Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to be Donald Trump’s well being secretary has been dogged by his lengthy document of anti-vaccine and anti-science statements. Whilst Republicans embrace him as an iconoclast, Democrats and different critics have lambasted Kennedy as a know-nothing with out the scientific or bureaucratic expertise to do the job successfully.
However in portray Kennedy as a clown, these criticisms miss one thing vital. Kennedy has not solely gained a public following for his outlandish claims, he has additionally made some huge cash broadcasting them. And he may stand to make extra from his anti-vaccine campaign as America’s high well being official — the type of brazen self-dealing that’s grow to be all however normalized in Trump’s America.
Because the New York Occasions reported final week, Kennedy has referred potential plaintiffs — individuals who say they’ve been injured by vaccines — to the regulation agency Wisner Baum, which is suing Merck over alleged hurt associated to the HPV vaccine. (He has additionally been concerned in different circumstances for the agency.) Wisner Baum pays Kennedy for these referrals, within the vaccine case and different circumstances: He’s earned greater than $2.5 million over the previous two years, the Occasions reported. When the lawsuit concludes, if the vaccine producer loses, Kennedy will get a monetary reward.
On the Senate Finance Committee’s listening to Wednesday on Kennedy’s nomination, Kennedy refused to say that he would finish the connection with Wisner Baum throughout a line of questioning by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
After affirming Kennedy wouldn’t settle for drug firm cash as well being secretary, Warren requested if Kennedy would likewise commit to not take cash from lawsuits towards drug firms, underneath his association with Wisner Baum.
“You’re making me sound like a shill,” Kennedy replied, earlier than deflecting Warren’s query with an excuse he repeated greater than as soon as: “You’re asking me to not sue drug firms.”
Warren then ran by the varied methods Kennedy may affect the end result of these lawsuits whereas serving as secretary of the US Division of Well being and Human Providers. He may publish anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, she stated, “this time on US authorities letterhead.” He may appoint anti-vaccine scientists to federal vaccine panels and take away vaccines from the federally really useful schedule of childhood vaccines. He may even give FDA information, Warren stated, to the regulation agency that sues the drug firms and compensates him for his or her wins.
Given one other alternative by Warren, Kennedy once more declined to decide to eradicating his monetary stake from the anti-vaccine litigation. As an alternative, a couple of minutes later, he claimed that he had been unfairly maligned as a conspiracy theorist as a result of he opposed highly effective company pursuits — the identical type of misdirection that has fueled his ascent towards the highest of US well being coverage, whereas offering cowl for his precise conflicts of curiosity.
“Nobody must be fooled right here,” Warren stated. “As secretary of HHS, Robert Kennedy may have the facility to undercut vaccines and vaccine manufacturing throughout our nation … Kennedy can kill off entry to vaccines and make hundreds of thousands. Youngsters may die, however Kennedy can hold cashing in.”
Regardless of all this, the Senate seems on observe to approve his nomination, no less than to date. Kennedy will testify on the Senate well being committee on Thursday.
The second Trump time period is shaping as much as be even much less constrained by the outdated norms of excellent governance, which prize the avoidance of any notion {that a} public official may revenue from their function. In that respect, Kennedy is very similar to Trump himself: His risible public statements, designed to attract a spectacle, can distract from any old style corruption taking place behind the scenes.
Over the past 30 years, vaccines have saved the lives of greater than 1.1 million youngsters within the US alone. Over the identical interval, they’ve additionally saved Individuals $540 billion in direct well being care prices and trillions in social prices by stopping diseases like polio and measles.
Kennedy has spent a long time spreading anti-vaccination pseudoscience, and the group he leads, Youngsters’s Well being Protection, has been one of many foremost anti-vaccine advocacy teams within the US and overseas. As a part of his disclosures as a Cupboard nominee, Kennedy reported hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in revenue from e-book offers and talking engagements which have resulted from his public profile, on high of his revenue from Wisner Baum.
There have been critical well being penalties from Kennedy’s anti-vaccine marketing campaign as properly. His assist of an anti-vaccine group in American Samoa helped gasoline a wave of vaccine hesitancy within the island nation; a 2019 measles epidemic killed 83 folks there, most of them youngsters.
Throughout Wednesday’s listening to, when criticized about his involvement by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Kennedy insisted he performed no function within the outbreak and even alleged that lots of the folks had not really died from measles. (The deaths had been reported by the WHO as associated to measles, and measles continues to kill 100,000 folks globally yearly.) He additionally refused to reply a query from Wyden about whether or not measles was a pandemic.
Kennedy has espoused different conspiracy-laden concepts about well being: He says fluoride is “industrial waste” linked to a variety of ailments, and recommended it must be eliminated from all US water methods. He has speculated that gender dysphoria might consequence from herbicide publicity and implied mass shootings are linked to antidepressants.
These views have angered scientists, however additionally they helped gasoline the burgeoning Make America Wholesome Once more motion. There’s now an ecosystem of influencers and firms making an attempt to become profitable by pitching themselves, like Kennedy, as options to the standard pharmaceutical and wellness industries.
In one of many listening to’s extra exceptional moments, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) requested Kennedy about his baseless beliefs in a collection of rapid-fire questions. Bennet pressed Kennedy about his previous claims that Lyme illness was “extremely doubtless” to have been engineered by the navy. “I in all probability did say that,” Kennedy allowed.
Regardless of Kennedy’s lengthy historical past of anti-vaccine rhetoric, he stated earlier than the election and once more on the listening to that he wasn’t planning to take anybody’s vaccines away. “I assist the polio vaccine. I assist the measles vaccine,” he stated in his change with Warren. That is regardless of his lengthy document of public statements disparaging vaccines, together with casting doubt on the need of the measles shot, suggesting the illness could possibly be cured by hen soup as an alternative.
Nonetheless, a co-chair of Trump’s transition staff had stated only a week earlier that Kennedy hoped to entry federal well being information with the objective of proving vaccines are unsafe and pulling them from the US market.
And if, underneath Kennedy, the federal authorities begins to say vaccines are unsafe, that might present the idea for extra vaccine lawsuits — and probably extra revenue for Kennedy. His refusal to say he’d withdraw from that battle of curiosity is telling, and heightens these fears: Warren gave him a simple out to decide to good authorities rules. He refused to take it.
Along with the probabilities Warren floated, there are numerous methods Kennedy may sow doubts about vaccine security: He may resuscitate HHS’s Nationwide Vaccine Program Workplace, which monitored vaccine security with explicit rigor however was shuttered in the course of the first Trump presidency.
As well being secretary, he would additionally oversee the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention (CDC), which is housed underneath HHS. That company has two vital roles in selling vaccines within the US: It convenes an Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to supply professional suggestions on who ought to get which vaccines and at which age, and it administers the Vaccines for Youngsters program, which supplies free vaccines for hundreds of thousands of kids in low-income households.
The advisory committee isn’t mandated by federal regulation — it’s convened solely as a result of the CDC has traditionally wished it to be. A vaccine skeptic appointed to run the CDC may both workers the committee with anti-vaccination activists or dissolve it fully, additional eroding the general public’s religion in vaccines and probably offering extra gasoline to anti-vaccine litigation.
Having a president and HHS secretary so brazenly hostile to the US public well being institution is unprecedented. Already, as vaccination charges nationwide slip, the US is seeing extra outbreaks of measles and different ailments that had beforehand been stamped out by vaccines. Usually, we might count on the nation’s high well being care official to marshal any sources essential to forestall such outbreaks. However Kennedy has a monetary in addition to an ideological stake in denying vaccines’ effectiveness and security. We’re in unprecedented territory.
