Every Senate Democrat should vote against confirming RFK Jr.

Democrats are wondering how far to go opposing some of the outlandish choices President-elect Trump has made to fill his Cabinet. While unified in their opposition to some nominees, cracks are showing elsewhere — including around Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to head the Department of Health and Human Services.

Recently, a handful of Democratic senators — most notably Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) — have suggested that they are “leaving the door open” to supporting Kennedy’s nomination. My advice to those senators is simple: Close that door quickly, and don’t worry about who it hits on the way out.

Kennedy is a prolific and unrepentant conspiracy theorist. He promotes claims that vaccines cause autism, that HIV is not the cause of AIDS, that antidepressants cause school shootings and that fluoride in the drinking water is lowering the IQ of American children. None of these have the remotest connection to reality.

But, some might object, not everything RFK Jr. says is crazy. What about the stuff about food additives and plastics? That is exactly how conspiracy theorists work. Peppering outlandish claims with a few reasonable points makes the crazy stuff easier to swallow. Kennedy’s so-called “reasonable ideas” are key to his conspiracist worldview.

How bad would it be to have a conspiracy theorist lead a nation’s health care? In the early 2000s, I worked in South Africa at the height of the HIV epidemic. Hundreds of people were dying from the virus every day while the president of the country, Thabo Mbeki, and his minister of health, Dr. Manto Tshabala-Msimang, fell under the spell of a conspiracy theory that HIV was not the cause of AIDS. Rather than helping to roll out effective antiviral treatments, they pushed bogus cures and vilified doctors who tried to give pregnant mothers HIV meds to prevent transmission of the virus to their babies.

Dr. Manto’s impassioned embrace of roots and vegetables as natural remedies for HIV even led to the nickname “Dr. Garlic.”

While the pair fiddled, the fires of the HIV epidemic burned, decimating South Africa. Manto’s and Mbeki’s actions led to as many as 350,000 avoidable deaths. Imagine a Secretary Kennedy leading our response to the next pandemic.

The game plan for Democratic opposition to Trump 2.0 is still a work in progress, but rolling over on Kennedy’s nomination to head HHS would be a bad way to start. If Democratic senators think leaving the door ajar for RFK Jr. will get them points for bipartisanship, I recommend they find those opportunities elsewhere.

Sadly, I suspect some Democrats are using Kennedy’s nomination as an opportunity to placate anti-science conspiracists in their own camp. Suspicion of vaccines and “big science” are, after all, one of the few places where the crazy right and the wacky left come together.

Democrats need to be 100 percent united in explaining to Americans why allowing a man like Kennedy to preside over the crown jewels of this country’s scientific and medical community — including the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — is a terrifying idea. Dr. Peter Lurie, president of the public advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest, summed up RFK Jr.’s nomination quite succinctly: “Nominating an anti-vaxxer like Kennedy to HHS is like putting a flat Earther at the head of NASA.” It does not matter if the nominee has some cool ideas about space travel.

Never in my most dystopian dreams did I think someone like Mbeki or Dr. Manto could ascend to power in America. But that is exactly what we are facing, and Democrats need to articulate this message clearly. Regardless of what insane policies a Secretary Kennedy would, or would not, be able to enact, simply giving him an official platform would do irrevocable damage to the reputation of American science.

Democratic senators “leaving the door open” to supporting this nomination would do well to realize that like Dr. Manto’s garlic treatment for HIV, the stink of supporting Kennedy will take a long time to wash off.

David Oxman is a physician, teacher and medical ethicist living in Philadelphia.

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