Trump Transition Chair Blurts Out Plan to End All Vaccines

I have become increasingly acculturated to crazy shit going on in the politics space. So much so, that few things raise themselves to the point where I feel really upset above the baseline feeling of the country falling apart around me, which is bad, but like... you can't really be thinking about it all the time, you gotta live.

So it's a big deal that when I saw this article it struck me as extremely, worryingly, abnormally bad even within the context of an abnormally bad time in American history. The idea that Trump is lining up to back RFK Jr. on health policy is terrifying, almost certainly guaranteeing some of the worst possible immediate outcomes out of any of the potentially terrible things he could do.

What is far more likely, Semafor notes, is that Kennedy could be an “adviser or czar, positions that would not require Senate confirmation. That sort of post would allow Kennedy to wield influence over the broad swath of agencies he has taken an interest in (he has named CDC, FDA, NIH, USDA, and “others”). Kennedy couldn’t shape policy in all these agencies from any one cabinet position, but he could do so as an adviser or czar with a broad portfolio.

The sort of havoc this arrangement could wreak is almost impossible to fathom. The federal government plays an essential role in authorizing vaccines and pharmaceuticals. It is true that the government’s scientific authority is not omniscient, and there are enough cases in which scientific authorities have imposed political judgment in place of evidence to raise ample grounds for treating any of their pronouncements with some skepticism.

But justified skepticism is one thing. Subjecting public-health decisions to RFK Jr.’s racked worldview is something else altogether. And the process Lutnick proposed to Collins — that the FDA could withdraw approval for a suite of life-saving vaccines because Kennedy decides the data is insufficient — is a glimpse into a public-health nightmare.