By Blox Content Management

Copyright berkshireeagle

To the editor: Robert Kennedy Jr. was asked by a Senate committee why vaccines and funding for medical research — things he promised not to touch — have been reversed.

He broke those promises and is known to rely on fringe theories without consulting with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientists. Because of this, California, Oregon and Washington are forming their own CDC and Massachusetts is considering doing the same with other states in the Northeast. Why is this important?

When parents are told by Kennedy that vaccines might be harmful to their children, they might avoid having them vaccinated. (Every year, more than 200 children die from flu-related causes, 80 percent of which have not been fully vaccinated.) This tells you that red states are more likely to follow Kennedy’s unscientific advice and have greater child death rates than those in blue states.

If you shrug this off, have you ever gone to an amusement park in Florida with your children or grandchildren? Florida is about to remove the requirement that school-age children have to be vaccinated. This creates the possibility that you and yours can unknowingly become infected by a person that is standing next to you in line waiting to go on an amusement park ride.

Because of Trump’s meddling, there will soon be a reason not to rely on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. After firing Erika McEntarfer, the respected head of that agency for what Trump said was not providing accurate information, Trump announced that he will install E.J. Antoni, a person I won’t expect to provide accurate information. Antoni said he might decide to issue statistics quarterly instead of monthly, a delay which will make the data stale and unsettle world markets.

ADP is the country’s largest payroll service provider. It tracks and issues employment statistics monthly, which are then compared to that of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Going forward, you can expect banks, financial companies and governments to rely more on ADP’s data, while Trump’s information will be viewed as questionable with the president’s thumb likely to be on the scale.

Republicans are complicit in what is going on by doing nothing.

Frank Gunsberg, Great Barrington