Some of RFK Jr.’s policies merely seem intended to cause misery, like blocking people using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program from buying soda. True, carbonated sugar water has little nutritional value, but preventing poor people from purchasing it demeans infinitely more than it actually helps.
Further up the ladder of harm, RFK Jr.’s inevitable move to remove fluoride from the nation’s drinking water will result in 25.4 million more cases of decayed teeth, incurring $9.8 billion in added costs over five years, according to a recent study published in JAMA Health Forum. These new cavities and any associated pain will particularly afflict young children because as any parent can tell you, getting a toddler to properly brush their teeth is harder than getting RFK Jr. to say something positive about vaccines.
As for vaccination, it is here where RFK Jr.’s policies turn undeniably dangerous. Globally, vaccines have saved an estimated 154 million people over the past fifty years, two-thirds of them infants. He’s now undermining vaccines’ effectiveness from the highest health podium in the country, disincentivizing their research and production, and stymying their approval and uptake. Most recently, RFK Jr. removed and then hand-picked members of a key committee that issues government recommendations on vaccination. This committee sets the schedule for child vaccination, which insurance companies use to decide which shots to cover. While the old panel was decidedly pro-science and pro-vaccine, the new panel appears decidedly less so. It’s entirely within the realm of possibility that many vaccines will no longer be covered as preventative care in the near future. Vaccine coverage would thus slip, making it almost certain that previously eliminated diseases will reemerge.
RFK Jr’s disdain for vaccines recently materially manifested in the revocation of more than half a billion dollars in grants the Biden administration previously awarded to pharmaceutical company Moderna to develop mRNA vaccines against H5 avian influenza and other potential pandemic-causing viruses. As RFK Jr. hampers pandemic preparedness, he’s also advocating for making one more likely. During a Fox News interview in March, Kennedy said that rather than cull flocks infected with H5N1, farmers “should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it.” Experts say the harebrained idea would only give the virus more of a chance to mutate and jump to humans.
In the Soviet Union in the mid-20th century, the Soviet government adopted pseudoscience espoused by Trofim Lysenko as state science in an ideological effort to counter the West. These ideas, which rejected Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution, directly led to disastrous agriculture policies that ultimately resulted in the starvation deaths of 30 million people across the globe. With RFK Jr.’s crank notions now suffusing key areas of influence in the federal government’s health apparatus, tens of millions could suffer deadly consequences.
“This is American Lysenkoism,” prominent science communicator Dr. Steven Novella wrote at Science-Based Medicine. “The only question now is – will RFK Jr surpass Lysenko with a higher body count? The smart money is on yes.”
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