[UPDATE: ProPublica reports that “Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging”. That has all the signs of Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism.]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent years peddling crank theories about vaccines and yet the Republicans in the Senate approved of his nomination to be the head of the department of Health and Human Services, the cabinet office that oversees almost all the agencies that deal with public health, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

During his hearings he claimed that he was not a vaccine skeptic but anyone who has followed his career knows that he was being disingenuous at best, if not outright lying. And sure enough, top career people in those agencies are quitting, with one of them Dr. Peter Marks, pointing to Kennedy’s misinformation and lies as the reason.

Dr Peter Marks served as the FDA’s top vaccine official. He had been lauded by Donald Trump during the US president’s first term for his role in Operation Warp Speed, the initiative that developed, manufactured and helped distribute the Covid-19 vaccines.

Multiple media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, citing people familiar with the matter, reported late on Friday that Marks had been given the choice to resign or be fired by a Health and Human Services (HHS) department official. He chose to resign. The FDA is a key federal agency within HHS.

The resignation letter that Marks handed in took aim at Kennedy, who has spent years sowing doubt about the efficacy and safety of vaccines that protect communities from preventable diseases.

“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Marks’s resignation letter said. “Undermining confidence in well-established vaccines that have met the high standards for quality, safety and effectiveness that have been in place for decades at FDA is irresponsible, detrimental to public health and a clear danger to our nation’s health, safety and security.”

Marks’s resignation came three days after the US Senate confirmed Dr Martin Makary – a surgeon at Johns Hopkins University – as the commissioner of the FDA.

Dr Jonathan Howard, a New York neurologist who has closely tracked medical misinformation, has been critical of Makary. Howard has alleged that Makary sought to try to convince people that the world overreacted to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Kennedy’s agenda is obvious.

Marks’s departure comes a day after the Trump administration said it was laying off 10,000 employees at HHS. In comments about the move posted on YouTube, Kennedy suggested his office was facing opposition inside the department from “defiant bureaucrats” who had stopped his office from gaining access to “closely guarded databases that might reveal the dangers of certain drugs and medical interventions”.

He clearly is going to trawl through the research and databases to find anything that supports his crank views and will then publicize them triumphantly as evidence that scientists have been covering it up. But in science, there is rarely complete unanimity over anything so Kennedy will surely find some things somewhere that support his views. What scientific policy should be based on is the preponderance of evidence, and those do not support the lies that Kennedy has been peddling concerning the dangers of vaccines.

Others are issuing warning signs.

The US biotech industry’s main lobby group issued a rare warning following the forced and abrupt resignation of the nation’s top vaccine official at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), saying the loss of his experienced leadership would “erode scientific standards” and affect the development of transformative therapies to fight disease.
…

“We are deeply concerned that the loss of experienced leadership at the FDA will erode scientific standards and broadly [affect] the development of new, transformative therapies to fight diseases for the American people,” said the statement from Crowley, BIO’s president and chief executive officer. “It is imperative that we retain and recruit scientific expertise and strong leadership at our health agencies and that the high standards that are the hallmark of these health institutions are upheld and advanced.”

But the Trump-Kennedy gang does not want scientific expertise. They want people who will support their crank prejudices and propagandize them. Recall that just a few weeks earlier, the top spokesperson at the HHS also resigned after just two weeks on the job.

The top spokesperson at the Health and Human Services Department has abruptly quit after clashing with Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his close aides over their management of the agency amid a growing measles outbreak, two people familiar with the matter told POLITICO.
Thomas Corry announced on Monday that he had resigned “effective immediately,” just two weeks after joining the department as its assistant secretary for public affairs.
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The sudden departure was prompted by growing disagreement with Kennedy and his principal deputy chief of staff, Stefanie Spear, over their management of the health department, said the two people, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly.

[Thomas] Corry had also grown uneasy with Kennedy’s muted response to the intensifying outbreak of measles in Texas, the people said. The outbreak has infected at least 146 people and resulted in the nation’s first death from the disease in a decade.
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A longtime vaccine skeptic, Kennedy, during a Cabinet meeting last week, said measles outbreaks are “not unusual.” However, measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Kennedy is a danger to public health and the US is courting a disaster by having him be in such an important office and seemingly having a free hand to wreak damage.