Chicago (Special to Informed Comment, Feature) – With a Cabinet full of fascists, fools, drunks, and sycophants, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stands out as a dangerous quack and sociopathic liar. A vaccine opponent and an anti-science conspiracy proponent with no experience in public health, Kennedy is blatantly unfit to be director of Health and Human Services [HHS] yet the depraved President appointed him, and spineless Republicans confirmed him.
Since taking office, Kennedy has waged an assault against the Centers for Disease Control [CDC] and our nation’s public health system. Culminating in his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as CDC director, Kennedy has decapitated the CDC, sabotaged the agency’s credibility, fired over 10,000 HHS staff — many with decades of knowledge — and thereby put Americans’ health at risk.
I grew up in the 1950s when the terror of the polio virus hung over every family. A classmate went for a summer swim and came back to school on crutches. Before the polio vaccine became widely available, the virus crippled children, paralyzed others, sentenced some to entrapment in iron lungs, and killed many others. Kennedy is yanking us back to those dark times.
In July, RFK abolished U.S. support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making false statements.
It’s enraging to hear Kennedy, with his painfully tortured voice, be so willfully ignorant about vaccines, jeopardizing the health of all Americans and instigating policies that will make people sick again with preventable, even once-eliminated diseases. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he focused on unproven “treatments” while downplaying vaccines.
On Fox News, Kennedy promoted vitamin A and cod liver oil, proclaiming them as “dramatically” effective remedies against measles. Some unvaccinated children took so much vitamin A, they showed signs of liver damage. “Vitamin A supplements will not protect someone from measles,” said Dr. Sean O‘Leary chair of the Committee on Infectious Diseases for the American Academy of Pediatrics. “We have a very safe and effective vaccine, and that’s really how you control a measles outbreak.”
Kennedy’s history of reckless “guidance” includes a trip to Samoa during a measles outbreak in 2019 where he claimed, falsely, that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMRV) had contributed to the deaths of two Samoan infants. He exacerbated anti-vaccine disinformation, worsening the outbreak that resulted in 83 deaths there and infected 500 in Tonga.
Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash
As HHS director, Kennedy is endangering children instead of safeguarding them. “RFK Jr is a disaster,” said one CDC staff member. “He is completely dismantling things to the point where the damage is going to become irreparable.”
Creating a firestorm, Kennedy not only fired thousands of federal health workers — 25% of its workforce, but he also severely decimated programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, AIDS, strokes, lead poisoning and more. In response CDC workers and alumni protested outside the agencies headquarters, calling for Kennedy to resign.
The eradication of important research devastated the CDC, which was already reeling from the mass layoffs and a deadly shooting at its headquarters by an anti-vax maniac.
In early August, a man who blamed COVID vaccines for his depression sprayed 500 bullets into the CDC campus of buildings, killing a police officer. A letter signed by hundreds of CDC employees after the shooting condemned the “politicized rhetoric that has turned public health professionals from trusted experts into targets of villainization” and accused Kennedy of being “complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure and endangering the nation’s health by repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information.”
The CDC was further inflamed by the recklessly foolish COVID vaccination changes. The virus is on the rise again along with lots of confusion as to who is eligible to get immunized. Kennedy issued new obstructions on COVID vaccines that will make it harder for Americans to get the shot covered by their health insurance. Thanks to him, the CDC no longer recommends pregnant women and healthy children get COVID shots, a move that broke with expert guidance and bypassed the usual scientific review process. Women who are pregnant are more likely to get very sick from COVID compared to those who are not pregnant. Vaccinating during pregnancy offers vital protection to the fetus by transferring protective antibodies from the mother, safeguarding the infant.
Previously in a stunningly stupid action, Kennedy had fired, without cause, all 17 experts on the independent Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). The mass termination of the ACIP eviscerates a half-century of practice designed to insulate vaccine policy from political convulsions. Kennedy — with an established track record of ignoring reality — made the unilateral, ideological decision to gut one of the most trusted and effective pillars of America’s vaccine infrastructure. This is a system that helped eliminate smallpox, drastically reduce childhood diseases like rubella and mumps, and save millions of lives.
