Before Crackpot RFKism There Was Crackpot Lysenkoism
The danger of putting a charlatan and conspiracy theorist in charge of the powerful U.S. health department.
RATHER THAN OPPOSE DONALD TRUMP’S dangerous nominee for secretary of health and human services, some liberal commentators have suggested that the critics of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should find ways to accommodate him.
Writing in the New York Times in November, physician Rachael Bedard argued for finding “common ground” with the anti-vaccine ideologue. “We can’t spend four years simply fighting his agenda,” she wrote. Instead, RFK Jr.’s critics should try to “turn his most valid criticisms of the American health care system into constructive reforms.” In a follow-up interview this week, Bedard insists she isn’t “sane-washing” RFK Jr., she just wants to be realistic about recognizing “that he has a growing movement of people behind him, who aren’t just going to go away because we yell at them.”
Meanwhile, Adam Jentleson, a former Democratic congressional staffer—he held prominent jobs under Sens. John Fetterman and Harry Reid—has called for an effort to get RFK Jr. to “bless the next wave of vaccines.” How Jentleson thinks the notorious antivaxxer might be persuaded to perform an about-face is left unstated. Jentleson just wants to “build bridges.”
At a moment when we should be thinking of this nomination in terms of the potential risk to human lives, all this muddled analysis about science and politics calls to mind a grim episode from the last century that is a cautionary tale for today: the career of the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko.
Born in 1898, Lysenko had accomplishments of great consequence to his name. Most of these occurred in the field of agronomy, where he advanced a revolutionary set of ideas—now known as Lysenkoism. His main contentions were that genes did not exist, that acquired traits could be inherited, and that heredity itself could be altered by “educating” plants.
One such form of education was called “vernalization”—the notion that crop yields would dramatically increase if seeds that usually died in harsh frosts were exposed to lower temperatures before sowing. “Insights” like that, derived ultimately from Marxist ideology instead of legitimate empirical research, were put into practice on a large scale, first in the USSR and then in Communist China. Widespread crop failures followed, and then famines in which millions perished.
Lysenko—a crackpot with the power of the Soviet state behind him—was the recipient of numerous awards, including, on eight occasions, the Order of Lenin, and on three occasions, the Stalin Prize. Lysenko died of natural causes in 1976.
This history of massive state-sponsored scientific fraud is pertinent to Trump’s attempt to install Kennedy to the highest-ranking healthcare position in the U.S. government. The secretary of health and human services has oversight of everything from food safety to medical research to private health insurance to epidemiology to Medicare and Medicaid and much, much more.
Like Lysenko, RFK Jr. has departed from science even as he claims its mantle. He is a proponent of consuming raw milk despite the proven safety benefits of pasteurization (just last month raw milk in California was found to contain bird flu). He opposes the fluoridation of water despite the proven benefits to dental health. But it is for his opposition to vaccines—and his lies about them—that he is most notorious and most dangerous.
Kennedy’s position atop HHS would put him in charge of the Vaccines for Children program. It has saved millions of lives by immunizing children against diseases like polio and measles that, thanks to the vaccines, are now rare. He would also oversee the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has as one of its most important roles deciding which vaccines health insurers are required to cover.
To be sure, in lobbying for his confirmation Kennedy has said that “We’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody.” He also says he aims to improve the science of vaccine safety and wants nothing more than to provide “good information” so people “can make informed choices.”
But in light of some of his other pronouncements, this is all disingenuous. One piece of his “good information”—repeated in a 2023 interview with Fox News—is that vaccines cause autism. This theory was first popularized by the British doctor Andrew Wakefield in the Lancet in 1998. But Wakefield was discredited and his Lancet paper was retracted because it was fraudulent. Despite numerous studies that have since found no link between vaccines and autism, Kennedy has persisted in trumpeting his view, and gone even further to claim that “no vaccine is safe and effective.” Notably, the lawyer Kennedy selected to screen candidates for positions at HHS has filed a petition to the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of the polio vaccine. On social media, Kennedy has called COVID shots “a crime against humanity.” Estimates are that COVID vaccines have prevented 3.2 million deaths in the United States alone through 2022.
A person with no medical or scientific training, RFK Jr. is evidently unaware that vaccines are one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments. Smallpox, the deadliest disease in human history, has been wiped from the face of the earth. Polio, a scourge that terrified generations of Americans and struck down an American president, has been largely consigned to the dustbin of history, at least in the developed world. Rabies, an invariably fatal disease, is preventable by vaccination (does RFK Jr. want to stop vaccinating Fido as well?). New vaccines can even prevent cancer. This is “good information.”
Even if, unexpectedly, RFK Jr. did absolutely nothing to hinder the development and distribution of vaccines, the mere elevation of someone with such views to a position of national authority would undermine public confidence in vaccines and increase vaccine hesitancy, with severely deleterious consequences for public health. If vaccination rates decline sufficiently, diphtheria, measles, yellow fever, shingles, and many other infectious diseases now relatively dormant may roar back into prominence.
UNFORTUNATELY, RFK JR. IS NOT THE ONLY Lysenko-like figure nominated to serve in the incoming administration. Trump has also tapped MAGA loyalist Dr. Mehmet Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Oz has a long record as a grifter pushing pseudoscience for bucks. Among his claims lacking any scientific backing are that selenium supplements are “the holy grail of cancer prevention”; that raspberry ketones are “the No. 1 miracle in a bottle to burn your fat”; that umckaloabo root extract is “incredibly effective at relieving cold symptoms,” and that hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment for COVID-19. All of this is quackery.
The analogy to Lysenko and Soviet science is not exact, of course. The differences between the totalitarian USSR under Joseph Stalin and the (for now) liberal democratic United States under Donald Trump are too obvious to enumerate. For one thing, a democracy such as ours has self-corrective mechanisms that can set things right. Crackpots like Kennedy and grifters like Oz have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate—and it is not inconceivable that, even with a Republican majority, their nominations will be shot down. But given how cowed Republican senators are by Donald Trump, it would not be surprising if both are confirmed.
For another thing, Lysenko’s critics were either executed outright or sent to the gulag to die of starvation and overwork. Critics of RFK Jr. and Oz are not likely to suffer a remotely similar fate . . . unless, of course, their name is Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is now being threatened with imprisonment by leading figures in MAGA world, including by RFK Jr. himself. “You should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. You belong in prison, Dr. Fauci,” says Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. On his X platform, president-elect sidekick Elon Musk has been particularly insistent, tweeting the same message multiple times: “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” The threats are serious enough that President Joe Biden is reportedly considering offering Fauci a preemptive pardon.
Trump has said he has appointed Kennedy to “go wild” on U.S. health. The phrase is well chosen. When it comes to medical care and medical science in the unfolding second Trump administration, we’re entering a wild time and a dark age. Among other things, Trump intends to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization on his first day in office. The WHO is a flawed international body that badly needs reform—but withdrawal will have potentially catastrophic effects on the battle to contain the next future global epidemic. In the United States and around the world, as happened with COVID, millions could die. We are less than a month away from opening a new chapter of Lysenkoism, American style.
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