The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s top public health agency, is crumbling like the walls of Jericho under the astonishingly inept leadership of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.
And it’s there that you’ll find Sen. Rand Paul, R-Bowling Green, taking in the entire, tragic spectacle from his front row seat, whooping and hollering his approval like a rube at a sideshow.
Kennedy, the wacky offspring of the late, revered Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, is under the delusion that vaccines that protect the populace from diseases ranging from measles to whooping cough to COVID-19, an insidious malady that led to the deaths of about seven million individuals worldwide, are liable to give you the cooties and maybe we ought not rely on them so much.
President-cum-Dictator Donald J. Trump, at Kennedy’s urging, fired CDC Director Susan Monarez, a microbiologist who had been on the job for less than a month, in late August because she refused to go along with Kennedy’s dangerous anti-vaccine policies. In a Senate hearing on Thursday, Kennedy cast her as “untrustworthy.’’
Monarez tells a different story. Writing in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, she said Kennedy demanded that she fire members of the senior staff for no reason and ordered her to “preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed anti-vaccine rhetoric.”
It’s important, Monarez said, “that the panel’s recommendations aren’t rubber-stamped.”
Monarez’s departure sparked a series of resignations from some of the CDC’s top officials who offered support for their deposed leader, asserting in a statement that she refused to endorse “unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts.’’
Monarez, the group said, “chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda.’’
Before all this folderol, Kennedy in June fired every member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, replacing the experts with members of his own choosing who share his skepticism about vaccines, explaining that “ A clean sweep is necessary to reestablish public confidence in vaccine science.’’
Yeah, that’ll do it.
So, the nation finds itself in a state of chaos over the key issue of public health and there’s our boy Rand Paul, smirking deviously as usual over the whole mishigas. Wrote Paul on X: “Good riddance to these extremists at CDC.’’
Now, Paul, a licensed ophthalmologist, is a notorious gadfly when it comes to public health policy. He engaged in a years-long, bitter feud with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the retired director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, over the agency’s recommendations for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, openly calling for Fauci to be sent to prison for funding research at a Chinese lab he insists created the deadly virus.
Fauci, of course, has told Rand to go pound sand.
Now he’s siding with Kennedy and picking on the nation’s health experts when it comes to vaccination policy.
Paul, for instance, is adamant that children should not be required to receive any of the COVID vaccines, stating that “The extremists in this debate are the officials continuing to push COVID vaccines on children despite a lack of scientific evidence showing a benefit.’’
Yet the Mayo Clinic, one of the nation’s leading medical facilities, maintains, “While rare, some children can become seriously ill with COVID-19 after getting the virus that causes COVID-19. The vaccine might prevent children “seriously ill or having to stay in the hospital due to the COVID-19 virus.’’
In May, Kennedy withdrew an agency recommendation that pregnant women and healthy children receive routine COVID vaccinations, drawing criticism from various medical groups. Then last month the FDA, under Kennedy’s oversight, cleared COVID vaccine usage for those 65 and over but determined only younger individuals with health risks need get the inoculation.
Paul is also engaged in a fight over the efficacy of recommending hepatitis B vaccinations for newborns, stating “No medical reason to give newborns Hep B vaccine if mother is not infected. All mothers who deliver in a hospital are tested. This “scientist’s” fetish for vaccines not supported by the data.’’
That is countered by Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-LA, a physician who argues that Paul’s claim is “not true’’ and that infants infected with hepatitis B at birth face a “much higher chance of developing liver cancer and spreading hepatitis B to others.’’
Kennedy, meanwhile, is even taking a jaundiced view of the vaccination protecting children from measles, mumps, rubella and chicken pox, better known as MMRV. In early August, his Department of Health and Human Services announced that its Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority was pulling the plug on further MMRV development.
Kennedy has long stated that there appears to be a link between various vaccines and autism. That theory has proved true only in Kennedy’s wildest fantasies.
Paul, going well beyond normal criticism, now claims that one of the officials who resigned in protest over the Monarez firing, Demetre Daskalakis, the erstwhile director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, “should have never had a position in government.’’
Paul’s reasoning has nothing to do with Daskalakis’ public health expertise. It’s because of his lifestyle. Daskalakis is gay but, well, let’s let Rand take it from here. Speaking with The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper, Paul said:
“He (Daskalakis) should have never had a position in government. And he brags about his lifestyle, you know, this whole idea of bondage and, you know, multiple partners and all that stuff. He brags about that stuff, but he’s got no business being in government. It’s good riddance.’’
Now, it’s likely that BDSM is a tad outside the mainstream, even by those who participate in such. Hell, I can hardly tie my shoestrings, if you get my drift. But Paul, perhaps a presidential wannabe in 2026, is supposed to be this great Libertarian god, generally walking with folks who pay little heed to anything anyone does in their respective bedrooms.
Daskalakis carries a degree from the NYU School of Medicine with further medical training at Harvard and additional training in clinical infectious diseases. Robert Kennedy Jr. is not a physician or even a scientist. He is the loudmouth at the end of the bar who doesn’t know a hog from a handsaw.
Who are you going to trust on these issues, the expert with sexual predilections a bit off the beaten path or, Rand Paul’s preference, the wandering son of a famous father who fits the very definition of a poseur?
Kennedy let the cat out of the bag awhile ago. On Fox News back in May, Kennedy made it clear he has no use for experts.
“‘Trust the experts’ is not a function of science or democracy,’’ he said. “It’s a function of totalitarianism and religion.”
Really? If you’re having a heart operation, do you want a doctor with some knowledge in cardiac surgery or the mechanic at a shade tree garage in Dunellen, New Jersey?
Trump, Kennedy and the gang have led the nation into an era of anti-expertise. This pretty much sums up the entire Trump administration. Got someone in the Environmental Protection Agency who knows something about global warming? Get rid of them. Someone in the Commerce Department who doesn’t think tariffs are the answer to the nation’s ills? Sayonara. Someone at the Centers for Disease Control who understand vaccines? Take a hike.
The country is being run by dilettantes with weak minds and lousy attitudes, just like the guy at the top.
Apparently the American public ain’t buying whatever Robert Kennedy Jr. or Rand Paul are selling. A poll conducted in June by the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard shows that 79 percent of those questioned agreed that children should be required to get vaccinated against diseases like measles, mumps and rubella in order to attend school. Another poll, this one from Reuters taken in August, found that 55 percent of those questioned believe public health in the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction.
The record book establishes that Kennedy for years has spouted anti-vaccine horse manure and spread misinformation about their efficacy, including his well-worn claim that they can cause autism, which time and again the experts have disproven.
He’s the perfect choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services under the nation’s leading sociopath.