To Kennedy, we’re the disease and he’s the cure

The CDC changed its website. It now says that “the statement ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim.”

Wrong. It is. There is decades of evidence showing no link between them. Everyone knows it. “The conclusion is clear and unambiguous,” said the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

By “everyone,” I include Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Yes, he’s the chief conspiracist behind the effort to turn the federal government into the world’s biggest organ of antivax propaganda.

But conspiracy theories in the hands of men like him are merely tools for achieving an outcome. In his case, the desire for that outcome is rooted in feelings of disgust in the presence of sickness and disease, and at the sight of people who seem to him abnormal or deviant.

That some people are born on the autism continuum – or with some form of mental illness – is a fact of life that is so unacceptable to him that something, or someone, must be to blame, whether it’s vaccines for infectious disease or mothers who take Tylenol during pregnancy.

Kennedy knows vaccines don’t cause autism, but he also knows he needs a rationale for pursuing the goal of “purifying” the nation.

The Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported today that Kennedy ordered the change to the CDC’s website, breaking a promise he made. He also acknowledged “that large-scale studies of MMR vaccine and thimerosal show no link. But he cited gaps in vaccine safety science” (my italics).*

And that brings me back to outcomes.

• Scare people away from vaccines.
• Allow preventable diseases like whooping cough and the flu to spread and kill people who are seen as unfit or undesirable.
• Make America healthy again.

Kennedy is famous for saying things about people’s health that are objectively weird. (He says he can see "the mitochondrial challenges” of children just by looking at them.) But while that may be due in part to immersion in pseudoscience and quackery, it’s also due to ideology.

Some call it eugenics. Some call it social Darwinism. Let’s put it this way: Kennedy doesn’t see individuals. He sees people as if they were cells making up the blood and sinew of the body of America. If a cell gets corrupted, it’s better to kill it off in the name of “the nation.”

He will never say that out loud, because it would sound like what it is, which is evil, so instead he talks about inflammation or “mitochondrial challenges” or sperm counts or testosterone levels. He makes up emergencies to be solved with “solutions” that achieve his goals.

That sperm counts etc are not emergencies distracts from the fact that Kennedy himself is hardly the picture of good health. I don’t know why more isn’t made of it. I don’t just mean his dead brain worm.

I mean he tans. He takes something like steroids, if not the real thing. (Steve Kettmann thinks he’s juicing.) Thanks to Olivia Nuzzi, we know that he was smoking dimethyltryptamine, the hallucinogen found in ayahuasca, during their affair, which ended in September of last year. Kennedy seems to be so addicted to a brand of nicotine pouch called Zyn that he had to pop one during his Senate confirmation hearings. This is in addition to a well-known decade-and-a-half heroin bender.

You would think that the man who tells us he’s leading an effort to make us all healthy again would have the integrity to begin with himself. After all, what’s good for you and me is good for him, right?

But that assumption runs afoul of reality, which is to say that Kennedy does not see himself as he sees you and me. He is the pure bloodline of the aristocracy, a rich and powerful man, the exception to every rule.

He is the nation.

You and me? We're just cells.

Standards of health that apply to you and me were never going to apply to a cabinet secretary so immune from the consequences of his choices that he can tan, take steroids, smoke psychedelics and pop Zyns in front of a panel of United States senators – and no one says boo.

We are the corruption, not him. We are disgusting, not him.

He is America and we are making him sick.

Make America healthy again.

*The Times: “In his view, sweeping statements like ‘vaccines don’t cause autism’ are unproven, and have been deployed by public health leaders who want to ease parents’ fears. He said he is not saying vaccines cause autism; he is simply saying there is no proof that they don’t.”

That, my friend, is a goal in search of a rationale.