RFK Jr. tightens his chokehold on the nation's public health

RFK Jr. tightens his chokehold on the nation’s public health
But the demise of American leadership in science didn't begin with him

By Heather Digby Parton
Columnist
Published August 31, 2025 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) The recent purge of several high-level members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent shock waves through the political establishment. And with political shock waves seeming to hit every few hours these days, that’s quite a feat.

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Kennedy is probably the world’s most famous vaccine skeptic, having spent years wallowing in the rabbit hole of dark conspiracy theories. A card-carrying practitioner of the woo-woo wellness movement, he was a known fanatic on this issue when he and Donald Trump apparently struck a backroom deal during the campaign to deliver his followers in exchange for a role in the new administration. Since the woo-woo and wingnut factions of the growing anti-vaccination movement merged in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, that represented a fairly good-sized chunk of voters. Trump needed them, especially since he’d lost credibility with that crowd when he bragged about Operation Warp Speed, which produced and approved COVID vaccines in record time.

It was widely suspected that among Kennedy’s first orders of business would be to do away with vaccines. On Aug. 27, the Food and Drug Administration announced stringent restrictions on this season’s COVID vaccines. Besides limiting the updated shot to adults 65 and older and immunocompromised people, the agency has also cut research funding for the vaccine’s mRNA technology, which has shown tremendous promise for breakthroughs in cancer and other life-threatening diseases. Kennedy has also promised to provide the results of a new study, apparently thrown together in the last couple of months, that will reveal the cause of autism. Considering he recently demanded the retraction of a Danish study that found no correlation between aluminum — a component of vaccines for the last 100 years — and autism, it’s fair to suspect he has miraculously discovered that he was right all along and childhood vaccines are the culprit.

At the heart of Kennedy’s ideology is an apparent belief in eugenics, something he shares with the president, who has extolled the “racehorse theory” and expressed confidence in his own “good German genes.” Kennedy has signaled his own fidelity to eugenics by suggesting recently that people with autism are nonfunctional members of society, a claim that echoes the 1920 essay “Permitting the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life,” which claimed that people with disabilities and mental illness are nothing more than “empty human husks” who “are a terrible, heavy burden upon their relatives and society as a whole.” He and TV Dr. Mehmet Oz, who serves as director of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, declared that “being healthy is your patriotic duty” and suggested that people who get sick or develop a disability are traitors — and probably don’t deserve medical care. .....................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/08/31/rfk-jr-tightens-his-chokehold-on-the-nations-public-health/