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President Trump promised me control of the public health agencies

Currently, the election is a toss-up, which means there’s a decent chance that America’s #1 anti-vaccine crank, Robert Kennedy Jr. will head up America’s health agencies next year. In a recent interview with Joe Rogan, Donald Trump said:

I’m gonna let him go wild on health. I’m gonna let him go wild on the food. I’m gonna let him go wild on medicines.

Mr. Kennedy has big plans about what he might do if he’s given the keys to America’s health agencies.  In a video posted this week Mr. Kennedy said:

President Trump promised me control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its other agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH, and a few others, and also the USDA, which you know, is the key to making America healthy.

One thing RFK Jr. did is he would post true stories of children who died immediately after the vaccine.

The idea of Mr. Kennedy staffing the CDC, FDA, and NIH is a scary thought, though not everyone shares my concern. Some doctors are eager to hand control over these agencies to Mr. Kennedy, perhaps hoping he’ll bring them along for the ride. As I discussed previously, several We Want Them Infected (WWTI) doctors, namely Drs. Vinay Prasad, Jay Bhattachara, Marty Makary, and Tracy Hoeg, sanewashed Mr. Kennedy while dunking on vaccine-heroes like Dr. Peter Hotez. These doctors glossed over Mr. Kennedy’s anti-vaxx disinformation, claiming that he was a “free speech” champion, a fighter against chronic disease, and correct about his approach to the pandemic. Here’s an example from this week:

An article titled Dr. Makary on RFK Jr’s Criticism of the ‘Medical Industrial Complex’: Saying Things ‘People Know Are True’ shows how desperate some WWTI doctors were to normalize his anti-vaxx disinformation. That article said:

DR. MARTY MAKARY: [Kennedy Jr.] talked about guilt by association, that sort of modern-day McCarthyism. He’s talked about how asking questions is not allowed. He asked a lot of questions himself. But what’s interesting is people really don’t criticize the details of what he actually said when it came to the COVID pandemic. He‘s been a skeptic, and he may have a different opinion, but he wrote a 500-page book on Dr. Fauci and the medical industrial complex. 100% of it was true. He said that [Biden’s] NIH nominee to direct the NIH … received $200 million from Pfizer for research. 100% true. So he’s saying things that people know are true, but they just don’t want to hear it. 

One thing RFK Jr. did is he would post true stories of children who died immediately after the vaccine. These were otherwise healthy children. Social media didn’t like that. Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, anyone who even associated with him was censored. And in his hearing yesterday, what I really appreciated is when he talked about the so-called toxic polarization of society and how we need to be kind to one another and restore civility. That is a message people are hungry for in the medical community and I think at large.

In reality, Mr. Kennedy does not post “true stories of children who died immediately after the vaccine”, nor does he talk about “how we need to be kind to one another and restore civility.” Mr. Kennedy spreads disinformation and makes threats. Ten days before the 2024 election he said on social media:

Thanks in part to WWTI doctors and their efforts to normalize Mr. Kennedy, it’s entirely possible that this time next year the CDC will be publishing articles like these next year:

I am unabashedly pro-vaccine

If these articles appear on the CDC, WWTI doctors will own some the blame. However, so will the many people who normalized WWTI doctors, treating their views as respectable and worth taking seriously. Indeed, many “respectable” doctors teamed up with Drs. Prasad, Bhattachara, Markary, and Hoeg and sanewashed their misinformation, the same way these doctors sanewashed Mr. Kennedy.

These “respectable” doctors said that WWTI doctors thought “deeply about the currently crisis,” and they excoriated their critics, claiming the most important thing was not to hurt anyone’s feelings. Though they claimed to “love the vaccine” and to be “unabashedly pro-vaccine“, these “respectable” doctors were silent as their partners lavished praise on Mr. Kennedy, and this silence sentence a message- doctors who glorify and partner with Mr. Kennedy are reasonable and trustworthy.

In reality, doctors who do this are not reasonable, and it should not be hard to criticize them. This wouldn’t have been controversial in 2019, and this isn’t just about vaccines. Disinformation agents like Mr. Kennedy purposefully confuse the public, robbing them of their ability to know truth from fiction. Doctors who feel people have the right to be informed about basic facts when it comes to their health, have no problem speaking out against Mr. Kennedy.

If Mr. Kennedy turns the CDC into an anti-vaxx propaganda outlet and measles, pertussis, and chickenpox invariably spike, I am sure these “respectable” doctors will performatively stomp their feet and bemoan the lack of trust in medicine. They’ll blame COVID boosters and mixed messaging on masks. They’ll point the figure at everyone but their collaborators, who told the world Mr. Kennedy was sane and wise.

Hopefully Mr. Kennedy will never gain power. It’s bad enough that it’s a real possibility. However, if it happens, I don’t want to hear a peep out of some doctors. Any doctor who is unabashedly pro-vaccine has already spoken up about the normalization of anti-vaxx quackery within medicine. These “respectable” doctors said nothing, and their silence spoke volumes

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  • Dr. Jonathan Howard is a neurologist and psychiatrist who has been interested in vaccines since long before COVID-19. He is the author of "We Want Them Infected: How the failed quest for herd immunity led doctors to embrace the anti-vaccine movement and blinded Americans to the threat of COVID."

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Posted by Jonathan Howard

Dr. Jonathan Howard is a neurologist and psychiatrist who has been interested in vaccines since long before COVID-19. He is the author of "We Want Them Infected: How the failed quest for herd immunity led doctors to embrace the anti-vaccine movement and blinded Americans to the threat of COVID."

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