The man no rational person would put in charge of the public’s health Robert Reich Jan 28 Friends, Tomorrow, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will appear before the Senate Finance Committee for the first of two confirmation hearings as Trump’s nominee for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. This is a big deal. Kennedy Jr. is a nutcase and conspiracy theorist with racist tendencies. If confirmed, he’d have sweeping control over 18 agencies critical to the nation’s health, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In his confirmation hearings, keep your eye on these three big issues: Vaccines Kennedy Jr. has assured senators that he doesn’t want to take vaccines away from Americans but just wants to cast more “sunlight” onto the science behind them. But his history of anti-vaccine advocacy has made those promises difficult to believe. Over the past five years, Kennedy Jr. has repeated over 100 times false claims linking vaccines to autism — a theory debunked by decades of scientific research. He has claimed that COVID-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” And that “the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons. They’re collecting Russian DNA. They’re collecting Chinese DNA so we can target people by race.” He was a leading proponent of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, erroneously suggesting the vaccine has killed more people than it has saved. In his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, he alleged, without plausible evidence, that Dr. Fauci performed “genocidal experiments, sabotaged treatments for AIDS, and conspired with Bill Gates to suppress information about COVID-19.” This is libelous nonsense. RFK Jr.’s misinformation about vaccines continues to endanger public health. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination comes as childhood vaccination rates are falling. According to KFF, a nonprofit group that researches health policy issues, less than 93 percent of kindergartners had received all of their state-required vaccines in the 2023-2024 school year, compared with 95 percent in the 2019-2020 school year. The secretary of Health and Human Services also shares with the surgeon general the nation’s highest pulpit for speaking about health care. That means that Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vax bias is likely to deter more parents from getting their children vaccinated. The good news is we’ve largely eliminated these diseases. The bad news is we’ve eliminated the memory of these diseases. So parents are now more prone to worry about the safety of vaccines. Kennedy has opposed vaccine mandates — including those for children to attend schools. He could direct the Center for Disease Control to remove requirements that children receive certain vaccines, and leave the decision up to parents or guardians. He cold also stop shielding manufacturers and providers of COVID vaccines from legal liability — which would spur a tidal wave of litigation over alleged injuries from the shots. Bird flu The H5N1 bird flu virus is ripping across America. As of January 16, an estimated 928 herds of dairy cattle in 16 states have been infected, according to the Agriculture Department. Experts worry that bird flu has the potential to set off another pandemic if it were to mutate to spread easily among people. So far, at least 67 cases have been found in people, mostly farmworkers. One person has died from the virus. There have been no documented instances of human-to-human transmission of bird flu in the United States, at least so far. Kennedy Jr. would oversee the CDC, which has managed much of the outbreak and tracked the risk to humans, as well as the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, an agency responsible for managing the nation’s stockpile of flu vaccines, which currently includes two bird flu vaccine candidates. He’d also have authority over the FDA, which would need to authorize the vaccines before they could be used in people. Given his anti-vax advocacy, there is no reason to trust his judgment on any of this. Public health insurance If confirmed, Kennedy Jr. would also oversee Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act. Taken together, these three programs provide health insurance to more than half the American population. Many Republicans in Congress want to let expire the subsidies that make Obamacare premiums more affordable. They have also expressed interest in imposing work requirements for Medicaid eligibility. Trump’s nominee to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Dr. Mehmet Oz, has previously expressed support for privatizing Medicare. We don’t know Kennedy Jr.’s views on any of this, but I’m wary. The bigger picture Kennedy Jr. is not just a nutcase. He’s also a designated hitter in the oligarchy’s efforts to get government out of public health — and force Americans to rely instead on private for-profit corporations for their health insurance, hospitalization, vaccines, and pharmaceuticals. These corporations continue to merge into giant for-profit monopolies and oligopolies. Recall that Kennedy Jr.’s candidacy for president was supported by billionaire Timothy Mellon — grandson of Andrew Mellon and an heir to the Mellon banking fortune — who donated $15 million to Kennedy Jr.’s SuperPAC. (Mellon was also a major donor to PACs supporting Trump.) Friends, I knew and worked for Robert F. Kennedy. Robert F. Kennedy Junior is no Robert F. Kennedy. Robert F. Kennedy was passionately committed to social justice. He would never have suggested that a deadly virus was targeted at certain races. In 1962, when Robert F. Kennedy was President John F. Kennedy’s attorney general, JFK signed the Vaccination Assistance Act in order to, in the words of a CDC report, “achieve as quickly as possible the protection of the population, especially of all preschool children … through intensive immunization activity.” The Senate should reject RFK Jr.’s nomination to be secretary of Health and Human Services.