Dangerous, Irrational, Illogical: RFK Jr. Has Put So Many Lives at Risk
The decision by Trump's extremist health secretary to restrict COVID vaccines and oust the CDC chief could be a death sentence for vulnerable Americans.
WINTER PARK, Florida - As a pediatrician, Gil Walker has seen parents face the collision of fears: dread of childhood diseases, anxiety about new vaccines designed to prevent them.
But with help from trusted scientists and schools, and political leaders, Walker guided patients past it. That guidance, echoed for years by hundreds of thousands of other doctors across the country, helped Americans snuff out the deadly scourge of polio and measles, among others.
“I just told them about my own family members and relatives getting the vaccine, and that I was sure it was safe,” recalls Walker, now 97 and long since retired. “They went along with that. This was the answer.”
I traveled here to learn from Walker, part of my late-in-life blended family, because Donald Trump’s administration has laid siege to each of the elements responsible for that progress. It has cut funding for vaccine research, shredded the public health workforce, undercut faith in medical science, and altered government recommendations – all to stoke support from the president’s angry, conspiracy-addled MAGA base.
Trump made an anti-vaccine kook with a famous name, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the federal government’s top health official. It was an extraordinarily cynical and destructive move for a president whose previous administration helped fast-track the development of the COVID-19 vaccine, and who took it himself for his own protection.
Already, Kennedy has unilaterally revoked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendation that healthy children and pregnant women receive the COVID vaccine and terminated funding for the development of mRNA vaccines. This week, a British cardiologist allied with RFK Jr. told The Daily Beast that, within months, the Trump administration will pull the vaccine off the market altogether. On Wednesday, the FDA made it much more difficult for healthy Americans to get the shot when it approved updated COVID vaccines, but only for those over the age of 65 and people at high risk of severe illness. Public health experts estimate the vaccine has saved at least 2.5 million lives since the COVID pandemic began in 2020.
Adding to the chaos, the White House said late Wednesday that CDC Director Susan Monarez had been sacked – just a month after her confirmation by the Senate. Monarez’s lawyers said she had been targeted after she "refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts." At least four other senior CDC officials resigned, apparently frustrated over vaccine policy, per the Washington Post. In a fiery resignation letter posted online, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, said RFK Jr.'s changes to vaccine guidelines "threaten the lives of the youngest Americans and pregnant people," adding, "eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated."