Profiles in poltroonery: Senator Bill Cassidy
The Louisiana senator and physician could have stopped the world's worst antivaxer from taking over the regulation of vaccines. He didn't. And now we're paying for it.
Note: This is the second installment of an occasional series here at The Watch in which we’ll scorn and ridicule politicians who could have done something to address the current crisis — but chose not to act.
When Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy first ran for the U.S. Senate in 2014, he leaned heavily on his record as a physician and public health advocate. And with good reason. Here’s the opening to a 2017 profile in the Washington Post:
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) vividly remembers his worst day as a doctor. His patient, an 18-year-old woman with hepatitis B, needed a liver transplant, and he arranged to have her airlifted to Shreveport for the procedure.
“I was sitting there thinking, if we had vaccinated this girl with a $50 vaccine, we could have saved a $250,000 operation and a lifetime of $50,000-a-year medical bills,” Cassidy recalled in a recent interview. There's a happy ending to the story: The patient's liver began to recover, avoiding the need for a transplant. But Cassidy didn't know that as the helicopter took off. He was motivated to set up a vaccination program to prevent the infection. Over six years, 36,000 schoolchildren in his state were vaccinated.
Cassidy recounted the story in his opening remarks during the Senate confirmation hearings for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Cassidy chairs the Health, Education, Labor, and Pension committee — the committee whose endorsement Kennedy needed to move on to the full Senate.
It was a notable way to start because Kennedy himself has rather different thoughts about the Hepatitis B vaccine. Less than two years ago he told Joe Rogan’s 20 million podcast subscribers that the only way to get Hepatitis B is from “sharing needles,” “going to a really seasoned prostitute,” or participating in “compulsive homosexual behavior.” He added that the vaccine is only given because of a “profit motive.”
As is often the case, Kennedy is full of shit. Prior to regular vaccinations, about 18,000 kids got Hepatitis B each year. Today it’s rare, and it’s rare because of the vaccine.
Kennedy is the single worst person on the planet to head up the Department of Health and Human Services. I don’t think this is an exaggeration.
Look at this way: With respect to leading HHS, everyone on the planet could be put into one of three pools. The first pool consists of the extremely small percentage of the world’s population who are capable and qualified to lead an agency — the people who have the skills, knowledge, and experience to do at least a competent job.
The second is the very, very large percentage of the world’s population who are not capable or qualified to lead HHS. This group includes me, the entire cast of The White Lotus, probably you and everyone you know, most of Belgium . . . and nearly everyone else on earth. You can do a lot of damage with incompetence. But importantly, no one in this group would have the clout, “just enough” knowledge, or the desire to actually weaponize the agency against public health.
This brings us to the final pool of people. It’s also a small group, and it includes Kennedy. These are the quacks and charlatans who push risible conspiracy theories and want to either ban vaccines entirely or eradicate all public confidence in them. Anyone from this group would be a far worse pick to oversee the country’s largest public health agencies than anyone from either of the other two groups.
Kennedy isn’t just a member of this group, he’s the most dangerous member. He’s worse than all the others because of his surname, influence, wealth, and devout following of influential tech executives, manosphere podcasters, wellness weirdos, and conspiracy mongers. He knows just enough about vaccines to make those who know little think he knows what he’s doing.
All of this would have made Kennedy the worst possible candidate to lead HHS prior to 2024. But once Kennedy endorsed Trump, his cultish following grew to absorb the entire Republican Party. With the imprimatur of HHS, the damage Kennedy can do even in the short term is hard to overstate. The long-tail devastation could be catastrophic.
As a doctor and public health advocate, Bill Cassidy knows all of this. It’s why he immediately expressed skepticism about Kennedy’s nomination, and why he opened the confirmation hearing with that anecdote about the Hepatitis B vaccine. That anecdote also made some think that maybe — just maybe — Cassidy’s Hippocratic Oath, sense of duty, and interest in public health would override his party’s slavish devotion to Donald Trump.
But Cassidy’s initial skepticism was also met with a wave of threats, fury, and criticism from MAGA supporters.
