Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were still reeling from a recent deadly shooting at its Atlanta headquarters when conditions within the agency deteriorated further. Team Trump ousted Susan Monarez as the CDC’s director after less than a month on the job, sparking a series of resignations from many of the agency’s most respected leaders.
A day later, as MSNBC’s Brandy Zadrozny reported, hundreds of employees and CDC supporters lined the sidewalks outside the agency’s Atlanta headquarters for a “clap out” rally to honor the senior leaders who resigned in protest.
And now Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who technically oversees the CDC under the umbrella of the Department of Health and Human Services, is giving the public new reason to question his judgment and competence.
The morning after Monarez’s firing, RFK Jr. appeared on Fox News and boasted that he could diagnose children with “mitochondrial challenges” by walking past them at a distance in airports. (Kennedy has no professional background in medicine or science.)
Dr. Kathleen Bachynski, a professor of public health at Muhlenberg College, described Kennedy’s comments as “absolute gibberish” and slammed the HHS secretary as a “dangerous buffoon” who is “threatening us all.” Dr. Ashish Jha, dean at Brown University School of Public Health, added, “This is wacky, flat-earth, voodoo stuff.”
In case that weren’t quite enough, Kennedy went on to condemn the CDC’s “priorities.” USA Today reported:
Kennedy, whose views on vaccines are at odds with the overwhelming majority of doctors, then went on rail against what the agency website lists as the 10 greatest advances in medicine, including vaccines. ‘One of them is abortion. Another is fluoridation and another is vaccines,’ he said. ‘So we need to look at the priorities of the agency. If there’s really a deeply, deeply embedded, I would say, malaise at the agency.’
Right off the bat, it’s worth emphasizing that vaccines really are one of the greatest advances in medicine in human history, and it’s not all surprising that CDC would acknowledge this unambiguous fact in a top 10 list.
As for the rest of the CDC’s list on historic advances in medicine, Kennedy was also factually wrong: The list references family planning, but not “abortion.”
RFK this morning complained about the list the CDC had put together on the top 10 advances in medical science. He argued it included abortion (it doesn't) and, gasp, fluoridation and vaccinations. Here's the apparent list pic.twitter.com/qZg8ytRtqJ But just as notable is the secretary’s conclusion that it’d be a good idea to publicly slam the agency in the first place, making the broader CDC crisis worse, not better. A growing number of Democratic senators spent Thursday calling for Kennedy’s resignation — Georgia’s Jon Ossoff called the anti-science conspiracy theorist a “quack” — and on Friday morning, they were joined by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “Donald Trump knew Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would be a disastrous pick to lead health care in America and he nominated him anyway. Donald Trump made this mistake and now he must fire RFK Jr. immediately,” the New York Democrat said in a written statement. “RFK Jr.’s stubborn, pigheaded, and conspiracy-based attacks on proven science are going to make many more people sick and cause more deaths. Americans are in greater danger every day Robert Kennedy Jr. remains as HHS Secretary. “By keeping Robert Kennedy in charge of HHS, Trump is doubling down on his own failure. President Trump must admit his mistake and remove Kennedy now.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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