Vax quack lacks facts

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services secretary, speaks during a news conference in Washington, April 16, 2025. The White House and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were engaged in a tense standoff last week, after Kennedy tried to fire the director, Susan Monarez, and multiple high-ranking agency officials resigned. (Pete Kiehart/The New York Times)

By MAUREEN DOWD

I almost died of rubella when I was 3.

I was very weak and wouldn’t eat. My mother was frantic. The doctor prescribed mashed lima beans and I pulled through.

I still keep lima beans in the freezer.

It’s infuriating to see Bobby Kennedy Jr. be so benighted about vaccines, risking the health of all Americans. How can the most powerful country on earth sow the seeds to make people sick again with preventable, even once-eliminated diseases?

Between school shooters and RFK Jr., children in America are vulnerable in ways they don’t have to be. Officials are endangering children instead of shielding them.

The boneheaded vaccine debate has inflamed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is reeling from mass layoffs and a deadly shooting by an anti-vaxxer at its headquarters.

Kennedy tried to fire the director, Susan Monarez, then called in President Donald Trump to finish her off after she refused to go along with his dictum to back his advisers if they recommended restricting access to proven vaccines. Other officials quit, leaving the health agency in crisis, just as Winter Is Coming.

The administration put out the most restrictive policy yet on the new COVID vaccines, with more constraints likely, given that Kennedy has stacked the CDC advisory committee with vaccine skeptics and outright anti-vaxxers.

When I was growing up, vaccines were the great American success story. It felt momentous when my father picked up my sister and me to go get polio shots.

My father helped guard FDR at baseball games and other events. He saw FDR’s braces, a result of polio, and saw the elaborate lengths the White House went to camouflage the paralysis in the president’s lower body.

My family was grateful to be in the age of scientific achievement — from vaccine shots to moon shots. My mother would tell us harrowing tales of how her little sister, Mary, died in 1918 from the Spanish flu.

Trump and Kennedy are yanking us back to those dark times.

This month, Kennedy canceled nearly $500 million in grants and contracts for developing mRNA vaccines, the best chance against a future pandemic. That followed the cancellation of a $600 million contract to develop a vaccine for bird flu.

In March, as measles spread in Texas, Kennedy went on Fox News and promoted vitamin A and cod liver oil containing it as “dramatically” effective remedies. Some unvaccinated children took so much vitamin A, they showed signs of liver damage.

In 2019, Kennedy went to Samoa and claimed, falsely, that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine had contributed to the deaths of two Samoan infants. That helped spark a measles outbreak that killed 83 there and infected 500 in Tonga.

On Wednesday, Kennedy was acting bizarre, saying he can tell as he walks past children if they are dealing with “mitochondrial challenges” or “inflammation.”

He has no medical degree. Can he mysteriously divine illnesses just by looking?

Our health secretary is a certified quack. But the president, who is letting Kennedy run wild, knows better. Trump got seriously ill from COVID and was saved by the doctors at Walter Reed, who gave him antibody treatments and remdesivir — not the remedy he once suggested people consider: bleach. His greatest triumph — and a stirring example of American scientific chops — was Operation Warp Speed, a push to develop a COVID vaccine in less than a year, saving many lives and springing us from our awful sequestration.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Trump told top donors that he wished he could brag about Operation Warp Speed. But he can’t offend MAHA (the ironically named Make America Healthy Again movement). He can’t push his greatest accomplishment because of the willful ignorance of some of his supporters.

Why does this notorious germaphobe play lickspittle to debunkers of science?

Disgusted with Monarez’s dismissal and the way Kennedy places ideology over science, four top officials resigned. One of them, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told The Journal and CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Kennedy had not even bothered to be briefed by the center’s specialists on COVID and measles.

“Yes, he’s getting information from somewhere,” Daskalakis told Collins, “but that information is not coming from CDC experts who really are the world’s experts in this area.”

Republicans failed miserably in not blocking Kennedy’s nomination. Sen. Bill Cassidy, the gastroenterologist who cast the deciding vote on Trump’s snake-oil health secretary, said Wednesday that the chaos at CDC would require oversight by Congress.

To which I reply: Physician, heal thyself. You were too craven to vote against someone you knew would decimate our health system because you wanted to hang onto your seat. You swapped the Hippocratic oath for the Hypocritic oath.

Asked about the CDC meltdown Friday, Trump’s creepy consigliere Stephen Miller told reporters that Kennedy is “a crown jewel of this administration.”

Crown crank, more like.