Doctors fear an explosion of disease if RFK Jr has control of federal health care under Trump
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Routine vaccination rates among children are falling, the percentage of children exempt from vaccination requirements is at an all-time high and measles cases are being reported across the country.
And it can quickly get worse.
Doctors are now looking ahead to the future under president-elect Donald Trump and his administration, which has floated the idea of bringing in prominent vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr to lead the nation’s health agencies. .
Kennedy, a former independent candidate who dropped out of the race to support Trump, does not have a medical background, but his anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense focuses on chronic diseases and chemicals in food – and promoting misinformation and conspiracy theories. – they attracted him great reviews and deals.
Trump has promised to appoint Kennedy to a key role in his administration. The Republican president-elect said he wants to “let her live poorly” and “on food and” medicine.
With Republican control of the Senate, Kennedy could easily be confirmed to top health jobs if Trump nominates him, including secretary of Health and Human Services, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration or director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Disease Control and Prevention.
Trump said he would “decide” to ban vaccines based on Kennedy’s recommendations, although he would not have the authority to do so. Kennedy said this week that he “will not remove them” and that “people should have a choice, and that choice should be informed by the right information.”
Pediatricians and public health experts are voicing their grave concerns about the possibility that a vaccine opponent could be in a strong position to cast doubt on the safety and effectiveness of life-saving drugs, and I accelerated the trend of parents who refuse vaccines. for their children.
“I saw a child die in the hospital because of a vaccine-preventable disease because his parents refused to vaccinate him,” Dr. Catherine Ohmstede, a pediatrician at Novant Health in Charlotte, North Carolina, told NBC News. “Many parents today haven’t seen that – yet… if this trend continues, that’s the reality we’re going to face.”
Doctors have warned the Trump campaign “about the consequences to the party and the country of appearing anti-science, and controlling and having a flood of measles and polio,” according to a former Trump surgeon. Dr. Jerome Adams.
Adams told CNN that Kennedy could “spread misinformation and take us back to the dark ages about vaccine-preventable diseases.”
Routine childhood vaccinations – which have fought for decades against measles, chicken pox, polio and other diseases – have prevented about 508 million deaths and more than 1.1 million deaths among children born over the past 10 years. 30 last year, according to an August report from the CDC.
Last month, the department reported that the percentage of children exempt from vaccination requirements reached 3.3 percent – up from 3 percent in 2023, which marks the highest since such requirements have been in place.
At least 15 outbreaks of a total of 272 cases have been reported this year, as of November 1, according to the CDC. More than half of those patients were children under the age of 5, and another quarter were between the ages of 5 and 19. About a quarter of 90 percent of those patients were not vaccinated.
Putting Kennedy in charge of those cases is “a potential disaster waiting to happen,” according to Dr. Kavita Patel, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and a board-certified internal medicine physician who served as director of policy for the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Communications in the White House under President Barack Obama.
“Imagine, if you could, giving the keys to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention database to someone who has spent years spreading falsehoods about vaccines,” he wrote. . It’s like asking a spaceman to pilot our next space mission.
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