Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy has a well-documented history of lying, and so it was reasonable to believe he was lying again during his January confirmation hearing when he said he is "not anti-vaccine" and promised he wasn't going to take vaccines away. Still, it's both alarming and remarkable how swiftly he's moved to take away COVID-19 boosters that have helped millions of Americans avoid becoming seriously ill from this still-novel virus. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration announced plans to deny access to the vaccine for people under 65 without an underlying health condition.
This fits in with Kennedy's long-standing history of eugenics-tinged notions that disease is a good thing, falsely claiming that it strengthens the gene pool, and insinuating that it makes survivors stronger. (In reality, vaccines boost overall immunity while disease often weakens it.) But the particulars of the policy also reveal something about Kennedy's reactionary class politics, which contradict his family's history of progressivism. As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted on Bluesky, "I strongly suspect you’re going to have doctors leaning forward on what constitutes a preexisting condition in this case." Which is to say, people who want the booster can get around the FDA ban by asking their doctor for a prescription.
