We need to talk about Bobby

Deworming Our Minds

The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth. - Garry Kasparov

Your Freakshow guide has been chomping popcorn by the Ferris wheel these weirdly warm and sunny days. Eyes a-popping! So much to see as the MAGA Freak Tent gets some new, raw talent! A Fox News host and supporter of war criminals as Secretary of Defense! A South African billionaire about to “clean house” at the very federal agencies investigating him, and influencing geopolitics! An End Times Christian Zionist dispatched as ambassador to Israel and a friend of Russia as Director of National Intelligence! An accused statutory rapist as Attorney General! And rumbles of vicious infighting among the plastic-fantastically modified mutants, zombies, and clowns in MAGAland.

Unless and until the free press is deported or litigated into silence, we will have ample opportunity to meet and gawk at all of the incoming Trump 2.0 Freaks for years to come. This week, I want to think about the recovered heroin addict, possibly unrecovered sex addict, and champion science denier poised to play a major role in Trumpnation’s public health system (and oversee “women’s health” — whatever the holy hell that means). 

Trump hasn’t given the K-scion an official job yet but Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy Jr. is already “reportedly reviewing resumes” for top jobs at the HHS and FDA. 

“He can do anything he wants,” Trump said about Kennedy a few days before the election. Kennedy had recently commented on social media that on its first day in power, the Trump regime would ban fluoride in water. Fluoridated water has been a favorite bogeyman of paranoid anti-government conspiracists dating to the mid-20th Century. The disinterring of a Cold War conspiracy theory like fluoride is of a piece with Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” disinformation strategy. 

Citizens blinded by blizzards of bullshit lose trust in themselves and soon reach for the hand of the strongman to lead them to the light. As modern tyranny historians from Ruth Ben-Ghiat to Timothy Snyder have been warning for nearly a decade now, autocracies thrive on befuddled, ill-informed populations. They foster communities in which, as Peter Pomerantzsev titled his terrific book on post-Soviet Russia — “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible.”

Bobby — a man with no scientific expertise who sailed through Harvard on a heroin high — blames everything from autism to food allergies to cancer on childhood vaccines. He came out of the conspiracy closet in 2005 with articles published in Salon and Rolling Stone — both of which were retracted. In 2015 he joined anti-vaxxer Eric Gladen’s World Mercury Project, immediately raising the nonprofit’s financial profile by half a million dollars. The Project renamed itself the less tin-foil cappy-sounding Children’s Health Defense. During the pandemic, the Children’s Health Defense reaped millions and grew into a “juggernaut” and the grift keeps on giving. 

Kennedy’s assault on expertise and science is extra-odious to me because he’s lying about something I actually know a little about. In the last months of 2020, the publisher of a small press called to ask if I could quickly write a short book about the race to the COVID-19 vaccine. I said yes if I could also write about the Trump administration’s abysmal handling of the pandemic, and the crazy conspiracy theories then already erupting around the mRNA platform. I hired a young postdoc at Stanford to crash-course me in genetic science and fact check me on DNA, and read everything I could get my hands on about the history of vaccines. 

The result was my short book, Virus: Vaccinations, The CDC and The Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic. One question I grappled with was why so many of us rejected the vaccine.

I concluded that we live in the most medically protected time in human history — and we have forgotten what came before. We think health is our birthright. As recently as the early to mid-20th century, it was not uncommon for children to suffer the agonies of infectious diseases or witness family members who did. Children got terribly sick and died at home. Their survivors — including some of our grandparents and great-grandparents — were intimately acquainted with the sights, sounds, and smells of dying and with the deaths of siblings or their own small children. Most Americans simply cannot imagine being parents helplessly watching their small child cough to death from this bacterial infection.

We also fail to appreciate just how recently we have even understood what kills us. Before about two hundred years ago, we were utterly helpless against infectious diseases — we could neither see nor conceive of what caused them. Technology has outpaced the evolution of our primordial impulses. Many of us cannot relinquish the instinct to seek miracle cures and magical spells to keep illness at bay. 

The fact that we do live in such a scientific world — buried in a blizzard of data points and facts and the cacophony of beeping updates — only enhances the embroidering tendency of our conspiratorial hive mind.

Bobby Kennedy has been crusading against vaccines for a while. Whether he truly believes the bullshit or not, is not something I can assess. He morphed into a spokesman for the alternative health community after some years dabbling in environmental protection, as a clean water (Riverkeepers) activist. 

