EDITORIAL: The candidate running against public health

A candidate for president of the United States promotes dangerous conspiracy theories, claims falsehoods are proven truths, spreads unfounded doubts about valid scientific findings and achievements and attacks government institutions with vicious insinuation.

No, it’s not that candidate, not the loved-or-hated fellow who is expected to win the Republican presidential nomination. This candidate is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy will not win the election, but the attention he will garner as a surprisingly well financed independent candidate will amplify  the lies that comprise his hysterical rhetoric.

Kennedy rages against vaccination, spreading doubt and fear through the forums accessible to a person with a name as famous as his—organizations that raise large amounts of money for his perverse mission, books, appearances, social media and now a presidential campaign that has somehow raised $15 million with a like amount on the way from a PAC.

Kennedy’s disinformation takes root in ground fertilized by internet traffic in imagined conspiracy plots accepted as reality by people who are unable, or don’t try, to discern the difference between fact and malign fantasy. It abets the growing resistance to vaccination, even that required for young children.

Children’s vaccination rates are declining in many states, including Wisconsin. According to the state Department of Health Services, 10% of K-12 students in this state have not received the vaccinations required to attend school, including those that guard against the dangerously infectious diseases measles and polio.

Once a plague that sickened and killed millions across the planet, measles was all but wiped out by the vaccine developed by scientists and the vaccination requirements put into effect by governments. In 2000, it was declared eliminated in the U.S. Now, an increasing number of cases are reported each year. These involve unvaccinated children and threaten devastating outbreaks in communities with a high percentage of unvaccinated children.

Kennedy said in a TV interview that when he meets parents with young children he tells them to not have the children vaccinated because the vaccines are dangerous.

He repeats the false claim that has terrified parents for years—that childhood vaccinations cause autism.

In a speech to Louisiana legislators, he said the coronavirus vaccine was the “deadliest vaccine ever made.”

He authored a book pilloring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, for their efforts encouraging vaccination against Covid, charging that they promoted “a historic coup d’ etat against western democracy.”

Kennedy’s sister Kerry Kennedy reacted with a statement that his comments were “deplorable and untruthful.” She joined her brother Joseph Kennedy in writing an article published in Politico Magazine condemning him for attacking “the institutions committed to reducing the tragedy of preventable diseases.”

This is consistent with their family history. The siblings’ uncle, President John F. Kennedy, was a vaccination advocate who in 1962 signed the Vaccination Assistance Act providing federal grants for immunization programs in all of the states.

Like every state, Wisconsin requires children  to be vaccinated against diseases that took the lives of many children before vaccines were developed.

Wisconsin, however, is one of only 15 states that allows parents to exempt their children from immunization requirements with a waiver based on “personal conviction”—in  other words, children can go unvaccinated just because that is what their parents want.

Republican and Democratic representatives in the Wisconsin Legislature have introduced bills that would end the personal conviction exemption and allow waivers only for medical and religious reasons. The bills haven’t been scheduled for hearings yet; the Legislature needs to get going and pass one of them for the protection of Wisconsin’s children. Acceptance of the vaccine paranoia espoused by Kennedy surely has a role in the increase in personal exemption waivers Wisconsin has been experiencing.

This in spite of the numerous scientific studies that have proven Kennedy’s vaccine claims false. These findings should remove any facade of credibility Kennedy has, but his own unhinged words should convince even the science skeptics that this is a man not to be believed.

Kennedy is documented to have said Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted to attack Caucasians and Blacks, but spare Jews and Chinese people.”

And this man thinks he’s qualified to be president?