Is using public office to encourage the spread of deadly viral infections bad? Views differ

I would like to tell you that The Atlantic did not just do a classic Do Measles Vaccines Work Views Differ profile of the Secretary of Child Murder, but:

But since about 2010, the long, steady increase in life expectancy has flatlined. Chronic illnesses such as heart disease, cancer, stroke, and lung disease now top our mortality tables—affecting some 130 million Americans and accounting for 90 percent of our $4.9 trillion annual health-care expenditure. We are the world’s least healthy high-income nation, bombarded with prescription-drug ads and buffeted by a wellness industry of alternative fixes. A September poll by Navigator, a Democratic public-opinion firm, found that seven in 10 Americans are convinced that the health system “is designed so drug and insurance companies make more money when Americans are sick.”

Kennedy aims to channel the frustrations of that majority to remake public health. He arrived at this goal by way of his decades as a trial lawyer focused on contamination of the nation’s water by polluting corporations. In the latter part of his career, he has come to perceive a comparable contamination of American health by pharmaceutical and food companies. A central premise of Kennedy’s leadership at HHS is that modern science is infected with bias that costs lives—that the regulatory agencies have been captured by industry, that medical journals are corrupted by.

For years, Kennedy was a gadfly outsider. The scientific establishment ignored him. Even now that he sits atop America’s health bureaucracy, Kennedy told me, public-health authorities—whose convictions, he said, are more akin to religion than science—will not engage with him. He blamed his opponents for dodging his arguments on vaccines. “Why for 15 years have they refused to have a conversation with me? I’ve been asking for 15 years for somebody to come up and debate me on this,” he told me. “Their reaction to that is ‘Oh, don’t debate him. He’s too crazy. You don’t want to give him a platform.’ ”

It gets worse, as it manages to combine the Sanewashing profile with the Horny profile:

Kennedy is 71, but with the help of weight lifting, artificial tanning, a careful diet, and testosterone-replacement therapy, he looks more like a comic-book character than a senior citizen, his bronzed face all chiseled angles, his eyes sky blue. He adheres to a strict uniform at work—dark, embroidered skinny ties like his father sometimes wore, with suit jackets that bulge over his bodybuilder’s chest and biceps. 

One conspiracy theory I could endorse is that Olivia Nuzzi was the ghostwriter for this.

I’m sure that, as with the similar if not quite this egregious New Yorker sanewashing, some apologists will try to argue that if you dig through all the fawning and Just Asking Questions you could piece together the actual truth that RFK Jr. is an extraordinarily dangerous con artist. But to write story framed around the idea that this is just one of many conclusions a reasonable person could draw is grossly irresponsible.

Whatever combination of residual worship for America’s most overrated political dynasty and the resonance of the message that health is fundamentally an individual responsibility has among media elites explains why these embarrassing stories keep appearing, it would be really nice if they would be cast into Poucha Pond forever.