@RobertKennedyJr Welcome to the United States of Dumbfuckistan where a lawyer decides who must receive what type of vaccination. You just cannot make this up but this is the price the US will pay having a demented criminal as President and a cocaine wormbrain as your director of health.
Congratulations. You have achieved what generations of viruses could only dream of: turning the United States’ vaccination programme into an experiment in whether political vanity can outrun basic immunology.
As a virology professor, I am almost impressed by the audacity. Most people who know little about a subject have the decency to remain merely wrong in private. You have elevated the practice into a governing philosophy: take a century of immunology, epidemiology, clinical evidence, safety monitoring, and pediatric medicine; shake it vigorously until the nuance falls out; then announce that you have discovered “freedom.”
It is an admirable business model, if one’s product is confusion.
Vaccination schedules are not handed down on stone tablets by solemn men in white coats, nor are they designed during midnight rituals in the basement of a pharmaceutical company. They are adjusted, tested, criticised, studied, re-studied, monitored, and revised when evidence demands it. This is perhaps the central problem: the process requires reading things longer than a slogan and understanding things more complicated than a grievance.
Your contribution appears to be the political equivalent of walking into an operating theatre, declaring yourself independent of surgeons, and rearranging the instruments because the scalpel looked insufficiently democratic.
Naturally, you call this “choice.” That word has a pleasantly hygienic sound, especially when it allows those with wealth, access, and television studios to transfer the consequences of their choices to premature infants, cancer patients, the immunocompromised, and families who will discover—too late—that a preventable disease does not care how bravely one distrusted experts.
The viruses, of course, will be delighted. Unlike your administration, they understand transmission dynamics. Unlike your advisers, they do not need a focus group to recognise a vulnerable population. And unlike political appointees, they are astonishingly efficient at their jobs.
You have made a career out of mistaking contrarianism for intellect. It is a common error among men who encounter a consensus and assume it exists chiefly to deprive them of the pleasure of being the cleverest person in the room. But expertise is not a conspiracy simply because it does not applaud on cue.
A public-health system can survive disagreement. It can survive scrutiny. It can survive bad faith remarkably well. What it cannot indefinitely survive is leadership that treats ignorance as authenticity and treats the health of children as raw material for ideological theatre. Be very ashamed of what you and Trump did today.