On the morning of the critical vote, he posted this Bible verse to X:
“Joshua said to them, do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. Be strong and courageous. This is what the LORD will do to all the enemies you are going to fight.”
Apparently, God told Cassidy to let lot of people die. Because, like nearly everyone in his party, Cassidy caved. The committee approved Kennedy along party lines. Cassidy cast the deciding vote.
There aren’t many inflection points in U.S. history in which we can say that a politician’s single vote on a single matter was responsible for a large-scale loss of life. We will be able to confidently say this about Bill Cassidy’s committee vote to approve Kennedy. The question here isn’t if people will die, it’s what multiple of people will die. It will be more than hundreds. It will likely be tens of thousands. Worst case scenario, it could be millions.
The last 25 years of RFK, Jr.’s public life and persona have been building toward this moment. When the one-time environmentalist embraced vaccine denial, he relegated himself to the far fringes of public debate, rightly mocked and ridiculed across the political spectrum.
But then two things happened. First, Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Trump had long been antivax-curious, but he played down those inclinations when the topic first came up.
Then came the pandemic. As Covid swept the country, Trump’s narcissism, lack of intellectual curiosity, and utter lack of empathy set in motion a disastrous series of consequences. Recall that when travelers on a cruise ship were sick with Covid early in the pandemic Trump wanted to keep everyone trapped on the ship because “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.” Or recall his ghoulish mantra, “If we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”
As Trump took heat for exacerbating the spread through policies primarily intended to protect Trump, he and his supporters did what they often do: They created an alternate reality. They simply claimed that Covid wasn’t real, or “no worse than the flu.” MAGA influencers insisted that doctors and nurses were lying about over-capacity ICUs and medical examiners were lying about morgues overflowing with bodies. Deaths would be down to zero within a matter of months, they assured us. And if the pandemic isn’t real, there’s no need for a vaccine. Among his supporters, Trump’s greatest achievement became his biggest liability.
And we paid for it. Among peer countries, the U.S. had the highest Covid death rate. We also had the lowest vaccination rate.
All of this provided fertile ground for RFK, Jr. During the pandemic, donations to his poorly-named anti-vaccine non-profit jumped eight-fold, and the annual salary he paid himself rose from $131,000 in 2017 to $837,000 in 2022.
Meanwhile, the vaccine denialist faction of the Republican party swelled like a 71-year-old bicep shot through with HGH. Vaccine denial isn’t just acceptable in the Republican party now, it is the Republican party. There’s no other explanation for putting the man most identified with vaccine denial in charge of the agency that oversees vaccines. (The only Republican to vote against Kennedy was Mitch McConnell, who had polio as a child.)
We need only look to Cassidy’s deep-red home state. After winning election in 2024, Louisiana MAGA governor Jeff Landry — who as attorney general extended a personal invitation to Kennedy to come speak to state lawmakers — appointed two vaccine skeptics to top public health positions. One is an ophthalmologist, the other a veterinarian/physician and failed candidate for governor and Congress. In November those two officials implemented a new policy forbidding the state from spending public funds to promote flu, mpox, or Covid vaccines. Three months later, on the very day Kennedy was confirmed, they expanded the prohibition to include all vaccines.
Just to be clear: In Louisiana, the state where Bill Cassidy began the vaccination project he considers to be his most important contribution to public health, state employees are legally prohibited from recommending that parents vaccinate their children.
In fact, much of Louisiana government appears to have been taken over by antivax zealots. In 2023, 29 of the 40 candidates for statewide office endorsed by the militant antivax group Stand for Health Freedom won their elections.
This is why Cassidy — someone who knows better — had an ethical and professional responsibility to oppose Kennedy, to use his moral authority as a physician to stop this dangerous movement from taking over the agency that would empower their hysteria.
He did not. Instead, Cassidy gave an embarrassing speech on the floor of the Senate in which he offered himself up as the dewiest-eyed chump ever to chair a committee. He did deploy his moral authority as a physician, but did so to justify his vote in favor of Kennedy — to say, “Hey, you can trust me. And I trust Kennedy.”
