Dr. Phil McGraw, left, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr
The insanity continues with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who appeared on Dr. Phil McGraw’s YouTube channel Tuesday to crow about the “revolution” in health he and the Trump administration are administering to the American people.
The interview was chock-full of Kennedy’s usual conspiracies, ranging from debunked anti-vaccine theories to chemtrail nonsense. And Dr. Phil—who has been a right-wing shill for Trump since his first term when he downplayed the coronavirus pandemic—was there to help serve up the MAGA slop.
Conspicuously absent from the hour-long interview was any mention of Kennedy’s catastrophic mishandling of the country’s public health system or massive cuts to essential healthcare infrastructure. Instead, Kennedy peddled robustly debunked claims about vaccines and autism, spreading more doubt about immunizations amid the worst measles outbreak in more than a decade.
“Many of the parents have reported that their kid, that their child, developed autism immediately after the vaccine,” Kennedy said.
Of course, this claim has been debunked many times by many different scientific studies.
He then cavalierly implied that a pharmaceutical conspiracy is behind medical professionals’ support for the measles vaccine.
“I got chicken soup and vitamin A, which, you know, which nobody can patent. But now the only treatment that doctors really know about is you've got to get the measles vaccine,” Kennedy said.
When an audience member asked whether new parents should vaccinate their children, Kennedy gave an intentionally vague anti-vax response.
“We live in a democracy, and part of the responsibility of being a parent is to do your own research,” he said.
Kennedy also repeated the myth that the COVID-19 vaccine led to an increase in myocarditis in children, ignoring the evidence showing that the risk of myocarditis is actually higher in those who contract COVID-19 than in those who are vaccinated.
And during a Q&A session, a woman who identified herself as “Emily” raised concerns that “stratospheric aerosol injections” are “continuously peppered on us every day.”
“Stratospheric aerosol injections” is the sesquipedalian way of referring to the chemtrail conspiracy theory, which purports that the white trails left behind airplanes—officially called condensation trails—are some kind of biological weapon sprayed by sinister and shadowy actors to manipulate everything from the weather to human minds.
“It's not happening in my agency. You know, we don't do that. It's done, we think by DARPA. And a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel,” Kennedy said, blaming the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “I'm going to do everything in my power to stop it. We'll bring on somebody who's going to think only about that.”
For years, Kennedy and other Republicans have eschewed their actual responsibilities to bring bills to state legislatures that presuppose that the unsubstantiated chemtrail theory is true. Just last month, Kennedy boasted that he would use his office to tilt at this windmill.
Kennedy’s interview with Dr. Phil wasn’t the revolution he thought it was. Rather, it was an hour-long disinformercial for Kennedy’s rampant conspiracy theories, proving that he remains one of the most dangerous obstacles facing public health today.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
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