The outrage aimed at Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. regarding policy changes made under his leadership at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is unwarranted.
Our very own Senator Bernie Sanders has called for Kennedy’s resignation. Democrats, prominent Democratic Party-supporting influencers, most of the mainstream media, and a notable cohort on the American Left, of which I consider myself a part, have been quite vocal about Kennedy’s leadership. They’ve been especially critical of the agency’s decision to stop recommending mRNA COVID-19 shots to healthy adults under age 65 and healthy children older than six months.
I’ve seen online influencers critical of Kennedy lying, saying HHS is banning the shot; it’s not. Others say it’s a de facto ban: not putting it on the vaccine schedule will make it more costly and more cumbersome to receive, because insurance plans won’t cover it, or it will require a prescription.
First, the issue with insurance not covering care is a problem that goes way deeper than Kennedy, so if critics want to direct their anger, they need to point the finger at insurance companies and the American healthcare system.
Second, there’ll be insurance plans that will cover the shots, especially for people for whom it is deemed necessary as preventative care. BlueCross BlueShield has already stated that it will.
Third, I find it bizarre that people are outraged that HHS is not recommending a shot for people who are not at high risk for severe illness from COVID-19. Ironically, this demand is coming from people who cyberbullied and broke longtime ties with people who didn’t “follow the science.”
Speaking of “the science,” a front page piece critical of Kennedy and CDC in the Boston Sunday Globe on August 24, reported that northeastern public health officials met to discuss the possibility of, and a framework for, coordinating guidelines around a vaccine schedule to supplant HHS policies. This development is ironic considering these same people cited CDC and Dr. Anthony Fauci’s public health guidance with cult-like reverence; COVID-19 shot enthusiasts literally called the shot the “Fauci ouchie.”
The article cites one defensive comment from Kennedy about an issue not even directly responding to the policy change, but repeats, in almost every paragraph, that northeastern health officials are calling for science and evidence based policies, without even having the dignity to explain at any length how HHS’s policies aren’t based on evidence or science.
At the heart of these criticisms is a much larger issue, which is how absolutely clueless most of the critics are about the total lack of science underlying the pandemic response.
First, take the six-feet-apart rule. There were no controlled studies done specifically for COVID-19 at the time the decision was made.
In an interview on Face the Nation September 19, 2021, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) head Dr. Scott Gottlieb on admitted that the rule was arbitrary, and that, “nobody knows where it came from.”
On June 3, 2024, regarding the agency’s decision to adopt the rule, Fauci testified before Congress that “there was no trial that looked at” the amount of distance required to keep people from coming in contact with the virus.
I’ve seen it suggested that the decision was likely a compromise based on previous studies that show how far flu particles travel when airborne, but that’s for the flu, not COVID-19: they’re different viruses and need to be treated as such. Even if that’s what the decision was based upon, that’s an assumption based on older studies of a different type of virus. Assumptions aren’t science.
Second, take the mRNA shots. We were all told by the federal government and mainstream media day after day, week after week, that if you received a COVID-19 shot, you wouldn’t contract or spread the virus. Crucially, that claim was the basis of COVID-19 shot mandates: the public benefit of stopping the virus in its tracks outweighed the sacredness of bodily autonomy, because of the amount of lives that would be saved, the medical costs savings and keeping hospital capacity manageable. Follow the science, they said.
Okay, let’s look at the science, specifically a comment made by a Pfizer executive on October 11, 2022. When asked by a representative in the European Union Parliament whether Pfizer tested to see if its shot stopped transmission of the virus before the shot entered the market, she said, “no,” because they had to work at the speed of science.
I’m not sure what the speed of science is, but if I had to guess, it’s slow, methodical and thorough, the opposite of the shot rollouts.
So, again, where was the science?
Either the Trump and Biden administrations and the officials in HHS, FDA and CDC didn’t read the data Pfizer made available to them, or someone lied, either the administrations or Pfizer.
Either possibility is, to me, equally disturbing. It’s almost like this explains all those breakthrough cases, a term they stopped using when CDC quietly admitted that yes, anyone who gets the shot can still contract and spread the virus, including the Moderna shot.
