Trumps Wrecking ball
Kennedy is bad news for reason, science and health.
I’m sad to say Trump has appointed RFK Jr to lead Health and Human Services (HHS), its $1.7 trillion-dollar budget, and its 80,000 staff. This might be a small story after the bizarre appointments this week, all based on loyalty rather than ability, including for example, a climate denying oil executive for in charge of energy. These bizarre secretaries will be totally beholden, and obedient to Trumps narcissistic whim.
What is called the blogosphere has gone mad with scientists and doctors, who like me are trying to make some sense of all this, and worried about the implications for some very malevolent frankly bonkers people running the USA.
I’ve struggled to keep this brief enough to hold your interest, but it’s so difficult to minimise these events and in particular RFK Jr, even if he is not the worst appointee to Trumps demolition department.
On the surface RFK Jr has some appealing ideas. Ultra-processed food is linked to many diseases and there are things that can be done about this. I didn’t hear him mention to voters the increasing the cost of fast food (that might have swung the election away from his Leader) but improving poor school meals would be something.
Huge public institutions always need to develop and change, and what he calls ‘Big Ag’ and ‘Big Pharma’ need smarter regulation. However, the majority of what he wants to do is based on his self-serving interpretation of science and the implications for the health and science sector are downright horrifying. Radical changes to agricultural practice based on personal dogma led to famines in the past.
It’s rather akin to Manchester United appointing a football hooligan supporter of Manchester City as their new manager!
Who is he?
RFK Jr is a lawyer who started his career with environmental work protecting waterways - which was the last good thing he did. Since then, he has made a living out of antivaccination fanaticism, joining the World Mercury Project which he morphed into the Children’s Health Defence, the world’s leading anti-vaccination organisation.
To add to his usual nonsense on the harm of vaccines, he is a HIV denier, someone who thinks that Wi-Fi causes ‘leaky brain’, that chemicals in water causes transgender issues, that antidepressants are responsible for school shootings, fluoride should be taken out of drinking water and is a proponent of SCAM (So Called Alternative Medicine).
He tried to downplay the impact of COVID19, comparing public health measures to those in Nazi Germany and publicised his notion that Bill Gates was trying to control people by means of a microchip contained in vaccines, which is physically impossible.
He also released a video claiming that COVID vaccines were specifically designed to harm racial minorities, spare Jewish people, and buys into the fantasy that Ivermectin is a cure for COVID supressed by the nasty FDA. He is also suing various press organisations for having the cheek to do what the press should do - take action to expose his misinformation.
To sum it up, he has done everything he can to make people distrust just about everyone in the healthcare sector which he now leads. He wants to get the real data to “prove that vaccines cause harm”.
What sort of person is he?
A visit to his Wikipedia page describes his astoundingly dishonest personal life which as a Trump ally, I guess could be seen to be an advantage. I was just going to provide a link, but this says it all….
“During his marriage to Richardson, [his second wife] Kennedy was known among his friends for sending explicit nude photos of women that they presumed he had taken, according to Vanity Fair. He reportedly engaged in multiple affairs during the marriage. His friends later called him a "lifelong philanderer".
On May 12, 2010, Kennedy filed for divorce from Richardson. On May 16, 2012, Richardson was found dead in a building on the grounds of her home in Bedford, New York. The Westchester County Medical Examiner ruled the death a suicide due to asphyxiation from hanging. Before her death, Richardson had discovered Kennedy's personal journal from 2001, in which he recorded sexual encounters with 37 different women. According to Kennedy, Richardson passed the journal along "to her sisters with instructions that, if anything happened to her, [it should be] published in the press"
As if all that wasn’t bad enough, he took her family, (who wanted her buried next to her siblings), to court to have her buried in the Kennedy family plot, succeeded but later disinterred her body and moved it away.
In other words, he is clearly capable of significant cruelty which he can now wield in public office, so what’s his plan?
RFK’s aims to MAHA (Make America Healthy Again)
This way too chummy interview lay out his initial thinking now he has the political power voters would never have given him directly. Almost innocuously, he declares his to-do list:
1. Clean up the (thirteen) health agencies under the umbrella of the National Institute of Health and reduce conflicts of interest.
2. Return those agencies to ‘gold standard of empirical science’.
3. Reduce the rate of childhood chronic disease.
So, end corruption, encourage good science and make children less unwell. All sounds very nice, if you don’t think about it too much.
1 – The Health Agencies
There is no denying that improvements could certainly be made in these agencies, but generally they are a force for good and staffed by some very clever and dedicated people. Most of his many rants on corruption and agency capture simply relate to the fact they consistently fail to support his extreme views based on his own intentional misinterpretation of science.
It is a common tactic of anti-vaxxers to declare anyone who disagrees with them must be corrupt. Importantly, these agencies, like many others Trump is targeting, are way easier to demolish than rebuild.
He feels the financial link between drug companies and the regulatory agencies should be broken, which to the cynic sounds nice, but means the taxpayer would have to pay for the complex detailed and expensive work needed to examine applications for drug approval (or rejection). There are other links which are too cosy, but there are also many drugs that improve people’s lives and the drug sector is developing some very exciting treatments for some pretty awful diseases and for this co-operation with federal agencies is critical.
It's akin to saying taxpayers should pay for MOTs for vehicles because chummy mechanics paid by the vehicle owners will tend to give them the nod for dangerous vehicles. Regulation ensures this doesn’t happen. The agencies also carry out primary research which then feeds into pharmaceutical companies, with patents shared – that is not corrupt.
