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On Thursday, Donald Trump announced that he will nominate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the notorious peddler of anti-vaccine disinformation and numerous pseudoscientific conspiracy theories, to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Among a series of highly provocative cabinet selections, the nomination of Kennedy is the most brazen so far. Holding no medical degree or relevant experience, he would oversee 11 critical public health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Administration for Children and Families (ACF) and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
No other individual could be less qualified or more inadvisable for this position. It is akin to placing Al Capone at the head of the Department of Justice, or climate change denier and Chevron CEO Mike Wirth to oversee the Environmental Protection Agency, the latter of which could very well still take place.
After ending his own presidential campaign and endorsing Trump in August, Kennedy played a central role in Trump's campaign, especially at its final events. Speaking at his fascist Madison Square Garden campaign rally last month, Trump pledged to let Kennedy "go wild on health. I'm going to let him go wild on the food. I'm going to let him go wild on medicines."
The implications are far-reaching, as Kennedy has openly opposed vaccines, pasteurization, water fluoridation, and other long-established scientific practices, while promoting every quack medicine under the sun. On October 25, Kennedy tweeted:
FDA's war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can't be patented by Pharma. If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.
Under conditions in which H5N1 bird flu is spreading widely among dairy cattle across the US and scientists have explicitly warned that the consumption of raw milk could facilitate human infections and the danger of another pandemic, Kennedy has continued to advocate this dangerous practice. Historically, bird flu has a 50 percent fatality rate.
Under the banner "Make America Healthy Again," Kennedy and Trump will facilitate the emergence of the next pandemic and the revival of long-eliminated disease like measles and polio. In fact, the same day that Trump announced his pick of Kennedy, news reports noted that measles cases in America are now four-fold higher than last year, primarily due to declining vaccination rates.
Speaking at an anti-vaccine conference last November, while still a candidate for US President, Kennedy pledged to fire 600 workers at the NIH if elected, adding, "We're going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years."
In other words, the man ostensibly in charge of preventing pandemics and infectious disease outbreaks has explicitly stated that he will work on behalf of the pathogens instead of the public.
The most dangerous and well-known of Kennedy's beliefs is his fervent promotion of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. Since 2005, he has steadily become America's leading purveyor of this far-right propaganda. In 2015, he was appointed chairman of Children's Health Defense (CHD), where he has continuously advanced false claims that vaccines cause virtually all developmental disorders and diseases, in particular, autism.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the spread of anti-science disinformation on all social media platforms, with Kennedy playing a dominant role. In 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate listed him among their "Disinformation Dozen," 12 individuals who collectively bore responsibility for roughly 65 percent of all anti-vaccine disinformation on social media. Kennedy is thus implicated in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans who have needlessly died after refusing to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
Throughout the pandemic, Kennedy has vocally opposed vaccine mandates, temporary lockdowns, masking, and virtually every public health measure known to save lives and stop the spread of COVID-19.
In his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the War on Democracy and Public Health, Kennedy embraced every conspiracy surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. He also advanced HIV/AIDS denialism, questioning the "orthodoxy that HIV alone causes AIDS" and the "theology that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS."
Alongside both the Democratic and Republican parties, Kennedy has propagated the Wuhan Lab conspiracy theory, which falsely claims that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was deliberately created by Chinese scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
A leaked 2023 video of Kennedy showed him further twisting the Wuhan Lab Lie into an antisemitic and racist anti-Chinese conspiracy, in which he claimed that the virus was engineered to become "ethnically targeted ... to attack Caucasians and Black people" because of "the genetic structure" of the virus. He added, "The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese," insinuating a conspiracy by Jewish and Chinese scientists to kill Christians.
Primary responsibility for the coming catastrophe of the second Trump administration rests with the Biden-Harris administration and the Democratic Party as a whole. Not only have they done nothing to oppose Trump's formation of a fascist cabinet, they have welcomed them with open arms.
Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, tweeted Thursday:
I'm excited by the news that the President-Elect will appoint @RobertKennedyJr to @HHSGov. He helped us defeat vaccine mandates in Colorado in 2019 and will help make America healthy again by shaking up HHS and FDA. I hope he leans into personal choice on vaccines rather than bans.
If Kennedy is not approved by Congress, he will likely be installed via Trump's plan to bypass this constitutional requirement through recess appointments.
The elevation of Kennedy to head the HHS will represent a massive social retrogression, akin to sending the United States -- the world's richest capitalist country -- back to the Middle Ages.
Once in power, it is entirely possible that Kennedy would work to impose nationwide "vaccine choice" policies in regards to measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) and other vaccines, which are currently mandated for children to enter kindergarten in all 50 states. He could implement a nationwide mask ban, broadening the county- and state-wide bans put in place in parts of the US this year.
As with Trump's election and his cabinet selections as a whole, the nomination of Kennedy signifies the turn towards fascism by substantial sections of the American ruling class. Within these layers, there is a growing desire to normalize mass infection and death from long-suppressed infectious diseases such as measles and polio.
The conditions for this wholesale scrapping of public health were cultivated by the Biden administration, which oversaw the full implementation of Trump's "herd immunity" policy of mass COVID-19 infection, death and debilitation with Long COVID.
The US is now on the cusp of the tenth wave of mass infection, which will likely be peaking as Trump takes office. The latest models project that within one month, over 1.3 million Americans will be infected with COVID-19 each day. Over 40,000 Americans have officially died of COVID-19 this year alone, while the cumulative excess death toll now stands at roughly 1.5 million, the vast majority taking place under Biden.
Not a word is said about this by any politician or in the corporate media, all of whom have enforced the "forever COVID" policy of unending mass infection and death.
As the Trump administration begins to implement its fascist policies, profound shocks will grip the American and international working class. The essential task is to build a revolutionary socialist leadership to prepare for the inevitable struggles that lie ahead. A critical component of the fight for socialism will be to advance a socialist public health program, in opposition to the anti-scientific nonsense of Kennedy, Trump and all of their allies and enablers.
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