The Louisiana Republican knew higher than to vote for public well being enemy RFK Jr. He did it anyway.
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Senators Invoice Cassidy (R-A) left, and John Cornyn (R-TX) are seen after the Senate luncheons within the US Capitol on Tuesday, June 3, 2025.(Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Name, Inc through Getty Photographs)
Over 10 years in the past,
a Republican congressman named Invoice Cassidy attended a ribbon-cutting at Westdale Center College in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana. The celebration was to honor the renovation of three native school-based well being facilities, made potential by a federal grant from the US Well being and Human Companies Administration, which had been secured with Cassidy’s help. On the ribbon-cutting, Cassidy talked about how he had helped to get hepatitis B and influenza vaccinations entering into East Baton Rouge faculties.
The top of an area nonprofit, Well being Facilities in Faculties, talked fondly of the congressman’s enthusiasm for vaccines, saying: “I keep in mind Invoice (Cassidy) calling me from the ground of the Louisiana Senate when he was within the state legislature asking me if I knew concerning the flu immunization research from a health care provider in Texas—I had simply learn that very same article myself. So, with Invoice’s assist, we launched the flu vaccinations in East Baton Rouge faculties the identical yr.” Cassidy had labored in public hospitals in Louisiana for 30 years, and he was properly conscious of the ability of immunization. His push for school-based vaccinations for HBV was motivated by his personal medical expertise and, specifically, the near-death of a girl underneath his care because of liver failure related to this preventable viral hepatitis.
Cassidy is now the senior senator from Louisiana and the chair of the highly effective Senate Well being, Training, Labor, and Pensions Committee. He’s extra influential than ever, and he has presumably not forgotten concerning the significance of vaccinations. So when Donald Trump nominated longtime anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the submit of secretary of well being and human companies earlier this yr, Cassidy was in an ideal place to push again.
Everyone knows what he did as an alternative. After expressing reservations concerning the nomination, Cassidy circled and made an lodging with Kennedy, securing “key commitments” on vaccine coverage that Cassidy claimed had glad his considerations. He then supplied up the essential sure vote to RFK Jr., setting the vaccine denier up for full Senate approval.
It’s now June. Each promise Kennedy made to Senator Cassidy has been damaged. The Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has been purged and its members changed with famous anti-vaxxers with apparent conflicts of curiosity. In the meantime, a troika of fellow vacationers, Vinay Prasad and Marty Makary on the US Meals and Drug Administration, together with Jay Bhattacharya on the US Nationwide Institutes of Well being, have unilaterally modified US Covid vaccination policymaking into an end-run round ACIP, largely notably hanging the advice for pregnant ladies and youngsters to get the vaccine, which flies within the face of the scientific proof and the medical actuality of the illness in these populations.
As Katherine Wu at The Atlantic has stated, we’re now coming into America’s anti-vaxx period. With measles and pertussis outbreaks occurring throughout the nation, this can be a gasoline-on-a-fire second. As colleagues of mine at Stanford have urged, measles is prone to return to endemicity within the US, and may RFK Jr. and his “Mini-Me”s additional erode vaccine protection for different ailments, we danger different infections turning into extra frequent as properly.
All of us knew who RFK Jr. was. So did Senator Cassidy. But he voted for him. Now, when questioned about what is occurring,
Cassidy flees from reporters chasing him down the hallways of the Senate, and he has refused interviews on the topic since January.
RFK Jr.’s uncle as soon as wrote a e book referred to as Profiles in Braveness, consisting of quick biographies of US senators who bucked their occasion to do the precise factor and suffered the results. JFK’s e book was fashionable—braveness and integrity amongst politicians appeared to promote properly again in 1956. However cowardice is all the craze on this subsequent century.
If somebody want to write it, I’d recommend Invoice Cassidy be Chapter One in Profiles in Cowardice. He can run from reporters, however he can not conceal from historical past. How does a lifelong advocate for vaccination capitulate so readily to the king of the anti-vaxxers? Within the wake of his vote and in spite of everything that has occurred in these quick months, Invoice can’t even rally himself to combat again for even a second. Does he even consider these kids in East Baton Rouge? That younger lady who virtually misplaced her life to HBV? In fact he does—however he’s decided, which is to place his personal political future forward of the hundreds of thousands of kids on this nation who will now undergo the results of his cowardice.
This can be a particular sort of cravenness. The Susan Collinses and Lisa Murkowskis of this world will all the time categorical concern over unhealthy issues after which vote with their occasion. However Invoice Cassidy has
a selected lifetime of service that he has now trashed: Along with establishing vaccination packages in his state, he served the poor and uninsured at Earl Okay. Lengthy Medical Middle for greater than 20 years, and arrange a makeshift hospital in an deserted Baton Rouge Okay-Mart after Hurricane Katrina. Now he will probably be linked with RFK Jr. perpetually.
Cassidy opened the door and let RFK Jr. in. Now, he’s listlessly watching as RFK “goes wild” on well being. Fairly a precipitous fall for the nice physician. Sadly, we’ve got not hit all-time low but on this new anti-vaxx period. Cassidy’s repute nonetheless has additional to fall, too.
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Onward,
Katrina Vanden Heuvel
Writer, The Nation
Gregg Gonsalves
Nation public well being correspondent Gregg Gonsalves is the codirector of the World Well being Justice Partnership and an affiliate professor of epidemiology on the Yale College of Public Well being.
