Our View: RFK Jr. must go for the good of America

Sherlock Holmes had it right: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

And so it is, with some real dismay, that we must tell you we’ve eliminated the impossible — hoax, mass delusion, multiversal madness, what have you — and now must report the wildly improbable truth. Noted conspiracy theorist and crank-for-all-seasons Robert F. Kennedy Jr. really is the U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services. And yes, he’s in charge of vaccine policy in the world’s greatest nation.

Yes, it boggles the mind and is having tremendous impacts. So, here’s where things stand in Kennedy’s campaign to return America to the simpler days of mumps, polio, pertussis — and, of course, Covid.

In June, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the expert federal panel that sets vaccine guidelines. In turn, he replaced most of them with charter members of the Do Your Own Research Society — after promising not to do precisely that during his Senate confirmation hearings.

Then in early August, he canceled federally funded research into mRNA vaccines — the same technology that helped save millions of lives during the Covid pandemic and now holds promise for treating cancer.

And then last week, he announced that only high-risk patients — basically people 65 and older or those with certain preexisting conditions — would be eligible for the Covid vaccine this fall.
When Susan Monarez, his fellow Trump appointee as head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, refused to get with the anti-vax program, Kennedy had her removed — prompting some of the agency’s best and brightest scientists to resign in protest.

Given the circumstances, Medical University of South Carolina professor and former CDC scientist Michael Sweat may deserve an award for professional discretion and restraint when he spoke with Statehouse correspondent Jack O’Toole on Aug. 29.

“It’s concerning that some of the most respected leaders in our premier public health institution have resigned over this issue,” he said. “Which raises questions about whether we’re following the science as closely as we could.”

Actually, it raises questions about whether what we’re following is science at all. Still not convinced? Here’s America’s secretary of Health and Human Services, in his own words from March 2023:

“Covid-19, there is an argument that it is ethnically targeted,” Kennedy told reporters at a campaign press event. “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.”

We can’t even envision those words coming from RFK Jr.’s father, the late progressive senator Robert F. Kennedy, slain in 1968 by an assassin.

So let’s be frank. RFK Jr. is making a mockery of the preeminence of American medicine and health research. President Donald Trump’s decision to put Kennedy in charge of America’s health system was trolling on a scale not seen since the emperor Caligula appointed his horse to the Roman Senate.

But now with millions of lives at stake, Trump shouldn’t need the world’s greatest consulting detective to help him deduce what to do.

Put simply, it’s time for Trump to bring Kennedy into the Oval Office and bark the words for which he’s best known: “You’re fired.”