RFK’s notorious anti-vax reputation and his dismantling of vaccine policy infrastructure have already driven some states to pursue their own vaccination rules — a splintering that will likely lead to unprecedented confusion among doctors and patients.
The blue state-red state fracture was on stark display last week when Washington, Hawaii, Oregon and California formed a coalition — The West Coast Health Alliance — to issue their own shot recommendations, a rebuke to what they called the Trump administration’s “destruction” of the CDC.
Hours later, Florida lurched in the opposite direction, declaring itself the first state in the nation to abolish all school vaccine mandates. Florida Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo railed against vaccine mandates, which every state has, and likened them to slavery.
Even more constraints on vaccines are likely, given that Kennedy has stacked the ACIP with vaccine skeptics and outright anti-vaxxers — unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views.
He appointed Retsef Levi, who does not have a biomedical degree or clinical medicine experience, to lead the COVID vaccine review. In a debunked claim, Levi compared COVID vaccines to thalidomide, a drug that decades ago caused serious birth defects. Another ACIP replacement was Robert Malone, who has denounced COVID vaccines and, without evidence, suggested that they can worsen coronavirus infections. Yet another Kennedy-picked ACIP member was Vicky Pebsworth, who, like Kennedy, has a long history of insinuating that vaccines can cause autism despite decades of high-quality studies refuting that connection.
The new anti-vax tilted ACIP recommended that U.S. flu vaccines be supplied only as single-dose, thimerosal-free product — a symbolic victory for long-standing anti-thimerosal, anti-vaccine activists despite decades of safety data. Normally, flu vaccines are supplied in multi-dose vials, which contain thimerosal to prevent bacterial contamination once the vial is opened. These multi-dose vials are cheaper, easier to distribute, and allow more people to be vaccinated efficiently. Not incidentally, Kennedy falsely blames thimerosal for autism.
The decision elevated ideology over evidence and set a precedent for bypassing ACIP’s usual rigor. A document on the CDC website summarizing thimerosal research concluded “the evidence does not support an association” between the preservative thimerosal and any neurodevelopmental disorder. The document was removed after Kennedy accepted the recommendation to eliminate thimerosal.
The thimerosal reversal was not an isolated tweak; it was an early signal of a wider evisceration of vaccine research. Kennedy canceled nearly $500 million in grants and contracts for developing mRNA vaccines, the best chance against a future pandemic and an adaptable platform for next-generation vaccines against influenza, RSV, HIV, Bird Flu, Malaria, Tuberculosis, and even some cancers.
Though he has no medical degree or training, Kennedy claimed that mRNA vaccines can “encourage new mutations and can actually prolong pandemics as the virus constantly mutates to escape the protective effects of the vaccine.” This is not true.
“Viruses mutate on their own whether or not vaccines exist for them. This was true every year for the flu virus, for example,” said Dr Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Dr Offit also said that mRNA vaccines were “remarkably safe” and a key to helping prevent against severe infections from viruses like COVID.
When CDC Director Morarez refused to rubber-stamp Kennedy’s dangerous and unfounded vaccine recommendations that would restrict access to proven vaccines, Kennedy tried to fire her. She rejected his authority to dismiss her so Kennedy implored Trump to oust her. The White House spokes-liar said Trump backed Kennedy.
The germaphobe president grants Kennedy free rein even though his own life was saved by science. After Trump got seriously ill from COVID during his horrific first term, Walter Reed doctors gave him the latest antibody treatments and remdesivir — not bleach or the animal deworming drug ivermectin, the remedies he suggested people consider. Predictably, he learned nothing. Trump is letting the anti-science health menace run wild.
Feckless Republicans — terrified of Trump — failed miserably in not blocking the confirmation of this unqualified fraud. Senator Bill Cassidy, the gastroenterologist who cast the deciding vote approving Trump’s snake-oil health secretary, was too craven to vote against someone he knew would decimate our health system. In doing so, Dr. Cassidy betrayed his Hippocratic Oath “to do no harm.” At last weeks Senate hearing with RFK, Cassidy accused him of lying at his confirmation hearing. Cowardly Cassidy was almost annoyed enough to take action.
