Trump nominates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary
U.S. president-elect Donald Trump announced Thursday that he’ll nominate anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, putting a man whose views public health officials have decried as dangerous in charge of a massive agency that oversees everything from drug, vaccine and food safety to medical research, and the social safety net programs Medicare and Medicaid.
“For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social site, announcing the appointment.
He said Kennedy would “end the Chronic Disease epidemic” and “Make America Great and Healthy Again!”
Trump said Kennedy would target drugs, food additives and chemicals.
Nomination alarms health officials
As one of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists in the world, Kennedy’s nomination immediately alarmed some public health officials.
Dr. Mandy Cohen, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told The Associated Press, “I don’t want to go backwards and see children or adults suffer or lose their lives to remind us that vaccines work, and so I am concerned.”
Kennedy, 70, hails from one of the nation’s most storied political families, and is the son of the late U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of both former president John F. Kennedy and Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy.
He challenged President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination last year. He then ran as an independent candidate this year before abandoning his bid and striking a deal to endorse Trump — with the promise of a role overseeing health policy in a second Trump administration.
He and Trump have since become good friends. The two campaigned together extensively during the race’s final stretch, and Trump had made clear he intended to give Kennedy a major public health role.
“I’m going to let him go wild on health,” Trump said at a rally last month.
During the campaign, Kennedy told NewsNation that Trump had asked him to “reorganize” agencies including the CDC, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration.
Kennedy has pushed against processed foods and the use of herbicides like Roundup weed killer. He has long criticized the large commercial farms and animal feeding operations that dominate the industry.
But he is perhaps best known for his criticism of childhood vaccines.
Again and again, Kennedy has made his opposition to vaccines clear. In July, he said in a podcast interview that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told Fox News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism.
In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines that advise when kids should receive routine vaccinations.
“I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get them vaccinated,’ ” Kennedy said.
Vaccines proven safe
Repeated scientific studies in the U.S. and abroad have found no link between vaccines and autism. Vaccines have been proven safe and effective in laboratory testing and in real-world use in hundreds of millions of people over decades. The World Health Organization credits childhood vaccines with preventing as many as five million deaths a year.
During his first term, Trump launched Operation Warp Speed, an effort to speed the production and distribution of a vaccine to combat COVID-19. The resulting vaccines were widely credited with saving lives, including by Trump himself.
With the Trump campaign, Kennedy has also worked to shore up support among young mothers in particular, on a message of ridding the U.S. of unhealthy ingredients in foods, promising to model regulations imposed in Europe.
His claims that the U.S. obesity epidemic, as well as a rise in chronic diseases like diabetes, are the result of processed and unhealthy foods has resonated on social media among fitness gurus and mom influencers alike.
It remains unclear how that will square with Trump’s history of deregulation of big industries, including food. Trump pushed for fewer inspections of the meat industry, for example.
Kennedy’s stance on vaccines raises question about his ability to get confirmed, even in a Republican-controlled Senate. He also has said he would make a controversial recommendation to remove fluoride from drinking water, although fluoride levels are mandated by state and local governments.
The addition of the mineral, which is considered safe at low levels, has been cited as one of the reasons dental health has improved.
Incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune would not comment on Trump’s pick of Kennedy or any other potential nominees. “I’m not going to make any judgments about any of these folks at this point,” he said.
Confirmation would be ‘disaster,’ top Democrat says
Several Democrats quickly condemned the selection.
Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the No. 3 Democrat, said that Kennedy’s confirmation would be “nothing short of a disaster for the health of millions of families.”
But not every Democrat recoiled from the news. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said he was “excited” for Kennedy to lead HHS. Polis said he wants to see Kennedy take on “big pharma” and hopes he will “lean into personal choice” on vaccines.
That idea is concerning to former New York Public Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan, who said that if people opt of of getting vaccines, deadly viruses could run wild. He points to an uptick in measles outbreaks — 16 have occurred so far this year compared to four last year.
“That’s going to continue if we have someone at the top of our health system that is saying, ‘I’m not so sure about the science here,’ ” Vasan said.
Published at Fri, 01 Nov 2024 08:11:21 +0000
A Georgia woman was arrested late last month after her 10-year-old walked to their rural town alone, sparking a debate about whether childhood safety fears have gone too far.
According to the warrant, which CBC News has viewed, Brittany Patterson, 41, of Mineral Bluff, Ga., was arrested on Oct. 30 and charged with one misdemeanour count of reckless conduct.
She “willingly and knowingly did endanger the bodily safety of her juvenile son, 10 years of age, by consciously disregarding a substantial and unjustifiable risk,” it states.
According to a GoFundMe, her son walked less than a mile from their home toward downtown Mineral Bluff — which has a population of 370 — before a concerned citizen reported him. The road he walked down did not have a sidewalk, so he walked on the shoulder.
