As U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues making vaccines in general and COVID-19 inoculations in particular harder to get, blame for any resulting deaths lying with him and his boss, President Donald Trump, will become clearer and clearer.
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That also applies to the current outbreak of whooping cough (or pertussis), of which 10,082 cases were reported by the end of May, killing five infants. That led Kennedy’s top U.S. Senate critic, Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy, whose state had three times as many cases as last year, to call on him to encourage mass vaccinations for whooping cough. As of this writing, Kennedy had not responded, and the outbreak was unabated.
It’s important to make clear neither Trump nor Kennedy is responsible for the summertime measles death of a Los Angeles child infected when too young for vaccination and before either RFK Jr. or Trump took office.
Yet there’s little doubt much of the blame in any future stackup of bodies dead from strains of COVID-19 will lie with Kennedy. For years, he was America’s foremost critic of vaccines of most types, from long-established preventives like the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) inoculations required for most schoolchildren to the newer COVID-19 antidotes.
We know New York City and parts of New Jersey experienced such high death tolls early in the COVID pandemic that hospitals and morgues used refrigerated trucks to store piled-up bodies. Images of mass burials on Hart Island near the Bronx also circulated widely during 2020 and 2021.
In that same year’s winter surge (the deadliest wave yet), hospitals in California, Arizona and Oregon also converted trucks into temporary morgues. Now another round of COVID threatens, and we shall see how responsible the American public that elected Donald Trump president is willing to hold him and his political deal-making.
Just now, a new variety of COVID-19 — at least the fourth since the pandemic’s supposed end — proliferates across the nation, while Kennedy makes it continually more difficult for people to get protected by new forms of the vaccine.
As secretary of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, Kennedy names the committees that set the rules for this. He has systematically filled them with anti-vaccine cronies he calls “distinguished scientists.”
They’ve set rules making it almost impossible for anyone under 65 to get previously free vaccinations unless they tell a pharmacist they have some kind of underlying condition weakening their health. Even some over 65 in California and other states have reported being forced to get COVID-shot prescriptions from physicians.
These are far higher barriers to inoculation than Americans faced as recently as last year, before RFK Jr. took over HHS. Why blame Trump too? For one thing, he put Kennedy where he is, part of a Trump/Kennedy political bargain sealed very publicly in August 2024.
That’s when Kennedy — until then a secondary presidential candidate — agreed to throw whatever support he had at the polls (it wasn’t much) behind Trump, often reported as an exchange for any cabinet job he desired.
Kennedy sorely wanted his current HHS post. He has used it to the hilt, first lying about the extent of his anti-vaccine sentiments during U.S. Senate confirmation hearings and then acting on his true feelings after taking over the only federal job he ever wanted.
Trump knew he was suborning this deceit, saying later that “everyone knows these (vaccines) work” but still refusing to fire Kennedy even after most of Kennedy’s family begged him to. Who knows what written “pre-nup” may exist between the two men, restraining Trump from taking appropriate action?
Even senators who voted to confirm Kennedy as a cabinet member now loudly point out contradictions between his confirmation hearing testimony and his actions in office.
“I would say effectively we are denying people vaccines,” said Louisiana’s Sen. Cassidy, a doctor who was the decisive vote to confirm Kennedy.
The bottom line is that responsibility for today’s rising positive results for COVID-19 and other once quiescent ailments like pertussis runs directly through Kennedy and Trump. No one knows if voters will hold either to account, though.
Email Thomas Elias at [email protected], and read more of his columns online at californiafocus.net.