Pick of RFK Jr. for Cabinet is a war on science and medicine

Several of Donald Trump’s cabinet nominations — even aside from former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who has now withdrawn his name from consideration as attorney general — have been met with widespread bewilderment and shock because of the nominee's personal history, erratic views, or both. This is certainly true of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominated for secretary of health and human services — a position for which the maverick Kennedy scion is not only unfit but, in a very literal sense, dangerously unfit.

Never mind bizarre episodes like hauling a dead bear cub found by the roadside to Central Park and staging a bicycle hit-and-run. The real problem is that Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat who ended his own presidential quest earlier this year and campaigned for Trump, is an anti-vaccination activist and a pusher of medical (and other) conspiracy theories.

Kennedy, a former environmental lawyer, first waded into the medical quackery field when he published two articles nearly 20 years ago about the supposed connection between childhood vaccination and autism. The articles caused a storm of criticism, since the studies by a British researcher claiming such a connection were already regarded as dubious; a few years later, they were exposed as fraudulent. But Kennedy has continued to endorse the discredited theory.

While Kennedy has sometimes claimed that he’s not anti-vaccine but simply pro-safe vaccines, that’s a dodge, since he explicitly stated on a podcast last year that there is "no vaccine that is both safe and effective." He even asserted that the polio vaccine has taken more lives than it has saved by causing deadly cancers.

This is, in plain language, bonkers. And Kennedy has made plenty of other crazy claims over the years — for instance, that HIV may not be the cause of AIDS, or that the coronavirus may have been designed to ethnically target white and Black people while sparing Jews and the Chinese.

Several partial defenses of the nominee have pointed out that not all of his ideas are crazy: While his opposition to water fluoridation has been widely ridiculed, many European countries and some major cities in the United States do not fluoridate water. His belief in the importance of obesity prevention is widely shared by mainstream medical authorities. But when we’re talking about placing someone at the head of the department that oversees all health- and medicine-related federal agencies in the U.S., one major crazy idea is bad enough.

Even in his role as an activist, Kennedy helped cause the deaths of more than 80 people, most of them children, in the Pacific Island nation of Samoa where he boosted local anti-vaccination activism after the deaths of two infants due to improperly administered measles shots. A major drop in vaccination followed; a measles outbreak was the predictable result.

As head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Kennedy would not be able to ban vaccines outright. But he could impede vaccination efforts by demanding reviews of various vaccines’ approval, and he could certainly use his post to peddle vaccine skepticism to parents. He could also promote bogus research to boost various quack remedies. Not long ago, he proposed an eight-year "break" in drug development and infectious disease research to study chronic illness.

The Kennedy nomination is, no doubt, not only a reward for a political ally but part of Trump’s war on the "establishment." In this case, it would also be a war on medicine and scientific research.

Opinions expressed by Cathy Young, a writer for The Bulwark, are her own.

By Cathy Young

Cathy Young is a writer for The Bulwark.