The Kennedy Family Wants RFK, Jr. Out
When common sense is thicker than blood.
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It’s been a rough few weeks for Robert Kennedy, Jr., who may have no true rival in the contest for greatest public self-immolation among Trump officials, all of it stemming from his bizarre crusade against life-saving vaccines.
It began on August 27th, when his department announced the firing of Dr. Susan Monarez, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—less than a month after she was narrowly confirmed by the Senate in a party-line vote—reportedly for resisting Kennedy’s increasingly insane demands, including his insistence that she sign off on unscientific recommendations regarding vaccines and fire CDC staffers.
That quickly launched a shitstorm.
Within hours, four top CDC officials had resigned in protest: Debra Houry, Chief Medical Officer; Demetre Daskalakis, Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; Daniel Jernigan, Director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; and Jennifer Layden, Director of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology.
A letter by current and former HHS employees blasting Kennedy’s leadership and calling for his resignation had already been released on August 20th but has ballooned in size to over a thousand signatories since the ouster of Dr. Monarez.
In the midst of all that was a blistering op-ed by Dr. Monarez in The Wall Street Journal, in which she partly wrote:
…I was confronted with another challenge—pressure to compromise science itself.
Reporters have focused on the Aug. 25 meeting where my boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., pressured me to resign or face termination. But that meeting revealed that it wasn’t about one person or my job. It was one of the more public aspects of a deliberate effort to weaken America’s public-health system and vaccine protections.
Then came yesterday’s Senate Finance Committee hearing in which Kennedy was pilloried by senators on both sides of the aisle for three hours over his tumultuous and incompetent tenure. It was, hands down, the worst appearance by a sitting cabinet official in a congressional hearing. Ever.
He was confused, uninformed, and defensive throughout the hearing. He answered their questions with about as much expertise and confidence as a blackout drunk behind the wheel of a school bus.
It was such a bad performance that Republican Senators John Barrasso (WY), Bill Cassidy (LA), and Thom Tillis (NC) all openly expressed skepticism of his leadership, to put it mildly.
Although none of them have yet called for his resignation, their pointed questions and remarks are what pass these days for notable criticism of Trump’s cabinet.
Senator Tillis raised more than a few eyebrows when he told Kennedy: “I do also believe that some of your statements seem to contradict what you said in the prior hearing. You said you’re going to empower the scientists at HHS to do their job — I’d just like to see evidence where you’ve done that.”
Then there was the funny-but-not-funny exchange between Kennedy and Senator Cassidy over the Nobel Peace Prize. The Senator asked Kennedy if Trump deserves the honor for Operation Warp Speed, which was the federal government’s response to COVID in 2020. Kennedy replied in the affirmative. Cassidy then basically asked how he could believe that but also that vaccines are bad.
Yikes.
All three of them voted to confirm Kennedy earlier this year in what was one of the narrowest confirmations for any of Trump’s cabinet officials.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (SD) also voted for his confirmation, but you wouldn’t have been able to tell that this week from his visible frustration with Kennedy: “Honestly, he’s got to take responsibility. We confirm these people, we go through a lot of work to get them confirmed, and they’re in office a month?”
Yet, somehow, this all pales in comparison to the shellacking Kennedy has taken from his own family over the past several days.
Former Congressman Joe Kennedy III, nephew of RFK, Jr., didn’t mince words in a statement released on Twitter this afternoon:
Robert Kennedy Jr. is a threat to the health and wellbeing of every American. A United States Secretary of Health and Human Services is tasked with protecting the public health of our country and its people. At yesterday’s hearing, he chose to do the opposite: to dismiss science, mislead the public, sideline experts and sow confusion.
None of us will be spared the pain he is inflicting. It doesn’t matter how rich or powerful you are or what state you live in— the heartbreak of watching a loved one fall ill knows no borders.
The challenges before us—from disease outbreaks to mental health crises—demand moral clarity, scientific expertise, and leadership rooted in fact.