Women and men in our military were literally threatened with court-martial if they didn’t comply with the mandates and thousands were involuntarily discharged.
Tens of thousands of people around the country lost their jobs over the mandates.
Encouragingly, New York City lost a major legal battle in the state supreme court over firing public employees for not complying with the mandate, which the court found arbitrary and capricious.
Third, healthy adults and children are not at risk of hospitalization or death from COVID-19.
That’s just a fact. I know that triggers and offends people when you say that, but it’s true.
For most people, even in a country as unhealthy as ours, COVID-19 is not a death sentence.
Sure, healthy people can get a bad case of COVID-19; I’ve been parallel to the floor for three solid days from it.
But that’s not the same as being at risk of hospitalization or death; that distinction is paramount.
Any healthy person can get a bad case of the flu or a bad cold, yet no one runs around screaming about fatalities and prophylactics.
No one calls you an anti-science conspiracy theorist for skipping your flu shot.
I don’t think people remember how bad it was. There was a perverse, nation-wide schadenfreude against those who didn’t comply with pandemic policies and who became severely ill and, in some cases, died.
Jimmy Kimmel literally said that hospitals shouldn’t treat non-vaccinated people; they should be left to die–and people cheered him on.
Speaking to the issue of healthy children specifically, the New York Times reported early on in the pandemic about children and COVID-19, noting that the risk of severe illness in most children is so low that it is difficult to quantify. Indeed, as recently as 2023, an article from Stanford Medicine acknowledged that “although kids under 5 represent about 6% of the U.S. population, they account for fewer than 0.1% of COVID-19 deaths in this country.”
Yet, many states took the advice to vaccinate and mask healthy children, and to keep them out of school.
The masking was especially pernicious, because it stunted the development of young children who were learning to speak and understand facial expressions.
There’s a double-standard most of the follow the science people have regarding vaccines, medicine and big pharma. I can talk with any of them about big pharma’s greed or the negative side effects of certain medications such as the infamous Vioxx. But vaccines are deemed sacrosanct, even though they’re made by the same companies that they criticize for a million other misdeeds.
Many of the people who think this way are the same upper middle class totebag pseudo-liberals who will tell you to suck on some plant they found in the woods instead of taking Advil.
Yet it doesn’t seem to bother them that pharmaceutical companies have legal immunity from the federal government over adverse vaccine-induced side effects and deaths. They’re the same people who still wear a mask in a crowded cafe yet somehow perform the mental gymnastics to convince themselves that taking their mask off to sip their $8 latte doesn’t expose them to the same air everyone else is breathing.
One thing that has been made crystal clear to me since 2020 is that a great many people and institutions for whom and for which I had the utmost respect don’t stand on principle.
They don’t care about science. Period.
They don’t want people to think critically or to even ask questions.
They’d rather silence and verbally abuse anyone with whom they disagree.
They cling to their beliefs with a force akin to religious dogma.
Those same people publicly crucified medical experts such as Dr. Pierre Kory, a renowned pulmonary specialist, and Dr. Robert Malone, one of the early mRNA medical scientists, for publicly expressing legitimate concerns about COVID-19 pandemic policies.
Moreover, as revealed in the “Twitter Files,” government actors secretly called on social media companies to censor malinformation about the virus and the shots, meaning information that was true but that would discourage people from wearing masks or getting vaccinated.
They were, in a very direct way, violating the principle of informed consent.
I know vaccines save lives.
Based on the evidence, however, I don’t think pandemic measures worked, they weren’t science- or evidence-based, and the COVID-19 vaccine is not the medical miracle it was said to be.
The whole country was B.S.’d into complying with a handful of policies that were reckless and made no sense.
So, my point is, I don’t want to hear another word from the critics about the science, because they clearly don’t care about it or practice it in their own lives.
And the medical professionals and health officials who are still clinging to, and propagating, the Fauci-era dogma have earned every bit of skepticism and scorn they receive.
Joe Murphy lives in Morristown.
