Bernie Sanders has joined in on growing public calls for Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, to resign, after recent chaos across US health agencies.
In an op-ed published in the New York Times on Saturday, the Vermont senator accused Kennedy of “endangering the health of the American people now and into the future”, adding: “He must resign.”
“Mr Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and over, that they want to Make America Healthy Again. That’s a great slogan. I agree with it. The problem is that since coming into office President Trump and Mr Kennedy have done exactly the opposite,” Sanders wrote.
Sanders pointed to the White House’s firing of Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as four other top CDC officials who resigned in protest this week after Monarez “refused to act as a rubber stamp” for Kennedy’s “dangerous policies”.
“Despite the overwhelming opposition of the medical community, secretary Kennedy has continued his longstanding crusade against vaccines and his advocacy of conspiracy theories that have been rejected repeatedly by scientific experts,” Sanders wrote.
“Against the overwhelming body of evidence within medicine and science, what are secretary Kennedy’s views? … He has absurdly claimed that ‘there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective’… Who supports secretary Kennedy’s views? Not credible scientists and doctors. One of his leading ‘experts’ that he cites to back up his bogus claims on autism and vaccines had his medical license revoked and his study retracted from the medical journal that published it.”
Sanders went on to add: “The reality is that secretary Kennedy has profited from and built a career on sowing mistrust in vaccines. Now, as head of [the Department of Health and Human Services] he is using his authority to launch a full-blown war on science, on public health and on truth itself.”
Pointing to what he described as “our broken health care system”, Sanders said that Kennedy’s repeated attacks against science and vaccines will make it more difficult for Americans to obtain lifesaving vaccines.
“Already, the Trump administration has effectively taken away Covid vaccines from many healthy younger adults and kids, unless they fight their way through our broken health care system. This means more doctor’s visits, more bureaucracy and more people paying higher out-of-pocket costs – if they can manage to get a vaccine at all,” he wrote.
The senator warned that Kennedy’s next target may be the childhood immunization schedule, which involves a list of recommended vaccines for children to protect them from diseases including measles, chickenpox and polio.
“The danger here is that diseases that have been virtually wiped out because of safe and effective vaccines will resurface and cause enormous harm,” Sanders said.
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In recent days, the Trump administration has faced rare bipartisan pushback following its firing of Monarez, which came amid steep budget cuts to the CDC’s work as well as growing concerns of political interference.
Meanwhile, Kennedy has continued to make questionable medical and health claims – and has been lambasted in response by experts and lawmakers alike.
Since he assumed leadership over the health department, Kennedy – a longtime anti-vaccine advocate – has fired health agency workers and entertained conspiracy theories. Last week, more than 750 current and former employees at US health agencies signed a letter in which they criticized Kennedy as an “existential threat to public health”.
The health agency workers went on to accuse the health secretary of being “complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure and endangering the nation’s health by repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information”.
The letter comes after a deadly shooting at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta earlier this month, when a 30-year-old gunman fired more than 180 rounds into the buildings, killing a police officer before dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The shooter had been struggling with mental health issues and was influenced by misinformation that led him to believe the Covid-19 vaccine was making him sick, according to the gunman’s father.
