RFK Jr doesn’t think that the American people should take medical advice from him

“You’ve been unable, in most instances, to answer any specific questions relating to your agency… You are the wrong person for this job.”

That is what Democratic Senator Angela Alsobrooks said to Robert Kennedy, or RFK Jr (as he likes to be known, thereby ensuring maximum Kennedy association) after he appeared before a Senate committee to answer questions on his disastrous leadership, so far, of the U.S. Human and Health Services (HHS) agency.

In April, the HHS eliminated 10,000 jobs, including 3,500 full-time positions at the Federal and Drug Administration, 2,400 employees at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 1,200 jobs at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and 300 at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

Terence Cosgrave

Senators on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) were unhappy with his answers about specific programmes that have been effectively shut down, either due to layoffs or a lack of funding.

These include the CDC’s Healthy Aging branch; the CDC’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention programme; the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program; the CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities; the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention; the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration; the World Trade Center Health Program; the National Firefighter Cancer Registry; the NIH’s Safe to Sleep programme and the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health.

For most questions, Kennedy responded by either lying – claiming that the specific programme and its funding had not been cut – or by claiming that he wasn’t aware of the programme that had been cut, and promised to work with Senators to address funding concerns. He also acknowledged that as the HHS began its mass layoffs “We understood there would be some mistakes, and that we would go back and reverse them when they were made.”

There aren’t the words to describe this tomfoolery, disingenuity or lying. RFK Jr also promised at his confirmation hearing that he wouldn’t promote his vaccine scepticism, but under questioning from Senator Chris Murphy, refused to say that the MMR vaccine was safe. Murphy gave RFK Jr several opportunities to endorse the vaccine, but he declined on each occasion. Murphy remarked: “I think you are answering the question, and it is dangerous for the American people.”

RFK Jr replied that he didn’t think that the American people should take medical advice from him.

This is where we are. The head of Health and Human Services isn’t capable of giving reasonable medical advice on something so basic as the MMR vaccine, despite the current outbreak of measles in the U.S. – the largest in 25 years.

That outbreak has infected 1,000 people across 31 states and killed three people – two children in Texas and an adult in New Mexico. All of the deceased were unvaccinated.

But that is just the tip of an iceberg of misinformation, the devastation to medical research and mismanagement that RFK Jr has brought to HHS.

The CDC reports that approximately 96 per cent of those infected in the measles outbreak were either unvaccinated or had unknown vaccination status. But this is the CDC now, not the CDC that Trump and RFK Jr have in mind, because that CDC – in perhaps just a few months’ time – will not give out the correct information unless it makes them look good. And it never will.

This is not unbridled fantasy on my part. Already, the National Institute for Health (NIH) has been told to remove any reference to mRNA in submissions for research grants. mRNA no longer exists, by order of the government.

In any case, the Trump administration is capping grants issued by the NIH, has cancelled funding for certain projects, and in the upcoming budget, Trump is looking to cut $18 billion from the body, or about 40 per cent of the NIH’s budget, as well as closing a wide range of its agencies.

As they freely admit, they don’t know what they’re doing, but they’re going ahead and doing it, and (hopefully, maybe) they’ll correct it later.

Senator Bill Cassidy, who is also a medical doctor, voted to approve RFK Jr’s appointment to HHS, knowing that he was a vaccine-sceptic. He asked how the NIH would compete with international rivals given the cuts.

In response, Kennedy claimed that the Chinese weren’t spending any money on DEI (Diversity, Equality and Inclusion) and therefore the U.S. could cut all the money they were spending in that area.

He also claimed that the staff cuts made at the NIH were purely administrative, and that no working scientists have been fired. This is simply a lie, or as Senator Alsobrooks later (less accurately) told the committee ‘not true’, telling Kennedy that he had ‘no knowledge whatsoever of the absolutely amazing scientists and researchers who you have callously fired’.

All of this, combined with the withdrawal of U.S. funding for the World Health Organisation, will have massive implications for the health of Americans, and the health of the world. The Bill Gates Foundation has promised to release funds to try to counteract some of the damage, but a Foundation – no matter how wealthy – cannot compete with the annual funds that countries, especially big countries, can provide.

The EU and Ireland need to react to this situation, but it’s very difficult for many to accept it is even happening. We were brought up to believe that Europe and the U.S. shared certain values, and a big part of those values was respect for science, medicine and academia. Another part of those values that seemed unshakeable was a commitment to human rights and human dignity.

Trump’s first State visit to Middle East despots and his statement that the U.S. would no longer give lectures to those despots on how they should live, demonstrates that Trump and his acolytes have no morality or decency. They stand with people who execute homosexuals and beat women for driving in cars. They stand for making millions and billions of dollars for themselves and their families in kickbacks, bribes and cryptocurrencies.

All the while cutting services, medicine and food for the poor, removing books from libraries, and planning the biggest tax cut ever for the wealthiest people in the country.

While spending one trillion dollars on war and weapons.

That’s America now.

The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.