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IS ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR AN UNMITIGATED QUACK? (UPDATED)

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Is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a quack?

Is Robert F. Kennedy an unmitigated quack?

If you strip it all away, remove all the increasingly tiresome journalistic writing niceties, the blunt response is: yes. RFK, Jr. is a quack. But a dangerous quack.

RFK, Jr. is a conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist quack who despite growing bipartisan opposition is a powerful quack, who continues to have his President’s backing because Donald Trump is a President whose default response to opposition is to battle it or ignore it and perceive opposition as part of an ongoing power struggle.

Donald Trump’s presidency is the wadayagonnadoaboutit presidency. Trump made a Faustian bargain with Kennedy during the 2025 election campaign: if he backed Trump he’d get free reign to do what he wanted in a Trump cabinet as the 26th United States secretary of health and human services. And, so, with his widespread firings, overt opposition to vaccines, denial of facts, staff firings, staff resignations, firing all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and then appointing new members that included some who were openly skeptical about vaccines, RFK, Jr. has created major chaos at the CDC.

How extreme is RFK, Jr.(Joke alert)? He thinks CDC doesn’t stand for Centers for Disease Control but Conspiracy Theory Central. He won’t eat alphabet soup because it has too many letters from government agencies in it. At his recent Senate hearing he lied so much that Pinocchio filed a defamation suit for stealing his act. He told so many lies that George Santos told him him to tone it down.

This just in from RFK’s nephew Joseph Kennedy III who is calling for his uncle’s resignation (be sure to click on the tweet so you can read the entire thing):

What RFK, Jr. said at his confirmation hearings versus what he’s doing and advocating now are at such variance with the his confirmation testimony that Republican Senators are starting wavering:

Republican senators are sending clear signs of disapproval and unhappiness with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., making it plain to President Trump that they want the administration to address the chaos Kennedy has caused by trying to rewrite the nation’s vaccine policies.

GOP senators have stopped short of calling on Kennedy to resign and haven’t yet said they regret voting for him in February, but they want him to back off efforts to change vaccine policy recommendations without sound scientific backing as the administration faces a growing public backlash.

Kennedy received an unusual admonishment from Senate Republican Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), an orthopedic surgeon, when he testified before the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday.

“I support vaccines. I’m a doctor. Vaccines work,” said Barrasso, the Senate’s No. 2-ranking Republican leader.

“Secretary Kennedy, in your confirmation hearings, you promised to uphold the highest standards for vaccines,” he said. “Since then, I’ve grown deeply concerned.”

Meanwhile:

Polls show Kennedy’s management of the nation’s health agencies is becoming a bigger political problem for Republicans.

An Economist/YouGov poll of 1,691 adults nationwide found that just 26 percent of respondents said they “somewhat” trust Kennedy’s medical advice, while 48 percent said they distrust him.

A CBS News/YouGov poll found that 74 percent of U.S. adults said government health agencies should make vaccines more available, while 39 percent of respondents said Kennedy’s policies are making vaccines less available. Only 9 percent of U.S. adults said Kennedy is making vaccines more available.

The survey of 2,344 adults found Kennedy has a 45 percent job approval rating and a 55 percent disapproval rating.

Republican senators’ views of Kennedy are souring compared to when almost the entire GOP conference voted to confirm him in February. Former Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) was the only Republican to vote against his nomination.

The Atlantic notes that Kennedy has Trump’s full support and is now in attack mode:

This sort of aggression from a Cabinet secretary could seem like political suicide. The lawmakers Kennedy was chiding not only have the power to investigate his work at HHS; they also control the funds he needs to keep his agency running. But Congress has never removed a Cabinet secretary from office. And even if some Republican senators are starting to raise concerns, one very prominent Republican still seems to remain in Kennedy’s corner. Earlier this week, Trump questioned the value of COVID vaccines and the massive effort that his first administration orchestrated to bring them quickly to the public in 2020. “I hope OPERATION WARP SPEED was as ‘BRILLIANT’ as many say it was,” he wrote on Truth Social. “If not, we all want to know about it, and why???”

As Kennedy grows bolder in his attacks, Trump has been his greatest enabler. Trump achieved the rapid delivery of vaccines during the pandemic with Operation Warp Speed, yet he seems to be happily cheering Kennedy on in dismantling that legacy. He might share Kennedy’s views, or perhaps he sees the pitfalls of dismissing a secretary who has some of the highest favorability ratings in the Cabinet. Even recent speculation that Kennedy plans to run for president in 2028 failed to generate a public rebuke from Trump. (Kennedy has since denied that he’s running.) At least for the time being, Kennedy looks invincible. He knows it.

