Congratulations To RFK Jr. On Fishing Trip, Ability To Inspire People To Shoot Up CDC
He's at least a little bit to blame.
On Friday, a 30-year-old man opened fire at the Atlanta headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) because he believed, deeply, that the COVID vaccine was responsible for making him suicidal and depressed. One police officer was killed and the shooter himself, Patrick Joseph White, is dead. It’s still not clear whether he was killed by police or by his own hand.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responded swiftly, with pictures of his fishing trip to Alaska.
Here he is, with a salmon.
Is “fishing after the CDC gets shot up” the new “fiddling while Rome burns”?
Then — “then” being about 18 hours later — he issued a statement.
“We are deeply saddened by the tragic shooting at CDC’s Atlanta campus that took the life of officer David Rose. We stand with his wife and three children and the entire CDC family. We know how shaken our public health colleagues feel today. No one should face violence while working to protect the health of others. We are actively supporting CDC staff on the ground and across the agency. Public health workers show up every day with purpose — even in moments of grief and uncertainty. We honor their service. We stand with them. And we remain united in our mission to protect and improve the health of every American.”
Kennedy has previously called the CDC a “cesspool of corruption.”
Dr. Jerome Adams, who actually served as surgeon general in the previous Trump administration— who, we must say, was clearly more qualified than his current nominee, RFK Jr. pal Dr. Casey Means — did not particularly care for how Kennedy dealt with the situation (or his anti-vaccine nonsense).
“How you respond to a crisis defines a leader, and quite frankly Secretary Kennedy has failed in his first major test in this regard,” Dr. Adams told CBS’s Margaret Brennan on Saturday’s “Face the Nation.”
“It took him over 18 hours to issue a tepid response to these horrific shootings, and that’s not even considering how his inflammatory rhetoric in the past have actually contributed to a lot of what’s been going on,” he added.
You think?
Current CDC employees weren’t so thrilled, either, and have even called for Kennedy to resign.
“I am enraged at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” said Dr. Elizabeth Soda, an infectious disease doctor with the CDC’s Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, who said she was speaking in her “own private capacity.” “As Health secretary, his lies are costing people their lives. His dangerous rhetoric is making Americans sicker as scientific decision-making is destroyed.”
The fact that there are any sane people still working at the CDC is a testament to how much they must care.
There are I-don’t-know-how-many people in the comments responding to Kennedy Jr.’s post going on and on about how many people have been killed by the COVID vaccine, which would be really poignant if they could actually name one of those people. There are people claiming, without evidence, that this man was absolutely right and that the vaccine changes your brain somehow and can make people depressed or suicidal.
They just say it, over and over again, just as RFK Jr. himself talks, endlessly, about how dangerous these vaccines are, without any actual proof whatsoever. As he’s now HHS Secretary, his words have even more weight, and these people are chomping at the bit even harder to be taken seriously.
The risk of myocarditis, their most favorite thing to harp on, is seven times higher after a regular COVID infection than it is after the vaccine. The vaccine literally makes it less likely that one will get myocarditis. Is it that they don’t know this? That they don’t believe it? Or that they don’t care?
In the past decade and some change, we’ve seen men go on killing sprees because they’re angry that women won’t date them or because they believe we have too many rights. We’ve seen white supremacists commit mass murder for a variety of deeply stupid reasons, a popular one being the “Great Replacement.” We’ve seen anti-abortion nuts kill abortion providers. We’ve seen a guy nearly shoot up a pizza place because he believed they were trafficking children in their non-existent basement. We’ve seen QAnon people commit all kinds of crimes. We’ve seen hate crimes against Latino people skyrocket. We saw at least 2,000 people attack the Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
It is more than clear that the combination of disinformation and hysteria has never led to anything good and far too often leads to something violent. While there are certainly many instances of people going off the deep end or committing an act of violence over something that is factually true (Luigi Mangione, for example), it doesn’t happen as often because people who believe in true things have less to prove. When someone believes something patently untrue and people don’t believe them because it’s untrue or because there is no evidence for it, their instinct is often to keep upping the ante in hopes of being taken seriously. “Oh no, it’s so much worse than you think, millions are dying!” they will cry. “It’s a plot to kill and/or control us all!”
That’s why conspiracies end up being so wacky, how they end up claiming Wayfair selling mole children in overpriced cabinetry, MKUltra-ing Manchurian candidates, and worshiping Satan. Whether or not people are conscious of what they are doing, the result is to keep raising the stakes until others think “Well, there must be something to this” or “Wow! That guy was really serious, perhaps we should take his complaints more seriously ourselves!”
That doesn’t happen as often with the truth because the truth, frequently, is quite boring. I don’t need to go overboard to convince you that the sky is blue. If someone doesn’t believe the sky is blue, no one is going to go apeshit over it, because that person is not to be taken seriously. You’re not going to see pro-vaccine people going on murder sprees, because we have the facts on our side.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is responsible for what happened on Friday — at least as responsible as Patrick Joseph White’s father, whose legally purchased firearms he used to kill a police officer and shoot out however many buildings — and it won’t be surprising if we see more like it in the future. He’s made it clear that he has no intention of telling the truth about vaccines or toning down his rhetoric, and that it will always matter more to him than people’s lives. It always has.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
We knew RFK Jr. was unqualified for the job and so did DOCTOR Bill Cassidy, but Cassidy lacked the backbone to vote NO on the nomination. People will die and the blood will be on both their hands.#RELEASE THE FILES!
T.rump’s presidency in action. Spew ignorant disinformation, claim victimhood, profit!