The nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services was transactional: RFK 2.0 abandoned his 2024 presidential campaign (which was drawing sufficient support to pose problems for the Trump candidacy), and in return for switching teams received a position in the second Trump Administration cabinet. Politics often works that way, no matter how much we may deplore it.
Mr. Kennedy’s confirmation as HHS secretary, however, was a national disgrace and another blow to constitutional government as the Framers envisioned it.
RFK 2.0’s grave personal disqualifications for high office were outlined in a devastating letter sent by his cousin Caroline (daughter of the late President Kennedy) to every senator. The letter was also released as a chilling video. That this familial intervention was an unprecedented break with Clan Kennedy’s habit of circling the wagons and defending its own should have raised a bright red caution flag.
Then there was Mr. Kennedy’s performance at his confirmation hearing, in which he displayed an arrogance, an inability to handle criticisms and challenges calmly, and a shiftiness that ought to have given senators pause. Will the damage done by the arrogance and dissembling of Doctors Fauci and Collins during the Plague be mitigated by the arrogant dissembling of a Secretary Kennedy, who continues to hint, against three decades of scientific evidence gathered across various academic specialties in studies conducted in several countries, that childhood vaccines are linked to autism?
That willful, dangerous scaremongering alone should have been cause for the Senate, which once fancied itself “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” to reject the nomination. But the wholesale intimidation of senators by social media mobs threatening the bastinado (“We’ll primary you if you don’t go along!”) suggests that the 17th Amendment to the Constitution has been de facto amended to read, “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two bobbleheads from each state…and each bobblehead shall have one vote.”
Mr. Kennedy’s irresponsible, personally lucrative anti-vaccine campaigns have already raised the likelihood that certain cohorts of Americans will be less healthy and that public health (which is bad enough) is going to deteriorate further. Consider the outcomes possible when children are not vaccinated against such preventable diseases as polio (respiratory failure; permanent paralysis, partial or total); measles (encephalitis, causing permanent brain damage in a quarter of cases; “immune amnesia”); mumps (infertility and acquired deafness); Hepatitis A (liver failure, sometimes requiring transplant); Hepatitis B (chronic liver disease, liver failure, liver cancer); tetanus, diphtheria, and smallpox (all of which can cause death or, in the case of smallpox survivors, significant scarring).
In addition to the children who have been and will be put at risk by Mr. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine polemics — whose numbers include, tragically, the children of Traditionalist Catholic parents susceptible to such propaganda — the national pro-life movement took another major hit by RFK 2.0’s confirmation.
I say “another” because the first step in the dissolution of pro-life witness at the national level was the willingness of national pro-life organizations to swallow the 2024 Republican Party’s retreat from a comprehensive pro-life position: a retreat illustrated by the party platform encouraging IVF (thanks to which some 1.5 million tiny people now live in cryogenic suspended animation) and candidate J.D. Vance endorsing ready access to the “abortion pill” Mifepristone. That the Democratic Party platform and its candidates were orders of magnitude worse cannot justify pro-life leaders kowtowing to those who had just stiffed them.
For many of those same organizations to then sign off on the confirmation of Mr. Kennedy — an unabashed, unapologetic supporter of the abortion license for decades — just about completed the self-immolation process. Notwithstanding the welcome steps the administration has taken in liberating the Federal Government from gender ideology and its “transgender” offspring, whatever hopes of a place-at-the-table in HHS discussions those pro-life organizations’ leaders may harbor are likely to be disappointed. Once political leverage anchored in a firm adherence to principle is lost, it is difficult to regain.
Anti-vax passions reflect a collapse of confidence in traditionally trusted professions, caused in part by some in those professions becoming snobbish, authoritarian, and woke. Historical ignorance is also in play. When I mention “iron lungs” to some vaccine skeptics, they have no idea what I’m talking about. Do we want to return to the days when parents were terrified of their children going to swimming pools because the kids might contract polio and spend years (or a lifetime) enclosed in a metal tube in order to breathe?
RFK 2.0 might be willing to risk that to satisfy whatever demons drive him. Responsible parents will not.
