Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified before the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday, largely concerning U.S. vaccine policy, which the infamous anti-vax conspiracy theorist oversees in his role as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. As is his custom, Kennedy spent the hearing confidently delivering weird lies, really just a virtually uniform stream of appalling lies, in service of his campaign to destroy the nation's public health infrastructure and replace it with eugenics.
Kennedy lied, a lot, about the efficacy and safety of vaccines; he lied about the clinical data supporting vaccination as public health practice; he lied about childhood vaccinations; and he lied about his own previous lies concerning what he would and would not do as HHS secretary. He accused the Senators interrogating him of "making stuff up," which was also a lie. He lied and lied and lied. At the most fundamental level, his very appearance before the Senate committee was itself a kind of lie, an empty and contemptuous performance of public accountability by a man and an administration plainly committed to violating every last institutional and moral constraint on their use of power. If Kennedy regarded himself as answerable in any meaningful way to America's people (or their elected representatives), he would not presently be working to feed the most vulnerable of their family members into the maw of communicable disease.
Here's one thing Kennedy said to the Senate committee, in defense of his flagrant efforts to complicate and obstruct COVID-19 vaccine access for as many Americans as possible, a gambit which would by design leave people more likely to contract the virus and would necessarily allow some greater number of them to be killed by it:
Right now we are dealing with completely different circumstances [from those prevailing during the initial rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines] where the virus has mutated, it's much less dangerous and there is a lot of natural immunity and herd immunity. So the calculus is different, and it's complicated.
And here is what New York Times science reporter Apoorva Mandavilli had to say about that, in the Times liveblog of the hearing: "Setting aside the incorrect claim about herd immunity, Kennedy makes good points."
There's more, after that—setting aside the appalling claim about Kennedy making good points, one might say, Mandavilli makes good points—but you could be forgiven for missing it if your vision whited out just then. Kennedy makes good points. Amazing!
The man's point in all of this, his plain goal in this testimony and in the virtually uniform content of years upon years of public statements and advocacy, is to propagate pseudoscience and conspiracy theory, to confuse and mislead an ill-informed and undereducated populace, to make people afraid of the very things that most effectively protect them from a host of deadly diseases, and so to replace evidence-based medicine wherever and whenever possible with the most deranged possible conception of "wellness." If some of the things Kennedy says in service of that point happen to flop a pinky toenail over the most generous outer threshold of factual accuracy—"there is indeed much more immunity in the population," Mandavilli grants, passively recapitulating Kennedy's elision of exactly how that immunity came to be, and also that immunity is not some fixed thing but rather a constantly eroding wall that must be continually reinforced through active public health measures, and also that "immunity in the population" does fuck-all for vulnerable people if the disease's vectors to them are not cut off by a critical mass of vaccination in everybody else, and that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. all but explicitly wants those vulnerable people to literally fucking die—well, so what? Of what use is that fact, outside of a performance of evenhandedness?
This sort of framing is both worse and less than uninformative. What's funny is, the simple converse—Setting aside the factual but irrelevant observation that more individuals have some immunity to COVID-19 than did in 2020, this statement is complete nonsense—is actually perfectly fine, and leads naturally to an explanation of why it's nonsense and why the nation's leading public health official is spouting it. All of which is the sort of thing that a newspaper would want from a science reporter doing a liveblog, but which is also the sort of thing that risks irritating a certain stripe of readers; the Times would rather indulge those readers than inform them. In any case, it's the analytical and journalistic equivalent of a movie studio scraping a negative print review for a handful of words that can be cobbled together into a positive-seeming blurb for the poster: "This is the [...] top [...] film [...] this year!"
Sure, yes: Set aside what Kennedy said, and what he meant, and why he said it, and what he hopes to accomplish, and everything else he has ever said, and all useful or informative context whatsoever, and one simply must grant that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was right when he said "I am [...] not really [...] a [...] Senator." It's true! He really got their asses with that one.
