We are All Lab Rats for RFK Jr.’s Dangerous Ideas

The performance last week by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. before the U.S. Senate Finance Committee confirmed what any thinking person already knows: Kennedy is compromising the health of every American in order to pursue his dangerous ideas about vaccines and basic scientific research.

Kennedy’s firing of Dr. Susan Monarez as the head of the Centers for Disease Control (just one month after he himself had appointed her to that post and her confirmation by the Senate) because Dr. Monarez refused to sign off on the untested and unproven recommendations of Kennedy’s recently-named vaccine panel laid bare Kennedy’s long-held desire to undo decades of public health policies that have made America the world’s model for the eradication of infectious diseases.

In June, Kennedy removed all 17 members of the key independent advisory panel (the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) that makes vaccine recommendations to the government. He quickly replaced the panel with eight new members, most of whom have espoused views that align with Kennedy’s regarding skepticism about the safety and efficacy of vaccines as an essential tool for public health.

In addition, during his short tenure as HHS Secretary, Kennedy has terminated vaccine research projects that use the mRNA technology that produced the COVID-19 vaccines during the first Trump administration that saved millions of lives. These cutbacks not only will threaten to eliminate the use of mRNA vaccines for respiratory diseases, but also will affect the promising research of using mRNA technology for cancer prevention and cures.

Kennedy’s unfitness to be HHS Secretary was obvious from the moment he took office when, during the measles outbreak this past winter in West Texas and New Mexico (the largest in the U.S. in 20 years), he not only downplayed the severity of the outbreak, but also offered the dangerous suggestion that parents give their children high doses of Vitamin A and doc liver oil both as a preventative and as a treatment for a measles infection — and a number of children whose parents took that advice ended up in the hospital with liver damage caused by Vitamin A overdoses.

Ever since the introduction of the Salk polio vaccine in the 1950s (an era when American moms annually canvassed their communities to raise funds for the March of Dimes for polio research), America has been the world’s model — the gold standard — for public health policy. Our universities and hospitals have led the world in biomedical research that has led to breakthroughs in our understanding of diseases ranging from cancer to Alzheimer’s to cardiovascular disease to infectious diseases of all sorts.

However, with Kennedy at the helm of HHS, we now are entering a Dark Ages for scientific research that promises to end America’s pre-eminence in this field — and that inevitably will result in disastrous health outcomes for Americans of all ages.