At that Senate hearing, Democrats condemned Kennedy as “a charlatan” and “a hazard to the health of the American people.” Many demanded he resign, but none formulated a plan to impeach him or otherwise rid the nation of this reckless disease enabler, who has undermined the CDC.
Disgusted with Monarez’s dismissal as head of the CDC and the way Kennedy places ideology over science, four top CDC officials resigned: Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, Daniel Jernigan, the director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, Jennifer Layden, who oversaw the agency’s Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology, and, Debra Houry, the chief medical officer, who said that the group quit together to signal that they believe science is being ignored and that public health is in danger.
These former civil servants, along with Monarez, exemplify true courage, self-sacrifice and an unwavering sense of duty in an authoritarian era of almost universal moral degradation and political cowardice among our corporate, union and political leaders.
In his resignation letter, Daskalakis wrote, “I am unable to serve in an environment that treats the CDC as a tool to generate policies that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve public health.” He later criticized Kennedy for not even bothering to be briefed by the center’s specialists on COVID, polio, and measles before making policy decisions. “Yes, he’s getting information from somewhere, but that information is not coming from CDC experts who really are the world’s experts in this area.”
Like Trump and the self-deluded MAGA followers, Kennedy is suspicious of people that know things. Rather than believing a so-called “ruling class of experts,” these self-destructive dupes prefer the medical advice of non-doctors and the pseudo-science of non-scientists.
For example, an overwhelming body of scientific evidence from decades of research confirms that vaccines do not cause autism. Since 2005, Kennedy has pushed the debunked claim that there is a link between childhood vaccinations and autism. So, he has ordered more research and politicized it.
Kennedy appointed the longtime vaccine critic David Geier to lead an unnecessary government study on autism. Geier, who has been disciplined for practicing medicine without a license, has promoted thoroughly discredited links between vaccines, thimerosal and autism. The mission of this research isn’t scientific discovery; it’s laundering fringe ideas through the pretense of governmental legitimacy.
“Grim Reaper,” Digital, Dall-E, 2025
RFK’s ignorance was on full display after the recent school shooting in Minneapolis. Without acknowledging the prevalence and easy accessibility of firearms across the U.S., he said that his department was “launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors] drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence.”
Kennedy’s comments triggered criticism from the Minnesota senator Tina Smith, who wrote on X: “I dare you to go to Annunciation School and tell our grieving community, in effect, guns don’t kill kids, antidepressants do. Just shut up. Stop peddling bullshit. You should be fired.”
Last week, Kennedy was spewing more bizarre nonsense, saying he can tell as he walks past children if they are dealing with “mitochondrial challenges” or “inflammation.” It is miraculous that a raw-milk guzzling conspiracy theorist with no medical degree and a brain hollowed out by a parasitic worm can mysteriously divine illnesses just by looking. Our health secretary is a certified lunatic.
More than 750 current and former employees at US health agencies signed a letter in which they criticized Kennedy as an “existential threat to public health.” Kennedy is gutting the health institutions Americans rely on to stay healthy and safe. He is demonizing and firing lifelong experts in their fields and forging policy based on phony studies and junk science, all while confusing the public and amplifying distrust of the scientific community.
In just four months, Kennedy’s war on science and public health has produced operational confusion among pharmacies and clinicians, an erosion of scientific integrity, and potential reemergence of vaccine-preventable diseases through ideological vaccine recommendations. By cancelling research contracts, mass firings and hostile rhetoric, Kennedy has strangled innovation and driven scientists to leave for friendlier countries, inflicting long-term damage that will last well beyond the Trump/Kennedy regime.
Soon, Americans will face a stark choice: abandon compromised federal public health institutions for more reliable sources; or, cling to RFK-corrupted public health agencies, out of habit or fatigue. If the latter happens, pseudoscience and crackpot theories will have become normalized. The consequences will not be theoretical. They will be viral and bacterial: a resurgence of dangerous infectious diseases.
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