This week, Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shocked many when he announced, via an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, that he was firing all 17 members of the panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines. He named eight new members, four of whom are known to have expressed anti-vaccine sentiments.
Kennedy said his decision was meant to restore faith in vaccines, alleging that the committee has been “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine.”
Right. You’d have to have a worm in your brain to believe that—a big, voraciously hungry worm.
No, there’s more to this story. Right now, a host of different theories as to the real reason for the panel’s purge are spreading through Washington like a virulent new strain of the coronavirus.
Here’s a rundown as to some of the most popular:
- The panel insisted on using big medical words in their e-mails that Kennedy just didn’t understand.
- It came to Kennedy’s attention that all the panel members were D.E.I. hires: Distinguished, Educated, Intelligent.
- Kennedy saw all the fun the guys at DOGE were having randomly firing government employees and wanted to get in on the action.
- He wants to restore balance to the C.D.C. panel, where, historically, crackpots and whackjobs have been woefully under-represented.
- There was a scintilla of credibility and decency left to his family’s name that Kennedy wanted to extinguish once and for all.
- Kennedy grew to resent the fact that every time he said something at a meeting, one of the panel members would correct him with facts and scientific data.
- Kennedy is secretly working with Stephen Miller to make extra sure not a single child of a poor, undocumented immigrant will ever get vaccinated on the U.S. taxpayers’ dime.
- Kennedy fired the panel based on false information, incorrect data, and disproved theories, so he was 100 percent confident in his decision.
John Ficarra is a former editor of Mad magazine
