Alaska’s U.S. Senators deserve blame for the grave threat to national health that is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan could have tried to prevent Kennedy’s confirmation, but they sided with ignorance and arrogance and Trump. They are culpable for the damage Kennedy is doing, which includes making future pandemics harder to stop.
Dan and Lisa helped elevate this crackpot to a position of power, rewarding the unholy alliance Trump made with a guy he identified a year ago as a “total fake.”
Thanks to the Republicans in the Senate, RFK has a powerful platform to spew his anti-vaccine nonsense and attack the science of medicine.
Kennedy’s entire campaign for the presidency was based on lies that vaccines cause autism and are dangerous, lies about antidepressants, lies about cancer, lies about fluoride, lies about AIDS, lies about COVID and more. He spreads vaccine doubt wherever he goes, including Alaska.
The Anchorage Daily News has the best coverage of the absurd event in Alaska Tuesday at which Kennedy spouted misleading and dishonest claims about vaccines in the presence of our senators, who didn’t denounce his fabrications.
That Murkowski and Sullivan can’t find the will to stand up and clearly say Kennedy is spreading misinformation reveals a lot about their shortcomings.
Of course Murkowski has concerns, which is like saying that McDonald’s has hamburgers. Coming from her the word is meaningless.
And Sullivan, he has nothing to say because he can’t find a way to blame Biden for Kennedy’s blather.
“Sullivan did not comment on Kennedy’s approach to vaccines,” the Anchorage Daily News reported.
It was the same day on which Kennedy canceled $500 million in vaccine research and Kennedy released a video in which he lied that mRNA vaccines are not effective against upper respiratory illnesses. He repeated the lie in Anchorage.
“The mRNA vaccines, we know from COVID, don’t work against upper respiratory infections,” he told Anchorage reporters, according to Alaska Public Media. “They don’t work very well — Let me put it that way.”
I am waiting for Lisa and Dan to issue press releases praising themselves for aiding Kennedy’s attempts to create doubts about vaccines across the U.S. and around the world.
Murkowski repeated her criticism of Kennedy’s firing of the members of a key vaccine advisory board, but then she said: “But I don’t fault the secretary for wanting to ensure that there is a more rigorous testing process for our vaccines, although I do believe that we have many vaccines that have been in place for years, if not decades, that have clearly demonstrated that efficacy over a period.”
In framing her position with a mealy-mouthed semi-compliment, she helps Kennedy’s reckless campaign of spreading vaccine uncertainty.
Kennedy’s new scientific advisers, focused on creating confusion about vaccines, couldn’t ask for a better endorsement from a U.S. senator than her murky remarks.
The Associated Press quoted a University of Minnesota expert in infectious diseases as saying Kennedy’s action in stopping the $500 million of research was the most dangerous decision he has seen in his 50 years in public health.
“This is a bad day for science,” Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told the New York Times. Hensley is working to create an mRNA vaccine for the flu.
“First used during the Covid-19 pandemic by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, mRNA shots instruct the body to produce a fragment of a virus, which then sets off the body’s immune response,” the Times reported. “Unlike traditional vaccines, which can take years to develop and test, mRNA shots can be made within months and quickly altered as the virus changes.”
Kennedy told the Anchorage audience the canceled mRNA funding will go instead toward “universal vaccines.”
“The health department said it will favor other types of shots over those using mRNA, like whole-cell vaccines. That technology is more than 100 years old. The United States has not used a whole-cell vaccine for whooping cough since the 1990s because it was potent but harsh, often setting off high fevers and seizures,” the Times said.
But it was a little more than a month ago that because of Kennedy, the U.S. stopped supporting the leading international organization that uses the whole-cell vaccine in low-income countries. His pattern is to spread mistrust of vaccines.
“The organization’s work is estimated to have saved the lives of 17 million children around the world over the past two decades,” the Times reported June 25.
Meanwhile, Kennedy is going fishing.
Sullivan extracts promises from all cabinet members to visit Alaska, especially in the summer when they can go fishing.
“It was not a hard sell to come back to Alaska,” Kennedy said in Anchorage. “I wanted to do it during sockeye season.”
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
