Years from now, assuming this sick country somehow manages to rediscover respect for science and truth, historians will marvel that a serial-lying convicted criminal and a serial-lying bargain basement Kennedy forged a moronic marriage that endangered the health and lives of millions.

How tragic it is for America that Robert Kennedy finished life on a hotel kitchen floor, but his son wound up imperiling lives in a Cabinet post. I won’t bother to count all the ways that Trump’s “health” secretary is raping science, laying waste to our once-proud public health system and behaving like a crackpot from the Middle Ages. Suffice it to say last week, it was all on detestable display in front of a Senate committee.

I long ago exhausted my ability to listen at length to MAGA liars, but this particular hearing was fascinating – much the way one is compelled to rubber-neck on the highway at a multi-car collision. This Senate showdown was inevitable, I suppose, because back in January when Kennedy’s name was up for confirmation, he assured everyone that he’d “do nothing as HHS secretary that makes it difficult or discourages people from taking” vaccines – only to do the opposite in office, packing his panels with anti-vax whackos, canceling vaccine development contracts, and severely curbing access to the Covid vaccines that have been readied for autumn. In many states, new barriers have already been erected.

At yesterday’s hearing, even a few Senate Republicans managed to rouse themselves to a state of semi-awareness. The pitiable Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor who’d cast the key confirmation vote based on his naive belief Kennedy wouldn’t screw with Americans’ access to the demonstrably safe Covid vaccines, actually uttered these words out loud: “We’re denying people vaccines!”

To which Kennedy lied, “You’re wrong!”

How typical. Have you ever tried to talk facts with a medieval MAGAt? They just double down.

The same thing happened to Senator Maggie Hassan when she pointed out that, thanks to the Covid vaccines, “there’s been much less serious disease. People do not have the same level of risk from Covid that they used to, because of these vaccines. People who want to exercise their freedom (to get vaccines) are being denied that because you are rejecting science.”

Kennedy’s response: “You are making things up to scare people and it’s a lie!”

Worse yet, it’s impossible to talk data with someone wearing a tinfoil hat. Kennedy actually declared, in an exchange with Senator Mark Warner, that he didn’t know how many Americans had died of Covid during the pandemic (1.2 million, a number that’s readily available), and that he didn’t know how many lives the Covid vaccine had saved (at least 14 million, according to hundreds of studies).

Warner’s comeback: “You are sitting as secretary of health and human services. How can you be that ignorant?”

I guess Trump was wrong during the 2024 presidential campaign, when he decreed that his ally Bobby Jr. is “respected by everybody.”

Of course, it should’ve been obvious during the campaign Kennedy was a dangerous fanatic – with his serial lies that 5G mobile networks were plotting to ferret out America’s anti-vaxxers; that anti-vaxxers were being hunted the way Anne Frank was; that Anthony Fauci was a “fascist”; that vaccines cause autism; and many more that will not foul this paragraph.

Kennedy reminds me of “Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber,” a Steve Martin character on the original Saturday Night Live. After prescribing quack remedies to suffering patients, he had a momentary epiphany: “Wait a minute! Perhaps I’ve been wrong to follow the medical traditions and superstitions of past centuries! Maybe we should test our assumptions analytically, through experimentation and the scientific method! Perhaps I can lead us to a new age, an age of rebirth, of renaissance! (Long pause.) NAH!”

But seriously, folks. Let’s repurpose Mark Warner’s question: How can the American electorate be so ignorant?

A plurality voted for ignorance, so now it’s endemic. The best we can hope for, barring some miracle, is that family doctors and pharmacies and blue state governors concoct work-arounds so that Americans who want vaccines can exercise their freedom to be healthy.

It’s bad enough that Kennedy has disgraced his family’s legacy. How worse it would be if he drags the rest of us down with him.

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Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]