Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
By Michael Gold
Robert Kennedy’s restrictions on access to the new Covid vaccine for anyone not over the age of 65 or who has an underlying health condition is Big Brother at its worst.
The vaccines were developed by two private companies – Pfizer and Moderna, to help people protect themselves from this vicious illness. The government of the United States authorized the development and use of these vaccines.
So, why is a government official now taking away American citizens’ ability to decide for themselves what is the right thing to do for their own health?
Conservatives should be screaming in the halls of Congress and on the airwaves about the Federal government’s usurpation of an individual’s right to decide on their own what is and is not in their best interests.
Back in the 1990s, I remember extreme right-wingers who were paranoid that the Clinton Administration would let the United Nations take over the country. We heard a lot about black helicopters invading and taking away Americans’ rights.
Well, at least one black helicopter has finally arrived, and Robert Kennedy is the pilot.
I’m over the age of 65, so Kennedy, in all his beneficence, has decided I can get the vaccine. But my wife, who is younger and healthier, cannot. The same goes for my daughter.
There is a huge contradictory hole here, through which I can drive a school bus. Kennedy has said, without any evidence of course, that the COVID-19 vaccine is the “deadliest vaccine ever made.”
If that’s true, why are seniors and vulnerable people allowed to get the deadliest vaccine ever made? Won’t it kill us?
I’ve gotten COVID-19 vaccines multiple times and I’m still alive and as healthy as it’s possible for me to be. Why are hundreds of millions of Americans who got the vaccine still walking around? Shouldn’t we all be dead?
Before the vaccine came along, my entire family contracted COVID.
This illness was like nothing any of us ever suffered before. I was once hospitalized with pneumonia, and it wasn’t as bad as COVID.
COVID had so thoroughly penetrated my lungs that I It felt as if I could never get enough breath, like I had been a two-pack a day smoker for 30 years.
My teenage daughter was flattened. She was in so much pain she couldn’t sleep. She asked me to sit up with her one night on our living room couch, as we were relentlessly assaulted by fever and the raw body aches of the disease.
I would rather have been forced to watch the “Mean Girls” musical on Broadway twenty times in a row before getting COVID again.
It took three days for us to shake it off. It wasn’t until I was prescribed Paxlovid that I started to feel better.
Other people around me were not as fortunate. A former work colleague and friend died from COVID. Her daughter told me Alison had literally turned blue. She went to the hospital, but the doctors couldn’t save her.
A friend of my parents died from COVID. My sister-in-law’s father, who was suffering from Parkinson’s, caught COVID and died. We heard from friends who lost relatives.
The New York City public school where I taught shut down, as did every other school around the country.
We conducted classes and assigned homework over Zoom. I’m not sure much real learning actually occurred during those last five months of the school year. The mother of one of my students told me on the phone that her little daughter used to run around their apartment singing, “No school, no school.”
The TV news was filled wall to wall with images of hospitals overwhelmed with patients, some of whom had piles of the dead enclosed in body bags stored in refrigerated units.
And the economy crashed, with 22 million jobs lost.
So, yes, I was one of the first people on line to get the COVID vaccine. There were hundreds of people with me at Westchester Medical Center ready to get a needle in our arms. I didn’t want to get COVID ever again. I’ve gotten an updated vaccine several times since. My wife and daughter have also received the vaccine and multiple boosters.
The country recovered, thanks to the vaccines, a program President Trump initiated.
What did Robert Kennedy do at the time? He filed a petition to stop the Food and Drug Administration from approving and licensing the COVID vaccine.
And now, here he is, somehow voted in by the U.S. Senate to be the Health and Human Services Secretary, telling us we cannot protect our families from this awful disease.
My daughter is in college now, with thousands of other kids, huddled together in classrooms both large and small, ripe locations in colder weather for contracting all manner of illnesses. And Kennedy is saying she can’t get the current vaccine. He has no credible evidence establishing that the COVID vaccine will harm people.
As Secretary for Health and Human Services, Kennedy is supposed to be in charge of the physical health and general welfare of the nation. Right now, he’s providing neither.
Michael Gold is a Westchester based reporter whose work has been published in The New York Daily News, The Albany Times-Union, The Hartford Courant and other newspapers.
