So far this week, America watched two disturbing headlines flash across the news. First was Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. disbanding the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee. It’s the very body designed to safeguard our nation’s health.
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During his confirmation process, Kennedy lied about what he would, or rather, wouldn’t do to that committee. “If confirmed, [Kennedy] will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, without changes,” Louisiana Republican U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician, said on the Senate floor, saying that assurance came directly from RFK Jr.
Trusting Kennedy with vaccines is akin to trusting Donald Trump with our nation’s military, and speaking of …
Trump, in a stunning act of unconstitutional overreach and blatant untrustworthiness, sent U.S. Marines and National Guard troops into the streets of Los Angeles to quell largely peaceful protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Yes, there was violence and some destruction, but at a level that local law enforcement can handle. For a president to invoke martial force (it’s a governor who asks for such help) against the American people, particularly the Marines, is abominable.
At first glance, these events may seem unrelated. One is about public health, the other about military power. But scratch the surface and a dangerous throughline appears, a thread that pulls at dismantling our core systems of defense, one biological, the other constitutional. Both leave the American body, individually and collectively, exposed to something far deadlier than a single virus or a single protest.
Together, they represent a nation teetering toward the dystopia we once smugly claimed only happened “over there.” Well, guess what? Over there has come right here.
You don’t have to be a Senate physician to know that vaccines are a defense weapon. They are not just a medical tool but part of a long-standing, science-based shield that protects us from mass illness, disability, and death.
The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is a bedrock institution composed of immunologists, pediatricians, and public health experts and all manner of doctors and medical experts. This committee, quite obviously, doesn’t include vaccine deniers, but now it likely will.
The physicians let go by Kennedy are not lobbyists, and they are not ideologues. By dissolving the committee, RFK Jr. isn’t just playing politics. He’s stripping the country of its immune system in the name of "freedom," while inviting the return of preventable diseases like measles, polio, and whooping cough. Not to mention that COVID isn’t over, and Kennedy’s latest assault on relaxing COVID vaccines is as chilling as a COVID fever.
Meanwhile, our military is also defense, not against citizens protesting injustice, but against external threats to our nation. When Trump sends Marines into Los Angeles to intimidate young people holding signs at an ICE facility, he is not protecting democracy; he is abusing the machinery of the state to smother it. And like RFK Jr.’s assault on scientific consensus, Trump’s militarized reaction to protest is meant to silence truth-tellers, chill dissent, and cement power through fear.
RFK Jr. and Trump are massively abusing their power at the expense of the health of our citizenry and the health of our democracy, but which will wane, most assuredly, in the coming years and months.
And herein lies the grim symmetry of this confluence for our future. Weakening public health protections makes a nation physically vulnerable. Weakening constitutional norms and the right to protest makes a nation politically vulnerable. And history shows that these vulnerabilities often go hand in hand.
Consider Argentina in the 1970s and '80s, when a military junta seized power during a time of political and economic instability. The dictatorship disappeared tens of thousands of citizens and crushed dissent, while the nation's broken public health system failed to address infant mortality, infectious disease, and even basic sanitation in rural areas.
Or look at Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, where a collapsing health system, culminating in a devastating cholera outbreak in 2008, mirrored the collapse of civil liberties, elections, and judicial independence. Not to mention an economic collapse.
Closer to home, the United States has its own haunting example, and that of course is the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. For years, the Reagan administration refused to acknowledge or adequately respond to the epidemic, effectively letting a virus ravage a stigmatized community. Silence did indeed equate to death, and not just medically. It exposed how power can willfully neglect vulnerable populations when political gain outweighs moral responsibility.
In RFK Jr., we see that same callousness dressed up as phony “freedom of choice.” The only choice he wants you to make is not to skip the line for vaccines,but skip them altogether. His anti-vaccine ideology, long discredited and steeped in conspiracy, is no longer fringe.
We should not be surprised. We were sufficiently warned by every medical expert in the country, even by his revered cousin, Ambassador Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, the daughter of President Kennedy. She rarely speaks publicly, but boy, did she speak out about her cousin.
RFK Jr. is pushing his life-threatening ideology as hard as he can into the mainstream, and it now threatens to destroy the very infrastructure that keeps outbreaks at bay. In Trump, we see the same lust for power that once led him to tear-gas peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. His new mobilization of Marines in L.A. is a sign that he long ago gave up any doubts about abusing power. He welcomes it at the detriment of all of us.
Both moves, the gutting of scientific authority and the militarization of protest response, create the conditions under which freedom dies, not all at once, but piece by piece. The irony, of course, is that both men brag about being defenders of liberty.
However, real freedom requires healthy bodies and healthy institutions. It requires the right to live without fear of polio and the right to protest without fear of weapons. Tanks replacing syringes are a sure sign of societal deterioration.
We like to believe that America is exceptional, immune, if you will, to the diseases that afflict other nations. They are the plagues of authoritarianism, repression, and mass sickness. But immunity is not a birthright. It must be maintained, vaccinated against, strengthened by legitimate committees, science, law, and civil society.
When we allow that immune system to be dismantled, whether through Kennedy’s pseudoscientific sabotage or Trump’s military theatrics, we don’t just risk becoming another cautionary tale. We begin to weaken — and ultimately write our own obituary.
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