I will leave it to others to comment on the nature of other Trump nominations but must try to convince you that Robert Kennedy Jr. is uniquely unfit to be the head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Not all his ideas are bad. His campaign against ultra-processed foods and food additives could benefit the U.S. population if they withstand the onslaught of opposition from the food industry. It would also be better if the revolving door between industry and regulatory agencies could be shut, as he has proposed.
Unfortunately, his rabid anti-vaccination stand by itself should disqualify him from a position overseeing the nation’s health.
Vaccines, along with clean water supplies, have done more to save lives than almost any advance in history.
I am old enough to remember the scourge of polio. Almost every summer the city of Montreal would shut public swimming pools because of polio outbreaks. In the mid-20th century, over half a million people world-wide died or were left paralyzed by polio. The best care available was the iron-lung, which took over for paralyzed respiratory muscles.
The Salk inactivated polio vaccine was released in 1955, and in 2 years, U.S. cases of polio fell from 58,000/year to 5,600. By 1961, that number was 161.
The Sabin oral polio vaccine soon followed, and the ease of giving an oral rather than an injected vaccine led to mass administration around the world. By 2021, only two cases of polio were reported world-wide.
Measles, too, sickened and killed millions before the 1963 introduction of an effective vaccine. Prior to vaccination, there were over 100 million cases and 6,000,000 deaths world-wide. In the U.S. there were some 4,000,000 cases and 450 deaths annually, along with over 1000 left brain-damaged.
Andrew Wakefield, in Britain, published two studies in 1998 and 2002 claiming that the MMR vaccine caused autism. Both studies have been withdrawn by the publishers, citing fraud, and numerous studies since then have shown no association of vaccination and autism.
Celebrities with no scientific background have continued to push this discredited idea, leaving some parents hesitant to vaccinate their children. The result has been a series of measles outbreaks across the U.S.
Even though most decisions about mandatory childhood vaccination are made at the state level, having a vaccine skeptic as head of the nation’s health agencies will only lead to more parents opting out and more children needlessly sick or dead.
Kennedy has also jumped to support therapies such as ivermectin for COVID, despite very solid studies showing that no dose of the drug did any good and, in some cases, did harm.
If you agree to the severity of this, please write to your senators immediately and beg them to reject this candidate as Secretary of HHS.
Edward Hoffer MD is Associate Professor of Medicine, part-time, at Harvard.
What Does The Doctor Say?
By Dr. Edward Hoffer