Sens. Thune and Rounds, reject RFK, Jr. He's way off base on vaccines and says farmers are poisoning people
Talk about disbelief. Watching Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., squirming, deflecting, denying and generally mangling his position on vaccines while being grilled during his Senate confirmation hearings yesterday was an exercise in extended head-shaking. The proposed head of the Department of Health and Human Services doesn’t inspire much confidence, both in terms of an executive background, of which he has none, nor in terms of his rejection of science as the basis for making decisions about healthcare and medical research.
He doesn’t even have a grasp of how Medicare and Medicaid work.
I mean, this is a guy who acknowledged that he once probably did say that “Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon.” There are similar doozies in Kennedy’s track record of unsupported assertions about vaccines, including the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism.
Kennedy said during yesterday’s hearing that he supports the measles and polio vaccines, completely and blithely contradicting his long history of unsupported claims against them.
He has spread misinformation about the measles vaccine.
He once said that the polio vaccine “killed many, many more people than polio ever did.”
The Wall Street Journal reports that in December 2021, Kennedy said that the Covid-19 vaccine was “the deadliest vaccine ever made.
As to Covid-19 itself, Kennedy once said that Covid may have been ethnically targeted to spare Jews and Asians.
You’d think that ridiculous assertions like these would be enough for our Sens. Thune and Rounds to give Kennedy the heave-ho when it comes time to vote for him in the Senate, but Republican reality may be too much for South Dakota’s senators to resist.
If so, maybe they can consider how strongly the ag community – a major component of our state’s economy and culture – opposes Kennedy and use that as reason enough to reject confirmation.
I wrote about this last November when Kennedy’s name was being mentioned as a possible Secretary of Health and Human Services. Because Kennedy will be in charge of the Food and Drug Administration if he’s confirmed to run HHS, the safety of our country’s food supply will be one of his responsibilities.
This should give farmers some pause, as Kennedy has claimed that they are poisoning us.
In my earlier piece I noted that despite the USDA’s claim that food additives are safe based on the best scientific knowledge, Kennedy has said that “pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs and toxic waste permeate every cell in our bodies … this assault on our children's cells and hormones is unrelenting. They are swimming around in a toxic soup … we are mass poisoning all of our children and all of our adults.”
Sens. Thune and Rounds, how do you suppose South Dakota’s farmers and ranchers feel about Kennedy’s claim that they are “mass poisoning all of our children and all of our adults?”
Perhaps giving a signal about how the ag community, generally, feels about the nomination, AgWeb, a widely followed source of news and information about the ag community, yesterday noted in a headline, “90% of Ag Economists Say RFK Jr. Wouldn’t Be Positive for U.S. Agriculture.” The piece goes on to list various reasons that most elements of the ag community are concerned by the Kennedy nomination, largely because they worry that Kennedy is opposed to the modern, scientifically-validated food production methods required in a society that must feed 300+ million people three times a day.
At today’s hearing, Montana Sen. Steve Daines, a Republican, did get Kennedy to promise that he would work with ranchers and farmers before implementing policies that affect our food supply. I suppose that gives Daines some political cover for voting in favor of Kennedy’s nomination, but I don’t exactly get how a vague promise like that would play out in real life. Based on Kennedy’s steady and determined rhetoric, I doubt that farmers will stand much of a chance if they get in the way of his claims that they are poisoning us.
There probably is a need for change in American dietary habits, but to blame food producers for health outcomes is way off base. American consumers like to eat ultra-processed foods (UPFs), so much so that we’re the top-ranked country in the world for UPF consumption. There’s plenty of room for improvement on that front, but it’s really about consumers, not producers. Kennedy would do better to focus on getting people to change their eating habits instead of fingering farmers and the rest of the food production chain.
This ill-informed, inconsistent opportunist should be rejected by the Senate.
Tsitrian is a businessman and writer from the Black Hills. He was a weekly columnist for the Rapid City Journal for 20 years. His articles and commentary have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post and The Omaha World-Herald. Tsitrian served in the Marines for three years (1966-69), including a 13-month tour of duty as a radioman in Vietnam. Republish with permission.
Photo: per Kennedy, farmers poisoning Americans, public domain, wikimedia commons
