EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Josh Green is the governor of Hawaii. Before being elected governor in 2022, he labored as an emergency room physician and household doctor in Hawaii for over 20 years.
As a father, a doctor and a governor, it’s my accountability to guard each neighborhood in my state – particularly essentially the most susceptible – from threats to their health and security, and to advocate for the general public health of the whole nation.
That is why I’m making an enchantment to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to resign as secretary of Health and Human Services. Mr. Kennedy’s actions as our nation’s chief public health officer should not simply irresponsible and misguided; they’re harmful. I urge him to step aside now earlier than extra injury is finished to our health care system, extra lives are put in danger and extra American kids die on account of his insurance policies.
In January, I issued a public warning that if Mr. Kennedy have been confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services, “he would jeopardize half a century of progress and success gained by the United States as a result of vaccination programs. Too much depends on our commitment to truth and the lifesaving power of vaccines to entrust Mr. Kennedy with the direction of these programs. Our children’s lives depend on it.”
That warning was based mostly on my firsthand expertise throughout an outbreak of measles in Samoa in 2019 – an outbreak that contaminated over 5,000 individuals and killed 83 – after misinformation unfold by anti-vaccine activists together with Mr. Kennedy and his group eroded public belief in vaccines, lowered vaccination charges throughout the nation and led on to the devastating outbreak.
The public warning I gave in January has proved to be heartbreakingly prescient.
Right now, America is struggling the worst measles outbreak in a technology. In 2000, the World Health Organization declared measles eradicated within the United States, a public health triumph that has been undone in lower than eight months beneath the disastrous management of Secretary Kennedy.
Over 1,400 measles circumstances have been confirmed this yr in additional than 40 states. Many individuals have been hospitalized, and a number of have died. Entire college techniques have shut down. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued journey advisories for a number of home areas for the primary time in a long time. Parents are terrified, docs are overwhelmed, and public confidence in our nation’s health management has collapsed.
This didn’t occur accidentally. It has been the direct results of Mr. Kennedy’s coverage selections – misguided, harmful and ideologically pushed actions which have crippled America’s potential to answer infectious illness outbreaks.
Secretary Kennedy’s response to the quickly spreading outbreak included recommending unproven, fringe cures over confirmed medical prevention. He touted cod liver oil, nutritional vitamins, steroids and antibiotics whereas casting doubt on MMR vaccine, which the medical neighborhood recommends as the primary line of protection in opposition to measles and which has been discovered protected and efficient by the FDA since 1971.
This type of irresponsible rhetoric throughout an outbreak not solely erodes public belief and contradicts established science, it endangers lives. By failing to prioritize and to induce vaccination, Mr. Kennedy has allowed measles to rage throughout the nation, spreading quicker and farther, and placing extra of our kids’s lives in danger.
Undermining scientific progress and public belief within the CDC
Secretary Kennedy’s anti-vaccine beliefs have set us again years in our struggle in opposition to different lethal illnesses.
In May, he canceled a virtually $600 million contract to develop a vaccine in opposition to fowl flu – a illness which consultants concern might develop into the following world pandemic – and two months later, he canceled practically $500 million in grants and contracts to develop mRNA vaccines, falsely claiming that these vaccines should not efficient in opposition to respiratory diseases like Covid and flu.
Mr. Kennedy has additionally unleashed turmoil and disaster on the CDC, marked by abrupt firings, mass resignations and the sidelining of scientific experience.
In June, Mr. Kennedy dismissed all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, changing them with a rubber-stamp panel for his ideology, together with a number of identified anti-vaccine activists.
In August, lower than a month after she was confirmed as CDC director, Dr. Susan Monarez was terminated for resisting Mr. Kennedy’s push to limit vaccine entry. Her firing triggered the resignations of different senior officers who refused to bow to political interference, warning that Mr. Kennedy was politicizing public health and endangering essentially the most susceptible.
This month, 9 former CDC administrators, representing each Democratic and Republican administrations, issued an op‑ed accusing Mr. Kennedy of crippling the CDC, dismantling world vaccination packages and endangering tens of millions of lives, calling the injury he has completed to our nation’s public health system over the previous a number of months “unlike anything we had ever seen at the agency and unlike anything our country had ever experienced.”
By making an attempt to drive his anti-vaccine ideology into nationwide public health coverage, and by substituting conspiracy theories for scientific proof and consensus, Mr. Kennedy has subverted revered public health establishments constructed on a long time of experience, inflicting monumental injury to public belief within the CDC within the course of.
My name for Mr. Kennedy to step aside has nothing to do with partisan politics, and it isn’t a private vendetta. It is predicated solely on my accountability to guard the individuals of my state and to advocate for the general public health of the whole nation.
I imagine Mr. Kennedy can nonetheless make invaluable contributions on points such because the health impacts of processed meals, chemical preservatives and weight problems in our nation. He can nonetheless play a optimistic and constructive function in American public life – however not as secretary of Health and Human Services. He has misplaced the belief and confidence of the medical and scientific communities in our nation, and a majority of the American individuals now disapprove of his actions.
Secretary Kennedy’s resignation would ship a robust message to the American individuals and to the world: that science nonetheless issues. That penalties exist for failed management. That the lives of kids should not acceptable collateral injury in an ideological marketing campaign.
It would enable a brand new secretary – somebody whose insurance policies are based mostly on scientific proof, not anti-vaccine ideology – to start the pressing work of restoring public confidence in our health management, repairing our vaccination packages to cease the unfold of this totally preventable measles outbreak, and rebuilding our nationwide health care system to guard each American.
It wouldn’t erase the hurt already completed, however it could be the primary step towards therapeutic it.