Paul Kengor: Revenge of the covid rogues

Of all the cast of rebels and rogues selected by President-elect Donald Trump for his incoming administration, few are igniting a meltdown quite like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Jay Bhattacharya. RFK Jr. has been nominated to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Bhattacharya has been selected to run the National Institutes of Health.

Both picks have the Washington establishment in a state of apoplexy. And indeed, those who demanded vax mandates ought to be shaking in their boots, as should their accomplices in HR departments, college admissions offices and wherever else the bullies sat. They tried to force countless Americans of all ages and non-risk groups to be vaccinated against their will, even when those individuals had justifiable medical or religious objections.

For the record, lest I be accused of being an “anti-vaxxer,” readers here will recall that in 2020 I wrote numerous columns for the Tribune- Review in support of President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed to rapidly develop a vaccine. I spent several years working in immunology at UPMC. I reminded readers of the pioneering work at my alma mater by the great Jonas Salk in developing the polio vaccine.

I assumed that for covid a conventional vaccine would be developed (nothing like the mRNA shots), and I certainly assumed that people wouldn’t be coerced into being injected against their will, especially if they already had covid and thus had natural immunity, and doubly so if they had statements from doctors saying the shot could be hazardous to their health, especially if they had survived a bad bout of covid and had sky-high antibodies.

Instead, the mandaters — in the name of “science” — ridiculed the very notion of natural immunity. They put quote marks around “natural immunity,” as if it were some fuzzy, strange concept heretofore unknown in the history of biology. Those who dared to question the prevailing orthodoxy, like Kennedy and Bhattacharya, were laughed at, treated as crackpots, pariahs. To this day, in the reporting on Bhattacharya’s nomination, he’s being ridiculed for his skepticism of lockdowns and work on “herd immunity” (likewise put in quotes), as if such a queer thing never existed in the annals of immunology.

The smearing of Kennedy has been especially shocking. For several years now, if you Google Kennedy, you’ll see that the first thing that pops up is his Wikipedia page, the opening line of which smears him as an “anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist.” In September, I interviewed Kennedy at the National Press Club in Washington. When I asked him about that smear, he told me that the worst part is that his Wikipedia page is frozen and can’t be edited or corrected by him or his staff. “They also dutifully removed my entire Instagram account, a million followers,” Kennedy told me. “Everything that I ever put up I sourced and cited government databases or peer-reviewed publications.” He pleaded: “Show me where I got it wrong. Because I would correct it. But they would not do it.”

Kennedy was accused not only of misinformation, but a new term: “malinformation.”

That censorship of Kennedy, the character assassination, the refusal to permit his voice of dissent after decades of faithfully serving public health, and much more, pushed him from the party of his family and toward Donald Trump.

Now, Trump has rewarded RFK Jr. big-time by choosing him to run HHS. He has done the same with Bhattacharya at NIH. And now, if confirmed, they’ll be the guys in charge.

The rebels and rogues have come to town. Those who smeared and silenced them may now need to listen.