A few notes about polio, measles, and COVID:

• Polio used to kill or paralyze half a million people a year worldwide. If you weren’t alive then, ask your parents or grandparents, who may well have known someone who had to live inside a huge metal coffin-like contraption called an “iron lung.” A safe and effective vaccine eradicated polio from our country and nearly the entire planet.

• Measles has been and remains one of the deadliest vaccine-preventable causes of death in the world. But a safe and effective vaccine (had) basically eradicated measles in the United States.

• Just a few years ago, COVID-19 was killing Americans by the thousands every day. Donald Trump — who was president at the time — was telling us all to ingest an anti-parasitic compound commonly used in livestock and to inject bleach directly into our veins. But somehow his administration managed to get out of the way enough for the development of safe and effective vaccines that have saved millions and millions of lives.

Earlier this year — with votes from Republicans in the Senate who knew better and should have blocked the nomination — Trump installed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the federal government’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

As we and others predicted, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is on an absolute rampage to roll back decades of science and life-saving public health measures. It goes way beyond vaccines. RFK Jr. is defunding, downsizing, and dismantling essential agencies and programs in practically every area of public health.

It seems like RFK Jr. won’t be satisfied until he has undone many of the great achievements of modern medicine, even if that means taking us back to a time when people died by the millions from preventable and treatable diseases.

By the way, it’s not like modern medicine — or the private, for-profit health insurance regime we Americans are still forced to endure when it comes to paying for it — is without fault. And nobody has done more than Public Citizen over the past half century to fight Big Pharma, the health insurance corporations, and their political puppets in pursuit of affordable medicines and Medicare for All. But let’s not, you know, throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Whatever his weird intentions may be, Kennedy is in effect on a crusade of misery and death that could result in literally millions of Americans, not to mention millions of people throughout the rest of the world, getting sick or dying.

But if all Donald Trump really cares about is what’s good for him personally — which we know is the case — even he should be able to see that the American people will blame him when they and their loved ones get sick or die because of the stupid, retrograde, and inhumane things that RFK Jr. is doing in Trump’s name.

This week, Public Citizen and 60 other organizations sent a letter to Trump urging him to fire RFK Jr.

Add your name in support of our message to Donald Trump:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the most dangerous individual ever to hold the title of Secretary of Health and Human Services. President Trump and Senate Republicans made a grievous error when entrusting RFK Jr. with our nation’s health — with results both horrible and entirely predictable. It is far past time that Trump rectifies this error by firing RFK Jr. before more lives are unnecessarily put at risk by his anti-science views and gross mismanagement.

Click to add your name now.

Thanks for taking action.

For health and safety,

- Lisa Gilbert & Robert Weissman, Co-Presidents of Public Citizen
 
 
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