New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd called U.S Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK Jr. a quack who’s “needlessly” endangering the nation’s children with his war on vaccines. But what’s most galling, said Dowd, is that Trump knows he’s a quack and still lets him swing his hammer at the CDC.
“I almost died of rubella when I was 3,” said Dowd, adding that her father helped guard F.D.R. at baseball games and other events, and “saw F.D.R.’s braces, a result of polio, and saw the elaborate lengths the White House went to camouflage the paralysis in the president’s lower body.”
“My family was grateful to be in the age of scientific achievement — from vaccine shots to moon shots. My mother would tell us harrowing tales of how her little sister, Mary, died in 1918 from the Spanish flu,” Dowd said.
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But now Trump is allowing an environmental lawyer to pose as a doctor while “yanking us back to those dark times.”
This month, Dowd said Kennedy canceled nearly $500 million in grants and contracts for developing mRNA vaccines, as well as a $600 million contract to develop a vaccine for the encroaching threat of bird flu. In March, while measles spread in Texas, Kennedy went on Fox News and promoted vitamin A and cod liver oil as a treatment, despite some unvaccinated children taking so much vitamin A, they showed signs of liver damage. In 2019, Kennedy traveled to Samoa and helped spark a measles outbreak that killed 83 people and infected 500 in Tonga after falsely claiming the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine had contributed to the deaths of two Samoan infants.
“Our health secretary is a certified quack. But the president, who is letting Kennedy run wild, knows better,” writes Dowd. “Trump got seriously ill from Covid and was saved by the doctors at Walter Reed, who gave him antibody treatments and remdesivir — not the remedy he once suggested people consider: bleach.”
She added that Trump’s greatest triumph was his Operation Warp Speed program, which developed a Covid vaccine in less than a year, yet Trump told top donors that couldn’t brag about the program for fear of offending the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement.
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“Why does this notorious germaphobe play lickspittle to debunkers of science?” asked Dowd.
She also slammed Trump’s fellow Republican gastroenterologist Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) who approved “Trump’s snake-oil health secretary” during his nomination, and she called him “too craven to vote against someone you knew would decimate our health system because you wanted to hang onto your seat.”
Read the New York Times report at this link.