Another day, another hint that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is using his role as health and human services secretary not to save Americans and improve human health, but to try to kill us all. On Tuesday, it was ending the recommendation that most children and pregnant women receive the COVID vaccine. Now it’s a quest to save hundreds of ostriches that likely have bird flu.
Yes, the man who is supposed to be keeping the people in his country safe from disease is currently using his power to try to stop Canada from culling 400 ostriches that were in contact with H5N1, the bird flu virus that has killed millions of birds in the US since last year and infected dozens of people, one of whom died. Last week Kennedy encouraged our neighbor to the north not to kill the birds—which Canadian officials fear will further spread the disease—but to study them. “We believe significant scientific knowledge may be garnered from following the ostriches in a controlled environment,” he wrote in a letter to the head of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Oh, and he and Dr. Mehmet Oz have offered to move the probably diseased birds to a Florida ranch owned by Oz, who is currently serving as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
As The New York Times notes, “most veterinarians agree that keeping birds alive that may still have active infections and could spread the virus to others is a threat to public health,” i.e., the thing Kennedy was hired to protect, not undermine. Kennedy, of course, has a long history of doing weird shit with animals. While running for president, he recounted throwing a dead bear cub in the back of his car, only to set up an elaborate murder scene with its carcass in Central Park after he realized he wouldn’t have time to get to his house to refrigerate the meat (yes). Later, his daughter recounted the time he sawed off a whale’s head and strapped it to the roof of his minivan, telling Town & Country: “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet. We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.” Kennedy also once lived with an emu that would attack his wife.
In other bird flu news, Kennedy’s department on Wednesday reneged on millions of dollars in funding it had committed to Moderna to help develop a bird flu vaccine for humans. The bizarre reason cited by HHS? Moderna’s use of messenger RNA technology—which was used in two of the COVID vaccines developed during Donald Trump’s first term in office.
Mike Johnson: Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?
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The post RFK Jr. Thinks What We Need Right Now Is More Bird Flu appeared first on Vanity Fair.