His recent comments on Twitter (now known as Musk’s verbal toilet) will horrify the vast majority of doctors, nurses and the public health sector:
“FDA’s war on public health is about to end. If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.” On the campaign trail he said " I'm really going to let loose on them for the next 18 months."
2- “The gold standard of empirical science”.
This is rich from a man who has spent his torturing science. Most starkly, he influenced a Samoan decision to suspend measles vaccination which led to an outbreak which killed over 83 children and sickened thousands. Of course, he denies he has anything to do with it, but had visited Samoa and given high profile support to antivaxxers there.
His aim to waste federal research on quackery will be hard to bear for anyone who is interested in effective healthcare. The McCarthy like persecution of public health doctors and scientists will no doubt intensify as demonstrated by Republican morons on the House Committee, fuelled by RFK’s hateful and wildly inaccurate book “The Real Antony Fauci”.
3 - Reducing childhood disease
Reducing the rate of childhood chronic disease is of course, a laudable claim. Right now, he isn’t saying how this will happen other than improvements in farming and removing ‘toxins’; from food. Yet, his own antivaxx organisation is clear - this can be achieved by getting rid of vaccines, fluoride, paracetamol, aluminium, mercury, Wi-Fi, and whatever other trendy culprits come along. (He didn’t tell voters to turn off their Wi-Fi!)
He states he is “not going to take away anyone’s vaccines but will give them the ‘best information’ on which to base their decision. This is nonsense. For one thing he is, perhaps after Mercola, the world’s biggest peddler of misinformation and outright lies regarding vaccines. Advice from government, agencies and professionals is important to people and makes a big difference to people’s decisions – will he prohibit doctors from advising for vaccination? It certainly sounds like it.
He has spent most of his life undermining this trust. Many Mums and Dads are not going to spend hours reading complex papers on every medical intervention they face, and if they visit his own website for information, and believe what he says, they will avoid vaccines altogether.
His real plan is clearly to continue his fight against vaccines by providing more of the misinformation which has made him famous. People will listen, children will suffer and die, not only in the USA but globally where American vaccines have helped save lives around the world.
Who would make vaccines with antivaxxers in power?
In a capitalist society vaccine manufacture can be problematical. To prevent illness, large numbers of well people are vaccinated, some of whom will suffer side effects. (There is no medical intervention that ‘does no harm) Then the lawyers step in with suits which make vaccine production commercially impossible as harms are punished and benefits not monetised.
I wonder what American vaccine manufacturers will make of all this. There are already problems with supply for one off intervention like vaccine and antibiotics with not enough put into research in those vital medications.
Opportunists like RFK Jr have make it financially impossible to make vaccines without appropriate government schemes to help those with side effects. Without these, no commercial company will manufacture medicines that prevent illness and suffering in favour of highly profitable medications for chronic disease, anti-impotence and baldness medications and the like. Our collective memory of the horror of infectious diseases is poor. I hope it will stay that way, but now it might not.
Fluoride in drinking water
Fluoride is another bugbear of RFK Jr and will seek to end its addition to water. In a country with the highest sugar consumption in the modern world, there can be no doubt that children will suffer worse dental health and poor children with the worst access to dentists will be worst off.
The only glimmer of hope I have is that if some of these policies are implemented, proof will emerge of the harm they can do, and they will be finally buried. Sad that so much suffering will be caused along the way and some of the harms will become evident once the wrecking ball has swung and either been sacked or scuttles back to his day job.
What about his environmental credentials?
The last bit of the interview is classic RFK Jr populist idiocy and trashes whatever environmental credentials he might once have had.
While demonising regulatory agencies looking after beneficial pharmacological products as evil, those regulating fossil fuels driving disasters and ultimate calamity of climate change around the world, he states, are the ‘best in the world’. We are really nowhere near doing enough as the graph below sadly shows:
To reassure anyone worried about carbon he claims regenerative agriculture is the solution. He states this could ‘absorb 100% of the carbon’ and return us to pre-industrial CO2 levels. This is typical of his manipulation of a good idea - to improve farming sustainability – into self-promoting gibberish. Like tobacco and alcohol, he avoids upsetting the oil corporations or American voters who see gas prices of more immediate concern than addressing climate change.
Soil could indeed absorb vast amounts of carbon, but sadly not as much as will be released even by thawing permafrost. Even if it could, in just 20 years’ time, the carbon sequestering capacity of farmland soil would be exceeded unless CO2 emissions are reduced.
So, what to do?
Like many other doctors and scientists, there must be a push back against this idiocy. Otherwise, we will be heading to a dark age of scientific illiteracy in a time and place when we need it most. People will suffer, and the chance of doing anything defining about climate change will pass us by, if it already hasn’t.
I’ll be blogging more on this phenomenon as its as important as COVID with ramifications for the rest of the world. Soon, he’ll be appointing like-minded antivaccine fanatics, COVID contrarians and signatories of the deadly Barrington Declaration on pandemic management.
In the UK we have right wing politicians who sing a similar tune waiting in the wings.
Perhaps Senate, controlled now by the Republicans, will not ratify his appointment or the others - it only takes a few pro-vaccine voces from the right to do this. But will they be able to stand up to the Glorious Leader?
We shall see. This is just the beginning of the beginning.