In the blink of an eye, I went from a healthy 41-year-old to having the immune system of a newborn. I was told that the sudden sharp pain in my back that I took to be a kidney stone was, instead, a symptom of acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive blood cancer. Within days, I began rounds of chemotherapy, followed by more blood and plasma transfusions than I could count, and months in and out of the hospital. Then came a lifesaving stem cell transplant from an amazing 27-year-old stranger, now my angel, from the stem cell donor registry. Her generous gift, the reason I encourage people to join the donor registry, gave me a new immune system — but not until my medical team had wiped out the old one. As if it were possible, the stem cell transplant was even more brutal than the initial rounds of treatment.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s wrongly questioned the safety and efficacy of vaccines, is one of my biggest worries.
But I still wasn’t out of the woods. For the first 100 days, I was required to stay close to the hospital, carefully cook and clean everything I ate, and stay away from crowds because any infection or illness could be deadly. A week after my release, the BK virus, a small urinary infection that most healthy people don’t even know they have, sent me back into the hospital.
To say I have been to hell and back again would be an understatement. I was lucky enough to make it through. Now, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s wrongly questioned the safety and efficacy of vaccines and who recently decided that Covid vaccines shouldn’t be readily accessible to everyone, is one of my biggest worries. As I’ve been rushing to be re-vaccinated against all the illnesses I was vaccinated against as a child (and getting a chickenpox vaccine that wasn’t available when I was a kid), Kennedy has been seemingly moving just as fast to upend our country’s vaccine infrastructure and making it harder for people who want vaccines to get them.
As someone who is immunocompromised, I’m on the list of people Kennedy concedes ought to be allowed to get a Covid vaccine. But he shouldn’t be trying to stop anyone who wants the shot from getting it. In fact, he ought to be encouraging it for the general public.
Because fewer people around me will have an opportunity to be vaccinated against the latest strain of Covid, the possibility of me catching Covid — again — goes up. I say “again” because despite my best efforts to avoid it, I caught Covid about a month after I’d received the vaccine. Though I spent my birthday sleeping 24 hours straight, I didn’t die or wind up in the hospital. I was shocked to learn that Paxlovid cost nearly $700 even with insurance.
None of Kennedy’s policies seem to keep in mind the American public, especially people like me. Kennedy wrote an op-ed Tuesday for The Wall Street Journal with the headline “We’re Restoring Public Trust in the CDC,” but the voices of the trusted scientists and doctors who resigned from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention last week (and the voices of those who staged a mass walkout) speak louder. Kennedy is not making Americans safer. He is putting more of us in danger. Nowhere in that op-ed does he talk about strengthening the country’s vaccination program. In fact, he’s only cut it.
President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, which resulted in a quick rollout of Covid vaccines, is a big part of what got us out of the Covid pandemic. And, historically, vaccines have eradicated or lessened the threat of many diseases that had the potential to kill us. But rather than acknowledge that, Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration have pilloried vaccines.
Thankfully, it’s now two years since my transplant. I’ve managed to stay in remission, but life is not quite back to normal for me yet. And the current political climate doesn’t make life easy. Even when I was bald and looked like I had cancer, people weren’t afraid to tell me what they thought about my mask. Now that I look healthier and have hair, of course the rude comments persist.
My immune system still does not bounce back the way it used to. And I know that not just cancer patients like me, but also elderly people and people with autoimmune diseases face the same risks. With Kennedy leading HHS, I worry about the medical discoveries we might miss out on. Covid vaccines, in the eyes of the government, are now deemed safe enough for the most vulnerable, but not safe enough for the healthy. Meaning they may no longer be as accessible or affordable for family members who have high risk individuals in their households. Teachers who work in schools with children or those who work with the elderly and sick. And while Covid infections are not as deadly as they used to be, it’s been found that every infection raises a person’s risk of long-term effects. Cancer rates are on the rise in younger adults like me. With Kennedy leading HHS, I worry about the possible medical discoveries we might miss out on. Just more than a decade ago, my diagnosis would have been a death sentence. But because of the leaps and bounds that have been made in stem cell research, my particular mutation now responds well to transplants. Though the hard work of doctors and scientists led to my recovery, I grow more apprehensive by the day feeling that our government’s top health organization is no longer being driven by science, but by politics. Our doctors take an oath to do no harm. It’s time for our politicians to do the same.
Kelly Betts
Kelly Betts is a producer for “Ana Cabrera Reports” on MSNBC. 
