RFK Jr.’s War on Evidence

When a scientific study challenges your beliefs, you have two choices: reconsider your beliefs or try to bury the study.

Under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., federal health officials chose the latter.

In April, the CDC blocked publication of a study showing that COVID-19 vaccines substantially reduced the risk of emergency room visits and hospitalization. Officials questioned the study’s methodology, though researchers had used the same approach in previous vaccine studies. The findings were later published elsewhere.

Apparently, even Kennedy’s brain worm knows you’re supposed to read the study before you shred it.

Meanwhile, Kennedy’s department has pushed to roll back longstanding childhood vaccine recommendations, weakening guidance that has helped protect generations of Americans from dangerous diseases. A federal court has since put the revised schedule on hold, but the message to parents has already been sent: decades of medical expertise can be swept aside by an administration determined to indulge its health secretary’s ideology.

Vaccines have protected Kennedy and the rest of us from diseases that once killed and disabled children by the thousands. Their success is precisely why so many Americans have never had to witness those horrors firsthand.

Facts don’t care about your political ideology. Neither do viruses.

The person in charge of America’s public health should understand both.