RFK Jr. Wants You to Die

By Dave Levitan | August 6, 2025 | 10:46am

Photo by Joyce Boghosian/the White House/Wikimedia Commons

Healthcare RFK Jr.

I am hard pressed, these days, to find a more damning proof of the inherent chaos of the universe, the sheer stochastic bubbling of trillions of particles flung this way and that, than the fact that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., gets to determine what vaccine research is done in this country. Any sort of grand design at all wouldn’t let him within a half mile of a child’s chemistry set.

On Tuesday, the Health and Human Services Secretary’s latest salvo against biomedical research — and sanity — landed: a “coordinated wind-down” of all research and development involving mRNA vaccines under the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA. There isn’t any use in pretending otherwise: RFK Jr. wants you to die.

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The announcement, which in concrete terms means the canceling of $500 million worth of research and development across 22 ongoing projects at pharmaceutical companies, essentially means the HHS Secretary wants to abandon efforts to improve vaccines for Covid, the flu, and other illnesses. Mixed with his never-ending insistence that existing vaccines including the MMR and others are somehow more harmful than helpful, cessation of support for nigh-on miraculous mRNA approaches is another nail in his “we’re just following the science” coffin.

He still tries to claim as much, of course. “We reviewed the science, listened to the experts, and acted,” the Secretary said in a statement. Of course, no they didn’t — instead, he has fired and replaced every expert advisory board he can find and surrounded himself with outright cranks. Peter Hotez, a pediatrics and vaccines expert at Baylor, said on Bluesky that Kennedy is clearly “untethered from reality,” and laid out why abandoning mRNA vaccine research makes no sense. One former FDA official told the BBC that the US is “turning its back on one of the most promising tools to fight the next pandemic.”

In his doth-protest-too-much statement, Kennedy said: “Let me be absolutely clear: HHS supports safe, effective vaccines for every American who wants them.” He can rasp such pleasantries toward the sky as often as he likes; every action he has taken since assuming office has proven otherwise. If he could tear it all down — literally, remove the sheer possibility of vaccination, for anyone, for anything — and get away with it, he would.