Now he’s at the doorstep of the inner sanctum of American power, suggesting the FDA step back from food and drug safety regulations, and make it easier for people to dose up on ivermectin and other unproven quackery. He apparently supports removing liability protection from vaccine makers. That would effectively destroy vaccine research and production, because vaccines always have side effects, and a tiny percentage of them are deadly. 

One of the things I learned writing about the COVID-19 vaccine is that very few big pharma companies even want to produce vaccines because they are only used once and are not moneymakers like expensive cancer drugs or diabetes drugs that need to be taken for decades. 

Like so many Trumpworld grifts, Bobby’s game relies on Americans’ ignorance of history, distrust of experts and science, and a preference for superstition, rumors, and “feelings” over facts. 

Here is a fact: The average lifespan of Americans in 1900, before childhood vaccines, was 48. By 2000, it was 76. This 30-year increase in life expectancy in a single century was largely due to the eradication of childhood illnesses by public vaccine mandates. 

Modern medicine and technology are our salvation and our doom. We love it and fear it. Genetic science and AI are discussed in what are essentially, to us, foreign languages. We don’t understand it, but it works. But every time I’ve gotten an x-ray or an MRI, or a shot of novocaine for a dental procedure, or taken an antibiotic that wiped out an infection, I’ve given silent thanks to the men and women who invented these things. 

Like everyone born before 1989, my youth was shaped by the nihilism of the nuclear arms race. I understand the paranoia about what I call bad science, the “Stranger Things” of Cold War research. Anyone paying the least amount of attention to popular culture or the actual news over the last half-century understands that the U.S. government’s storehouse of terrible secrets is vast and growing. Science helped build whatever is inside the locked vault of secrets, and that partly explains why so many Americans don’t trust the good science that has healed so many and made life more bearable. As I wrote in my review of the movie Oppenheimer:

The now culturally iconic madmen in white lab coats didn’t stop with nuclear explosives. For decades, they beavered away at weapons labs in New Mexico and California making ever more efficient killing machines, from uranium shells to cluster bombs. In Fort Detrick, Maryland, American scientists worked on biological weapons, and dosing unwitting people with LSD for mind control were just the benign experiments. Stephen Kinzer’s book Poisoner in Chief, on the scientists behind the bio-weapons program, details such horrific human lab rat situations that it is almost impossible to read.

The baby boom generation grew up side by side with the national security state. Trump and Bobby Jr. were born in the middle of the duck and cover generation. They ply their generation’s fear and paranoia. 

In the wake of the election, with the progressive movement vanquished and rudderless, we are desperately in need of leaders to confront ignorance, defend science, and politically, challenge the notion of “market-based health care” — the law of supply and demand simply doesn’t apply to people who would spend their last dime to keep themselves or their loved ones alive. 

In a parallel universe, Bobby might have leveraged his family’s progressive legacy to fight for national health care or put his philanthropic efforts into projects to provide Americans with basic science education about vaccines. In the MAGAverse, he’s just another truth-annihilating brainworm.

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RECOMMENDED BOOKS

For readers interested in the incredible true history of disease science and vaccines, I recommend these two lively, engrossing books, and a plug for my own novel:

Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif

This book, written in the 1920s, tells in vivid prose, the story of the discovery of microbes, beginning with the Dutch businessman who ground the first lenses enabling the human eye to see the “animalcules” that Louis Pasteur and others eventually matched with their deadly effects, enabling humanity to begin to fight back.

Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver. Arthur Allen  

Most of us can’t even pronounce the names of the childhood diseases vaccines have almost eradicated, nor can we imagine the parental grief, and childhood suffering, that those diseases routinely inflicted on families until well into the 20^th Century. This comprehensive history reminds us that the development of vaccines was always a see-saw between life-saving advances, and terrible mistakes and failures.

Zero Visibility Possible by Nina Burleigh

Trumpnation is shaping up to be a hellscape of disinformation with truth-tellers cowed or sacked and public trauma used as a political tool - all themes in my “witty, obsessively readable” (Rick Wilson) and ”stick of dynamite” (Greg Olear) debut novel. You can buy it on Kindle or paperback at the link above. I am recording an audio version next week, which will be available soon. 

As always, I will gift anyone who orders a copy with a free subscription to the Freakshow.