Vaccine denialist as Secretary of HHS?

By Matt Young
Death rate in US due to Covid 19, October 19, 2021 through April 1, 2023.
Weekly US death rate per 100,000. Red, unvaccinated; green, vaccinated without bivalent booster; blue, with bivalent booster. Edouard Mathieu and Max Roser (2021) - “How do death rates from COVID-19 differ between people who are vaccinated and those who are not?” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths-by-vaccination' [Online Resource]. CC BY.

A New York Times article yesterday reported that Kennedy Sought to Stop Covid Vaccinations 6 Months After Rollout. The Kennedy in question is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald J. Trump's nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, and the Times reports that in May, 2021, Mr. Kennedy petitioned the Food and Drug Administration, "demanding that officials rescind authorization for the shots and refrain from approving any Covid vaccine in the future." Mr. Kennedy's petition

claimed that the risks of the vaccines outweighed the benefits and that the vaccines weren’t necessary because good treatments were available, including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which had already been deemed ineffective against the virus.

Hardly anyone noticed at the time, and the petition was promptly denied. Now, however, Mr. Kennedy has been nominated to head HHS, a move that the epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves compared to "putting a flat earther in charge of NASA," which as far as I am concerned may be too kind to Mr. Kennedy.

A little bird, who chirped anonymity, led us to an article by the National Institutes of Health, COVID-19 Vaccines Prevented Nearly 140,000 U.S. Deaths through May, 2021, the very date when Mr. Kennedy submitted his petition. NIH claims,

About 570,000 people died of COVID-19 in the U.S. through that time. The [statistical] model [used in the study] estimated that there would have been about 709,000 deaths without the vaccines.

A later study, titled Two Years of U.S. COVID-19 Vaccines Have Prevented Millions of Hospitalizations and Deaths, found,

From December 2020 through November 2022, we estimate that the COVID-19 vaccination program in the U.S. prevented more than 18.5 million additional hospitalizations and 3.2 million additional deaths. Without vaccination, there would have been nearly 120 million more COVID-19 infections. The vaccination program also saved the U.S. $1.15 trillion (Credible Interval: $1.10 trillion–$1.19 trillion) (data not shown) in medical costs that would otherwise have been incurred. [Parentheses in original.]

Note: Possibly 3 million additional deaths if Mr. Kennedy's petition had been granted. That is approximately the population of Kansas.

The frontispiece to this article, incidentally, shows weekly Covid death rates by vaccination status from October 9, 2021 through April 1, 2023. (The article includes a nice discussion explaining why rates, not absolute numbers, are critical.) The result is striking: At the peak in January, 2022, the death rate among unvaccinated people was approximately 10 times that among vaccinated people. Let us hope that Mr. Kennedy has learned something since 2021.