It would be one thing, and an accurate one, to say Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is going to get people killed.
But he’s better understood as a wannabe slow-motion serial killer.
The man Donald Trump put in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services is not a scientist. He is not a doctor. He is not a researcher. He is an obviously mentally ill former heroin and sex addict who understands medicine, biology, biochemistry, and pharmaceutical research about as well as I understand string theory.
His Department of Death and Human Misery wants cancer to win, people to die of preventable illnesses, and children to suffer and perish from preventable childhood diseases.
Donald Trump handed him control of the vast machinery of American public health anyway.
And Kennedy has imposed an insane, fringe anti-vax ideology on American public health.
This isn’t science. It’s crank philosophy, administered by a crank Cabinet secretary working for a crank president, surrounded by an army of anti-vax conspiracists who spent the COVID years marinating in Facebook epidemiology and convincing themselves they had discovered truths hidden from the world’s doctors, virologists, immunologists, and research scientists by reading posts on 8chan.
The consequences aren’t theoretical anymore.
On mRNA vaccines, Kennedy and the Trump administration are working overtime to cripple one of the most promising technologies in modern medicine.
Last year, Kennedy’s HHS announced it was terminating or restructuring 22 mRNA projects at BARDA worth nearly $500 million and closing the door on new mRNA vaccine investments there.
BARDA, 1the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, isn’t some obscure federal office charged with regulating the font size on aspirin bottles. It exists to make sure America has vaccines, drugs, diagnostics, and medical countermeasures ready before the next pandemic, biological attack, or emerging pathogen starts stacking bodies.
The freakshow loons who decided this are, to put it mildly, not our best.