Striking a blow for deadly disease and against public health, our dangerous Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., flanked by doctors including National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya — handpicked for his vaccine-skeptic approach — decreed that that the COVID vaccine would no longer be recommended for children and pregnant women. Who will be next?
This was not a position following the science, but one more expression of the RFK’s nutty and long-standing anti-vaccine activism.
Congress has to stop RFK before he puts more American lives at risk if President Trump doesn’t have the guts to or is so enamored of his culture wars he doesn’t care.
And Trump should care, as this vaccine is also perhaps Trump’s greatest achievement. For all of Trump‘s downplaying of the pandemic and failures of management, one thing he did absolutely right in his first term was directing massive federal resources to the development of a vaccine that could help save humanity from a plague that killed millions. The COVID vaccine was developed in record time, a whole-of-government and private industry partnership that managed to meet the moment of total emergency.
Why Trump has decided to distance himself from one of his most tremendous accomplishments is a question only he can really answer, though it certainly runs through the never-ending culture war that he and his political constituency feel they must at all times wage, and which has sucked into itself not just culture itself, but science, medicine, economics and all else.
RFK himself might be a true believer, but he is still a loyal member of the administration that can be brought to heel if necessary. Trump, who if nothing else does seem to worry about how he is publicly perceived, should realize that the development and widespread adoption of the COVID vaccine can be a legacy-defining moment, and his health secretary is standing in the way of that.
If Trump won’t reel RFK in, then it should be the other branches, namely, Congress, which has the power to drag the secretary before it and, if need be, impeach him.
MAGA legislators may have turned the process of impeachment into one more political football, filing proceedings against not just former President Biden but members of his cabinet over thinly-sourced accusations that boil down to disagreements over broad-strokes policy, as was the case with former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Still, impeachment was intended as and remains a tool to remove high-level public officials who are engaged in gross negligence in the performance of their duties in ways that threaten public order and the polity as a whole. There’s hardly a more clear-cut assault on the public than throwing up obstacles in the way of life-saving vaccinations, perhaps humanity’s greatest ever medical advancement.
Kennedy likes to frame his actions in the language of anti-elitism: the vaccines, in his estimation, are being pushed by an out-of-control Big Pharma establishment and therefore their restriction is inherently an anti-elite move. Tell that to the kids who have been hospitalized and died from measles, following quack Dr. Bobby’s Rx to avoid the shots.
From smallpox to polio to measles, and yes, also to COVID, vaccines are safe, and have for many decades now driven back illnesses that were once widespread among the population. RFK should change this dangerous course, or be prevented from doing more damage.
