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
[[link removed]] to Trump urging him to fire RFK Jr.

Add your name in support of our message to Donald Trump:
[[link removed]]

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.
[[link removed]]

Click to add your name now. [[link removed]]

Thanks for taking action.

For health and safety,

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


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