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Anti-vaccine, anti-science, pro-brainworm, acknowledged heroin user Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed today to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services, despite having no qualifications for the job other than being popular with similarly delusional Trump cultists who think modern medicine is a racket that should be replaced with quack cures and herbs.
Yes, the United States Senate, and yes, the United States Health and Human Services Department, which is not only in charge of the nation’s public health and health research institutions but is also responsible for running Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, assuming any of those are still around in a few years.
Because the US health system comprises so very many huge organizations, there will be additional Trump-appointed quacks working below Kennedy, like TV diet-pill merchant Dr. Mehmet Oz at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), former Republican congressman and current antivaxxer Dave Weldon at the CDC, and Actual Doctor But Fox News Weirdo Marty Makary at the Food and Drug Administration. If the Senate was willing to confirm Kennedy, none of those three has any worries, not even if one or more turns out to be a cannibal alien shapeshifter bent on extracting all Americans’ cerebrospinal fluid for export to another galaxy.
All 47 Democrats in the Senate voted against Kennedy, many of them no doubt wishing they’d worn N95 masks to the chamber to get a jump on things. All Republicans voted to confirm him except for Mitch McConnell, a childhood polio survivor, who may mistakenly believe that taking a stand against Kennedy, whose antivax group pushed to discontinue the polio vaccine, might keep him out of Hell.
Kennedy has promised that he will …
Actually, why would we even credit what he says he wants to do? He’s a habitual liar who has repeatedly claimed that “no vaccine” is safe or effective, and then insisted he never said that, and that anyone pointing to recordings of him saying it is a liar. So no, we really don’t care what he says he’ll do at HHS. We can only hope he’s so incompetent that he can’t ruin much before he’s fired for calling the body of water between Texas and Florida “the Gulf of Mexico,” and even then he might have to do it on live TV, with Trump in the room.
Unfortunately, we can’t take much hope in the prospect that Kennedy’s stupidity and incompetence will save us, because even if he spends his time in office dithering over what endangered animal he should try to strap to the roof of his car as a prank this time around, there doesn’t appear to be much chance that serious people will have a chance to run things normally while the nincompoops are exploring bringing back the study of bodily humours in medical schools.
The effective silencing of the CDC suggests that it will be harder for real science to come out of the Trump administration, although we should note that today, the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which was shut down after Trump took office, finally published one of three highly anticipated reports on bird flu that had been delayed, as well as a report on the first case of a new strain of monkey pox that’s made it to the Americas, after an infected traveler returned to California from East Africa in November. (The CDC had previously issued a brief news release when the infection was confirmed.)
So, hooray for now, and where are the other two bird flu studies that were supposed to be published in January?
The Washington Post, just to provide further evidence of its utter debasement, chirpily explains that Kennedy has some very enthusiastic allies who
said they were elated to see him take up the helm of HHS, believing he’ll give a voice to people who are outside the mainstream.
“I think we’re going to see a deterioration of just the influence of corporations on policy decisions and a return to better science,” said Jeff Hutt, spokesperson for the Make America Healthy Again political action committee and who was the former national field director for Kennedy’s presidential campaign.
We need more people who don’t know what they’re doing or how science works, because they aren’t motivated by profits, so please go buy all their supplements. Frankly, we were so rattled by Kennedy’s confirmation that we couldn’t even come up with a good “Bring Solo and the wookiee” joke about this Jeff The Hutt guy.
The one bit of good news in all this is that we can hold onto the hope that we have all been dead and/or in a computer simulation since 2016 and none of this is actually happening.
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