Those values are not present in the Secretary’s office. He must resign.
Then Kerry Kennedy, President of RFK Human Rights, let her brother have it in a different statement:
The first smallpox vaccine was developed in 1796. Since then, countless vaccines have been developed and saved millions of lives. Vaccines work. This is not up for debate.
Medical decisions belong in the hands of trained and licensed professionals, not incompetent and misguided leadership. The decimation of critical institutions, like the NIH and the CDC, will lead to the loss of innocent lives. This means that children, mothers, fathers, and those you love are at risk now, like never before.
I stand with the many courageous individuals in the medical and scientific communities who have had to set aside their vital work to speak truth to power to keep the public safe.
Enough is enough. Secretary Kennedy must resign. Now.
Back in January, Caroline Kennedy, daughter of JFK and former U.S. ambassador to Australia and Japan, released a video statement urging senators to vote against her cousin, calling him a “predator” and “dangerous” and that he’s “unqualified to fill the role.”
That was shared by her son Jack Schlossberg, social media darling and current holder of the “Kennedy Most Beloved by the Public” title, who has taken to Twitter over the past 24 hours to make clear his own displeasure with his uncle, first with “RFK LOSER is choking so badly LIVE” yesterday and this afternoon with “RFK LOSER IS A THREAT TO PUBLIC HEALTH and AMERICAN SCIENTIFIC LEADERSHIP. WHO PLEASURES HIMSELF by lying to Congress.”
So, it’s safe to say his family is pretty sick of him at this point. That sentiment seems to be in line with the American people.
An Economist/YouGov poll released this week found his approval rating at 37 percent, with just 26 percent responding that they would trust medical advice from RFK, Jr. — meaning 3-in-4 Americans don’t trust the health guidance of the country’s top public health official.
A poll by CBS News found 74 percent of Americans believe government health agencies should make vaccines more available and 39 percent of the country feels RFK, Jr. is making them less available, which may not seem like a big deal at first glance but that marks a shift on top of the pre-existing skepticism of Kennedy before this imbroglio, meaning that his public messaging on vaccines has been an unqualified failure on all fronts.
It’s pretty safe to say that Kennedy would not survive a confirmation vote in the Senate right now, and it remains unclear if the bleeding will stop anytime soon. This is clearly not a person who can read the room, and moreover, it’s not really clear that he wants to.
The growing distrust and exasperation with RFK, Jr. among the American people and Congress and even his own family have spread quickly, and he may soon find out that his cringey fealty to Trump isn’t enough to inoculate him from the consequences of being a public liability for his boss.
The entire quagmire is all the more curious when you consider that RJK, Jr. admitted during his confirmation hearing that all six of his children are vaccinated.
It’s almost as though this has been one giant grift all along.
rfk jr is by far the creepiest of the creepy regime magats. As a social worker, I believe he exhibits delusional, grandiose & narcissistic tendencies in addition to lacking empathy. Scary guy, in waaaay over his head, & actively destroying public health & safety in our country. He, like his “president,” believes only HE is right, & everyone else is wrong. He strip quotes bizarre & unproven studies to support his idiocy. If he can drag himself away from swimming in sewer filth, his tanning bed addiction, drinking unpasteurized milk, eating road kill, & entertaining his brain worm, he should visit some early 1900’s graveyards & check out the cause of death of children under the age of five. He is dangerous.
I turned 17 two days after RFK -- the real one -- was assassinated. Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed two months earlier. What the country lost with those two deaths can't be calculated; I don't think we've really begun to reclaim the promise that we lost then.
It makes me a little crazy that RFK Jr., this incompetent wreck of a man, is the one with the "Jr." after his name. As an antidote, I'm rereading Patricia Sullivan's 2021 book JUSTICE RISING: ROBERT KENNEDY'S AMERICA IN BLACK AND WHITE. I recommend it. It's a reminder both of what we lost in 1968 and of what we're capable of becoming now.