When US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jnr removed the vaccine advisory panel of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), he framed it as a move for the “restoration of public trust”. But the implications stretch far beyond domestic politics.
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In dismantling one of the world’s most respected sources of vaccine expertise, the United States is not just undermining its public health, it is ceding global scientific authority to China.
Trump’s elevation of figures like Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel made clear his second term would test the limits of mainstream thought. But Kennedy is the president’s magnum opus. This is not some well-meaning reformer with unorthodox ideas, let loose to fix a broken health system. He is the embodiment of conspiracy masquerading as policy – an ideologue entrusted with the machinery of American public health.
Kennedy has hand-picked eight replacements, including vaccine critics such as Vicky Pebsworth, who has served on the board of America’s oldest anti-vaccine group. There is a trend here: Kennedy has promoted ideas so unhinged they barely warrant rebuttal.
He claimed Wi-fi can cause cancer, compared US vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany’s authoritarianism, mused that Covid-19 might have been ethnically targeted and posited that HIV does not cause Aids. If one tried to distil the collective fever dream ravings of a Reddit thread into human form, you’d get RFK Jnr.
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The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices has for decades been the gold standard for vaccine guidance – not merely for the US, but for the world. Its members are not political appointees but independent epidemiologists and immunologists with no obvious axe to grind, other than preventing disease and saving lives. To replace them with well-known sceptics is a purge, executed not in the name of transparency or science, but of ideology.