the study of chronic diseases, like diabetes and obesity. Kennedy has suggested without evidence that researchers and pharmaceutical companies are driven by profit to neglect such chronic conditions and invest in ineffective and even harmful treatments; he includes vaccines among them.
“I’m gonna say to NIH scientists, God bless you all,” Kennedy said. “Thank you for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.”
I’m pretty sure that infectious diseases aren’t going to give us a break though.
I don’t know what makes loons like this tick but it’s dangerous as hell that one of the two major political parties embraces the kooks who believe this garbage.
Florida’s top public health official, a leading voice behind Gov. Ron DeSantis’ controversial pandemic approach, joined his boss on the campaign trail Wednesday for an unusual appearance that further blurred the lines between the Republican presidential candidate’s day job and his political aspirations.
Taking the stage to the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” — a campaign playlist staple — Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo conveyed his unease speaking before the New Hampshire crowd but said he was compelled to visit the first-in-the-nation GOP primary state to “support a man that I have a great deal of admiration for.”
“There’s no one, no one right now, who is running in this election who has the critical qualities that Gov. DeSantis has — the integrity, the courage, the intelligence,” Ladapo said.
While it’s perhaps not atypical for public officials to heap praise on their bosses, it is rare for a government employee to be a featured act at a high-profile political event. But DeSantis, one of the few candidates running for the GOP nomination who are also currently in office, has at times flouted the distinctions that separate candidates from their elected offices.
DeSantis routinely faces questions back home about the cost of state resources used to support his White House bid, including after state law enforcement agents were involved in a multi-vehicle accident while providing protective services during a fundraising trip to Tennessee. Before announcing his presidential campaign, DeSantis signed a law that shields disclosures related to his security and travel from Florida’s robust public records laws.
[…]
Advertised as a town hall on “medical freedom,” the event served as a platform for Ladapo and DeSantis to cast aspersions on measures taken to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus during the pandemic and to sow doubts about the Covid-19 vaccine — an area on which the Florida governor has attempted to distinguish himself from former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 GOP nod, whose administration helped develop the vaccine in record time.
Ladapo told the crowd he had “nothing against Mr. Trump.” DeSantis, though, put Trump’s pandemic record on blast.
DeSantis vowed to overhaul the nation’s health regulators and disease response agencies if elected president, noting that he had championed laws in Florida to prevent pandemic-related restrictions in the future.
“We’re going to do a lot of different things right off the bat,” DeSantis said. “It’s going to change the way the federal government is going to be able to approach anything like this in the future.”
Ladapo recounted how he was plucked by DeSantis from UCLA, where he had ruffled feathers by penning op-eds increasingly critical of how governments were responding to the spread of the coronavirus and controversially pushing unproven Covid-19 treatments. DeSantis, who once celebrated the coronavirus vaccine’s arrival, appointed Ladapo as Florida’s surgeon general in the fall of 2021, putting him in charge of the state department of health just as he was cooling on the shots.
Together, DeSantis and Ladapo have continued to push against the medical consensus on coronavirus vaccines, with Florida the only state to officially recommend young men and children not get the mRNA shot. A document obtained by Politico showed Ladapo had altered a state analysis to remove comments that contradicted his assertion that the mRNA vaccine may be driving an added risk of cardiac-related death in men between ages 18 to 39.
In another outlier position, Ladapo this September advised Floridians not to get another dose of the vaccine after the federal government approved a new formula to improve immunity to recent strands of the coronavirus, similar to its method for annual flu shots.
Ahead of that announcement, with DeSantis videoconferencing via Zoom amid a campaign blitz, Ladapo helped lead a digital forum hosted by the governor’s office featuring the slogan “No way FDA.”
Though a state event, DeSantis introduced himself as though he was speaking to a national audience, saying, “I’m Gov. Ron DeSantis from Florida.”
This is mainstream GOP.