Vaccines

Vaccines Are Your Choice

Summary: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may not be evil—just a former heroin addict with a literal brain parasite who believes he's on a hero's quest. The distinction doesn't matter. As HHS Secretary, he controls a quarter of the federal budget while calling CDC scientists "biostitutes," firing anyone who disagrees, and adding asterisks to settled vaccine science. He defines every fight so he can't lose: refuse to debate him, you're scared; engage, you've given him a platform. Meanwhile, measles and whooping cough return. Evil requires intent. Stupidity doesn't. The graves fill up either way.

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Tuesday, at the newly renamed Trump Kennedy Center, the president mocked Franklin Delano Roosevelt for not dancing.

"Could you imagine FDR dancing?" he said to uncomfortable laughter.

FDR had polio. The disease paralyzed him from the waist down in 1921. He spent the rest of his life in leg braces and a wheelchair, hiding his condition from the public while leading a nation through depression and world war.

There's a vaccine for polio now. Has been since 1955. It's one of the greatest achievements in medical history. An entire generation of iron lungs, empty.

Trump's Health Secretary is working to undo that.

This is not coincidence. This is strategy.

Let me explain how PrumpTutin works.

You don't destroy institutions by attacking them head-on. That creates martyrs. Instead, you hollow them out. You appoint people who are incompetent, corrupt, or actively hostile to the mission they're supposed to serve. Then you let gravity do the rest.

The Environmental Protection Agency gets a climate denier. The Department of Education gets someone who wants to abolish public schools. The Department of Defense gets a Fox News host with sexual assault allegations and a drinking problem. The Director of National Intelligence gets a woman Russian state TV called "our girlfriend."

And the Department of Health and Human Services—the agency responsible for protecting Americans from disease, for ensuring safe food and drugs, for running Medicare and Medicaid—gets Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

A man whose brain was partially eaten by a worm.

A man banned from Instagram for medical misinformation.

A man whose own family calls him a predator.

A man who chain sawed the head off a whale and staged a dead bear in Central Park.

This is not incompetence. This is the plan.

Kennedy's qualifications for managing a two-trillion-dollar health budget include: environmental law degree, heroin addiction (recovered), mercury poisoning, parasitic brain infection, and decades of spreading vaccine lies that have already killed children in Samoa.

He couldn't answer basic questions about Medicare during his confirmation hearing. Didn't know how Medicaid worked. Fumbled the fundamentals like a student who'd skipped the reading.

The Senate confirmed him anyway. 52-48.

They knew what they were getting. That was the point.

Pete Hegseth runs the Pentagon now. He's a Fox News host and weekend warrior—National Guard, not that there's anything wrong with that unless you're claiming it qualifies you to run the largest military on Earth. His other qualifications include a tattoo that fellow guardsmen flagged as a possible white nationalist symbol, allegations of sexual assault, and a reputation for showing up to events drunk. He was confirmed 51-50, with the vice president breaking the tie.

Tulsi Gabbard runs national intelligence. Russian state television celebrated her nomination. She met with Bashar al-Assad and defended him. She's in charge of America's secrets now.

Linda McMahon runs the Department of Education. She made her fortune in professional wrestling.

The pattern isn't subtle. Every appointment is designed to weaken the institution it leads. Not through opposition—that would be visible, resistible. Through sheer inability to do the job.

When the CDC collapses, they'll blame the career scientists who quit. When vaccines fail to reach children, they'll blame the parents who were "given a choice." When measles comes roaring back, they'll blame everyone except the man who made it happen.

This is how you kill a government. Not with a sword. With termites.

Tuesday, Trump stood in the building he renamed after himself and mocked a man who couldn't walk.

FDR would have loved a polio vaccine. He spent years at Warm Springs, Georgia, trying to rehabilitate muscles that would never work again. He built the foundation that became the March of Dimes. He made polio eradication a national cause.

The vaccine came too late for him. It came too late for Mitch McConnell too—he got polio in 1944, eleven years before Salk's vaccine. He survived, barely, after two years of physical therapy at Warm Springs. McConnell was the only Republican who voted against Kennedy's confirmation. He remembered what polio does.

The rest of them forgot. Or never knew. Or don't care.

And now Kennedy is systematically dismantling the vaccine infrastructure that turned polio from a terror into a memory.

This week, his handpicked committee removed six vaccines from the childhood immunization schedule. Rotavirus. Meningococcal disease. Hepatitis A. Flu. The flu has already killed nine American children this winter.

Three Kentucky infants have died from preventable diseases.

Kennedy promised the Senate he wouldn't do this. Under oath. To their faces.

Nothing happened. Nothing ever happens.

Here's the part that matters.

