But the demise of American leadership in science didn’t begin with him
The recent purge of several high-level members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent shock waves through the political establishment. And with political shock waves seeming to hit every few hours these days, that’s quite a feat.
The ouster of Dr. Susan Monarez, the CDC’s new director and an infectious disease expert who was just confirmed by 51 Republican senators in July, was unexpected. But it was her unwillingness to sign off on dubious new COVID-19 vaccine recommendations and the apparent pre-determined findings of the vaccine board, which Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has packed with his quack cronies, that likely did Monarez in.
That it immediately triggered the resignations of five other top CDC scientists in protest made it all the more astounding.
Kennedy is probably the world’s most famous vaccine skeptic, having spent years wallowing in the rabbit hole of dark conspiracy theories. A card-carrying practitioner of the woo-woo wellness movement, he was a known fanatic on this issue when he and Donald Trump apparently struck a backroom deal during the campaign to deliver his followers in exchange for a role in the new administration. Since the woo-woo and wingnut factions of the growing anti-vaccination movement merged in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, that represented a fairly good-sized chunk of voters. Trump needed them, especially since he’d lost credibility with that crowd when he bragged about Operation Warp Speed, which produced and approved COVID vaccines in record time.
We suspected that among Kennedy’s first orders of business would be to do away with vaccines. On Aug. 27, the Food and Drug Administration announced stringent restrictions on this season’s COVID vaccines. Besides limiting the updated shot to adults 65 and older and immunocompromised people, the agency has also cut research funding for the vaccine’s mRNA technology, which has shown tremendous promise for breakthroughs in cancer and other life-threatening diseases. Kennedy has also promised to provide the results of a new study, apparently thrown together in the last couple of months, that will reveal the cause of autism. Considering that he recently demanded the retraction of a Danish study that found no correlation between aluminum — a component of vaccines for the last 100 years — and autism, it’s fair to suspect he has miraculously discovered that he was right all along and childhood vaccines are the culprit.