Here’s how he began:
I practiced medicine for 30 years in a public hospital for the uninsured. Caring for those who otherwise would not have been able to afford the access to the care that I provided. After seeing patients die from vaccine preventable diseases, I dedicated much of my time to vaccine research and immunization programs. Personally witnessing the safety monitoring, and the effectiveness of immunization. But simply, vaccines save lives.
This is the context that informed me when considering Robert F. Kennedy Jr as the nominee to be Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
It’s a set-up that only makes the rug-snatch all the more jarring.
I spoke with Mr. Kennedy not once, but multiple times over the weekend, including this morning. We had in-depth conversations about the medical literature and the science behind the safety of vaccines. He referred me to studies and people. I reviewed them and spoke to those whom he mentioned I should speak to . . .
Regarding vaccines, Mr. Kennedy has been insistent that he just wants good science and to ensure safety. Now, Mr. Kennedy and the administration reached out seeking to reassure me regarding their commitment to protecting the public health benefit of vaccination . . .
Mr. Kennedy and the administration committed that he and I will have an unprecedently close collaborative working relationship if he is confirmed. We will meet or speak multiple times a month. This collaboration will allow us to work well together and therefore to be more effective.
Mr. Kennedy has asked for my input into hiring decisions at HHS, beyond Senate-confirmed positions. This aspect of our collaboration will allow us to represent all sides of those folks that were contacting me this weekend . . .
If confirmed, he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes . . .
These commitments, and my expectation that we can have a great relationship to make America healthy again, is the basis of my support. He will be Secretary, but I believe he will also be a partner in working for this end.
If Mr. Kennedy is confirmed, I will use my authority as Chairman of the Senate Committee . . . I will carefully watch for any effort to wrongfully sow public fear about vaccines between confusing references of coincidence and anecdote.
But my support is built on assurances that this will not have to be a concern and that he and I can work together to build an agenda to make America healthy again.
The incongruence here is maddening. It’s as if a beluga sturgeon gave a press conference in which she announced that she’d be entrusting her eggs to a Russian fisherman. “Everyone knows how protective I am of my babies,” she says. “That’s why I’m entrusting the care of my eggs to Vlad, the Black Sea fisherman. I mean sure, I’m not crazy about that box of crackers under Vlad’s arm. And yes, there was an awkward moment yesterday when a blini recipe fell out of Vlad’s pocket while he ultra-sounded my ovaries. But Vlad has assured me that he is committed to seeing that each and every one of my eggs is properly incubated, hatched, and achieves its full potential as a thriving sturgeon. So I believe he will be a dedicated partner in working for this end.”
Cassidy then offered this astonishingly naive assurance:
“Mr. Kennedy and the administration also committed that this administration will not use the subversive techniques employed under the Biden administration . . . to change policies enacted by Congress without first going through Congress . . . Mr. Kennedy and the administration committed to a strong role of Congress.”
Cassidy said these words on February 4th. By that time, DOGE had already taken over USAID. Elon Musk had already sent those “fork in the road” emails offering thousands of federal employees buyouts — to be paid with funds Congress never authorized. And Trump had already nominated Russel Vought to head the Office of Management and Budget. Vought is the guy who wrote a roadmap for using executive power to neuter Congress.
This administration made clear from day one that as it steamrolls its way to authoritarianism, any Republican in Congress who tries to put up a roadblock will be political roadkill (or as Kennedy might call it, dinner).
Cassidy also needed only to look at what had happened in the preceding days. At her own confirmation hearing, Attorney General Pam Bondi testified that neither she nor Trump had any intention of seeking retribution against Trump’s critics and perceived enemies. One of Bondi’s first acts as attorney general was to request a list of the FBI agents who participated in January 6 investigations. This was public information on February 3rd, the day before Cassidy’s speech.
If he was too thick to know before then, Cassidy absolutely should have known by the time he cast his committee vote that not only did Trump’s nominees have no qualms about unabashedly lying their way through confirmation hearings, lying was their strategy. They knew that with patsies like Cassidy in Congress, there would be no one to hold them accountable.
