The original—Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?—began popping up at anti–Vietnam War rallies in 1966, as nightly newscasts showing villages leveled and villagers killed turned increasing numbers of Americans against our war. By then, the original RFK—New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, father of the boy who was to become Donald Trump’s destroyer of science-based medicine—was himself turning against the war, eventually to challenge Lyndon Johnson for the presidency on an anti-war platform.
Junior Kennedy now appears determined to see if his own war against vaccines, fluoridation, the biological sciences, and empiricism generally can produce an American death toll comparable to our losses in Vietnam. He’s canned every expert virologist, pediatrician, and public-health expert from policy-setting boards, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Food and Drug Administration, replacing them with conspiracy theorists and the occasional snake-oil salesman. Susan Monarez lasted 29 days as CDC director before Kennedy fired her because she “insisted on rigorous scientific review” of agency policies. His underlings have called for restricting the next tranche of COVID vaccinations to seniors and the seriously ill.
Nor is Kennedy alone in his quest: Yesterday, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced that his state would no longer require vaccines for schoolchildren, noting that every vaccine mandate “drips with disdain and slavery.”
Today, in a three-hour hearing before a Senate committee, Kennedy was challenged by a bipartisan group of understandably angry senators. Led by Bernie Sanders, the Democrats now are calling for Kennedy’s resignation. Their Republican counterparts voiced their fears that Kennedy’s anti-vaccine jihad could lead to untreated illnesses and avoidable deaths. But every one of the 53 Republican senators save one—Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell—had voted to confirm Kennedy’s nomination despite his decades of opposition to vaccines and health science, and today, not one of them joined the Democrats in seeking his ouster.
In the course of the hearing, for instance, Wyoming’s John Barrasso, the Senate Republican whip, told Kennedy, “I’m a doctor. Vaccines work. Secretary Kennedy, in your confirmation hearings, you promised to uphold the highest standards for vaccines. Since then, I’ve grown deeply concerned.” Despite that, when reporters asked him after the hearing if he still had confidence in Kennedy, Barrasso responded, “I have confidence in what the president of the United States is doing, and I will not second-guess.”
May I gently suggest that a stance such as Barrasso’s might prove electorally problematic for Republicans next year? According to a CBS News poll released earlier today, 74 percent of Americans believe government agencies should make vaccines more available against a bare 4 percent who want those agencies to make them less available. Seventy percent (including 57 percent of Republicans) say the federal government should encourage parents to have their children vaccinated, against, again, 4 percent who say it should not. And despite the pending diktat that would limit Americans eligible for the new COVID vaccines to seniors and the sick, 77 percent believe they should be made available to everyone who wants them.
Given numbers like these and stances like Barrasso’s, it should behoove the Democrats lining up to oppose Maine’s Susan Collins to make an issue of her vote in favor of confirming Kennedy’s nomination while fully aware of his fierce and decades-long opposition to vaccines. It shouldn’t be hard to get hundreds of Maine physicians to demonstrate against her. And even in midterm contests outside the swing states, even in House races where Republicans will respond as Barrasso did, Democrats should raise this issue, too. In the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans raised the completely spurious issue of the “death panels” that the newly enacted Affordable Care Act would allegedly create. Kennedy has now established actual death panels, and the Democrats should campaign on that, calling out every Republican on the ballot who hasn’t demanded Kennedy’s resignation.
Activists don’t have to wait for the midterms, of course, or confine their actions to election campaigns, to highlight the clear and present danger that Kennedy’s policies pose to the populace. The sidewalks outside the headquarters of the Department of Health and Human Services await daily demonstrators, peaceful but audible, some of whom may even voice an entirely justifiable chant: Hey! Hey! RFK! How many kids did you kill today?