As predicted, the worst Kennedy is taking an axe to America's vaccine programs

It took only a week or so for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to start doing the things he supposedly assured World's Most Gullible Person Sen. Susan Collins he wouldn't; gutting the approval process for new vaccines, sabotaging the production of current critical vaccines, and blowing off the first U.S. measles death in a decade—an unnamed child in undervaccinated West Texas—with not even a hint of concern.

Add that to the pile of evidence that the United States is less a democracy than it is a playground for rich sociopaths with delusions of grandeur, I suppose.

As Every Single Person Knew, Kennedy's sabotage of vaccination programs doesn't appear to be predicated on concern for any one vaccine. Nope; all of them are under attack. The most immediate public harm is going to come from the Trump administration's cancellation of the vaccine advisory committee meeting that was to happen in March; that meeting was the one at which advisers would choose the influenza strains to be targeted in next fall's new flu shots.

The cancellation comes as the United States is in the midst of a particularly severe flu season. So far, 86 children and 19,000 adults have died this season, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [...]

The meetings are important because the flu virus changes year to year, and the vaccine must be updated to provide the best protection. Deciding on the strains in the spring gives vaccine manufacturers enough time to produce the shots to be ready for the fall.

What does that mean for next year's vaccines? It's not entirely clear. At minimum, the flu shot you get next fall or winter will be less likely to be effective. But because JFK Jr. is an idiot surrounded by idiots and enabled by other idiots, we can't say with certainty that he'll be allowing FDA-approved flu shot production to go forward at all. Don't worry, though: Our more developed neighbors, Canada and Mexico, should be able to hook you up on the down-low.

Disrupting next year's flu vaccine production is but one Kennedump among many, however. The clinical trials of a Covid-19 vaccine pill, which if sufficiently effective could make yearly vaccinations far less of a chore for everyone involved, has been at least temporarily shuttered, with Dead Animal Enthusiast Kennedy channelling Elon Musk to declare that "four years of the Biden administration's failed oversight" now means Kennedy and his grifters must look anew at, well, any vaccine program that anyone in the Biden administration so much as glanced at.

Kennedy issued a 90-day stop-work order on Friday related to the HHS contract with American biotech company Vaxart Inc., which is working to develop a new COVID-19 vaccine that can be taken orally. The stop-work order comes as 10,000 individuals were slated to begin clinical trials on Monday.

The trial is only paused, not terminated, with Kennedy and other health officials set to examine the study's initial findings over the next 90 days before deciding on next steps.

And in the newest burp of near-criminal incompetence, The Criminal's team is now "reevaluating" the government's Biden-era contract with Moderna to develop a vaccine against bird flu. Bird flu is spreading at pandemic rates through wildlife, commercially raised chickens, and dairy farms and is considered to be a likely candidate for the next worldwide human pandemic. But the United States won't necessarily be stepping up to help produce a vaccine. Or to track the disease. Or to do anything else that would go against Robert F. Kennedy Jr's nonsensical personal crank beliefs.

In Kennedy, Musk, Duffy, and every single other asshole signing up to be part of The Criminal's post-coup pseudo-government, we're seeing the hoariest of all Dumb Guy patterns emerge. The collected scientists or policy experts of the world spend years or decades working on a thing; in comes some bumbling, bellowing dumbass to announce that Actually, the entire rest of the world is probably wrong because only a true genius like them could possibly understand the fine details of whatever branch of science or expertise they just discovered last Tuesday and now consider themselves the foremost experts on.

The world truly needs a new measles vaccine. Not an anti-measles vaccine, mind you: I mean a new vaccine that would give all these assholes measles.

Government by narcissistic asshole is both expensive and almost unfathomably dangerous. Kennedy has spent his recent decades brushing off measles and other diseases while inventing new levels of bullshit to claim that well maybe it's the vaccines that are the real threat.

The lies Kennedy and other hoaxers have spread are partly responsible for falling vaccination rates, which in turn is responsible for children dying from diseases that we've had vaccines against for decades.

And it really can't be overstated just how dangerous measles actually is. Older Americans still seem to believe the disease is some sort of childhood rite of passage, but it's a brutal disease that spreads like wildfire through unvaccinated populations.

If your kids haven't gotten the MMR vaccine—and are old enough to get it—do it now. Go, get it done. And thank God for vaccine mandates in public schools and at universities.

As for the rest of the vaccinations that MODERN SOCIETY RELIES ON I MEAN LITERALLY WE COULD NOT HAVE OUR INTERCONNECTED GLOBAL SOCIETY WITHOUT THIS SHIT ... well, we'll have to see. It'd be a hell of a thing if The Criminal's team cut off, say, all access to flu vaccines, HPV vaccines, or other non-controversial lifesavers.

But we can't say they wouldn't do it. Not while they're seemingly intentionally crashing the economy with massive federal layoffs, sabotage of U.S. research and development efforts, new tariffs and belligerence towards every economic partner this nation has.

They genuinely seem eager to see people start dying. They'll get their wish. And yet another shoutout to the Republican senators who have backed every bit of it; sure, it may lead to a collapsed economy and another round of mass pandemic deaths, but what a small price to pay to avoid being singled out by a dementia-addled reality television star who believes he ought to own half the world.

UPDATE: There's no end to it.

Do you want a worldwide emergence of drug-resistant tuberculosis strains? A complete undoing of world progress fighting HIV? Because this is how you get this things. There's no way to "undo" this level of destruction, no matter what the courts or Congress might try.