RFK Jr. likened vaccinating children to ‘Nazi death camps’ and sexual abuse by the Catholic Church - ClickOn CC (Closed Caption)

In remarks at Autism

More Mishugoyim In Washington

One conferences in 2013, 2017 and 2019, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likened vaccinating children to putting them in “Nazi death camps” and falsely alleged a cover-up of vaccine injuries similar to the child sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. 

 

President-elect Donald Trump announced Thursday that he is nominating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).

In a speech before his appointment, Trump suggested he would let Kennedy “go wild on health” in the United States. If the Senate confirms Kennedy as the head of HHS, he would have oversight over 13 key health divisions, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS).

The nomination sent shockwaves through the public health community. Many experts raised alarm about Kennedy’s history of promoting pseudoscientific health claims and anti-vaccine rhetoric.

“This is an extraordinarily bad choice for the health of the American people,” wrote Ashish Jha, MD, MPH, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.

Vaccines

Routine childhood vaccinations prevented an estimated 508 million cases of illness and more than 1 million deaths in children born between 1994 and 2023, according to the CDC.1

Zhou F, Jatlaoui TC, Leidner AJ, et al. Health and economic benefits of routine childhood immunizations in the era of the vaccines for children program—United States, 1994–2023. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2024;73(31);682–685. doi:10.15585/mmwr.mm7331a2

Kennedy has long been a vocal vaccine skeptic. He founded the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense (CHD), one of the largest sources of anti-vaccine misinformation.

For years, Kennedy peddled stories that vaccines cause autism, a claim that has been repeatedly disproved.2 He also spread disinformation about the measles vaccine in Samoa, causing the vaccination rate to drop from about 70% to about 30% and leading to an outbreak that killed dozens of children.

In 2022, CHD co-published a book falsely claiming that the COVID-19 vaccine caused a spike of sudden deaths among healthy people.

Kennedy has since tried to soften his anti-vaccine rhetoric. On the day after the election, he said in an interview with NBC News: “I’ve never been anti-vaccine. I’m going to make sure the scientific safety studies and efficacies are out there, and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is going to be good for them.” 

What This Means For You

Kennedy hasn’t yet been confirmed as HHS Secretary. The Senate will approve or reject Cabinet nominees in the coming months. In the meantime, talk to a trusted healthcare provider about any concerns you may have about your health and where to find trustworthy resources for health information.

WASHINGTON — Scott Gottlieb, who served as Food and Drug Administration commissioner in the first Trump administration, is raising concerns with Senate Republicans about the president-elect’s selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, he said in a television appearance Friday. 

Gottlieb maintained that there is “skepticism in the Republican caucus [on RFK Jr.’s nomination], more than the press is reporting right now.”

“I’ve had conversations, and I’ve raised my concerns and I will continue to raise my concerns,” Gottlieb said on CNBC in response to a question about whether he’s spoken with individual senators about the prospect of confirming RFK Jr. 

Gottlieb’s remarks reflect an effort to undermine RFK Jr.’s. nomination before the Senate reconvenes after its Thanksgiving break, when RFK Jr. could begin meeting with senators to discuss his confirmation.

So far, moderate Republicans have held back from saying whether they will support RFK Jr.’s nomination. Given the commanding Republican majority in the Senate next year, RFK Jr. would have to lose four Republican votes and fail to sway a single Democrat in order for his nomination to fail. 

The former commissioner listed a number of potential issues that RFK Jr.’s nomination could face. Among them: Given his views on the U.S. food industry, senators with large agricultural interests could withhold their support, as could anti-abortion senators given RFK Jr.’s past support of abortion rights, along with “public health-minded” senators given his skepticism of — some critics say opposition to — childhood vaccines.  

Gottlieb expressed skepticism that Congress could try to put guardrails around RFK Jr. by attaching conditions to funding for HHS. He said it’s unlikely that senators would have the will to rein in an executive agency in that way, and that Congress already faces delays in passing full government spending bills instead of just stopgap measures. 

“That’s not going to be successful,” Gottlieb said. 

Gottlieb also implied that there could be a chasm between RFK Jr.’s beliefs about childhood vaccines and those of President-elect Trump himself. 

“I don’t think the president wants to see a resurgence of measles, wants to see a resurgence of whooping cough in this country, wants to see, God forbid, cases of polio in this country.… I think if RFK follows through on his intentions, and I believe he will, and I believe he can, it will cost lives in this country,” Gottlieb said.

Gottlieb warned that RFK Jr. could take specific actions harmful to public health, including by disbanding a vaccine advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and then re-creating it stacked with like-minded people and by frustrating funding for the Vaccines for Children program, which provides free vaccines when their health insurance won’t pay for them. Gottlieb called the team RFK Jr. is building “very experienced,” and pointed to individuals with ties to the anti-vaccine group RFK Jr. founded, the Children’s Health Defense. 

“These guys are capable, I think they are deadly serious and have been very clear about their intentions, and I think sometimes you have to take people at their word,” Gottlieb said. 

Beyond his criticism of RFK Jr., Gottlieb also called David Weldon, Trump’s pick to lead the CDC, a “very committed anti-vaxxer.” For the first time, following a change by Congress, that post is subject to confirmation by the Senate. 

Tensions have been high between Gottlieb and Trump’s picks for his new administration for a long time. 

Calley Means, an adviser to RFK Jr., has accused Gottlieb of working to “undermine President Trump’s reform agenda” and of “showing disloyalty to President Trump.” 