Kennedy, too, lied his way through his hearings. He claimed, for example, that his 2019 trip to Samoa had nothing to do with the measles outbreak gripping the island at the time. He also claimed that many of the 83 people — mostly young children — who died during the outbreak didn’t actually die of measles. These were lies. Kennedy’s trip to Samoa was arranged by a Samoan anti-vaccine activist. While there, Kennedy spread false fears that it was actually the vaccine that was making people sick. This made people more reluctant to get vaccinated, which exacerbated the spread. The day after Kennedy’s hearing, the Samoan health minister called his testimony a “complete lie” and a “total fabrication.”
Kennedy claimed that no healthy children died from Covid. Covid was the eighth leading cause of death among children in the United States in 2021 and 2022, and a third of the kids who died had no other medical condition. Kennedy defended his conspiratorial, bizarrely anti-Semitic claim that Covid was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” and that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” He defended his claims of a link between vaccines and autism, despite hundreds of studies utterly debunking those claims.
None of this should have surprised anyone. Kennedy is a fount of conspiracy theories. He has pushed time-worn, thoroughly debunked conspiracies about chemtrails; HIV not causing AIDS; September 11th; claims that antidepressants cause school shootings, or that gender dysphoria is caused by chemical exposure; and has claimed that the polio vaccine caused more deaths than it prevented.
In the face of all this, Cassidy still went on the floor of the Senate and declared that Kennedy — a man who has also admitted to dozens of affairs, basically shrugged when accused of sexual assault, and whose entire public life been marked by episodic lying and deceit — was a nominee that he, Bill Cassidy, could take at his word.
And so despite Kennedy’s blithe dismissal of what Bill Cassidy considers the greatest achievement of his life, Cassidy voted for RFK, Jr.
Meanwhile, the country was seeing the front end of the worst measles outbreak in the U.S. in a decade, one that has now spread to 19 states, killed two people, and is driven entirely by the unvaccinated.
Since Cassidy’s vote, Kennedy has done exactly what everyone expected he would do. Here’s a rundown of Kennedy’s historic assault on public health.
The childhood vaccine schedule
During his confirmation hearing, Kennedy assured Cassidy that he would not alter the CDC’s recommended childhood vaccination schedule.
Five says after he was sworn in — during his first address to HHS employees — Kennedy said he’d be forming a panel to . . . reevaluate the childhood vaccination schedule.
Flu shots
Less than two weeks after Kennedy was sworn in, the FDA abruptly canceled the annual meeting of the panel that determines which strains of flu will be targeted by this year’s shots.
Manufacturers need several months notice to have shots ready by the fall. We’re also currently in the midst a particularly severe flu season, with a 15-year high in hospitalizations and a seven-year high in deaths. Meanwhile, flu vaccination rates are dropping.
ACIP
In his speech explaining his vote to confirm Kennedy, Cassidy said, “if confirmed, he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) without change.”
ACIP is the committee that reviews new vaccines and vaccine research. About a week after Kennedy took office, HHS postponed ACIP’s next advisory meeting. A doctor who consults for the committee told NBC News that it was the first time in 40 years this had happened.
The official reason HHS gave for postponing the ACIP meeting was “to accommodate public comment” on the new administration’s policies. That excuse collapsed about a week later, when Kennedy posted an announcement to the Federal Register: HHS will no longer solicit public comment on proposed policy changes.
The real reason for the postponement: Kennedy is widely expected to replace the committee’s current members with people who share his skepticism of vaccines.
Kennedy claims he wants to replace members of ACIP who have “conflicts of interest.” It’s interesting he’d bring that up. One of the vaccines the panel was supposed to discuss at the postponed meeting is Gardasil, the enormously successful HPV vaccine that has saved countless lives — a Lancet study found that women vaccinated at age 12-13 showed an 87 percent reduction in cervical cancer. Kennedy, it turns out, has a financial stake in a pending lawsuit against Merck, Gardasil’s manufacturer. Kennedy told the Senate that he would give any proceeds from that lawsuit to his son. Which doesn’t really resolve the conflict.
At his hearing, Kennedy also declined to say he’d refuse any future financial benefit from other lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers — lawsuits which, as head of HHS, he could influence with his regulatory decisions.
