Don’t Be Fooled: RFK Jr. Is Still Talking Down VaccinesIt’s part of a much bigger blow to American health care that will reverberate for decades.
THREE PEOPLE HAVE DIED in Texas and more than five hundred have gotten sick in what is shaping up as the largest single measles outbreak in decades. And somehow Robert F. Kennedy Jr. still hasn’t provided a firm, unambiguous endorsement of vaccination, although you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise in light of the publicity around an interview he had with CBS News last week. The interview aired on Wednesday, after Kennedy had met with the families of two Texas girls who recently died from the disease. The online version carried the headline “RFK Jr. says people should get the measles vaccine,” and if you happened to be on social media at the time (like I was) then some version of it probably popped onto your feeds. It certainly seemed like a big deal, because up to that point Kennedy had given only tepid, halfhearted endorsements of the vaccine. These were mostly in prepared, written statements—such as his April 6 tweet saying “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine”—so it wasn’t clear if the words were truly his. Now, finally, here was Kennedy in his familiar, raspy voice, lending his full endorsement as health and human services secretary. Except that’s not what he did. If you clicked through and actually watched the full interview, you quickly discovered he was giving his endorsement grudgingly, following repeated prompts from interviewer Dr. Jon LaPook. And when he was eventually unable to avoid answering, Kennedy framed his endorsement as a description of official HHS posture rather than a personal belief. “The federal government’s position, my position, is that people should get the measles vaccine,” he said. Kennedy then proceeded to claim, as he had so many times before, that “we don’t know the risks of many of these products because they’re not safety tested.” That’s not true; vaccines go through extensive safety testing. And in the case of the MMR vaccine, there is now also more than a half-century of widespread clinical use—amounting to a real-world track record of several hundred million doses, giving a very clear safety picture. Kennedy also claimed that a particular type of vaccine, those that target one rather than multiple proteins on a germ, have “never worked” for respiratory disease. That’s also not true; multiple vaccines work that way. All of this was after an extended exchange in which RFK suggested that the second Texas girl who died may have been a victim of some other illness: “She had extreme tonsillectomy . . . she was graph positive for bacteria in her bloodstream.” “All of those are medical words,” Brown University professor Dr. Craig Spencer told me in an interview, referring to Kennedy’s invocation of an “extreme tonsillectomy” (which is not a standard medical term; it’s unclear whether he meant “radical tonsillectomy” or “an extreme case of tonsillitis”) and “graph positive” (the actual term is “Gram positive”). “It doesn’t mean that they actually reflect the reality of the medical case.” The theory that the girl died of something other than measles has been making the rounds online among vaccine skeptics and critics, much to the dismay of researchers and doctors who understand that when children die of measles complications like pneumonia, that still means they died from the measles. And while Spencer made clear he hadn’t seen the medical files, so he could not say definitively what had happened, he noted that the public health authorities in Texas say that both girls died of measles—and that both were unvaccinated, as has been true for nearly all of the cases in this outbreak. In the days that followed, any lingering ambiguity about Kennedy’s true feelings disappeared—first, with a report in the Atlantic that Kennedy had told the two girls’ parents that “You don’t know what’s in the vaccine anymore,” and then with Kennedy’s statement at Thursday’s cabinet meeting that his new inquiry into the causes of autism would have an answer “by September.” Generally speaking, real scientific inquiries don’t deliver conclusions on neat deadlines, unless the people running them know the answer in advance—which is precisely how former Food and Drug Administration vaccine-safety official Dr. Peter Marks described Kennedy in his resignation letter last month. “It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary,” Marks wrote. THE CBS INTERVIEW and the visit with the Texas families came toward the end of a multiday public tour through the Southwest that Kennedy used to spotlight his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, including its focus on improving diet and exercise—and ridding the air, water, and food supplies of toxins—in order to reduce the overall burden of disease on Americans. It’s a worthy cause, one that many physicians and researchers have been supporting literally for decades. And if all Kennedy were doing was pushing to intensify that pursuit, he’d likely have strong support from the public health establishment—and from elected officials in both parties too. But of course that is not all that Kennedy is doing. He is also presiding over a dramatic downsizing of HHS that even the most seasoned, even-tempered observers of American health care, like KFF News correspondent Julie Rovner, are calling a “dismantling.” The key elements include a 25 percent reduction in the HHS workforce, mostly through layoffs, as well as a dramatic reduction in the funding of medical research. Grants to university labs and professors and other researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are down 60 percent relative to a year ago, according to a recent tally in the Washington Post. It is difficult to convey precisely what is happening at HHS—how it’s so unprecedented and why it’s so destructive—because the changes are happening in so many places throughout the department simultaneously, and with no transparency. Instead of clear announcements about cuts and reforms, word is getting out through news stories as journalists learn about them, making it difficult to stitch them into a single coherent narrative. Late last week, for example, brought a report (also from CBS News) that the city of Milwaukee had requested the Centers for Disease Control send help after initial inspections in city schools had found evidence of “significant lead hazards.” CDC turned down the request, despite the well-documented damage lead can do to the brains of developing children, because its environmental-response team was wiped out in the recent cuts. “As far as I know, this would be the first time” in the CDC’s nearly eight decades that it did not respond to “a formal request for assistance from a state,” tweeted former CDC director Tom Frieden. A day later, the health-focused publication STAT News published a lengthy feature on how limits on external communication and cuts to basic administrative infrastructure like procurement offices had left researchers scrambling for basic supplies needed to keep experiments going. As one scientist told STAT, “There are email listservs going through the NIH that normally are for things like announcing interesting papers or talks that are now 90% ‘Anybody have this reagent? One little bit of this reagent that I can use?’” ANOTHER REASON IT CAN BE DIFFICULT to capture the full scale of what’s happening at HHS is that the most serious effects may not be seen for years or even for decades—in the form of an outbreak that a greatly diminished CDC failed to stop, or tens of thousands of overdose deaths a decimated substance-abuse campaign failed to stop, or a set of cancers that never-conducted breakthrough research failed to cure. And this isn’t just a function of all the research that the federal government has stopped funding. It’s also a function of lost expertise and institutional knowledge, from people HHS is firing now and will never hire in the future. To be clear, this isn’t Kennedy’s doing alone. These assaults on HHS wouldn’t be happening if the department and its work weren’t the target of several overlapping agendas, including the effort to bring universities to heel, to punish the “deep state,” and to shrink the federal government to its smallest possible size. Nor would HHS be vulnerable to this kind of attack if not for lingering public resentment over government actions during the COVID-19 pandemic, and not exclusively on the MAGA right. Still, whatever memories the public has of masks and shutdowns, the vast majority of Americans care about cancer research and vigilance against pandemics—and they support vaccines too. That’s one reason why spotlighting Kennedy’s rhetorical evasions is so important, especially in weeks like this when they can be so easy to miss. You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber. We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can reach and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletter or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here.
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