Aug 30 (Reuters) - U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Saturday called on Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to resign, days after a senior public health official was fired and four others resigned in disputes over Kennedy’s unorthodox opposition to vaccines.
Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, wrote in a New York Times guest essay that Kennedy is “endangering the health of the American people now and into the future.”
This week, Kennedy ousted the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Susan Monarez, less than a month into her tenure, deepening disarray at the nation’s main public health agency. Monarez had refused to adopt new limitations on the availability of some vaccines urged by Kennedy, saying they went against scientific evidence.
Four other senior CDC officials resigned in protest, citing anti-vaccine policies and misinformation promoted by Kennedy and his team; hundreds of their colleagues walked out of the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta in support of the departing leaders.
Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate’s health committee and an opponent of Kennedy’s confirmation earlier this year, wrote that Kennedy ousted Monarez because she refused “to act as a rubber stamp for his dangerous policies.”
I see them as protecting their dignity by not screaming into the void. Sanders isn’t accomplishing anything.
He is a much needed voice of dissent that proves that someone, anyone, cares about what is going on. Anyone who does not speak out or act out against this is complicit, or else terrified into complacency and therefore still complicit.
Bernie can’t oust RFK on his own but he can raise a banner for others to rally around and perhaps force legislative action about this. It might happen. If he stayed silent then it is guaranteed not to happen.
A voice of dissent… in the New York Times? Few people who read the NYT are Republicans, and few of those Republicans are the sort that support Trump. Bernie is preaching to the choir here, and I don’t see why you assume that people who don’t preach to the choir actually don’t care.
Inaction in a situation like this is complicity. To hell with dignity, these people are fucking fascists