Well, here’s something wild that former President Donald Trump said during his campaign event in New York City on October 27. Trump literally used the word “wild” when he told the crowd at Madison Square Garden what he would do with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., if the 45th President were to become the 47th. “I’m going to let him go wild on health. I’m going to let him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on the medicines,” said the 78-year-old Republican nominee. Looks like Trump might be oiling the wheels for Kennedy Jr. to determine what happens with health and science policy, operations and research in the U.S. government.
Speaking of oil, Trump did indicate one exception to what Kennedy, Jr. can go wild on: “The only thing I don’t think I’m going to let him even get near is the liquid gold that we have under our feet.”
All of this is in line with what Kennedy Jr. had told Tucker Carlson at an event Wisconsin in mid-September: “[Trump’s] asked me to help him end the childhood disease, chronic disease epidemic, and make Americans healthy again.” Kennedy Jr. also said that Trump wants Kennedy, Jr. to help chose the heads of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health and the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. “President Trump has asked me specifically to do two things,” Kennedy, Jr., asserted then. “One, to help unravel the capture of the agencies by corrupt influence. In other words, to drain the swamp.”
So, in less than a year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has gone from being a Democratic candidate for President to being an Independent candidate to potentially being part of the transition team for Trump. And should Trump re-take the White House, Kennedy, Jr. may go from making what FactCheck.org, a fact-checking project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania, described as a “trail of false and misleading claims on health topics such as vaccines, autism, and Covid-19” to helping Trump choose the next leaders of the U.S. government’s biggest health and scientific organizations.
Kennedy, Jr. also has the distinction of being named on of the “Disinformation Dozen” by the Center for Countering Digital Hate in 2021. It’s a distinction because there were only 12 of them. It’s also a distinction that one probably wouldn’t list on one’s resume or LinkedIn profile. The Center for Countering Digital Hate described the Disinformation Dozen” as “twelve anti-vaxxers who play leading roles in spreading digital misinformation about Covid vaccines. They were selected because they have large numbers of followers, produce high volumes of anti-vaccine content or have seen rapid growth of their social media accounts in the last two months.”
Here are just a few examples of what Kennedy, Jr. has done and said over the years:
- Claiming in a Fox & Friends interview, “Vaccines are the only medical product that is not safety-tested prior to licensure.” That, of course, is not the case as vaccines cannot reach the U.S. market without undergoing clinical trials that produce results reviewed by the U.S. FDA.
- Blaming anti-depressants for school shootings, which was basically the headline of an article by Miles Klee for Rolling Stone. Kennedy, Jr. has not provided adequate scientific evidence to support this view. Daniel R. Stalder Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, wrote for Psychology Today that “shooters who were prescribed antidepressants…constitute less than a fourth of the mass shootings,” but guns “co-occur 100 percent of the time.”
- Questioning on multiple occasions whether HIV is really a cause or the only cause of AIDS as described by an article in the New York magazine. There’s an abundance of evidence linking infection with the human immunodeficiency virus with AIDS. For example, a New England Journal of Medicine article entitled “The Discovery of HIV as the Cause of AIDS” detailed the steps that led to, well, basically what the title of the article said. By contrast, those denying HIV as the cause of AIDS have not produced adequate scientific evidence to support their views.
- Repeatedly suggesting that chemicals in water “making children gay or transgender and causing the feminization of boys and masculinization of girls,” as reported by Abby Turner and Andrew Kaczynski for CNN. See above about not providing adequate scientific evidence.
And even though Kennedy, Jr. is a lawyer without any formal scientific training, he was quoted by David Remnick for the New Yorker as saying, “I don’t necessarily believe all the scientists, because I can read science myself. That’s what I do for a living. I read science critically.”
Reading science is one thing. Understanding fully what you are reading is another thing. Making health claims without providing adequate supporting scientific evidence is something totally different. And giving someone with no real scientific background the power to decide how the largest and most important U.S. governmental health and science institutions will be organized, led and run would be quite, well, wild.
After all, would you want someone who simply says, “I can read science myself” in taking care of your health? Wouldn’t that be a bit like someone with no legal background saying, “I can read the Constitution myself,” and then representing you in court or serving on the Supreme Court? Or how about someone who has never flown an airplane but claims, “I can read an airplane manual,” pilot your next flight? Doing any of these things could set up a very wild ride. And wild may not be the first word you want to hear when it comes to your health.
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