Editorial written by New York Daily News Editorial Board.
It’s time for President Donald Trump, despite his own casual relationship with the truth, to stop putting American lives at risk and get rid of his dangerous quack in chief, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In his latest broadside against science, Kennedy is removing all 17 members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, the CDC’s main advisory body, to ostensibly restore “public trust above any specific pro- or anti-vaccine agenda.” God protect us, as RFK won’t.
This is how a society becomes undone. Science and reason get stepped on by half-truths and conspiracy theories. Next comes preventable death and disease.
The problem is that there is no anti-vaccine side in the legitimate practice of science and medicine. The department’s accompanying press release denigrated “public health ideology” as if the practice of public health wasn’t the CDC’s only function. Researchers and doctors should be biased in favor of evidence-based therapeutics that save lives.
Railing against bias towards vaccines is like a politician condemning researchers biased in favor of seatbelts in cars or keeping lead out of household paint. It’s idiotic.
We understand that the Make America Healthy Again movement Kennedy leads is all about questioning medical and nutritional practice. On a really abstract level, we are in agreement that no scientific truisms should be entirely above questioning — such a perspective would be anti-science.
But there is a specific and long-standing methodology for actually answering those questions, and it is not debate club or who can most incite crowds of followers. It is the scientific method, under which hypotheses can be rigorously tested in ways that are replicable and based on clear and clearly laid out evidence.
In that arena — really the only arena that actually matters when it comes to public health — the safety and efficacy of vaccines has been conclusively established. There is no additional discussion necessary or appropriate, particularly when it comes to immunizations that have now been standard-issue for decades and have by all measures radically decreased illness and mortality where they’ve been successfully deployed.
The measles vaccine will always be better for individuals and public health than getting the measles. The same is true for polio, tetanus, COVID and all else.
Preying on public skepticism of the pharmaceutical and health industries to hawk alternative approaches that are often unregulated and don’t work is damaging it enough. Yet a true believer like RFK is more dangerous, especially now that he stands at the pinnacle of our nation’s public health bureaucracy, a position that allows him to substantively impose his own anti-science view on an unsuspecting public and take the choice away from the American people.
If RFK‘s new picks for ACIP — which the secretary falsely promised Sen. Bill Cassidy he wouldn’t touch during his confirmation process — step back from recommending various crucial vaccines, this could substantially prevent even those who want to make the informed decision to receive inoculations or have their children vaccinated from being able to do so.
As much as Kennedy and his followers emphasize the need for people to be able to make individual choices about their health, they seem hell-bent on taking that choice away entirely, especially given that insurance is not required to cover vaccines that are not CDC-recommended.
We wonder what RFK will have to say for himself as once-eradicated diseases begin cutting through the U.S. population again. Is there anything that will get him to veer off this disastrous course? If the answer is no, and we suspect it is, then he must be removed before he can further damage public health.
