The anti-science, anti-medicine mindset of the nutso Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is killing people by quashing life-saving vaccines.
There is no other explanation why Moderna’s paperwork to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its new mRNA flu vaccine was rejected, citing supposed faults with the study the pharma giant had already conducted into the drug.
Meanwhile, in South Carolina, a measles outbreak that is approaching 1,000 cases due a too-low vaccine rate has pushed the head of another HHS subdivision, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Dr. Mehmet Oz, to beg people to get the measles shot.
Oz, a TV doctor, but still a real doctor, knows that the measles vaccine is safe and effective and will prevent the disease from spreading. His boss, RFK Jr., instead sows doubt, which causes parents to not vaccinate their kids. And we get South Carolina. And kids may die.
Another medical man, Dr. Vinay Prasad, who leads the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which oversees vacancies, has killed Moderna’s new flu shot.
For the FDA to take this step but then fail to identify any specific deficiencies with Moderna’s trial is highly unusual though there’s a simple reason for it: there were no deficiencies with the trial.
As with much else in this wretched administration, it’s a transparent pretext for officials to pursue political and ideological preferences under the guise of regular government administration. The FDA must be very meticulous about what pharmaceuticals it considers and approves; these are things that can easily kill or maim if they are not correctly formulated and tested. The problem here is that the guiding principle is clearly not a scientific or rigorous one.
Kennedy has made no bones about his misplaced skepticism of mRNA vaccines, pinging off the proliferating conspiracies around the COVID vaccines — incredible innovations that saved countless lives during one of the worst global catastrophes in recent memory.
Beyond the study Moderna already did, we had an unintentional global study of mRNA vaccine safety as millions took the therapeutics during that era; years on, the only effect seems to have been that many, many people did not die preventable deaths or were subjected to potentially lifelong consequences from COVID infection.
The idiotic recommendations of RFK and his minions are at least often things that reasonable people can just ignore and doctors can disregard, even if they are setting the broad agenda of health policy (or lack thereof) in the United States.
But as with the dismantling of huge swaths of our research capacity, this refusal to even consider this mRNA flu vaccine on what are obviously ideological grounds is going to affect a hell of a lot more people than just the cranks who agree with them. Without FDA sign-off, it’s likely that these vaccines won’t be available, coming off one of the worst flu seasons in history. The flu might not be quite as deadly as COVID, but it has killed thousands nationwide, including children, just this season.
Refusing to consider what might be effective remedies will condemn some people to die. If that is RFK‘s position, then we have a word for that, and that word is eugenics. It has fortunately been about a century since that was the policy of our public health authorities, and we cannot allow ourselves to go back to that.
RFK and his cronies like Prasad seeded throughout the public health infrastructure are not going to change, no matter how much the countervailing evidence piles up. They will keep doing damage until someone stops them, and the clearest someone with that power is Congress. Everything may have become political war now, but we sincerely hope that at least the potential deaths of thousands of children might cut through that noise. Lawmakers must act to remove RFK and the others who would toss our kids to the wolves.
