Make polio great again
By 
RFK Jr. is planning a frontal assault on public health in America:
At an event late last week in Arizona, anti-vaccine activist and Donald Trump transition team member Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he’d fire and replace 600 people from the National Institutes of Health on “day one” of a second Trump term. The NIH is one of the public health agencies Kennedy loathes the most—and despite still lacking any defined role in a new administration, he’s clearly relishing the opportunity to promise retribution against them.
In comments that were first reported by ABC News, Kennedy declared, “We need to act fast, and we want to have those people in place on January 20, so that on January 21, 600 people are going to walk into offices at NIH and 600 people are going to leave.”
Kennedy, a long-standing opponent of vaccines, has consistently been critical of the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control, and other federal agencies that are part of the basic infrastructure of public health. His The Real Anthony Fauci attacked Fauci, a former NIH director, at book length, albeit with what one physician reviewer called “many errors and gross misrepresentations.”
The remarks offering some concrete details about Kennedy’s Trump-aligned and so-called “Make America Healthy Again” agenda came during an onstage interview at an entrepreneurship event in Scottsdale, which included discussions of Kennedy’s workout routine and his relationship with the once and future president.
Calley Means, a self-described health care reform activist who played a role in Kennedy’s independent presidential run sat alongside him for part of the interview. He framed the MAHA movement as “kicking the special interests and the Deep State” out of government, calling the NIH “an orgy of corruption.”
Kennedy made other eyebrow-raising claims during the interview, for instance claiming that “pilot studies” showed that anorexia could be cured with a “keto diets and other kind of diets.”
“NIH won’t do those studies because they don’t want to know the source or the cure or the treatment of chronic disease,” he declared. He also returned to his hobby horse, claiming links between vaccines and a spread in autism.
“I never saw anybody who was autistic when I was a kid,” Kennedy claimed. “Never.” He added that men his age—Kennedy is 70—don’t have “full blown autism,” which he defined as “wearing helmets” and “not being toilet trained” and “head-banging, stimming, toe-walking.”
The Republican Party’s response to a historic pandemic being “we need a lot more of them and for them to be deadlier” is something else. And it’s not even about Trump — many Republican elites went anti-vaxx before he did.