Sanitising a Paranoid Crank

In a recent article for the Free Press, Vinay Prasad informs us that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has plenty of perfectly reasonable suggestions for how to improve public health in the United States. It is therefore regrettable, Prasad writes, that the legacy press and sundry contemptible elites have treated Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services “poorly and unfairly.” Kennedy, he maintains, “should not be called a conspiracy theorist” merely for advancing arguments that are “well within the bounds of discussion.”

This is the second time that Prasad has found it necessary to respond to Kennedy’s critics. Back in June 2023, when Kennedy was running a doomed campaign for the Democratic nomination, Prasad wrote another article for the Free Press titled “What RFK Jr. Gets Right—And What He Gets Wrong.” In that essay, he criticised Kennedy for pushing alternative COVID-19 treatments like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. He also said that he “vehemently” disagrees with Kennedy’s insistence that early childhood vaccines cause autism, observing that there’s “no proof” for this claim and that the “net impact” of these vaccines is “overwhelmingly positive.” He observed that “faith in standard childhood vaccines is declining, which I think is an unmitigated public health disaster.”

But Prasad also maintained that Kennedy expresses “deep truths about the public’s current—and very understandable—epidemic of distrust, the corruption of our institutions, and more.” He said he expected Kennedy to be an “important force in the Democratic Party.” He provided two examples of what Kennedy “got right”—regulatory capture and the “death of trust” in US public-health institutions—and two examples of what he “got wrong”—MMR vaccines and snake-oil COVID cures—before concluding that he was unable to pass “a final verdict” on the man. He failed to point out that Kennedy’s beliefs about the corruption of public-health institutions, the media, regulators, and so on are all grounded in rank conspiracism.