Confirmation Committee Fears RFK Jr.’s Questions, Not His Answers

Watching Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s congressional hearings this week made me think back to 2016 when President Trump publicly called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ineffective and questioned its purpose. His comments were met with snobbish mockery and outsized alarm by those who refused to entertain new ideas about old orthodoxies from the likes of someone without a Ph.D. That the president would even question NATO’s necessity was a clear indication that he wasn’t fit to assess it, according to his detractors.The same phenomenon is happening now to RFK Jr., Mr. Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, because he — a man without a medical degree — is calling for institutional scrutiny. He questions the safety of our vaccines, our water, our food supply, and the systems responsible for them. Mr. Kennedy can’t be right, according to those with allegiances to the status quo, so he has to be crazy and unfit for office.Many of us, also without medical degrees, don’t know if Mr. Kennedy is right or wrong about some of the assertions he has made, but after Covid the country is just as uncertain about the assertions of our leadership. What is clear to see is that Mr. Kennedy is seeking to ask questions and find answers in his prospective role at HHS. Those who oppose him deny that there are open questions and insist that we already have the answers.For some of Mr. Kennedy’s most animated opponents, it’s easy to imagine why that might be so. Senators Sanders, Warnock, Warren, and Wyden together have received more than $6 million in donations from pharmaceutical companies that will all come under greater scrutiny should Mr. Kennedy be confirmed. The anger they unleashed at Mr. Kennedy this week probably had more to do with that than with substantive differences they have with him about the adverse effects of vaccine adjuvants. Other committee members suffer from the shame of never having used their platforms to raise questions about why the childhood vaccine schedule has increased tenfold in our lifetime, or why autism and peanut allergies are the new normal. Mr. Kennedy shines an ugly spotlight on many of our representatives’ unforgivable lack of curiosity about the country’s health.The exception was Covid, when our elected officials did focus on America’s health — and made it worse. Masked toddlers, indemnified pharmaceutical companies, the shuttering of churches, schools, and gyms, and locking the elderly indoors with the windows closed were the policies they produced. Censorship of opposing views and uncomfortable data also occurred. We are still reeling from the consequences. These are the people now sitting in judgment of the man who got fluoride out of our water, red dye out of our food, and successfully sued Monsanto for poisoning our crops. Mr. Kennedy could be entirely wrong about everything he has ever said about vaccines and still claim a better record on health issues than all the senators combined who are attacking him in these hearings.Mr. Kennedy irritates those who botched Covid, missed the childhood chronic disease epidemic, and allowed big pharma to get so big because he is asking one important question: Why? The NATO crowd hated Mr. Trump for the same reason when he squeezed more money for the alliance out of Chancellor Merkel than anyone had ever thought to ask for before. RFK Jr. isn’t going to ban the polio vaccine, and his detractors know it. They aren’t worried that he will upend “science.” They worry that he will expose it, and them, for being a closed system that has produced bad health results and little transparency. That is exactly why he should be confirmed as secretary of health and human services.

Confirmation Committee Fears RFK Jr.’s Questions, Not His Answers

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