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Entering Our Crank Era
The Trump administration will be defined by people who refuse to trust empirical reality. RFK Jr. will be its avatar.
William Kristol
and
Andrew Egger
Nov 20, 2024
The TV-guy administration grows: Yesterday, Donald Trump tapped Dr. Mehmet Oz as his administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “Dr. Oz will work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake,” Trump said in a statement.
We can only assume the next tranche of nominees will include Pat Sajak, Maury Povich, and Stephen A. Smith. Happy Wednesday.
(Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images.)
Brain Worms in Control
by Andrew Egger
If you spent any time online in 2020 (a big year for being online!), you likely encountered the “plandemic”—the dark conspiracy theory that the coronavirus that brought the world to its knees had been deliberately unleashed by sinister elites to enrich themselves and increase their power over the masses via an eventual vaccine. The theory was huge among online conspiracy theorists, Facebook-addled MAGA boomers, and future nominees to run the Department of Health and Human Services.
Yesterday, Sam Stein and I 1 unearthed a previously unreported video of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. playing footsie with the theory in August 2020:
Many people argue that this pandemic was a “plandemic,” that it was planned from the outset, it’s part of a sinister scheme. I can’t tell you the answer to that. I don’t have enough evidence. A lot of it feels very planned to me. I don’t know. I will tell you this: If you create these mechanisms for control, they become weapons of obedience for authoritarian regimes no matter how beneficial or innocent the people who created them.
Kennedy went on to call public health efforts against the pandemic “a pharmaceutical-driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare.”
We uncovered plenty more wild remarks from Kennedy; read the whole thing to learn all you could hope to know of his belief that government measures to keep Americans safe were actually CIA interrogation techniques to break our collective spirit. I’ll just add a couple additional points.
The first is that Trump’s nomination of an out-and-out crank to run HHS is the strongest proof yet that the president-elect truly learned nothing from his experience quarterbacking the federal pandemic response.
The early and deep politicization and polarization that met that response was a tragedy. It caused many Americans to roll their eyes at critical information from pandemic experts, to fail to take lifesaving precautions like masking and social distancing, and ultimately even to reject COVID vaccination. It resulted in an untold increase in pandemic disease and death.
Trump wasn’t wholly responsible for that politicization. But his latent distrust of expertise led him to whiplash between showing support for his own government’s response and bursts of truly irresponsible punditry, heightening public confusion and a sense of chaos that added oxygen to conspiratorial thinking. The lesson he apparently took away from was that we’d be best served by a truly conspiracy-brained kook helming the federal health apparatus in the future.
The second is simply this: Pandemic or no pandemic, putting Kennedy at the helm of HHS will matter. Such is the case when you entrust a guy to run our health agencies who has organized his entire worldview around the hunch that scientific and medical subject-matter experts can never be trusted.
While we were reporting the piece, I spoke with Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and virologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. When it comes to public health, Offit is an American hero: He is the coinventor of the pediatric rotavirus vaccine, and he serves on the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee. He’s also no reflexive Trump hater. But when I asked him about RFK Jr., he didn’t hold back: “He’s like the anti-science secretary. . . . I think anybody who hears what he says should realize you shouldn’t have a science denialist heading agencies that are based on science.”
As HHS secretary, Offit said, Kennedy would be able to do substantial damage very quickly. He could dissolve HHS’s advisory committees, which give the department an enviable reservoir of public health knowledge. He could grind the approval of new state-of-the-art treatments to a standstill and even revoke approvals from treatments and vaccines already on the market. He could work to expose vaccine manufacturers to additional frivolous legislation. Much of this, we should note, Kennedy is on record supporting.
And that’s to say nothing of the messaging harm he would continue to do, with all the authority of the federal government behind him. “I’ve had emails from pediatricians just in the last week or so saying, you know, ‘I’ve had new parents come in and tell me they don’t want any vaccine because of what he has said,’” Offit relayed.
To Offit, this was the most discouraging thing:
In my lifetime, I got to watch the elimination of polio, a disease that caused 20 to 30,000 children to become paralyzed and 1,500 to die every year. In my medical lifetime I’ve gotten to watch the virtual elimination of a bacteria called Haemophilus influenzae B, which accounted for 20 to 25,000 cases of meningitis and bloodstream infections every year in this country. It dominated my pediatric residency in the late ’70s—I mean, we’d see a kid come in, a child come in every week with severe meningitis caused by that bacteria. Gone! Most pediatricians in our hospital don’t see that. Have never seen it. Rotavirus—I mean, that was our vaccine, I’m coinventor of that vaccine—that caused 75,000 hospitalizations a year. I don’t think pediatric residents have ever seen a case, currently in our hospital, of rotavirus-induced severe disease, the dehydration.
So, you know, vaccines work. When we make recommendations to give them, we lessen or in some cases eliminate diseases. So what is the problem we’re trying to fix?
Entering Our Crank Era |
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