On September 4, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Trump’s “health czar” and head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), testified in front of the Senate Finance Committee. Kennedy is tearing up the scientific institutions that have developed and regulated vaccines, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He has attacked medical science and science in general, pushed insane conspiracy theories and told absurd lies every minute he has been in office. 

The damage he is doing to vaccines alone could cause many people in this country—and potentially millions more worldwide—to die and many more to get sick. Kennedy upheld all this in his testimony before Congress, lashing out at the senators who challenged him. 

A day before his Senate testimony, more than 1,000 current and former staff from HHS issued a statement demanding Kennedy’s resignation, saying he is “compromising the health of this nation.” And on September 4, a joint statement from 22 national scientific, medical, and public health groups also called for Kennedy’s resignation, saying, “We are gravely concerned that American people will needlessly suffer and die as a result of policies that turn away from sound interventions.”

Here are just a couple examples of Kennedy’s lunacy at the Senate hearing:

—Kennedy has long claimed, against a great deal of scientific evidence, that vaccines cause autism. Kennedy is soon going to deliver a major report on autism, which scientists correctly fear will advance the lies about vaccines and autism. Senators at the hearing challenged Kennedy for hiring David Geier to play a key role in writing this report. Geier, who has no medical degree, is a fountain of unscientific claims about the causes of autism. He was disciplined for practicing medicine without a license when he used dangerous “cures” on patients that caused permanent harm.  Geier also attacks vaccines. Kennedy belligerently reiterated his support for this quack in the Senate hearing.

—Kennedy yelled “You’re just making stuff up, senator” when Maggie Hassan accused him of denying access to COVID vaccines. In fact, Kennedy has been on a rampage since taking office to limit access to the COVID vaccine, and changed policy so that the vaccines are not recommended for healthy people under 65. This is completely against what the evidence shows is needed, and means doctors will be hesitant to prescribe the vaccines, insurance companies won’t support the vaccines, and people who want it may have to pay hundreds of dollars.  Pharmacies in some areas are refusing to carry the vaccines. The Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that 2.5 million deaths in the U.S. were prevented by the vaccine between 2020 and 2024. In their joint statement, the American Public Health Association and the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society said that the changes undermine science and “will result in unnecessary hospitalizations and deaths.” In short, Kennedy restricted COVID vaccines, lied about it, lied about lying about it, and many people may die because of it.    

Much more could be said about Kennedy’s testimony. But what stands out is the combination of lunacy, conscious deception, and unconscionably playing with the lives of potentially millions and millions of people in the service of an overall fascist agenda. 

The urgent and essential thing that people need to understand: THERE IS NO LIVING WITH THIS FASCISM!

As revolutionary leader Bob Avakian put it in his major work, SOMETHING TERRIBLE, OR SOMETHING TRULY EMANCIPATING: Profound Crisis, Deepening Divisions, The Looming Possibility Of Civil War—And The Revolution That Is Urgently Needed. A Necessary Foundation, A Basic Roadmap For This Revolution:

These Republicans have mobilized a significant section of people who believe, with an intense, irrational passion, that white supremacy, male supremacy, and other oppressive relations (as well as unrestrained plunder of the environment) must be firmly upheld and enforced. They have been driven to a state of vicious insanity, embracing all kinds of lunatic conspiracy theories, along with a crazed Christian fundamentalism, as a response to the threat they see to their entitled (or “god-ordained”) position and their insistence that further concessions to the struggle against oppression will destroy what has “made America great.”

Every day, and in a thousand ways, the reality screams out that there is no living together with this fascist lunacy—and no one should want to! There is no way that any decent person should want to live in the society, and world, that these fascists are determined, that they are willing to kill, to bring into being.