Vaccine promotion
Within days of Kennedy’s swearing in, the CDC also shelved a series of ad campaigns encouraging people to get vaccinated. Kennedy has said that instead of focusing on encouraging vaccines, he wants ad campaigns to stress “informed consent,” and include warnings about (and therefore sow unnecessary alarm about) the minuscule risks associated with common vaccines.
Meanwhile, the NIH canceled at least 40 grants related to research on vaccine hesitancy and examining the surge in unvaccinated children. The email notifying grant recipients of the termination couldn’t be clearer: “It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research activities that focuses gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated and/or explore ways to improve vaccine interest and commitment . . . Therefore, the award is terminated.”
Measles
As the measles outbreak worsened during his first days in office, Kennedy first actually recommended the MMR vaccine. He then immediately went about undermining that recommendation.
In a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity, Kennedy falsely claimed the MMR vaccine causes more injuries than is commonly known, and he blamed the measles outbreak on poor nutrition instead of low vaccination rates. He also reiterated the false claim he’s made in the past that exposure to measles has protective effects against cancer and heart disease.
There’s no peer-reviewed evidence for this. There is evidence, however, that measles infections can reset the body’s immune system, making those who get it newly susceptible to diseases they would otherwise have fought off — including diseases for which they have previously been vaccinated.
As he played down the vaccine and played up the benefits of infection, Kennedy then claimed that doctors had achieved “miraculous and instantaneous” cures by treating kids infected with measles with steroids, antibiotics, and Vitamin A supplements like cod liver oil. Antibiotics can be used to fight bacterial infections that sometimes develop as the body fights measles, but measles is a viral infection, not a bacterial one. Antibiotics cannot instantaneously cure anyone of measles.
As for Vitamin A, Kennedy is either confused by or deliberately misstating studies showing that measles is particularly harmful to children with a Vitamin A deficiency. And in those cases, Vitamin A can help. But Vitamin A deficiency isn’t a problem in the U.S.
Moreover, too much Vitamin A can actually be harmful. Sure enough, Texas hospitals have since reported that they’ve been treating children for Vitamin A toxicity. Some of those kids have signs of liver damage.
mRNA
Trump’s greatest first-term achievement was his effort to remove regulatory barriers to facilitate the speedy development of a Covid vaccine. That vaccine saved millions of lives. He’s been running as fast as he can from that achievement ever since.
The mRNA technology behind the vaccine has enormous potential. It has shown promise in treating norovirus, tuberculosis (another disease now “having a moment”), HIV, melanoma, and two of the deadliest, most aggressive cancers — pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma, or brain cancer.
Kennedy and the antivax movement want to stop this technology in its tracks. Kennedy has absurdly called the mRNA-based Covid vaccines “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”
This now appears to be where the Trump administration is headed. At least one mRNA research grant has been terminated. Several outlets have reported that worried NIH staff have begun advising grant applicants not to put mRNA in their applications so they aren’t flagged by political appointees.
Bird flu
In January, the Biden administration agreed to purchase a stock of mRNA bird flu vaccines from Moderna. The Trump administration appears to be reconsidering. It isn’t clear where things stand right now, but as of the end of February, the new administration announced its own plan to fight bird flu. That plan includes $100 million for “vaccine research and development.” The Moderna deal was for $590 million. This was also right about the time that DOGE fired, then desperately tried to rehire, the USDA employees who were working on bird flu.
Kennedy has suggested that the proper way to combat bird flue is to let the virus run its course through poultry farms, on the theory that the surviving birds would be genetically resistant. Infectious disease experts say this is nonsense (Kennedy’s comments also got a rebuke from Trump’s own agriculture secretary). The chickens in poultry farms have been selectively bred to the point where they have little genetic diversity. Letting the virus run rampant would not only destroy the poultry industry, it would give the virus more opportunities to mutate into strains more easily transmitted to other species.
Censorship
Kennedy has instituted an unprecedented medical research censorship regime. ProPublica reported a few weeks ago that researchers at the National Cancer Institute, which falls under NIH, were told to screen all communications — including manuscripts, proposals, and presentations — for “controversial” terms like autism, peanut allergy, fluoride, marijuana, measles, and vaccine. Needless to say, this an insane way to run a public health agency.