The GoFundMe adds that Patterson was arrested in front of her children, and that her son feels responsible. The fundraiser was launched by Parents USA, which bills itself as a parental rights group and is backing her cause.
In an interview with NBC News posted Wednesday, Patterson explained she was taking her oldest child into town for a medical appointment, and her youngest son Soren didn’t want to come. She told the libertarian Reason magazine that she assumed Soren was outside playing on the 16 acres she shares with her father, or was maybe over at her mother’s house, two minutes away.
“The mentality here is more free range,” she told Reason.
So she left, and later got a call from police that Soren had walked to town. He was on his way back home when a woman called the police, Patterson wrote in Business Insider.
The police drove Soren back home, she told NBC, and then officers came back later that evening to arrest her.
“They asked me to put my hands behind my back and all that stuff and I realized what was going on,” Patterson told NBC.
“This is not right. I did nothing wrong.”
The child safety debate
Patterson’s case has touched a nerve in the parenting news community, where issues of child safety versus independence are hotly debated.
“Let that sink in. A kid walking alone in his own neighbourhood was treated like a crisis,” wrote parenting news website Motherly.
Running free, taking chances and even getting hurt are essential to healthy childhood development, says the Canadian Paediatric Society. A new study says engaging in risky outdoor behaviour with peers is key to kids’ mental, physical and social health.
In Georgia, children under age eight should not be left alone, according to the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services’ child supervision guidelines. Children between nine and 12 can be left alone for brief periods of time, “depending on level of maturity.”
In Canada, the issue is a bit of a grey area. Most provinces and territories don’t set a minimum age, but social services typically advise that no child under age 12 be left home unsupervised, according to 2021 research.
Similar cases have made recent headlines. In Canada, for instance, Winnipeg mom Jacqui Kendrick was investigated in 2016 by Child and Family Services due to a complaint about her children playing unsupervised in their own backyard.
In 2020, a single mom in Georgia was arrested after she left her 14-year-old daughter in charge of her younger siblings while daycares and schools were closed due to COVID-19 lockdown. Melissa Shields Henderson had been called into work, and while she was gone, her four-year-old walked next door to play with a friend. The charges were dropped three years later.
And in 2015, a B.C. court ruled a mother in Terrace could no longer leave her nine-year-old son home alone after school. She had argued in court that her son was mature enough to be unsupervised between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m., and the decision should be left up to parents.
Charges would be dropped if she signed safety plan: lawyer
In the Georgia case, Patterson told Business Insider that a case manager from the Division of Family and Children Services allegedly asked her to sign a child safety plan on Nov. 5, but she declined.
CBC News has seen a copy of the proposed safety plan, provided via email by her lawyer, David DeLugas, who founded ParentsUSA, the organization backing her fundraiser.
The plan includes requirements to delegate a “safety person” to be a knowing participant and guardian when she leaves home without the children, and to download a location-tracking app on Soren’s phone.
DeLugas told CBC News via email that the assistant district attorney told him Patterson’s charges would be dropped if she signed the plan, and shared his reaction.
“Are you saying that every time a kid says, ‘Mom, I’m going to play with my friends,’ and they go, ‘OK, be home by dinner!’ that is somehow criminal?
“Is it really protecting children when we lock up their mother?”
A public health advisory says today’s parents face unique challenges that can impact their mental health. Some parents from older generations say raising children has always been, and always will be, a struggle. Can we really say which generation has had it the worst?
Modern anxieties
For those who grew up as latchkey kids — letting themselves in for two hours of unsupervised chocolate milk and cartoons until their parents got home from work — modern anxieties about leaving children alone can seem perplexing.
In parenting literature, the term “safetyism” has been used to describe the modern culture of overprotecting children through methods like softer, lower playgrounds and constant hovering, which has also been called “helicopter parenting.”
Previous generations of children enjoyed more freedom even though crime rates at the time were higher, noted clinical psychologist Simon Sherry in a 2023 Dalhousie University article. But today’s parents grew up in a time of stranger danger and television shows like America’s Most Wanted, Sherry said.
“It’s no wonder parents became increasingly fearful and protective,” he wrote.
And while there have been some horrific cases of child abandonment and neglect — like an Ohio mom who left her toddler home alone for 10 days to go on vacation and is now charged in her death — Brittany Patterson in Georgia says what happened with her son was far from neglect.
“We’re free-range parents who want the same kind of life for our children,” she wrote in a first-person article for Business Insider.
“They’re allowed to go back into the woods and dig and build forts. They ride their dirt bikes or walk over to the neighbour’s house, where there’s a nice flat spot to play basketball.”
Published at Thu, 14 Nov 2024 20:31:46 +0000
