“I’m just trying to breathe at the moment”: Bill Cassidy makes futile effort to close barn door as horse reaches the Arkansas border

Too nothing, too late:

The chairman of the Senate health committee, in his first significant break with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has called for a delay in this week’s meeting of a panel of vaccine advisers, saying the group Mr. Kennedy appointed lacks the experience and diversity of opinion necessary to ensure public faith in its recommendations.

The chairman, Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, made his comments in a social media post on Monday night. Mr. Cassidy, a physician and a strong proponent of vaccines, voted reluctantly to confirm Mr. Kennedy after announcing that the secretary had agreed to consult with him on significant matters and not to disband the advisory committee. The senator has carefully parsed his words about Mr. Kennedy.

“Although the appointees to ACIP have scientific credentials, many do not have significant experience studying microbiology, epidemiology or immunology,” Mr. Cassidy wrote, using the acronym for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“In particular,” Mr. Cassidy added, “some lack experience studying new technologies such as mRNA vaccines, and may even have a preconceived bias against them.”

I give this 7 out of 10 brow furrows on the Collins scale.

The thing about “breaking with” the nation’s most prominent antivaxxer after you voted to install him as head of Health and Human Services is that it means literally nothing — the disease-spreading failson has been lectured plenty of times by non-idiots and he doesn’t care at all. Indeed, your support for life-savings vaxxines just means you’re in the pocket of BIG PHARMA:

Mr. Kennedy, who has complained that committee members he fired were too close to the drug industry, defended the dismissals on Tuesday when he appeared before a House subcommittee to defend a budget blueprint for his department that called for major cuts. The health secretary called the old panel “a template for medical malpractice” during a fiery clash with Representative Frank Pallone Jr., Democrat of New Jersey.

He then accused Mr. Pallone of being influenced by drug industry contributions to his campaigns, saying the lawmaker’s “enthusiasm” for the previous panel seemed to be “an outcome of those contributions.

After an outcry from Mr. Pallone’s fellow Democratic lawmakers, the subcommittee chairman forced Mr. Kennedy to retract his words.

Needless to say, this isn’t about restaining Kennedy but trying to restore his own reputation, and it won’t work. Cassidy voted for this — it hangs on him and every Senate Republican but one 100%. And this is what the Republican conference supports:

“I feel like I’m dying,” Kiley texted a friend. He couldn’t hold down food or water. He had already lost 10 pounds. His chest went numb, and his arms began to tingle. His oxygen was dropping dangerously low when he finally got the results.

“Positive for measles,” he wrote to his sister, in mid-April. “Just miserable. I can’t believe this.”

Twenty-five years after measles was officially declared eliminated from the United States, this spring marked a harrowing time of rediscovery. A cluster of cases that began at a Mennonite church in West Texas expanded into one of the largest outbreaks in a generation, spreading through communities with declining vaccination rates as three people died and dozens more were hospitalized from Mexico to North Dakota. Public health officials tracked about 1,200 confirmed cases and countless exposures across more than 30 states. People who were contagious with measles boarded domestic flights, shopped at Walmart, played tuba in a town parade and toured the Mall of America.

But what frightened Kiley more than the potential spread was the severity of the disease: About one in five unvaccinated people with measles will be hospitalized, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As many as one in 20 children contracts a secondary pneumonia infection. More than one in 1,000 dies. Measles stops spreading when 95 percent of a community is immune, but national vaccination rates for children have fallen to less than 92 percent. In parts of West Texas, they’ve dropped below 80.

Kiley’s business catered in part to patients who were skeptical of mainstream American health care and wanted to try alternative treatments. “The doctor of the future will give no medicine,” read one sign that he hung in his office. A former farmer, he believed in caring for everyone in his hometown — even if that meant sometimes taking payments in the form of a haircut, a used gun, a dishwasher or unpasteurized cheese from a member of the Mennonite community. Most of what he remembered about measles came from an old “Brady Bunch” episode, where the children celebrated staying home from school and played board games. “If you have to get sick, sure can’t beat the measles,” one of the children said.

“I feel like I’ve been lied to,” Kiley told his wife as his fever rose to 104 degrees. He tried to manage his symptoms at home with cod liver oil and vitamin D, supplements endorsed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. health secretary. He isolated himself in the living room to avoid infecting his four children and coughed and dry-heaved his way through the night.

“I’m just trying to breathe at the moment,” he texted one relative.

However much contempt you have to Republican legislators it’s not enough.