The Bulwark noted the arrogance of Kennedy. Some key portions:

During his confirmation hearings before the Senate HELP Committee1 earlier this year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a soothing, solicitous presence. Don’t you worry about a thing, he breathed to those Republican senators skittish of his lengthy history of anti-vaccine crackpottery. I won’t make waves. I won’t cause a fuss. Why pick a fight with Donald Trump over little ol’ me?

Yesterday, Kennedy—long since confirmed and busily taking a torch to America’s public-health agencies—came to the Senate again. This time, he cut a different, far more arrogant figure.

…In testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, he scoffed at the deep concerns of Republican senators, issuing a torrent of wild denunciations and ridiculous claims. The CDC, Kennedy said, had been perhaps the most corrupt agency in the entire federal government up until his arrival. It was impossible to know how many people had died during the COVID pandemic, “because there was so much data chaos coming out of the CDC.” He said he was personally ensuring that U.S. vaccine guidance would be “clear, evidence-based, and trustworthy for the first time in history.” Forget about making HHS great again—Kennedy insisted he was making it great for the first time ever.

Meanwhile, many of his claims failed to pass the smell test.

…Speaking to reporters later in the day, Trump said he hadn’t watched the hearings, and spouted off a few content-free endorsements of Kennedy’s performance: “I heard he did very well today,” the president said. “It’s not your standard talk, I would say that, and that has to do with medical and vaccines. But if you look at what’s going on in the world with health and look at this country also with regard to health, I like the fact that he’s different.”

Still, it’s not totally clear Trump is fully on board with Kennedy and co.’s hard charge to the anti-vax side. Earlier this week, after Florida’s crank surgeon general announced that the state would end all vaccine mandates, including for schools, I asked the White House whether Trump was on board with the plan. They haven’t responded.

The Daily Beast:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s appearance on Capitol Hill on Thursday quickly broke down into a series of angry denials, fractious name-calling, and even yelling.

The combative tone of the hearing was set from the start as the health and human services secretary’s testimony came with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in chaos, with its leadership ousted on top of mass firings.

At the same time, Kennedy has been widely accused of undermining science and the future of America’s vaccine policy.

Every single Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, before which RFK Jr. testified, called for his resignation moments before the hearing got underway.

While much of Kennedy’s hostilities were directed at Democrats who did nothing to hide their disdain for the secretary, Kennedy also butted heads with Republicans who raised concerns about his anti-vaccine activities and repeated contradictions.

Throughout the hearing, the secretary repeatedly undermined data, rejected allegations, and dismissed decorum to spar with senators.

….Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock had some brutal final words to Kennedy during his time that summed up much of how Democrats were feeling.

“You are a hazard to the health of the American people. I think that you ought to resign, and if you don’t resign, the president of the United States, who put forward Operation Warp Speed, which worked, should fire you,” the senator concluded.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board:

Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suffering from long Covid? His memory was foggy during a Senate hearing on Thursday, in which the Health and Human Services Secretary hailed as “genius” President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, which produced Covid vaccines in record time. Mr. Trump must have liked hearing that.

But these are the same vaccines that RFK has also called “a crime against humanity.” So which is it, Mr. Kennedy: Was Mr. Trump’s vaccine operation a triumph or a government catastrophe?

…Mr. Kennedy came under fire at Thursday’s hearing from both Democrats and Republicans over his moves to undermine vaccines. “In your confirmation hearings, you promised to uphold the highest standards for vaccines,” Wyoming GOP Sen. John Barrasso said. “Since then, I’ve grown deeply concerned.” Mr. Kennedy struggled to defend his inconsistencies.

Vice President JD Vance tried to ride to Mr. Kennedy’s defense. “When I see all these senators trying to lecture and ‘gotcha’ Bobby Kennedy today,” Mr. Vance wrote on social media, “all I can think is: You all support off-label, untested, and irreversible hormonal ‘therapies’ for children, mutilating our kids and enriching big pharma. You’re full of sh— and everyone knows it.” Classy, as ever, Mr. Vice President.

None of this is true of Dr. Cassidy, Dr. Barrasso, and other Senators, and the Vice President knows it. Mr. Vance is trying to rally Republicans to RFK’s side by framing this dispute in a polarized partisan framework, either/or, us/them. That may serve his political purposes as he courts RFK’s supporters with 2028 in mind, but it won’t win over anyone paying attention to the health secretary’s contradictions as he attacks life-saving vaccines.

In the end, the hearing revealed Robert Kennedy, Jr. to be a bona fide quack — and a bona fide political hack.

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