The Man is an Idiot

No, this is not about Trump, at least not directly. This is about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This is a person who has been sounding an alarm for decades based on faulty information. Specifically, the link between autism and vaccinations. This “link” doesn’t exist. It was based on a discredited 1998 report linking vaccinations to autism. That report was authored by Andrew Wakefield and 12 co-authors, and published in the medical journal, The Lancet. The study was later proven to be an outright medical fraud.

Andrew Wakefield falsified the medical histories of patients, fabricated timelines, faked diagnoses, and used unethical practices trying to get data. He went so far as to pay kids at his son's birthday party to provide blood samples for the study they were not part of. It turns out that he had been paid over a half a million dollars by a lawyer trying to build a lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers. Wakefield was also trying to promote his own rival single-measles vaccine after secretly filing for his patent.

Since the publication of the report in 1998, ten of the co-authors have signed a retraction, The Lancet fully retracted the paper, and Wakefield’s medical license has been revoked. Global studies on over 95,000 children have since confirmed there is no link between vaccines and autism.

Even in the face of this easily available information, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has never acknowledged that the vaccine-autism connection was proven to be a fraud. Instead, he has continued to promote the discredited claim, cite flawed or retracted papers, and question the scientific consensus. This is known as Belief Perseverance and Confirmation Bias. There is also the Backfire Effect where you double down on your original idea when shown facts that don’t match your old ideas. This latter tactic is a favorite of his boss, DJT.

RFK Jr. has no medical background or scientific training. His education is entirely in law, history, and environmental litigation.

So, who better to head the governance of the nation’s healthcare than a person with no medical training (beyond his self-medicating with heroin) and who bases much of his ideology on a proven fraud. Who better to appoint him but a man who sees nothing wrong with fraud.

What’s the harm? According to the NIH, we have seen a resurgence in 2024 pertussis (whooping cough) cases due to a steady decline in DTaP vaccinations. In 2024, the U.S. saw over 35,000 cases. While the 2025 death rate was only 16 people, the majority were infants under one year old. At the half-year mark of 2026, we have already had 16 deaths.

The recent whooping cough deaths are overwhelmingly concentrated among the non-vaccinated, specifically infants who are too young to be fully vaccinated themselves and whose mothers did not receive the vaccine during pregnancy. While infants under two months can’t be vaccinated, their mothers must get a Tdap booster to pass immunity to their infants.

During his 2015 campaign launch and subsequent presidential run, Donald Trump frequently boasted that he would surround himself with and hire only "the best people", claiming, "I know the best people. I know the best managers. I know the best dealmakers. I know people that will make us so strong.” If RFK Jr. is an example, I would have to say it takes an idiot to recognize that “quality” in another. Sadly, RFK Jr. is one among many.