* Associated Press…
Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was building up a following with his anti-vaccine nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, and becoming one of the world’s most influential spreaders of fear and distrust around vaccines.
Now, President-elect Donald Trump says he will nominate Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which regulates vaccines.
Kennedy has long advanced the debunked idea that vaccines cause autism. He has also pushed other conspiracy theories, such as that COVID-19 could have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, comments he later said were taken out of context. He has repeatedly brought up the Holocaust when discussing vaccines and public health mandates. […]
Kennedy has insisted that he is not anti-vaccine, saying he only wants vaccines to be rigorously tested, but he also has shown opposition to a wide range of immunizations. Kennedy said in a 2023 podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told Fox News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism. In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.
There’s lots, lots more, so click here.
* Gov. Pritzker was asked about the RFK Jr. announcement earlier today…
Q: Is there anything Illinois can do proactively in case there is something that happens with vaccines or no longer mandated?
Pritzker: I want to remind you that the last Trump administration was no help in terms of making sure that we got people vaccinated. And there were a lot of obstacles that that administration put into place, and yet we did it in the state of Illinois. Look, I’d rather do it with the help of the federal government. Usually the White House and the federal government are in a national emergency, are on your side helping, because we’re all their constituents, right? So I can’t tell you what, God forbid, if we end up in another emergency like that, or, you know, where we need help, exactly how they’re going to operate.
But I can tell you that, at least in the state of Illinois, we figured out a number of methods of just getting the work done anyway.
Look, there are vaccine support programs that the federal government operates. In fact, my predecessor pulled us out in 2017 or ‘16 from the vaccine, interestingly, when we actually needed more vaccines, not less. And so we didn’t get the benefit of that federal program when the measles outbreak came, which was right in the early term, early part of my first term. But we figured it out, we rejoined the program, and whether we had or not, we would have provided those measles vaccines. I think there are challenges ahead, but we’ll work through them.
Please pardon all transcription errors.
Bruce Rauner did sign a law limiting the religious exemption for vaccinations.
* But this is from a 2019 story in Healthcare Weekly…
Local pediatricians raised the alarm that there was a group of children at risk of triggering the outbreak. The children are covered by the Illinois-run Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which had enrolled up to 324,000 children by 2017. However, due to a policy shift by former Governor Bruce Rauner, doctors stopped vaccinating the children because it became too expensive to carry out the exercise.
It was reported that before Rauner’s policy shift, physicians got vaccines for free from the state for kids on CHIP as part of the Vaccines For Children program. In that program, the federal CDC bought vaccines at a discount and distributed them to agencies including state health departments, so that those organizations could immunize low-income children, including those on Medicaid.
- lake county democrat - Friday, Nov 15, 24 @ 12:32 pm:
I’d have preferred he challenge GOP senators to join Democrats in rejecting the nomination rather than treat it as a done deal.
- Norseman - Friday, Nov 15, 24 @ 12:33 pm:
=== … anything IL can do proactively in case there is something that happens with vaccines or no longer mandated? ===
JB is on the bigger issue, but he needs to direct IDPH to update its online resource library to include all (beyond simply vaccine-related info) the latest and most accurate information from U.S. health related websites. One of the first things we can expect from the Trump regime is a scrubbing of health websites of information that doesn’t conform to MAGA doctrine. Hopefully, there will be a national discussion by public health and health related organizations (Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, American Public Health Association, AMA, American Hospital Association, etc.), and universities. Public health professionals are a dedicated group and heroically showed it during COVID. Now they must be called to duty again to minimize the ramifications of the MAGA attack on science-based public health practices.
- Three Dimensional Checkers - Friday, Nov 15, 24 @ 12:59 pm:
Let’s just hope RFK Jr. shows the same ability in changing DHHS’s operations as he did in running for president.
- Garfield Ridge Guy - Friday, Nov 15, 24 @ 1:09 pm:
==I’d have preferred he challenge GOP senators to join Democrats in rejecting the nomination rather than treat it as a done deal.==
It’s a done deal. No reason to engage in fantasy.
- Steve Polite - Friday, Nov 15, 24 @ 1:27 pm:
@Garfield Ridge Guy
“The Appointments Clause appears at Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 and provides:
… and [the President] shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.” - Wikipedia
- Stephanie Kollmann - Friday, Nov 15, 24 @ 1:50 pm:
38.8% of IL nursing home residents and 11.5% of IL health care staff were up to date on the covid vaccine as of Aug.
https://www.aarp.org/pri/initiatives/aarp-nursing-home-covid-19-dashboard/
- Anyone Remember - Friday, Nov 15, 24 @ 1:50 pm:
“… rather than treat it as a done deal.”