Layoffs
This week Kennedy announced more than 10,000 firings throughout HHS. In Dallas, in the heart of the measles outbreak, previous cuts had already resulted in the shuttering of 50 vaccination clinics and the firing of 11 full-time and 10 part-time epidemiologists who track — you guessed it — outbreaks of infectious disease. Other shuttered offices included those that fight HIV, hepatitis, and tuberculosis. Again, we’re now seeing outbreaks of the latter that appear to be resistant to existing treatments, and stopping a course of TB treatment before it’s completed is a great way to create yet more resistance.
The CDC alone lost 2,400 employees this week, as Kennedy shifts the agency’s focus from infectious disease to pet issues like obesity, food additives, and what Kennedy considers to be over-reliance on antidepressants, ADHD drugs, and other drugs — or from the one area of public health in which government intervention makes the most sense to issues of personal choice, or what conservatives once derided as the “nanny state.”
Kennedy also laid off the entire Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS policy. That office oversees the National Vaccine Program, “which works with an advisory committee to coordinate the department’s agencies to develop vaccines, oversee their safety and increase their availability and use.”
The cuts also included, conveniently, the CDC’s entire Freedom of Information Act office, which will make it more difficult to keep tabs on, say, whether Kennedy is pressuring the agency to lend its credibility to his batty agenda.
The purge is expected to trim one tenth of one percent from the HHS annual budget.
Other anti-vaccine policies
A few weeks ago, the CDC announced that it would oversee yet another study on any alleged link between vaccines and autism. There are already hundreds of studies showing there is no link between the two, and Kennedy promised Cassidy during his hearings that he would not perpetuate this lie. But hey, if there’s really no link, surely this new CDC study will just be further confirmation of that, right?
That of course depends on who the CDC asks to conduct the study. Last week, we learned that it will led by David Geier. Who is David Geier? The New York Times describes him as “a steadfast figure in the vaccine movement” who “has published numerous articles in the medical literature attempting to tie mercury in vaccines to autism” and who in 2012 “had been practicing medicine without a license alongside his father.” Geier’s father is also an antivaxer whose license was suspended after “he endangered children with autism and exploited their parents.” Infectious disease experts told the paper that “appointing David Geier to work on a study of vaccine safety preordains the outcome — like having a basketball referee show up in one team’s jersey.”
In his speech on the floor of the Senate, Cassidy assured the country that “Mr. Kennedy and the administration committed that he and I will have an unprecedently [sic] close collaborative working relationship if he is confirmed,” adding that while “I will watch carefully for any effort to wrongfully sow public fear about vaccines between confusing references of coincidence and anecdote” . . “this will not have to be a concern.” When the New York Times asked Cassidy for comment on Geier’s selection, the senator “mentioned that he had breakfast with Mr. Kennedy on Thursday but said the topic did not come up.” You don’t say!
Finally, the top vaccine official at the FDA resigned last week. Dr. Peter Marks is largely credited for conceiving and overseeing Trump’s Operation Warp Speed for the Covid vaccine. In his resignation letter, Marks wrote that he was willing to work with Kennedy on vaccine safety (Marks himself had urged caution about giving the Covid vaccine to young children). Instead, Marks wrote, “truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”
Kennedy’s tenure will result in two types of unnecessary death — deaths we can see and deaths we can’t. The tangible deaths will follow if he’s successful in lowering vaccination rates for long-defeated diseases. We’ll start to see more outbreaks, more illness, and more death.
But the unseen death may be the bigger tragedy. If Kennedy is able to stop or hinder research into new vaccines and medicine, the body count will be harder to discern. It’s impossible to say how many deaths could have been prevented by vaccines or treatments that researchers were prohibited from pursuing.
But we can look to the recent past for guidance: Kennedy and his nonprofit sued to prevent the Covid vaccines from ever coming to market. Those vaccines saved 3 million lives. If Kennedy’s lawsuit had been successful — or if in 2020 he held the position he holds now — the additional death toll from Covid would have been larger than the population of Chicago. This is what’s at stake if another pandemic hits.
