Things seem to be going well at the CDC, the federal agency charged with protecting US public health. By “well” I mean terrible, thanks to the leadership of the health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr. Not only is the agency in complete disarray under his leadership, but the secretary’s fringe agenda is now also putting the lives of everyone in the country at risk.
Let me recount a few of Kennedy’s stellar accomplishments. He is, after all, a man labeled “a crown jewel of this administration” by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. In June, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the CDC’s advisory committee on immunization practices (ACIP), a panel that has long developed scientifically based recommendations on the use of vaccines. Kennedy dropped them like a hot beaker and replaced them with new members, several of whom share his anti-vaccine views and half-baked skepticism of the most common mRNA Covid-19 vaccines.
Covid is still with us, unfortunately, and the vaccines are helping us survive a dangerous reality. In fact, 14,660 people have died of Covid as an underlying or contributing cause so far this year alone. Yet, at his Senate hearing on Thursday, Kennedy was asked by Senator Jeff Merkley if he accepted the statistic that a million Americans had died of Covid since the outbreak began. “I don’t know how many died,” Kennedy responded. Meanwhile, the CDC’s own website, an agency he’s responsible for, tabulates the number of deaths as 1,234,371. At the same hearing, Kennedy also said he agreed with the statement made by one of his appointees to ACIP that “mRNA vaccines cause serious harm, including death, especially among young people”. Never mind that numerous studies have repeatedly shown the vaccines to be safe and effective.
That’s not all. Getting that Covid booster shot will probably become significantly harder in the future. In late August, the Food and Drug Administration, also overseen by Kennedy, approved some updated Covid vaccines, but at the same time severely restricted who would be authorized to receive boosters. Last year, anyone over the age of six months was eligible. But this year, you must be over 65 years of age or have an underlying health condition that increases the risk of severe Covid-19 infection.
We should have seen something like this coming. In May, Kennedy took the unprecedented unilateral move to remove Covid-19 booster shots from its recommended immunization schedule for pregnant women and healthy children. “Our healthcare system is now solidly anti-children and anti-science,” Fatima Khan, co-founder of the Protect Their Future group, which advocates for vaccine access for children, told CNN.
Booster shots will still be available, Kennedy says. But what he’s not saying is that they will probably be a lot harder to find and afford. Private insurance companies generally base their decisions on covering the costs of vaccines by following government recommendations, and many states limit which vaccines pharmacists can administer based on those same recommendations. (California, Oregon and Washington recently announced an alliance to safeguard vaccine access.)
The long and the short of it is that Kennedy is behind “a deliberate effort to weaken America’s public-health system and vaccine protections”. This is what Susan Monarez wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Monarez served as the director of the CDC for a whole 29 days before she was ousted from her position. (Jim O’Neil, Monarez’s replacement, is unsurprisingly a Trump loyalist with no medical or scientific background.) The ACIP is scheduled to meet later this month, and will discuss among other topics the Covid-19 vaccines. Monarez wrote that in August she was told to “preapprove the recommendations” to be made by ACIP. She refused. In another statement made through her lawyers, she said she would not “rubberstamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts”.
Kennedy, of course, has done all those things. He fired 2,400 workers (about 18% of the CDC workforce), later rehiring about 700 people. He has “severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more”, according to nine previous directors of the CDC who sounded the alarm about Kennedy’s leadership in the New York Times. He downplayed the use of highly effective vaccines during the largest single measles epidemic in 25 years in this country while cheering on the use of home remedies such as cod liver oil or vitamins.
It’s all so ideological and irresponsible, leading predictably to horrible consequences. There have been three confirmed deaths from the measles outbreak, but they are not the only victims. Our collective trust in the government is perhaps the main casualty. After Monarez was fired, four senior officials of the CDC resigned in protest at the politicization of the agency. More than 1,000 past and present workers of the Department of Health and Human Services signed a letter demanding his resignation and stating that “Secretary Kennedy’s actions are compromising the health of this nation”. We’re now living through a battle between sane scientists and zealous anti-vaxxers, and nobody knows who will win.
What do anti-vaxxers and the rightwing get out of such politicization of public health? They live in the same country as the rest of us, after all. Do they feel somehow healthier knowing that Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general, aims to end childhood vaccination against preventable diseases such as measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio and hepatitis? I certainly don’t. Routine childhood vaccinations prevented about 508m cases of illness in the US between 1994 and 2023. And he’s getting rid of them? Madness.
Ladapo claims that “what you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and your God”. OK. Fine. But none of us lives entirely alone, and your health affects my health, and vice versa. Living together means taking care of ourselves but also each other for our individual and collective wellbeing. It’s not rocket science. But it must be based on science.
The right wing sees it otherwise. To them, the government response to Covid in particular and public health in general is leading us straight to “a regime of suppression, censorship, and coercion reminiscent of the power systems and governance that were previously condemned”. The result? “Human rights and individual freedom, as under previous fascist regimes, will lose,” according to David Bell of the Brownstone Institute, a thinktank established to oppose Covid-19 restrictions.
But this seems a lot more like projection than any semblance to reality. Recent scholarship tends to point in the opposite direction, showing how social instability from the world’s last major pandemic before Covid, the 1918 global influenza pandemic, helped pave the way for the rise of the Nazi party in Germany and the Fascist party in Italy. One study found that “Mussolini’s newspaper tended to blame ‘others’ for the pandemic … and portrayed themselves as the voice of the common people against an out-of-touch ‘elite.’” Sounds familiar.
Kennedy’s anti-science anti-vax agenda could have catastrophic health outcomes across the nation, helping fuel the rise of an even more extreme rightwing politics in the future. Could that result be what this government is even counting on? The idea sounds too far-fetched to be true, but I would also like to be alive when I’m proven wrong.
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