RFK Jr. is a dangerous quack

Instead, our french fry-slinging presidential hopeful Donald Trump has, according to Kennedy, “promised” to give him “control” of all of Washington’s public health agencies, “which, you know, is key to making America healthy.”

Kennedy has wiggled his way into the hearts of MAGA by (rightly) opposing the public health establishment’s abuses during COVID — and, of course, by endorsing Trump.

And there’s nothing inherently wrong with Kennedy’s stated goal of encouraging people to be healthy “again.” Though, if he has his way, we’re all going to end up eating tofurkeys with spelt stuffing while praying for the sun to shine so our solar panels will kick in.

The bigger problem is that he is a proven scaremongering authoritarian and dangerous Luddite whose ideas would make life considerably worse for everyone.

The other day, Trump-Vance transition team co-chairman Howard Lutnick explained that Kennedy didn’t want the Department of Health and Human Services job and that he merely wanted access to federal data, allegedly hidden from the public, to prove vaccines were dangerous so we could take “right off, off of the market.’”

Granted, I’m not a scientist, but I suspect assuming what data will tell you isn’t how it’s supposed to be done. But Kennedy doesn’t want Americans to have vaccine choices. He wants to deny them the right to use them.

And after spending an entire “2 1/2 hours” with the man, Lutnick had embraced all his anti-vax nuttery, spreading the pernicious claim that vaccinations are linked to autism, for which there is zero scientific evidence. As proof, Lutnick made the preposterous claim that we “know so many more people” with autism these days as compared to when he was young.

Now, I’m a bit younger than Lutnick, but we grew up in the same area. Surely, he can recall children being called “slow” or “weird” or “off” or far uglier things but never “autistic” or “neurodivergent.” It is highly probable that the spike in autism cases is an epidemic of discovery. There is increased public awareness of how autism presents itself and what it is. Teachers, parents, caretakers, and friends all look out for it. Doctors have better ways of diagnosing it. Millions of people who might never have even known they were autistic have been identified as being on the spectrum.

Basing policy on the childhood recollections of a billionaire doesn’t seem very sciency, either.

Then again, even if there were more cases of autism, there’s still no evidence vaccines are the cause. Lutnick has embraced a false cause fallacy. We do a lot of things today that we didn’t do in the 1960s. Why not blame autism on cellphone use?

Of course, even if Kennedy were correct, banning vaccines to curb autism would entail a disastrous trade-off. The year Lutnick was born, the child mortality rate was 31 per thousand in the United States, and now, it’s seven. A few years before Lutnick was born, the U.S. saw 21,000 cases of paralytic polio. There is none now. Children have been spared all sorts of horrifying diseases like measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and so on. The upside of vaccinations has been a massive boon for humankind.

And make no mistake, Kennedy isn’t just a skeptic of the COVID vax. In 2023, he said there is “no vaccine that is safe and effective.” He claimed that vaccines had sparked an “autism epidemic,” which he abhorrently compared to a “holocaust.”

“I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby, and I say to him, ‘Better not get them vaccinated,’” Kennedy explained recently. Any rational person would ignore some rando on the hiking trail going on about the evils of vaccines. Not, apparently, the Trump campaign.

Most of Kennedy’s tired oeuvre is conspiratorial, unscientific, and “progressive.” “We’re going to reverse childhood chronic disease by taking on the corporations that are poisoning our food,” Kennedy likes to say. “There is nothing more profitable for much of the healthcare system than a sick child,” he argues, as if devious executives are sitting around concocting ways to make your children unhealthy.

The only person poisoning your children is you. There are tons of salubrious options out there if you want them. The market for them is bigger than ever. The organic, non-GMO, healthy food industry is a massive market. The more you buy it, the bigger it will be.

In Kennedy’s world, every unhealthy ingredient is “poison.” But you’re not “poisoning” your child by giving him or her something that tastes good on occasion. Seed oils are not poisonous. Neither are saturated fats. They’re unhealthy. If you want to be healthy, you should avoid them. But using Kennedy’s definition of poison, we would need to ban sugar, enriched flour, and salt. In the past, we would relegate these kinds of people to jobs behind the counter at specialty health food markets or head shops.

More seriously, Kennedy long wanted to destroy modern agriculture, which has not only made food affordable for people but drastically reduced hunger around the world. Kennedy’s case against genetically modified seeds, which thousands of studies have found pose no harm to people, is along the lines of his vaccine hysteria.

Again, if you agree with Kennedy, there are plenty of products for you on the market. Kennedy doesn’t want you to have a choice.  

If it is not Big Ag, it’s Big Pharma, which is a fashionable mark these days. But the fact is that Big Pharma has done more to help mankind in 2024 alone than every Kennedy combined in history. Big Pharma helps alleviate pain, repel disease, and mitigate depression. It allows people to enjoy intimacy longer, to live longer, and to live that life more actively. “Big Pharma” has transformed numerous once-deadly ailments into historical footnotes. And one day, in the not-too-distant future, it may well do so to Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s and lung cancer and autoimmune diseases. Who knows?

Kennedy paranoia is bad enough, but his policy positions are even more concerning. Another plank of his Make America Healthy Again is: “Level the playing field for Americans internationally on drug costs” — more commonly known as “price controls.” Thankfully, in large part, we’ve resisted these kinds of socialistic solutions. Without the possibility of recouping the enormous investment of capital that is plowed into the development of new drugs, on average, somewhere around 10 years and nearly $3 billion, the world would have far fewer lifesaving medicines on the market. This is one of the reasons we dominate the world in pharmaceutical innovation.

Of course, Big Pharma is also a big-money rent-seeking industry that will take advantage whenever it can. The only way Pharma CEOs can compel anyone to take a vaccine is if the state mandates it. Big Pharma doesn’t have guns or jails or courts. Your problem is with the government that allows it, not the people who make medicine.

One of the other planks of RFK’s “Make America Healthy Again” is to censor pharmaceutical ads because he’s the selective champion of the First Amendment. Indeed, his rationalization for denying certain companies the right to speak directly to citizens is exactly the same one people use to censor “disinformation.” He thinks you’re not smart enough to hear it.

It’s not really a surprise, considering Kennedy has accused people who refuse to embrace climate change alarmism as “traitors” and argued that they should face criminal prosecution from a global court.

Don’t forget, either, that the man who argued in 2002 that meat producers were a “greater threat to the United States and U.S. democracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network” praised the environmental benefits of the COVID lockdowns, perhaps the most devastating societal and economic decisions in history, because they would alleviate “lethal air pollution + associated #mortality.” 

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To be fair, Kennedy will also be an old-school conspiracy theorist. He’s promised to get fluoride out of water, suggesting it makes children gay, and put a stop to the crime of “chemtrails.” COVID, he once said, had been genetically engineered as an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon that spared Ashkenazi Jews.

One of the most popular justifications I hear for Kennedy running an agency is that he’s in amazing shape for a 70-year-old man. Seems thin. But it’s true. Kennedy is ripped. Even the young ladies are impressed. Then again, if being in shape was a prerequisite to running massive government agencies, Trump should put Hulk Hogan in charge of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because honestly, he’d probably do a better job.