Everyone who touches tRump dies

And they deserve it. Case in point: Sen. Bill Cassidy, MD.

Today, a year after now-Sen. Cassidy warily cast the vote that ensured Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ascension to that role, the Louisiana Republican’s life’s work — in medicine and in politics — is unraveling.

Newborn hepatitis B vaccination rates in the U.S. had plunged to 73% as of August, down 10 percentage points since a February 2023 high, according to research published in JAMA last month. In December, the CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) — remade by Kennedy — voted to revoke a two-decade-old recommendation that all newborns get the shot.

The next month, Trump endorsed U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow, a Cassidy challenger in what’s shaping up to be a competitive Republican Senate primary. Letlow’s foray into politics began in 2021 when she took the seat won by her husband, left vacant after he died from COVID.

I disagree with the the adverb. Cassidy’s display of wariness, like his performative extraction of promises that RFK Jr would not touch vaccine recommendations, came off as a calculated attempt to do the splits between Responsible medical professional and Licker of Pervert of the United States’ loafers. But that’s a move Simone Biles couldn’t pull off.

Cassidy did the right thing when he promoted vaccination clinics in Louisiana. He did the right thing when he voted to impeach tRump. That and being elected to the US Congress is a legacy anyone could be proud of. But he tried to undo the impeachment vote and appease the malignant Oompa Loompa by casting the vote for a man he knew is unfit for anything to do with health care. Except perhaps as the example in a Say no to drugs PSA.

The fate of former colleague Jeff Sessions should have told him that trying to get back in Short temper, short finger’s good graces was hopeless. But if he was capable of understanding negative personal consequences he wouldn’t be in the white supremacist party.

As the May primary nears, some Louisiana doctors are worried they’ve begun a long trek down a dark road when it comes to vaccine-preventable diseases.

Last year, on the day Kennedy was sworn in a thousand miles away in Washington, Louisiana’s health department stopped promoting vaccines, halting its clinics and advertising. Its communications about an ongoing whooping cough outbreak in the state have nearly ceased. It took months for the state to announce last year that two infants had died from the illness. A Louisiana child’s death from the flu was confirmed this January, and a couple of cases of measles were reported last year.

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“It’s so hard to see children get sick from illnesses that they should have never gotten in the first place,” said Mikki Bouquet, MD, a pediatrician in Baton Rouge. “You want to just scream into the void of this community over how they failed this child.”

As anti-vaccine forces have taken hold of the state and federal health departments, Cassidy has lamented the consequences.

“Families are getting sick and people are dying from vaccine-preventable deaths, and that tragedy needs to stop,” he wrote on social media last fall.

The fire from the pile of kerosene-soaked straw he threw a lit match at needs to be extinguished, he passively voiced.

But while it is Cassidy’s duty as chairman of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee to conduct oversight of the health department, Kennedy has appeared before the committee just once since he was confirmed.

I guess now that he’s not going to get the endorsement he doesn’t give a shit who dies. Or maybe he’s just a worm.

The comments, which appear to come from practitioners, say as much as possible without violating MedPage Today’s comment policy. For example:

Bill you put Party over country and your duty to your patients. And this is the thanks you get, even your Party has abandoned you. You can debase yourself to please Trump, but you can’t be sure it will work. Ask Kristi Noem

He made a cowardly vote in fear for his position as a Senator. He will lose that position anyway. Good.
The mayor was right. “Do the right thing”. You can’t save yourself by debasing yourself.

He deserves to lose his seat. He sold out babies, school children, his fellow Americans, and his legacy.
SO CONCERNED ABOUT KEEPING HIS JOB THAT HE DIDN’T DO HIS JOB.

His legacy might be First physician to be burned in effigy by pediatric practitioners and public health workers.