Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who currently leads the Department of Health and Human Services, is apparently under the impression that he’s doing excellent work. In fact, this week, the conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist boasted that his response to a measles outbreak should be seen as a “model for the rest of the world.”
As a report in The Guardian noted, the comments came “after Kennedy attended the funeral of a third measles victim over the weekend.”
If RFK Jr. meant that international observers should look to his example as how not to respond to a burgeoning public health threat, then yes, it’s fair to say his work deserves to be recognized as a “model for the rest of the world.” But I’m reasonably sure that’s not what he meant.
Either way, Kennedy’s overlapping failures continue to pile up. NBC News reported:
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called for people to get the measles vaccine while in the same breath falsely claiming it hasn’t been ‘safety tested’ and its protection is short-lived. … In an interview Wednesday with CBS News, Kennedy said the Trump administration was focused on finding ways to treat people who choose not to get vaccinated.
Kennedy’s on-camera comments were dangerously ridiculous. He talked about treating measles — despite the fact that there are no approved treatments for measles — before claiming that measles cases are inevitable because the vaccine “wanes very quickly,” which is the opposite of what science tells us.
This coincided with Kennedy downplaying the efficacy of measles vaccines (which was needlessly reckless), describing autism as “an epidemic“ (which isn’t true), insisting that autism is caused by “an environmental toxin“ (which also isn’t true) and dismissing scientific research on autism as “invalid“ (which is bonkers).
All of this was from a single afternoon, which was part of a busy week for the Cabinet secretary.
Within the last seven days, the public has learned that more top vaccine regulators at the Food and Drug Administration have either left or been forced out following the resignation of Dr. Peter Marks, the FDA’s top vaccine official, who opposed Kennedy’s “misinformation and lies” about vaccine safety.
That coincided with his new efforts to target fluoride in drinking water.
We’ve also seen RFK Jr. disseminate discredited misinformation, pointing to nonsensical and ineffective “cures” for measles patients. We’ve seen him appear completely ignorant about major developments at the agency he ostensibly leads. We’ve seen reports that Kennedy met with the families of two girls who died from measles in West Texas, where he reportedly said to one grieving family member, “You don’t know what’s in the vaccine anymore.” In case this weren’t quite enough, Kennedy also said he’d rehire many of the key officials from his department that he’d recently fired, though Politico reported soon after, “Turns out, it wasn’t the plan at all. HHS has no intention of reinstating any significant number of the staffers fired as part of a mass reduction-in-force on Tuesday, despite Kennedy’s assertion that some had been mistakenly cut.” Remember, all of these developments have unfolded over the last seven days. As unsettling as the news has been, none of it is surprising. RFK Jr.’s anti-science reputation was well established long before Donald Trump nominated him. That an unqualified, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist is behaving like an unqualified, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist is painfully predictable. The fact remains, however, that 52 Senate Republicans were given an opportunity to protect Americans from Kennedy and they failed spectacularly.
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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