STAT+: With Covid vaccine decisions, RFK Jr. unleashes an unfettered assault on public health
RFK Jr.'s unilateral decision to revise Covid booster guidance represents a bulldozing of safeguards, our columnist writes
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s unilateral decision that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would no longer recommend Covid-19 boosters for healthy people during childhood or pregnancy represents a bulldozing of safeguards intended to keep public health officials honest and their decisions transparent. It also tramples on individuals’ ability to make their own decisions about medical evidence.
The decision is also deeply and maddeningly ironic, because Kennedy and other top figures in the Department of Health and Human Services are shaped by grievances about how their predecessors behaved during the Covid pandemic. At the time, they railed against decisions that they said were made without medical evidence or the consultation of important experts. Yet Tuesday’s decision to change the CDC vaccine recommendations, as well as new policy made last week about the way Covid shots would be regulated, takes these mistakes and amplifies them.
Instead of slowing medicine’s pendulum so that it might eventually stop at a point of truth, Kennedy, the health secretary, is now swinging it so wildly that patients and doctors can do nothing but cover their heads and duck as medicine becomes more and more vulnerable to politicized extremes.
