Aug 30 (Reuters) - U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Saturday called on Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to resign, days after a senior public health official was fired and four others resigned in disputes over Kennedy’s unorthodox opposition to vaccines.
Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, wrote in a New York Times guest essay that Kennedy is “endangering the health of the American people now and into the future.”
This week, Kennedy ousted the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Susan Monarez, less than a month into her tenure, deepening disarray at the nation’s main public health agency. Monarez had refused to adopt new limitations on the availability of some vaccines urged by Kennedy, saying they went against scientific evidence.
Four other senior CDC officials resigned in protest, citing anti-vaccine policies and misinformation promoted by Kennedy and his team; hundreds of their colleagues walked out of the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta in support of the departing leaders.
Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate’s health committee and an opponent of Kennedy’s confirmation earlier this year, wrote that Kennedy ousted Monarez because she refused “to act as a rubber stamp for his dangerous policies.”
Kennedy’s an interesting case.
With the rest of Trump’s appointees, it’s tough to suss out exactly what they’re about. They’re generally some combination of corrupt, ideologically blinded, power-hungry, narcissistic and emotionally unstable, but it’s hard to be sure just how much of which they are.
But with Kennedy, it’s simple - he’s a raving lunatic.
He believes in miasma theory. It all makes sense in that context so he’s not just a raving lunatic.
Ah.
I’m betting that, like all too many people, he’s a binarist.
That seems to be the reasoning error at the heart of miasma theory.
The thing is that there’s some small measure of truth to it. Good health really does, to some degree, depend on good nutrition, good hygiene, a sound immune system and so on. But the way in which those things actually matter is the degree to which they help people fight off sickness (or to which their absence makes people more prone to sickness). The ultimate cause is, rather obviously, germs, viruses, etc., but we’re better able to resist them if we’re generally healthier, enjoying good nutrition and good hygiene and so on.
But that’s not the way Kennedy sees it. His simple-minded take on it is wholly binaristic, and essentially reactionary to boot. He can’t or won’t grasp the nuance of sickness being caused by germs and viruses and bacteria and things like poor nutrition and poor hygiene making us more susceptible to them - to him, it has to be entirely one or the other. And apparently mostly because disreputable people profit undeservedly from pretty standard capitalistic manipulations of health care based on germ theory, he’s decided that germ theory is entirely false and miasma theory thus entirely true.
So maybe not so much a lunatic as a shallow, confused snd deeply invested binaristic contrarian. Though I think a case could be made that that’s not far enough removed from lunatic to make any meaningful difference.
I think you’re heavily underestimating Kennedy as a corrupt, ideologically blinded, power-hungry, narcissistic and emotionally unstable bureaucrat.
He doesn’t seem to be in it for money or power, though. Fame maybe. Or power in the sense that he’s given a lot of levers to pull, though he doesn’t get to choose the levers. Narcissistic maybe, emotionally he seems fine though mentally wacko.
He’s absolutely in it for the power. His campaign to reshape US Health policy around a survival of the fittest eugenics ideology is plain as day.
Those aren’t mutually exclusive.
Just plain ol’ batshit crazy