One dangerous agent of Trumpist chaos is creating a tragedy to last decades

Donald Trump’s appointee as secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has set out to dismantle an Atlanta-based institution, attempting to transform the Centers for Disease Control, the planet’s pre-eminent public-health agency, into the Centers for Deluded Conspiracy, an official purveyor of pseudo-science and quackery.

And those with the power to stop Kennedy’s assault on the CDC lack the courage and wisdom to do so, while those who do have the courage to act lack the power to intervene. As a result, we are witnessing a tragedy play out before our eyes that will have consequences for decades.

If that sounds alarmist, let’s review who we’re dealing with in Kennedy.

In the not-too-distant past, he has suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic was a “plandemic,” created by the pharmaceutical industry to drum up business for itself, with the CDC serving as the industry’s enforcer.

It’s a familiar line of thinking for Kennedy, an echo of his earlier conspiracy theory that the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001 may have plotted by the U.S. defense industry so it could keep selling arms and munitions.

Kennedy has said that there is no such thing as a safe and effective vaccine. He has said that the polio vaccine has killed more people than it has saved. He has suggested that COVID-19 was “targeted” to kill certain ethnic groups, such as white and Black people, while making Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese immune. He also insists that vaccines and Tylenol cause autism, theories that are utterly without scientific basis.

Trump himself, the man who suggested that we could fight COVID by injecting bleach into our veins or letting the sun shine into places in our body where God did not intend the sun to shine, posted a vaccine-related meme this week on his Truth Social account claiming: “They’re ALL poison. Every. Single. One.”

Given their unquestioning faith in their leader, a lot of Trump supporters will probably be even more reluctant now to be vaccinated, or to allow their children to do so, and that will have consequences for them. But again, when powerful national leaders make health care policy based on such nonsense, even those of us who know better will pay a heavy price.

Living and working in Atlanta, I’ve met a lot of CDC employees. They are smart, they are honest, they are dedicated to science and to the mission of public health. Many have sacrificed more lucrative career paths because they wanted to be at the CDC, where so much important work was being done.

Imagine being someone like that and you’re told that to keep your job you have to pretend that vaccines do more damage than good, and other such nonsense. For a lot of CDC employees, they don’t have to imagine that scenario because they are living it.

In recent testimony to the U.S. Senate, Kennedy was asked why he had just fired Susan Monarez as CDC director, after just four weeks in the job.

“I told her that she had to resign because when I asked her whether she was a trustworthy person, and she said no,” Kennedy told the senators.

Somehow, I doubt that’s how the conversation actually went down. It seems far more likely that Kennedy asked Monarez whether she could be trusted to spew the pseudo-science that Kennedy demanded. When she refused, as integrity demanded, she was fired.

Monarez holds a doctorate in immunology and microbiology, with a long career of research into infectious diseases and other public-health issues. Her replacement as acting director of the CDC, Jim O’Neill, has a master’s degree in the humanities, but apparently Kennedy considers him “trustworthy.”

It’s easy to see why. Like Kennedy, O’Neill champions the use of ivermectin, a horse dewormer, to treat COVID. He believes that the government should allow the sale of unproved drugs and other treatments so that people can experiment on their own to find out if they work or not. Yeah, they may die unnecessarily, but it’s not the government’s job to protect them from such choices.

There have always been people who prefer to live in an alternate reality of their own design, as Kennedy, O’Neill and others do. We saw that at the peak of the pandemic, when some individuals stubbornly rejected the vaccine and medical science in favor of quack remedies such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

It was their choice, and many died as a result.

But now, in our era of national madness, we have surrendered control of major agencies of the federal government to such people, not just at the CDC but at the Pentagon, the Department of State, the Department of Commerce and the Department of Justice.

Now all of us are living in their alternate reality. Now all of us are at risk when actual reality reasserts itself, as it always does eventually. We can’t know what form that challenge will take, but we do know it will come, and the charlatans and conspiracy fools that we now have in charge will prove spectacularly unfit to meet it.

• Jay Bookman covered Georgia and national politics for nearly 30 years for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, earning numerous national, regional and state journalism awards. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award and the Walker Stone Award for outstanding editorial writing, and is the only two-time winner of the Pulliam Fellowship granted by the Society of Professional Journalists. He is also the author of "Caught in the Current," published by St. Martin's Press.