By By Ruth Bass

Copyright berkshireeagle

If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn’t kill us, President Donald J. Trump might. It’s a dismal contest to see which will happen first. Or, more dramatically, we might just keep killing ourselves with the plethora of unstable people who have guns, will shoot.

The unbelievers need to put their thinking caps on. Somehow, quite a large number of Americans left those caps in the bottom of the dirty clothes pile, and they haven’t surfaced yet. Vaccines work, research brings solutions, fewer guns means fewer massacres. It doesn’t seem like rocket science, but science isn’t popular at the moment.

RFK Jr. has his large and famous (sometimes infamous) family in a tizzy, and several of his relatives have openly told him he’s wrong-headed about vaccines. He’s right, though, about American eating habits: too much salt, too many pesticides, too much fat. However, if things were right in our world, the secretary of health and human services would enlist the overweight, fast food-loving president’s help with the campaign about eating better.

That possibility brings to mind the time years ago when Kitty Dukakis, then first lady of Massachusetts and a smoker who apparently would light the next cigarette from the one in her hand, announced a give-up smoking campaign. She tried hard and probably inspired any number of nicotine addicts to stop smoking, although she didn’t manage it herself until she was 80, eight years before her death.

Leadership matters. The Kennedy announcements on vaccines mean many people won’t bother to get their COVID and flu shots this year, especially since they may have to pay for them. In Massachusetts, leadership matters a lot on this issue. Gov. Maura Healy has mandated that pharmacists can give shots to anyone seeking them, without prescriptions, and insurance companies must pay. Without shots, especially where Kennedy’s Medicaid cuts have slashed funding, many more people will be sick.

As for Trump, he keeps saying he wants no cuts to Medicaid, although the supposedly big beautiful bill put in some requirements that will block millions from Medicaid help. When it comes to Kennedy’s opposition to processed foods, excessive sodium and pesticides, Trump apparently loves his fast-food diet and isn’t interested in stopping the environmental and personal health toll taken by pesticides that affect food and water across the nation. Agricultural use of pesticides (and the American craze over lawns) puts the toxins Kennedy doesn’t like into our food and our water. Kennedy has long linked those toxins with rising rates of chronic disease; Trump shrugs at environmental concerns.

As secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr. suggests that environment might be a major reason for the sharp increase in cancer cases among young adults. And epidemiologists agree, estimating that 40 percent of cancers could be connected to risk factors people can do something about: cigarettes, sun, alcohol, obesity. Yet Kennedy replaced members of the preventive services task force, a panel of medical experts focused on preventive care including the need for people to get cancer screenings. Politico reported that HHS stopped collecting data on various health issues, including material that shows trends, failures and successes.

Those data help doctors with treatment, and as treatments of various medical issues evolve, it’s largely because data, scientifically recorded, have kept the medical profession in touch with change. We and they need the numbers and the research that might benefit patients. Trump has cut billions from cancer research programs.

Like the preservation of our rights, our freedoms and our democratic elections, health might be pretty much in our own hands these days. Healey is protecting us in Massachusetts, while much of the nation isn’t paying attention to what the powers-that-be are doing. It’s an odd road to Make American Healthy Again.

On the home front, I’m about to get as many vaccines as I’m allowed. I have already updated on immunizations against tetanus, shingles and pneumonia. I didn’t need any for chicken pox or measles because I suffered both itchy plagues, one during all of a Christmas vacation. I would have preferred a shot.

As for the ongoing slaughter with guns, in the aftermath of the horrifying assassination of Charlie Kirk last week, again it’s the data. The numbers show our world-leading proportion of privately owned weapons to people among our unstable, sometimes enraged population. Kennedy and Trump contradict each other and sometimes themselves and continue to shout their stances. Neither mentions guns.