DO NO HARM

CNN’s Top Doc Relays Medical Community’s ‘Horror’ Over RFK Jr.

“Somebody said to me today, ‘I can’t think of any single individual who would be more damaging to public health than RFK,‘” Dr. Sanjay Gupta said.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon and CNN’s chief medical correspondent, laid out the medical community’s near-unanimous “horror” over vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. potentially being the next Secretary of Health and Human Services.

On Thursday’s edition of The Situation Room, Gupta told anchor Wolf Blitzer that Kennedy’s baseless claims about vaccines are particularly troublesome.

“He talked about COVID specifically being bioengineered to attack certain demographics of populations, but when it comes to vaccines and him talking about the connection between vaccines and autism, I think that probably gets the most attention,” he said.

“He is sometimes tough to pin down because he will say one thing at one time or say something else or say he did not say that. He said in the past there are no vaccines that are safe and effective and said there are some that are probably a good idea. It really revolves around infectious diseases primarily.”

What Gupta has been hearing from his peers about Kennedy isn’t good, he continued.

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“It‘s fair to say that the medical community is not monolithic. There are disparate voices here, but they are pretty much in lockstep about the concerns with regard to some of these public health issues and RFK,” he said.

The previous hour on CNN, Gupta said that some expressed “horror” at the idea of Kennedy in the role.

“Somebody said to me today, ‘I can’t think of any single individual who would be more damaging to public health than RFK.‘”

Kennedy’s vaccine views clearly clash with subject matter experts, among them the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mandy Cohen.

At a health summit Wednesday, Cohen said she didn’t want to see science “go backwards.”

“We have a short memory of what it is like to hold a child that has been paralyzed with polio, or to comfort a mom who has lost her kid from measles. It wasn’t that many generations ago,” she said.

“And I don‘t want to have to see us go backwards to remind ourselves that vaccines work. They work. They protect our kids. They are our best defense against these terrible illnesses.”

With Kennedy in charge of the nation’s top health department, that very well may happen. As CNN anchor Jake Tapper put it earlier Wednesday: “Well, America, I hope you like measles.”

Kennedy’s 2019 visit to Samoa, during which he promoted the views of prominent vaccine opponents there, preceded a measles outbreak that killed 83 people.

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