The administration is applying Kennedy’s antivax ideology elsewhere too. It’s likely, for example, that antivax sentiment — along with xenophobia and general cruelty — also fueled the Trump administration’s decision to stop providing lifesaving vaccines to the developing world. By one estimate, that decision in and of itself will result in 75 million fewer vaccinated children — and 1.2 million of those children will die unnecessarily. That’s 33 dead kids for every kid vaccinated through Cassidy’s Hepatitis B program.
You’d think Cassidy would at least be hopping mad at the way Kennedy, Trump, and JD Vance (who apparently personally pressured Cassidy) played him for a fool.
I’m having a hard time finding any evidence of that. Cassidy has said nothing about any of this until this week, when he called on Kennedy to testify before his committee about the HHS layoffs. He has remained noticeably silent on vaccines.
Meanwhile, Cassidy did put out this press release about legislation he introduced to “ratify President Trump’s Executive Order defining male and female.” And this one about keeping cell phones out of jails. Cassidy also weighed in on whether it should be a crime to leak “confidential information” about the Supreme Court (he thinks it should). And on President Trump’s address to Congress last month (he thinks it was really swell).
Not only has Cassidy not criticized Kennedy and Trump as they’ve made look him look like a gullible fool, he has actually put out not one, not two, but three press releases celebrating a trip he took to the White House. There’s the anticipatory statement, “Cassidy to Meet with President Trump at the White House,” the post-event boast, “Cassidy Releases Statement After Productive Meeting with President Trump,” and my personal favorite, “ICYMI: Photos from Cassidy Meeting with President Trump.”
You know, just in case you’re the sort who collects photos of powerful (nearly) all white guys sitting around a long table with another powerful white guy.
It isn’t as if Cassidy is incapable of criticizing antivaxers. He did criticize the Louisiana decision to stop promoting vaccines. He just can’t seem to criticize Trump. Or to even just stop praising him.
It’s probably true that if Cassidy had voted against Kennedy, Trump would likely have just nominated another vaccine skeptic. But no one else has Kennedy’s profile or following. Cassidy could have voted no, then drawn on his moral authority as a physician to explain to Trump supporters that vaccines save lives and that vaccine denialism is disproportionately killing the MAGA faithful.
Maybe it wouldn’t have changed many minds. But courage is contagious. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that a no vote might have inspired other Republican senators to find their spines and demand that Trump reverse course on this dangerous vaccine garbage.
It doesn’t take much sleuthing to discern the real reason Bill Cassidy voted to confirm Kennedy: Cassidy is facing a primary challenge from a die-hard MAGA candidate in a state that went for Trump by 22 points. Cassidy is currently trailing in primary polls, likely because Trump supporters are still mad at him for voting to convict Trump for trying to overthrow the 2020 election.
But if Louisiana voters want to punish Cassidy for holding Trump accountable for trying to steal an election, a vote for Kennedy seems unlikely to dislodge them. More importantly, if ever there were a rubber-meets-road time to leverage whatever political power you have — to cast the vote that defines why you went into politics — you’d think it would be to protect millions of lives.
Here’s my prediction for what’s ahead: Kennedy and Trump will continue to make Cassidy look like a useful idiot. Cassidy will continue churning out press releases praising Trump, anyway. Trump will then endorse Cassidy’s primary opponent, and Cassidy will lose.
At that point, Cassidy will no longer have his senate seat, his committee chair, or his dignity. He’ll have to live with the fact that his legacy will not be his admirable vaccination program, but his decision to sacrifice the lives of others in a desperate cling to his little morsel of power.
But Cassidy will get over it. He’ll comfortably glide into the lucrative life of a former senator. He’ll get appointed to boards, be feted by civic groups, and join or start a lobbying firm.
In the end, unlike the people who will die because of Bill Cassidy’s craven decision to put an antivaxer in charge of vaccines, Bill Cassidy will be fine.
Previous Profiles in Poltroonery: Senator Thom Tillis
Brilliant takedown. Right on point. Thank you.