Top Texas doctor warns Robert F. Kennedy’s appointment would endanger public health

One of Texas’ top infectious disease doctors warns that a dangerous era of medical disinformation will take hold if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is confirmed as Department of Health & Human Services secretary.

In comments to Texas Public Radio, Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of Baylor College of Medicine’s National School of Tropical Medicine, said Kennedy’s repeated false claims about the dangers of vaccines could endanger the nation’s infrastructure to combat disease, ultimately costing lives.

“He doesn’t really understand the vaccine science and is not really interested in understanding the science,” Hotez said during a Wednesday appearance on TPR. “He just makes a series of assertions that he can’t support and just keeps moving the goal posts.”

Kennedy, who’s President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead HHS, has repeatedly made bogus claims about vaccines, including that they cause autism. He’s also spread other falsehoods, including assertions that chemicals in water are making children question their gender identity and that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS.

Public health experts have cautioned that Kennedy’s leadership of HHS could make the nation more prone to epidemics of potentially deadly diseases such as measles, meningitis and whooping cough.

Hotez — an outspoken critic of anti-vaxxers’ spurious claims about the dangers of the COVID-19 vaccines — said scientists are fighting an uphill battle against medical disinformation that would become even more difficult if Kennedy is approved to lead HHS.

“We’ve seen this with other authoritarian-like regimes,” said Hotez, author of The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning. “This is what Stalin did in the ’20s and ’30s with the Great Purge. They’d target the intelligentsia, they’d target the scientists and portray them as public enemies or enemies of the state. So, something like that, I think, is going on as well.”

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This article appears in Nov 28-29, 2024.