Elections have consequences, and at this moment, we are all experiencing the consequences of half the electorate investing in all of Donald Trump’s hogwash. And in buying into Trump’s nonsense, MAGA made a collateral investment in Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man so mentally ill that throughout 2024 the entire Kennedy family screamed from the sidelines that he was unfit to hold public office or public trust.
This is of a piece with the rest of the Trump phenomenon: In 2017, 27 of the most respected psychiatrists in America wrote an entire book about Trump’s mental illness and unfitness for office (“The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”). Half the electorate was impervious to that information, as well.
As it turns out, half the electorate’s spontaneous immunity to facts and evidence may be of benefit to them now, because they may need to develop spontaneous immunity to disease. Spontaneous immunity will come in handy, because Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our current secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), does not believe in modern medicine.
Just as Donald Trump is the anti-democracy president, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the anti-science HHS director. The same guy who claims that his heroin addiction helped him to succeed in school; who says there is nothing wrong with his brain even though it was eaten by a worm; who insists that there is nothing wrong with his worm-eaten brain even though it was also bathed in mercury poisoning from consuming too much tuna; who thinks that it is perfectly natural to decapitate a dead whale and bring its head home strapped to the roof of a car; and who finds it hilariously funny to dump the carcass of a dead bear in Central Park and then stage it as some sort of weird bicycle accident. That guy is now responsible for your health and the health of your children.
This is a man so nutty that he should be supervised by a mental health professional. Instead, he is running public health in America, and by “running public health,” I mean “running public health into the ground.”
For more than 20 years, RFK Jr. has vigorously promoted the ridiculous and dangerous lie that childhood vaccines cause autism. They do not. His assertion is based entirely on the work of one charlatan whose theory was debunked over and over again by respected medical researchers, none of whose numerous peer-reviewed studies have ever established a link between vaccines and autism. Yet RFK Jr. is now utilizing our tax dollars not to rehire the National Institute of Health-funded virologists or the cancer researchers fired by Elon and the Musketeers, nor to restore funding that was yanked away from HIV and AIDS research or the rural health clinics that provide basic medical care to Trump’s MAGA loyalists, but to hire, instead, another quack to “prove” that childhood vaccines cause autism.
The man charged with Making America Healthy Again (its acronym, MAHA, sounds like the sort of evil laugh that would echo from within a haunted house—”Ma-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”) has vigorously embraced the following misinformation:
- That vaccines are harmful to the vaccinated (they are not);
- That the fluoride in our drinking water is hazardous to your health (it is not—it just prevents your teeth from rotting);
- That Ivermectin (a horse deworming medication) was an effective treatment for COVID (it was not);
- That COVID was lab-engineered to attack Black people and Caucasians, but to spare the Jews and Chinese (exactly how much of his brain did that worm eat?);
- That raw milk is healthier than pasteurized milk (raw milk carries foodborne illnesses such as E. coli, Salmonella, and Listeria);
- That wireless phones cause cancer and “cellphone tumors” (what?) and that, somehow, 5G networks cause the blood-brain barrier to decompose (OMG, stop!);
- That HIV doesn’t cause AIDS (it certainly does, you dangerous loon).
Thanks to Mr. Kennedy’s decades-long vaccine disinformation campaign, we are now seeing the first measles deaths in this country in a decade. Two children have perished, needlessly, in the Texas Mennonite community, because of their parents’ anti-vaccination stance. RFK Jr. flew to Texas recently for the funeral of one of those children and used the occasion to promote ineffective—and potentially dangerous—junk remedies (Cod liver oil cures measles! Vitamin C cures measles! Asthma medication cures measles! Vitamin A cures measles!).
Good grief.
I will now tell you what Mr. MAHA will not: Vaccines are safe and effective. They do not cause autism. A relatively small number of people are allergic to vaccines—mostly people who have egg allergies. Vaccines do not contain live viruses. Getting a flu shot will not give you the flu, nor will a COVID shot give you COVID. You might feel a little achy or droopy the next day, but you will not have the disease for which you have been vaccinated. Vaccines prevent you from dying of serious illness.
Because of vaccines, your children do not have polio. Because of vaccines, your children do not have smallpox. Because of vaccines, your children need not die of measles, or COVID, or flu. RFK Jr. is a public health menace—his form of health guidance increases the likelihood that you and your children will die of entirely preventable illness.
I was recently advised, as a member of a senior community, to get a second COVID booster this year. I made a vaccination appointment immediately, because all evidence suggests that a vaccination will dramatically reduce the likelihood of hospitalization or death if I am infected. So off I went to my local pharmacy for my second dose of the current vaccine, assuming that the process would be identical to every other time I have gone for my annual vaccinations. I allotted 20 minutes for the entire experience.
I could not have been more wrong. I failed to consider that there is a new HHS director in town, and he wants to create barriers to my continued good health by forcing me to complete pages of paperwork that I have never had to complete before. A particularly annoying and time-consuming part of the paperwork (after answering 2,000 questions: “Are you pregnant?” “Have you ever smoked a cigarette?” “Do you have a family history of…?”) were the pages and pages of vaccine “warnings” that I was required to read in their entirety and sign prior to vaccination. It took over an hour to get through all of it.
On every other occasion that I have gone for a COVID booster, all I needed to provide was my name, address, and date of birth. My pharmacy already had all of my health history in their system, as they still do. They asked me if I had any vaccine allergies and whether I had experienced any symptoms of COVID during the past 10 days, and that was it. Up rolled the sleeve, out came the needle, and presto!
Those days are now gone. Mr. MAHA and President Mump are in the process of making America so much greater, and so much healthier, that it will be a miracle if any of us survive.
