RFK, Jr. - The wrong man for a job on which millions of American lives depend

If Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. becomes Secretary of Health and Human Services, it is possible that people will die as a result.

All it would take is another pandemic at a time when the top health official in the United States is a man who has a years-long record of working to end the development and use of preventative vaccinations. This time, his rantings against vaccinations would attract more attention and likely convince many more people to take a pass on vaccines. Some of them would unnecessarily die.

COVID-19 killed 7 million people before the preventative vaccine was developed and came into widespread use in December 2021. Without the vaccine, developed in the United States, it is estimated by scientists that an additional 14 to 20 million people worldwide would have died from the pandemic.

How likely is another pandemic? Scientists say it is not a matter of if we will have one, but when. Mosquito and tick-borne diseases are considered a particular threat in the United States. Also, global warming carries the risk that contagious and potentially fatal diseases once confined mostly to Africa and regions near the equator could rage through the U.S. sooner rather than later.

The U.S., meanwhile, led the effort to develop the COVID-19 vaccine. Two scientists at the University of Pennsylvania, Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, shared a Nobel Prize for the research that led to it, and the federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing the vaccine in record time – less than a year for the kind of work that previously had required up to three or four years.

Early next year, however, the U.S. Senate will likely have to decide whether the U.S. should have a Secretary of Health and Human Services who is one of the world’s leading anti-vaxxers, a man who has proclaimed:

“There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.”

The expectation would be that many people – particularly those who have not studied the issue – could be persuaded to avoid the vaccine. The result could be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of unnecessary deaths.

The next pandemic is not the only realistic disease concern for the 340 million people of the United States.

The Americas region, including the U.S., has been considered measles-free for close to a quarter-century. There have been no known measles deaths in this region during this time, thanks to a vaccination rate of at least 95 percent, enough to create herd immunity.

In much of the rest of the world, however, measles cases and deaths have been on the rise. There were more than 100,000 deaths from measles in 2023, with children under age 5 being most at risk.

Continued preaching from a Secretary of Health and Human Services who believes:

“There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective” . . .

. . . could lay the foundation for a measles outbreak in the U.S. and other countries that presently are measles-free.

Yonatan Grad, a professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, said recently that the drop in vaccination rates has “already led to an increase in vaccine-preventable diseases.” He cited global measles outbreaks, which have occurred in part because of the anti-vax movement, and in part due to the challenges of vaccinating pediatric populations during the pandemic.

Grad also noted that there have been concerning outbreaks of polio and diphtheria, diseases “for which there are highly effective vaccines.”

Measles, however, “is likely the big one,” said Bill Hanage, an associate professor of epidemiology and associate director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard, “both because it is a nasty illness and because of the way it wipes [out] immune memory of other infections.”

Measles immunization poster, National Library of Medicine, History of Medicine, Wikimedia Commons

“A large measles outbreak would likely be followed by elevated amounts of other infections,” Hanage added.

The solution to the problem really is not difficult at all. It does not require a scientific breakthrough. The vaccine to keep America measles-free already exists and has been proven to be both safe and effective.

Oh, wait. There may be someone on the horizon who does not believe in science, and he may soon be in a position to promulgate his views widely. He’s a guy who is neither a physician nor a scientist. He simply believes what he believes. To wit:

“There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.”

Kennedy also is wrong about raw milk

Raw milk is milk straight from the cow, which has not been pasteurized to kill harmful germs that can cause illness and sometimes death. Among other things, it is known to have contained E. coli and salmonella. Now, bird flu also has been detected in raw milk.

Bird flu, which has had a 50 percent death rate among its victims, was found in raw milk by the Federal Drug Administration last spring. Last week, California health officials temporarily shut down production at Raw Farm, a raw milk dairy, because bird flu was detected in its products, The Atlantic reported this week.

An estimated 11 million people in the U.S. drink raw milk despite the risks. One of them is Kennedy, who also has been a long-time advocate for raw milk.

Kennedy responded to the disclosure that raw milk might be carrying bird flu by calling Mark McAfee, the owner of the dairy in Fresno County, California, where the bird flu virus was detected. Kennedy urged McAfee to apply for an advisory role at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

McAfee told a Fresno TV station that Kennedy has been a longtime customer of his dairy farm and wants McAfee to help create safety standards to get raw milk placed for sale in retail stores across the country.

Advocates of raw milk, according to the article in The Atlantic, point to the fact that it contains chemicals or compounds that are known to work against cancer and other diseases. These are removed in the pasteurization process, which also adds calcium and Vitamin D to milk, both beneficial to human health.

On the other hand, the substances that can work against cancer are present in such small quantities that a consumer would have to drink four more than a gallon of raw milk a day for these substances to be beneficial, The Atlantic reported.

The bottom line, the article stated, is that drinking raw milk is too unsafe to recommend, according to Tiantian Lin, who studied the issue as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Food Science at Cornell University.

Too unsafe for most, perhaps. Not for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Which would be OK for the rest of us – so long as he does not have a bully pulpit in President Trump’s cabinet to try to convince people otherwise.

He can choose to drink whatever he wants, regardless of whether it is safe or not. But it is wrong for him to be given a position of influence from which he can urge the rest of us to do it his way, safety be damned.

NOTE TO MY READERS: I write this column, Arnold Garson: Second Thoughts, as a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. You can subscribe for free. However, if you enjoy my work, please consider showing your support by becoming a paid subscriber at the level that feels right for you. The cost can be less than $2 per column.

Iowa Writers Collaborative Roundup

Linking readers and professional writers who care about Iowa.

By Julie Gammack

The Iowa Writers Collaborative is made up of some of the foremost regional journalists in the country. Each writer is independent and has a Substack of their own.