Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor, gave a forceful speech on the Senate floor yesterday, saying of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. being secretary of health and human services: “The science is good. The science is credible. Vaccines save lives. They do not cause autism. There are multiple studies that show this.” The outrage is that Kennedy won’t also say those truths and yet the senator had just voted for RFK’s confirmation in committee, violating the Hippocratic Oath that Dr. Cassidy took years ago.

Cassidy should be ashamed, as he knows that Kennedy poses a clear threat to public health.

The thing about holding elected office and political power is that, while it does come with the bully pulpit, the most important part is the exercise of that political power. So Cassidy can talk all day about the dangers of Kennedy’s vaccine views and it won’t matter nearly as much as the weight of a vote to confirm.

Let’s be clear that RFK Jr.’s antipathy towards vaccines is neither measured, new nor incidental. He has had a very long career of vaccine denialism, stretching far further back than his own presidential campaign. The Kennedy scion became chair of the organization that would come to be known as Children’s Health Defense in 2015, helping take it from a relatively minor group to the nation’s main disseminator of vaccine disinformation, particularly around children.

This is all in the public record and is easily verifiable, no matter how many times he says he is not against vaccines. This assertion alone is not a magic phrase that washes away the reality of his long-time efforts. As if to torpedo Kennedy’s attempts at being slippery, just as his nomination was being voted on, President Trump posted on his Truth Social site about rising autism diagnoses in children, referencing the repeatedly disproven theory that there’s a link between vaccinations and autism. “We need BOBBY!!!” the president wrote, dispelling any doubt about what it is that his boss will expect him to do as HHS secretary.

The potential harms are anything but theoretical. That’s a perch from which Kennedy could reorient the federal government’s health infrastructure concretely away from life-saving vaccines, along research, funding, implementation and communication.

As with a lot of this administration’s arson of the functions of the federal government, this is not something that can simply be undone at the stroke of a pen if Trump changes his mind or another president reverses course. Downticks in vaccination rates will mean upticks in communicable disease, which compound over time as viruses mutate and spread to other populations. Any gaps in vaccine research will delay development of the therapeutics, for no reason other than RFK Jr.’s false misgivings.

We understand that there are aspects of Kennedy’s approach that seem to resonate with Cassidy and other GOP senators, including some of his skepticism around the political might of so-called Big Pharma and an affinity for prioritizing healthier habits, but there are plenty of other people who have worked on these issues and have not spent many years trying to undo the gains of humanity’s greatest ever medical achievement. Whatever Kennedy’s bright spots, they don’t outweigh that.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Posts


This will close in 0 seconds