What can be done with RFK Jr.'s aggressive ignorance?
There is no shortage of absurdities at the periodic debasement competitions that are Trump Cabinet meetings. At this week's version, one could find the Labor Secretary encouraging the president to go look at his "big, beautiful" face on a giant banner at her department's headquarters, indistinguishable from Pyongyang; or envoy/billionaire Steve Witkoff calling the Big Special Boy the "the single finest candidate" for the Nobel Peace Price since its inception. But almost inevitably, it is when the conch is passed to Health and Human Services Secretary and wheezing sack of malarial miasmas Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that things seem most grim.
There was the strange praise, given his utter lack of connection to the administration crusade against offshore wind power, that Trump was going to save the whales as a result. But it was when the president asked Kennedy for an update on his dramatically unscientific and eugenics-adjacent quest to discover the underlying causes of autism that the spiraling situation inside his department had its moment:
"We will have announcements as promised in September, finding interventions, certain interventions, now that are clearly almost certainly causing autism," Kennedy said. Never mind the decades of actual science on the topic, he and his cadre of happy cranks have cracked it since April — and of course, it isn't hard to guess what those "interventions" will be when whatever absurdist stand-in for a scientific paper or report does drop.
And so it wasn't all that shocking, really, when the situation at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention started spiraling out of control not long afterward. The White House announced the firing of CDC director Susan Monarez, just weeks after her Senate confirmation, apparently because she would not rubber stamp the sort of anti-vaccine nonsense the HHS secretary is demanding. More CDC leadership followed her out the door — director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Demetre C. Daskalakis wrote in a resignation letter that he could not continue in his role because of the "ongoing weaponizing of public health."
It is all, of course, about the vaccines. Kennedy fired the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) a few months ago, reconstituting it with exactly the sort of people who should not be allowed within 10 miles of government policy-making. They have already overseen changes to the CDC's immunization schedule, which governs what insurance companies must cover; they want to oversee more of them.
There are signs that he may be taking this too far — a live-stream running on Thursday afternoon showed a huge walkout of CDC employees protesting the firings and assault on public health and science in general. One of the resigning senior officials said the crisis was a "bat signal" for Congress to intervene — not exactly reassuring, perhaps, but even Senator Bill Cassidy is stirring. That's Doctor Bill Cassidy, of course, he who received personal reassurance from RFK that ACIP would not be touched before voting to confirm the least qualified Cabinet Secretary in American history.
Cassidy said in a statement that "serious allegations" had been made about the "lack of scientific process" involved with the upcoming September ACIP meeting, and called for it to be postponed: "If the meeting proceeds, any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy given the seriousness of the allegations and the current turmoil in CDC leadership."
It is hard to imagine any improvement to the situation, though, until the man at the top of the department is gone. RFK Jr. is perhaps the most confidently wrong person in public life today, a collection of mistaken assumptions, misunderstandings, and glaring contradictions whose prominent place atop the government's scientific apparatus beggars belief. What can be done with someone so disdainful of actual expertise, so assured of his own infallible correctness that he will gleefully undermine decades of vaccine and public health progress? There is no measles outbreak big enough to prove him wrong, to cause even some minor moment of self-reflective consideration. Why would he be at that table, talking about whales, if he didn't have what thousands of scientists don't? The answers, his answers, the only answers, to be announced in September.
