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club asia What to Expect if Kennedy Is Promoted to a Position of Power
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reportedly wants to be the secretary of health and human services or hold a similarly powerful health position in a Trump White House. Mr. Kennedy claims he’s been promised influence over the two issues he is most eager to address: federal agency corruption and chronic disease. “I’m going to be deeply involved in helping to choose the people who can run F.D.A. and N.I.H. and C.D.C.club asia,” he told Tucker Carlson on a recent panel.
Mr. Kennedy has no meaningful claim to health expertise beyond an impressive geriatric six-pack and a do-your-own-research mantra. Nonetheless, he has gone from a fringe voice to the national leader of a rising “health freedom” movement powered by conspiracist thinking, resentment against the public health establishment and anti-vaccine fervor.
The Covid-19 pandemic was a divisive crisis for Americans. I worry that appointing Mr. Kennedy to a top health job would entrench the maddening, counterproductive, personality-driven dynamics that have dominated the politics of health and medicine for the first half of this decade, especially since Covid.
For the kind of person who chafed against mask and vaccine mandates and was susceptible to misinformation, the Covid-19 pandemic was a radicalizing event. Arguments for bodily autonomy, skepticism about corporate influence in health care and anxiety about the toxic effects of environmental contaminants have traditionally been the purview of health activists on the left. (Mr. Kennedy was until fairly recently a liberal Democrat with some idiosyncratic preoccupations.) During the first years of the pandemic, however, these themes were taken up against the public health establishment in service of a right-aligned agenda.
This realignment has politicized beliefs that were not traditionally tied to party identification: While the share of Democrats who supported school vaccination mandates held steady from 2019 to 2023, the share of Republicans who believed the same declined by 22 percentage points. In another survey, 69 percent of Republicans said they felt that the country had given too little priority to respecting people’s individual choices during the pandemic, compared with 28 percent of Democrats.
If Kamala Harris’s campaign mantra has become “We’re not going back,” a Kennedy appointment to a senior public health position would signify “We’re never getting out of here.” The fervor on the right about health and science inflames a similar tendency toward rigidity and dogma on the left; for each anti-vaccine post on X, a smug sign proclaiming “In this house, we believe science is real” blooms in someone’s yard. Mr. Kennedy’s promotion to power would make it all but impossible to learn from this difficult period.
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