Beyond the Pale - RFK, Jr.

 

This past weekend Washington, DC was the scene of a “Defeat the Mandates” rally, sponsored in part by the Children's Health Defense organization, a nonprofit anti-vaccination advocacy group founded by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in 2016.  It featured several speakers, including Mr. Kennedy, who criticized vaccination policies and mandates against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Last year the Center for Countering Digital Hate identified Mr. Kennedy among a dozen individuals in the USA who are responsible for over half of the anti-vaccine content on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.  In early March 2021, Kennedy released an anti-vaccine video, "Medical Racism: The New Apartheid" that promotes COVID-19 conspiracy theories and claims that COVID-19 vaccination efforts are medical experiments on the Black community.  His YouTube account was removed in late September 2021 for breaking the company's new policies on vaccine misinformation.  

And one should not forget that Mr. Kennedy accepted an offer made by former President Trump in January 2017 to become the chairman of the Vaccine Safety Task Force, and later that year he reported that he had been meeting with the federal public health regulators to discuss defects in vaccine safety science, at the White House's request.  It was the Trump White House that later played down the effectiveness of anti-COVID vaccines at a time when the virus was laying scourge to the US and Americans were dying by the thousands.

These vaccine mandates have been instituted to help Americans protect themselves and their fellow citizens from the COVID-19 coronavirus and its variants that over the past two years have resulted in 5.6 million deaths worldwide, including ca. 868,000 deaths in the USA alone, by far the largest death count of any country.  Add to this the millions who have suffered and been hospitalized greatly taxing our health care systems, not to mention the countless thousands who have lost family and friends to the pandemic.

We should all be thankful that scientists have worked around the clock to design, test, and manufacture vaccines and boosters that, if not wiping out the virus, has gone to great lengths to lessen the threat of the pandemic and make COVID 19 endemic.  One might think there would have been universal relief that we can now benefit from a vaccine that has been distributed free to any who want it.   Yet there are those that refuse the vaccine thereby continuing to put their health and that of their families, friends, and communities at grave risk.  Not only that, but they also liken mandates to getting vaccinated or to wear a protective mask in public as attacks on their individual rights.   But what about the rights of the rest of us who want to live normal lives free from the threat of the virus as we go about our routines.  Or for our children to be safe and protected in their schools.  It makes no sense at all.

This past weekend’s rally in Washington took the anti-vaccine protest to more absurd heights.   One of the main speakers on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the same steps, that “hallowed spot,” on which the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his iconic “I have a dream” speech almost 60 years ago, was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. whose father was assassinated just a few weeks after Dr. King in 1968.  Mr. Kennedy’s screed observed that the architects of our republic’s Constitution made a promise to every American that the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness would be guaranteed to all of us.  Not just to those who are more concerned about their own rights at the expense of others’.

Mr. Kennedy, whose family shared the same dreams as Dr. King and whose father died in the struggle for those same dreams, stood at the same hallowed spot to claim that the Biden administration's policies on vaccines were worse than the Nazis' persecution of the Jews, liken efforts by the US government to protect its citizens from the threat of a life-threatening pandemic to the actions of a totalitarian state.  He suggested that Germans living under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime had more rights than those Americans who challenged the vaccine mandates.  These Germans “could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did."  I would like to remind Mr. Kennedy that Anne Frank was a Dutch Jew who along with most of her family was murdered by the Nazis in a concentration camp.   He obviously did not read the book to the end.  And frankly, it goes beyond the pale to compare his misinformed league of anti–vaxxers with the fate of the European Jews.  Several signs drew comparisons to the Holocaust, including equating American scientists and health care professionals with Nazi doctors who perverted medical science by conducting inhuman medical experiments on Jews and other concentration camp inmates more often than not resulting in their deaths.    The Auschwitz Memorial responded to Mr. Kennedy and his ilk.  "Exploiting the tragedy of people who suffered, were humiliated, tortured & murdered by the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany - including children like Anne Frank - in a debate about vaccines & limitations during global pandemic is a sad symptom of moral & intellectual decay."

And while we are at it, what is keeping Mr. Kennedy and his minions from fleeing to Switzerland if they so desire?  They might be surprised to learn that Swiss authorities have instituted similar mandates to protect public health and safety.   Mr. Kennedy also reminded them that he traveled to Communist East Germany with his father in 1962 where they met Germans who escaped over the Berlin Wall.  I highly doubt these meetings took place in East Germany, the country they escaped from 

Some anti-vaxxers have likened Dr. Fauci, the noted factotum during the pandemic, with Dr. Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death at Auschwitz.  I should add that Mr. Kennedy released his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, this past November and he continues to hawk it at rallies like the one this past Sunday in Washington.  He falsely accuses Dr. Fauci (as well as Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) of being a powerful “technocrat” trying to profit off a vaccine while helping to orchestrate “a historic coup d’etat against Western democracy.”  Kennedy’s book advocates the use of unproven COVID-19 treatments such as ivermectin, which is meant to treat parasites, and the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine.  He also accused Dr. Fauci of deliberately sabotaging treatments for AIDS.  Kennedy appeared as a speaker at the partially violent demonstration in Berlin on August 29, 2020, where populist groups called for an end to restrictions caused by COVID-19.

To suggest that Mr. Kennedy, who majored in history at Harvard, doesn’t know what the fuck he is talking about is putting it mildly.  Mr. Kennedy has now apologized for his “insensitive” statements (I characterize them as far more insidious than that).  Yet this is not the first time he has drawn comparisons to the Holocaust, and I am not at all convinced of the genuineness of his apology.  He also needs to apologize for spreading false and dangerous misinformation about the vaccine and those who urge Americans to get protected for their own good and that of others.

Mr. Kennedy has accused the Democrats of having “drank the Kool-Aid.”  I think it is the other way around.  As scion of one of the great Democratic dynasties, Mr. Kennedy has jettisoned his good works of the past to join forces with the extreme Right’s and its belief that it is the Democrats who are foisting authoritarianism on the American people.  It is the Democratic who are fighting to protect voting rights in this country, something not one member of the Republican Congressional caucus has stood up to support.  Members of his own family, including his wife, who called his references to Anne Frank as “reprehensible and insensitive," have gone public to state his “lies and fear-mongering yesterday were both sickening and destructive" and they do not support his ill-conceived notions concerning the vaccine and its effectiveness in battling the COVID virus which has “helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicate in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines."

It is sad when an individual who has to his credit many good works in the past turns to the dark side and uses his celebrity to spread misinformation that puts so many lives at risk.