NYT liveblog: the cast of My American Cousin gave strong performances

The sanewashing of RFK Jr. is an outright pathology at this point:

Kennedy lied, a lot, about the efficacy and safety of vaccines; he lied about the clinical data supporting vaccination as public health practice; he lied about childhood vaccinations; and he lied about his own previous lies concerning what he would and would not do as HHS secretary. He accused the Senators interrogating him of “making stuff up,” which was also a lie. He lied and lied and lied. At the most fundamental level, his very appearance before the Senate committee was itself a kind of lie, an empty and contemptuous performance of public accountability by a man and an administration plainly committed to violating every last institutional and moral constraint on their use of power. If Kennedy regarded himself as answerable in any meaningful way to America’s people (or their elected representatives), he would not presently be working to feed the most vulnerable of their family members into the maw of communicable disease.

Here’s one thing Kennedy said to the Senate committee, in defense of his flagrant efforts to complicate and obstruct COVID-19 vaccine access for as many Americans as possible, a gambit which would by design leave people more likely to contract the virus and would necessarily allow some greater number of them to be killed by it:

Right now we are dealing with completely different circumstances [from those prevailing during the initial rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines] where the virus has mutated, it’s much less dangerous and there is a lot of natural immunity and herd immunity. So the calculus is different, and it’s complicated.

And here is what New York Times science reporter Apoorva Mandavilli had to say about that, in the Times liveblog of the hearing: “Setting aside the incorrect claim about herd immunity, Kennedy makes good points.”

This reflects the core of the RFK Jr. sanewashing, which is to imply that he’s a fundamentally normal figure with a few eccentric opinions, a lie that is going to get children killed all over the world:

This sort of framing is both worse and less than uninformative. What’s funny is, the simple converse—Setting aside the factual but irrelevant observation that more individuals have some immunity to COVID-19 than did in 2020, this statement is complete nonsense—is actually perfectly fine, and leads naturally to an explanation of why it’s nonsense and why the nation’s leading public health official is spouting it. All of which is the sort of thing that a newspaper would want from a science reporter doing a liveblog, but which is also the sort of thing that risks irritating a certain stripe of readers; the Times would rather indulge those readers than inform them. In any case, it’s the analytical and journalistic equivalent of a movie studio scraping a negative print review for a handful of words that can be cobbled together into a positive-seeming blurb for the poster: “This is the […] top […] film […] this year!”

Sure, yes: Set aside what Kennedy said, and what he meant, and why he said it, and what he hopes to accomplish, and everything else he has ever said, and all useful or informative context whatsoever, and one simply must grant that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was right when he said “I am […] not really […] a […] Senator.” It’s true! He really got their asses with that one.

A lot of prestige media outlets, even if they’re doing a lot of good work covering other aspects of Trumpism, seem unable to acknowledge what we’re dealing with here. And creating this much less dangerous version of RFK Jr. is exactly what Republicans are trying to do as the bodies pile up:

So absurd: Fox News is spinning RFK's epic implosion in the Senate by downplaying the riticism from *Republicans* and by portraying RFK as *pro* vaccine. On the pod, @mattgertz.bsky.social smartly explains that this shows Fox knows RFK is a major problem for Trump: newrepublic.com/article/2000…

[image or embed]— Greg Sargent (@gregsargent.bsky.social) Sep 5, 2025 at 8:06 AM

You can’t stop Republicans from doing this, but you can certainly choose not to help them.