CNN Headline: “Vaccine skeptic RFK Jr. confirmed as health secretary”

The combination of intellectual dishonesty and cowardice this headline embodies helps explain how we got into this mess in the first place.

In the first place, there are no “vaccine skeptics,” just as there are no “Holocaust skeptics,” or “global Earth skeptics.” There are people who accept science and history, and people who don’t. The people who don’t are sometimes liars, who don’t actually believe the Holocaust didn’t happen or vaccines aren’t safe and effective, but have other motives. In the case of “Holocaust skeptics” aka Holocaust deniers, those motives aren’t mysterious: their only objection to the Holocaust was its relative lack of success. In the case of “vaccine skeptics,” their motives are often purely venal, as was the case in the fraudulent study whose author claimed that certain vaccines caused autism (he was financially involved in the development of alternative vaccines).

It’s true that the followers of the leading “skeptics” in such cases are themselves sometimes simply delusional idiots, and perhaps RFK falls into this category himself (Grifter or mark is often a difficult judgment to make, given the inherent fluidity and constant overlap of these categories).

In any event, calling RFK a vaccine “skeptic,” even assuming such people exist (again, they don’t) is absurd on its face, given the facts:

It would be more than fair to argue that Kennedy’s years of false claims about vaccines has been tantamount to Kennedy urging Americans to avoid vaccination. But such an argument is not even necessary; Kennedy has explicitly said that he has urged people to avoid vaccination.

NBC News senior reporter Brandy Zadrozny noted Thursday that when Kennedy was asked on the “Health Freedom for Humanity” podcast in 2021 how parents should respond to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention schedule of immunizations for children, which his questioner described as “insane,” he responded by encouraging people to join him in telling strangers not to vaccinate their babies.

“For many, many years, I think parents were so gaslighted, and they were scapegoated, and they were vilified and marginalized, so that even parents of kids who were very, very badly injured, knew what happened to their kid, but they were just reluctant to talk about it. And I think now those days are over,” Kennedy said.

“We – our job is to resist and to talk about it to everybody. If you’re walking down the street – and I do this now myself, which is, you know, I don’t want to do – I’m not a busybody. I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’ And he heard that from me. If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it, you know, maybe he will save that child.”

Kennedy repeated later in the podcast: “If you’re one of 10 people that goes up to a guy, a man or a woman, who’s carrying a baby, and says, ‘Don’t vaccinate that baby,’ when they hear that from 10 people, it’ll make an impression on ‘em, you know. And we all kept our mouth shut. Don’t keep your mouth shut anymore. Confront everybody on it.”

That’s a CNN story! So what’s with the sanewashing headlines, now that this evil lunatic is the nation’s chief health officer?

We all know the real answer to that question.