On Friday, Means posted on X in response to Gottlieb’s CNBC appearance that, “Trust in public health has plummeted due to government officials like Scott going straight from the FDA to the Pfizer boardroom.”

Even before RFK Jr. rose to prominence, Vivek Ramaswamy, who is now running a process aimed at dramatically cutting government spending, made a dig at Gottlieb during an early presidential debate in December 2023.

“The leader, the commissioner of the FDA ends up on the board of Pfizer…. I don’t care if it’s a Republican or Democrat. We need some basic principles that end the corruption in government,” Ramaswamy said. 

Gottlieb isn’t the only former Trump administration raising concerns about RFK Jr.’s position on childhood vaccines.

Former surgeon general Jerome Adams has recently voiced concerns about increases in cases of whooping cough and global measles deaths.

“Chronic diseases are important- but you can’t die from cancer when you’re 50 if you die from polio when you’re 5,” Adams posted on the social media platform X. 

RFK Jr. and his advisers have called for more focus at federal agencies on chronic diseases as opposed to infectious diseases. 

Candidates for the Chief Rabbinate who are not approved of by the Haredi world stand little chance of getting elected. As a result, some Chief Rabbis have been convicted of crimes, and others were suspected of crimes. And the only criterion seems to be getting enough Haredi votes.

Israel’s Chief Rabbinate Promises More of the Same Flawed Policies After Election

 

Header of an instruction from Israel’s Chief Rabbinate for how to observe Shabbat during the war with Hamas.

While the world’s attention has been focused on the American election, there has been a far less publicized, but still significant, election in Israel for the Chief Rabbinate.

After months of wrangling, the election was finally decided, with left and right fighting about egalitarianism, and who should sit on the electoral committee.

I have always been a rebel and disliked authority and power — particularly when it is associated with religion, from which I expect a higher level of ethics and morality than elsewhere.

And yet, I am constantly disappointed. When people achieve authority, they tend to make decisions based on preserving their power, rather than the moral criteria. That is why religion and politics are two very different areas of human activity that really ought to be kept apart.

Sadly, they rarely are.

Israel’s Chief Rabbinate controls important levers of income and authority — from marriage and divorce, to conversions and kashrut. It also provides extremely well paid and plentiful easy jobs for Orthodox boys (less so for the girls), and like all bureaucracies, is very bureaucratic.

This is fertile ground for corruption, and indeed unpopularity. Yet there are some wonderful, honest, devoted and impressive rabbis serving in Israel’s rabbinate today.

The tensions that we have witnessed in Israel between ethnic groups, the right and the left, secular and the religious, the Supreme Court and its critics, and the different voices within them, illustrate the near impossibility of reconciliation and compromise.

Caught between conflicting interests comes the Chief Rabbinate, whose courts run parallel with secular courts. It’s a government agency of great power and reach that is unpopular with many sectors of Jewish life in Israel today, for good reason.

Candidates for the Chief Rabbinate who are not approved of by the Haredi world stand little chance of getting elected. As a result, some Chief Rabbis have been convicted of crimes, and others were suspected of crimes. And the only criterion seems to be getting enough Haredi votes.

In the early years of the state, most of the state rabbis were committed to the cause of a Jewish State, even if they wouldn’t necessarily call themselves Zionists politically. The Chief Rabbinates performed very well given the constraints. Over time, the institution, like most others in Israel, was slowly infected by a bureaucracy of entitlement, laziness, and incompetence.

At first, the Haredi community simply ignored the Chief Rabbinate. Their religious and sometimes charismatic leaders and authorities were not elected or appointed. They emerged as natural leaders. They had their own standards and attitudes towards Israeli life. But then the Haredi community increased, and it saw opportunities.

The salaries of community and local rabbis were very attractive, and you didn’t have to have a secular education. Increasingly the Haredi world entered the rabbinate and over time, have come to dominate it, so that the moderates have largely been undercut.

This year, the Sephardi candidate got through easily in a predetermined election that saw yet another member of the Yosef dynasty intent on keeping it in one family. The Ashkenazi Lau family also tried to maintain their grip on the position, but could not gather enough support. The Ashkenazi election came down to two candidates. Eventually Rabbi Kalman Ber from Netanya was elected by 77-58. He defeated the more open and impressive Rabbi Micha Halevi of Petach Tikvah, who had support from the Religious Zionists.

Both rabbis have good reputations and claimed to be moderates. At the induction ceremony, they spoke of embracing all sectors of Israeli life, to support IDF soldiers, visit army camps, and comfort the families of kidnapped Israelis. Rabbi Yosef concluded in English with a Trumpian declaration that resonated with the audience: “We will make the Chief Rabbinate great again!” Chief Rabbi Ber echoed this commitment to unity, expressing the vision rooted in Rabbi Kook. “My greatest mission is to bring about unity among all parts of the people,” he said.

I have heard this before from Chief Rabbis across the world. Music to my ears. But given human nature, they rarely live up to their campaign promises. In Israel, as the winning candidates were elected thanks to Haredi votes, I cannot see any change in matters of law or the culture of the rabbinate. Any hope for a new era will once again be brushed under the carpet. And nothing will change. The only saving grace is that Chief Rabbis are only elected for 10 years. I pray I am proven wrong.

 

https://www.algemeiner.com/2024/11/26/israels-chief-rabbinate-promises-more-of-the-same-flawed-policies-after-election/