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“The idea of Kennedy’s running health programs is particularly worrisome because the administration may not have much medical guidance. The White House science adviser isn’t actually a scientist. Trump is pulling out of the World Health Organization, whose global flu surveillance network helps develop flu vaccines, and the administration even directed employees from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention not to email contacts at the World Health Organization.

Kennedy has good ideas about promoting healthy school lunches and discouraging ultraprocessed foods. He’s right to ask questions about why there are increases in obesity, diabetes and autism (many scientists suspect that one factor may be environmental toxins such as endocrine disruptors). But Kennedy’s passion for many years has been hostility to vaccines, bundled in certitude and nastiness.

This is not simply a quest for vaccine safety, as Kennedy tries to suggest. It is a misguided and dangerous campaign to undermine confidence in vaccines. A woman dies every two hours in the United States from cervical cancer, which is almost entirely preventable with HPV vaccinations — yet Kennedy has backed a lawsuit against the maker of the vaccine.

The problems go beyond vaccines, of course. Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist who says he doesn’t “take sides” in the “debates” about who was behind 9/11, who argues that AIDS may not be caused by H.I.V., who suggested darkly that Covid-19 was engineered to spare Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews, who claimed that Lyme disease is likely a military bioweapon. Some of this is bigotry; all of it is nonsense.“


Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/opinion/rfk-kennedy-vaccines.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare