RFK Jr. Is as Bad as We All Imagined
If it walks like a quack, talks like a quack, and quacks like a quack. . .
Donald Trump has a few different grievances involving California and fire bouncing around in his bean, and it’s been fun watching him try to keep them all straight for the last few days. Behold the weave:
Happy Tuesday.
RIP ACIP
by Andrew Egger
Do you ever wonder how much the White House coordinates the rollouts of its various outrages? Whether Trump drops a line to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Hey, I’m going to spend today agitating against “insurrectionists” in Los Angeles and threatening to arrest Gavin Newsom—if you’ve got anything big and evil to announce, now would be a great time.
Yesterday left us wondering. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Kennedy launched his latest offensive against America’s vaccines, announcing he had fired all seventeen members of the Centers for Disease Control’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP). Kennedy, a dyed-in-the-wool anti-vax activist, said in an accompanying statement that the move had been necessary to “reestablish public confidence in vaccine science” and to rid the committee of “any specific pro- or anti-vaccine agenda.” He said he would appoint replacements, presumably before the ACIP’s next meeting, which is scheduled to begin in two weeks.
The ACIP’s influence on federal health policy is enormous. As the CDC’s institutional brain trust for best-in-class vaccine science, it issues guidance that shapes federal policy for recommended vaccine schedules, including which vaccines should be administered to children. (Notwithstanding Kennedy’s odd assertion that the committee had “never recommended against a vaccine,” the ACIP does not authorize new vaccines for public use, a responsibility that belongs to the Food and Drug Administration.)
How important is the ACIP? Important enough that Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican and a doctor, made it his line in the sand for supporting Kennedy’s nomination as secretary of health and human services—a nomination he could have derailed. In announcing his decision to vote yes on Kennedy, Cassidy said the nominee had committed to him that he would maintain the ACIP “without changes.”
In response to yesterday’s news, Cassidy blandly noted “the fear that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion” and lamely promised to “continue to talk with [Kennedy] to ensure this is not the case.”
Public health experts met the news with dismay. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine inventor who has previously served on both the ACIP and the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee, told The Bulwark that Kennedy had “eliminated an enormous amount of expertise and institutional memory.”
Kennedy “has consistently said that anybody who supports vaccines or writes a new journal article that says vaccines are safe and effective must be deeply in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry, because he believes vaccines are dangerous and harmful, and anybody who says otherwise must be influenced by big pharma,” Offit said. “Can we really trust the ACIP if RFK Jr. is picking the members?”
Others derided RFK Jr.’s suggestion that the ACIP had served as a “rubber stamp” for pharmaceutical industry interests.
“ACIP meetings are publicly broadcast,” said Adam Ratner, a New York pediatric infectious disease specialist and author of the book Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children’s Health. “People can watch the deliberations from prior meetings if they want to—the videos are freely available. If they do, they will see members with considerable expertise scrutinizing evidence and asking tough questions.”
Kennedy, Ratner added, “is subverting that process and ignoring that expertise and just making it up as he goes.”
HHS did not respond to a request for comment.
At this point, we should be alarmed but hardly surprised. Any assurance that Kennedy sought to provide that he wouldn’t be a quack has been replaced by clear evidence that he is fully intent on acting on that quackery. As we noted just two weeks ago, he has wasted no time laying siege to America’s vaccine institutions:
Weeks after Kennedy took the reins at HHS, he canceled the first of three yearly meetings of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, members of which he is also reportedly preparing to fire. He’s continued to claim that vaccines haven’t been “safety tested,” and his inaugural “Make America Healthy Again” report last week suggested that vaccines may play a role “in the growing childhood chronic-disease crisis.” Things look no better behind the scenes: HHS’s top spokesman quit in March after just two weeks on the job, and the FDA’s top vaccine official resigned a few weeks later, citing Kennedy’s avalanche of “misinformation and lies.” That same week, Kennedy brought prominent anti-vaxxer David Geier aboard to conduct a study hunting for a link between vaccines and autism.
In the last few days, Kennedy has started to make his anti-vaccine plans a reality. On Friday, his HHS announced that the FDA would revoke authorization for COVID boosters for most healthy Americans under 65 years old. And yesterday, Kennedy announced in a video posted to social media that the COVID shot would be removed from the vaccine schedule for healthy pregnant mothers and children—a change that will likely lead insurance companies to drop the vaccine from coverage for those groups.
Firing the ACIP clears the way for Kennedy to begin implementing far more sweeping changes. Things could get very ugly very quickly. And folks like Cassidy, who allowed this to happen, have a unique responsibility to try and stop it—if that’s even possible at this juncture.
Jonathan Cohn contributed reporting to this item.
President Boy King
by William Kristol
It was 12:16 a.m. on Monday, June 9, and Donald Trump could barely contain his excitement. So he posted on Truth Social, “Looking really bad in L.A. BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!”
At this point Trump had already activated soldiers from the California National Guard to send to Los Angeles. But that wasn’t enough to satisfy his insatiable narcissism, his desire for self-dramatization, his imperative of self-aggrandizement. After all, many presidents have deployed the National Guard for various domestic tasks (though rarely over the objections of the state’s governor). And so, though there were plenty of Guard troops still available—the California Army Guard has more than 18,000 soldiers—Trump ordered the activation of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, a light infantry battalion based at Twentynine Palms.
The Marines! Now that’s a force a strong president deploys. That’s power.
Deploying the Marines fits the performative needs of our childish commander-in-chief. But of course it’s much more than that. It also fits the deadly serious agenda of our authoritarian commander-in-chief. By deploying active-duty military here at home, Trump will have crossed yet another red line. And if he gets away with this without too much push back, he will have made it much easier to deploy active duty troops here at home in the weeks, months, and years ahead.
There is an irony to Trump’s deployment of the Marines at home: They’re the branch of the U.S. military that most dramatically puts the lie to the Trumpist claim that “America First” is the true and historic American foreign policy. The Marines are an expeditionary force. Way back in 1805, they fought their way to “the shores of Tripoli” in North Africa. In 1847, they took “the halls of Montezuma” in Mexico City. And their hymn emphasizes their pride in being “first to fight for right and freedom.”
I might add that their hymn also puts the lie to the mindless nativism that goes hand-in-hand with “America First.” The hymn’s melody comes from the opera Geneviève de Brabant, written by a French composer, Jacques Offenbach, and first performed in Paris in 1859.
Wait until JD Vance and Stephen Miller discover that the force they’re using to suppress domestic protests has a hymn with expeditionary words and a European melody! Quelle horreur!
But of course what’s happening in Los Angeles is no joking matter. We pray that all will go well, and that no Marines or Guardsmen will be hurt or will hurt others. We hope the deployment will be short-lived and doesn’t in fact become a precedent that Trump succeeds in exploiting. And we trust that the courts, the Congress, and the country will succeed in defending the Constitution against Trump’s project of usurpation, of which the deployment of the military to Los Angeles is a part.
And we look forward to 2029, and to listening to the Marines’ Hymn in a country with a president who believes that the United States should stand for right and freedom.
AROUND THE BULWARK
An Extremely Unfiltered Hour… Watch REP. STACEY PLASKETT join MICHAEL STEELE. Also: Today at 10 a.m. EST, there will be Part II of our farewell with a barbershop live stream. Come join Michael, Molly Jong-Fast, Elie Mystal, Lucy Caldwell, John Fugelsang and Karen Hunter!
Stop Making Excuses for Americans… On The Mona Charen Show, KEVIN WILLIAMSON of the Dispatch joins MONA CHAREN to muse about the voters’ culpability for Trump, socialism, and the “abundance” agenda.
“Arrest Me, Tough Guy!” Gov. Newsom Punches Back on Trump Admin’s Threats… At Bulwark+ Takes, SAM STEIN joins TIM MILLER to talk about California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s forceful response to Donald Trump and Tom Homan’s threats and deployment of the National Guard on anti-ICE protesters in Los Angeles.
Quick Hits
LAW VS. ORDER: What do Donald Trump and rioters setting fires and trashing Waymo cars in Los Angeles have in common? They’re all using recent protests against ICE to get away with some blatant lawlessness.
Trump’s decision to send the National Guard and hundreds of Marines to Los Angeles over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has been controversial enough on its own, defensible only via the dubious argument that some scattered violence constitutes “a form of rebellion” against the federal government. California filed suit against the federal government yesterday, arguing that Trump should have been required by law to seek Newsom’s consent before federalizing the Guard.
Meanwhile, Trump processed the conflict through his usual philosophy of “anyone who is against me is probably committing a crime.” Asked yesterday whether his border czar Tom Homan should arrest Newsom, Trump replied: “I would do it if I were Tom. . . . Gavin likes the publicity, but I think it would be a great thing.” Asked later to specify what crime he believed Newsom had committed, Trump replied that “I think his primary crime is running for governor, because he’s done such a bad job.” (Homan, later in the day, said there weren’t grounds to arrest Newsom at this point in time.)
“I was elected for many reasons,” Trump posted to Truth Social back in March, “but a principal one was LAW AND ORDER.” More and more, though, Trump pits the two concepts against each other, as though his resolve to maintain order absolves him of the need to follow the law.
WHEN IN DOUBT, CHEAT: The New York Times reports on a nascent Trump effort to stack the House deck in Texas ahead of next year’s midterm elections:
President Trump’s political team is encouraging Republican leaders in Texas to examine how House district lines in the state could be redrawn ahead of next year’s midterm elections to try to save the party’s endangered majority, according to people in Texas and Washington who are familiar with the effort.
The push from Washington has unnerved some Texas Republicans, who worry that reworking the boundaries of Texas House seats to turn Democratic districts red by adding reliably Republican voters from neighboring Republican districts could backfire in an election that is already expected to favor Democrats.
Rather than flip the Democratic districts, new lines could endanger incumbent Republicans.
But a person close to the president, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to talk publicly, nevertheless urged a “ruthless” approach and said Mr. Trump would welcome any chance to pick up seats in the midterms. The president would pay close attention to those in his party who help or hurt that effort, the person warned.
The story is notable both for its own sake—gerrymandering is always controversial, a mid-decade gerrymander all the more so—and for what it suggests about Trump’s thinking. There’s an element of risk and reward here: In the event of a small Democratic wave, redistricting in Texas could help Republicans squeak to another tiny House majority. But the strategy could backfire in the event of a larger blue wave.
Cheap Shots
I have contacted Cassidy each time RFK has moved against vaccines. I am not his constituent, but remind him I am a citizen, mother, grandmother, and former healthcare industry. Last night I begged him to to speak out as RFK had lied to him in the confirmation process. His public statements are disgraceful.
Can you imagine that Senator Bill Cassidy will go down in history as the person who ruined public health in the United States. And he is a medical doctor ! He had a chance to stop the madness and didn't !