Kennedy vaccinated his own children.

Caroline Kennedy, JFK's daughter, wrote this in her letter to the Senate: Bobby "preys on the desperation of parents of sick children—vaccinating his own children while building a following by hypocritically discouraging other parents from vaccinating theirs."

He knows vaccines work. He gave them to his kids. He tells your kids not to get them.

This isn't ignorance. This is something else.

In 2019, Kennedy's anti-vaccine campaign helped collapse immunization rates in Samoa. Measles tore through the islands. Eighty-three people died. Most were children under five.

Kennedy kept going. Built his organization. Made his money. Got his Cabinet position.

Those children didn't die of natural selection. They died because a wealthy American with a famous name told their parents lies, then flew home to his vaccinated family.

That's not Darwin. That's murder by proxy.

Perhaps Darwin wasn't wrong.

Perhaps "vaccines are your choice" is natural selection with better marketing. If you're stupid enough to trust a man with brain parasites over every doctor on Earth, maybe your genes shouldn't continue. Maybe the species is better off without you. Maybe Kennedy is doing us a favor, culling the herd of people who think YouTube is a medical school.

I could almost talk myself into it.

But here's the problem: the stupid don't die.

They're protected by the vaccines their parents gave them—the same vaccines they now refuse for their own kids. They've got immunity built on the science they reject. They'll live long enough to collect Social Security and vote in twelve more elections.

Their children won't.

The babies too young to be vaccinated. The toddlers whose immune systems never got a chance. The kids who trusted their parents to protect them.

Darwin isn't punishing the guilty. He's punishing their children for being born to fools.

That's not natural selection. That's human trafficking in stupidity, with kids as the currency.

Trump danced at the building he stole from the Kennedy family.

He mocked a man who beat polio's paralysis through sheer will, who hid his wheelchair so Americans could see strength instead of weakness, who built institutions that protected generations of children from the disease that crippled him.

And the Republicans laughed. Uncomfortably, reportedly, they laughed.

Meanwhile, Kennedy guts the vaccine program that would have let FDR dance.

This is the strategy. Mock the past. Destroy the future. Collect the profits in between.

Canadian health officials have publicly warned their citizens that American health institutions can no longer be trusted.

Let that sink in. Our neighbor. The polite ones. They're telling their people: don't listen to American health guidance anymore. We're not reliable.

We built the greatest public health infrastructure in human history. The CDC. The NIH. The FDA. Institutions that eradicated smallpox, tamed polio, turned childhood from a gauntlet into a given.

We handed it to a man who chainsaws whales and has brain parasites, because Putin wanted it broken and Trump does what Putin wants.

This isn't about vaccines. Vaccines are the weapon. The target is trust.

Once Americans don't trust their health institutions, they don't trust any institutions. Once they're making "choices" based on YouTube videos and brain-worm guy, they're making choices based on whoever lies loudest. Once the government is visibly incompetent, the argument for government collapses.

That's the goal. Not to replace government with something better. To replace it with nothing. With chaos. With a void that strongmen fill.

Kennedy isn't failing at his job. He's succeeding at his actual job, which is demolition.

FDR built things. The New Deal. Social Security. The arsenal of democracy. He took a broken country and gave it institutions that lasted generations.

Trump breaks things. Norms. Treaties. Agencies. Alliances. He takes working systems and gives them to people who will destroy them.

And when the destruction is complete, when children are dying of diseases their grandparents never worried about, when the "choice" to skip vaccines has gutted herd immunity, when the next pandemic finds us defenseless because Kennedy fired everyone who knew how to respond—

They'll blame the scientists who tried to stop it.

They'll blame the Democrats who voted no.

They'll blame the parents who trusted the wrong YouTube video.

They'll never blame themselves.

Vaccines are your choice.

So is this: You can watch it happen, or you can do something about it.

November is ten months away. Every House seat. A third of the Senate. State legislatures that determine whether your kids can attend school unvaccinated.

The people who confirmed Kennedy are on the ballot. The people who laughed at FDR are on the ballot. The people who let PrumpTutin fill the government with saboteurs are asking for your vote.

Make a choice.

If this landed, send it to one person who needs to read it.

Further Reading:

• Trump mocks FDR's wheelchair at GOP retreat
• RFK Jr. Removes 6 Childhood Vaccines From Recommendations
• Kennedy family denounces RFK Jr.'s vaccine views as 'tragically wrong'
• Caroline Kennedy calls cousin a 'predator' in letter to Senate
• RFK Jr. says he had parasitic brain worm
• Pete Hegseth confirmed as Defense Secretary
• Even as Kentucky families grieve, Kennedy undermines vaccine protections