Think Gaetz is designed to attract all the objections, making it easier for other people, like RFK, Jr., to sneak in.
- Norseman - Friday, Nov 15, 24 @ 1:57 pm:
=== 38.8% of IL nursing home residents and 11.5% of IL health care staff were up to date on the covid vaccine as of Aug. ===
And your point is?
That MAGA misinformation was horribly effective and has resulted in continuing risks to our elderly population, then I would concur.
- Norseman - Friday, Nov 15, 24 @ 2:04 pm:
Stevem if you’re going to quote the Constitution there are better reference sources to cite than Wiki. Garfield Ridge Guy’s point was practical politics (pray he’s wrong), yours was textbook recital. It would be nice to say that our leaders are following the book, but we’ve learned that doesn’t happen all the time, or hardly any of the time when it comes to the MAGA GOP.
- Pundent - Friday, Nov 15, 24 @ 2:04 pm:
=I’d have preferred he challenge GOP senators to join Democrats=
Right because if there’s one thing that would give the GOP Senators pause, it’s the Governor of Illinois weighing in.
I don’t like the appointment of RFK Jr. one bit. But this is what the majority voted for. And the party with majority control has no interest in challenging the incoming President. That’s the current reality. The most realistic approach for Pritzker and any other like minded governor is to focus on the things they can control within their own state. Stay above the fray as much as possible and show that governing can still occur at the state level amidst dysfunction in Washington. Meaningful contrast over pointless chaos.
- Norseman - Friday, Nov 15, 24 @ 2:04 pm:
Oops - Steve.
- Steve Polite - Friday, Nov 15, 24 @ 2:19 pm:
@Norseman I was only pointing out that Garfield Ridge Guy’s statement about it being a done deal is wrong. While I understand practically it’s certainly possible all of Trump’s picks will either be confirmed or recess appointments, it’s not a done deal yet.
- JS Mill - Friday, Nov 15, 24 @ 2:23 pm:
=Stay above the fray as much as possible and show that governing can still occur at the state level amidst dysfunction in Washington. Meaningful contrast over pointless chaos.=
This.
The pearl clutching on the left as each nomination is rolled out is really pointless and only feed the magas need to “own the libs”. The democrats needs to get focused. Self evaluate. Figure out how to get back on a more appealing message (focus on strong centrist/center left message without abandoning the big tent) and drop the obsession with sex and gender identity politics (let the magas wallow in their obsession). And that does not mean they should stop trying to protect people.
At the same time, it seems all of the broken toys from misfit island are getting jobs in the new cabinet.
- Norseman - Friday, Nov 15, 24 @ 2:35 pm:
Steve, given my mood over the darkness that is descending on America perhaps I was picking nits because I felt you had done the same. Of course, nothing is finalized right now other than the rank sycophancy of the MAGA GOP. If nominations are to be stopped, it has to be done by a groundswell of opposition from the MAGA Senators’ constituencies and a little guts by Thune to stick with an actual confirmation process.
- Stephanie Kollmann - Friday, Nov 15, 24 @ 2:42 pm:
==And your point is?==
That IL getting it done with or without the federal government is a glib and demonstrably untrue premise. That, as just one example, when the federal govt stopped supporting vaccination, the state was not in fact able to make up the difference and in fact did not do that much to try to, which has put us at an extreme deficit even before the next administration comes in to make it all worse.
Sure, MAGA and RFK are a problem, as was Rauner, but they’re not the only problem.
- Norseman - Friday, Nov 15, 24 @ 2:42 pm:
From JS Mill’s post to a lot of Dem opinion leaders’ focus.
- Another Millennial - Friday, Nov 15, 24 @ 3:09 pm:
@JS Mill I am so - expletive withheld - done with the way the center left all the way to the right gets to focus on their “average American” (take a second to picture who gets to represent that identity) values when it comes to politics as if people who are marginalized based on their sex, gender, or race aren’t American voters with significant issues that should be openly discussed, and more so addressed by political parties and government.
For people who say these groups get offended by everything (not saying that’s you), it strikes me that the political discourse mostly focuses on how comfortable the “average American” voter felt about how one party or another discussed and/or recognized the concerning issues facing marginalized groups.
The hypocrisy is gross.
We don’t become better people playing Monday-morning quarterback about how this election was mostly about the economy. By choosing the incoming president, the “average American” can’t rationally argue that. It was about “average American” feelings being most important.
The Dems need to have a conversation with themselves about who the party is, who it serves, and what it wants wants to be.
And the folks whose needs are perennial political footballs that are never securely met should have a conversation about who to stand with by the time next cycle comes around.