The CDC is advertising on TV the benefits of vaccines for folks over age 65, but those people have a choice, babies don’t and rely on parents and pediatricians and the government to protect them, which is a huge reason that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s unqualified nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, must not get the job.

Before the year is even out, New York has already reported nearly four times as many cases of whooping cough — also known as pertussis, which is especially deadly for newborn babies — as last year. At least that’s less than the five-fold increase in infections nationally, but it’s still terrible, as we’re going backwards. Once, this virus caused hundreds of thousands of cases in the early 20th century but that fell to a trickle.

The long decline in pertussis for more than a century wasn’t an accident, it was due to a breakthrough in medicine. The vaccine was first developed during WWI, and has been widely available in a combination inoculation with tetanus and diphtheria for more than seven decades.

Its resurgence is at least in part to waning effectiveness of some vaccines, but there is growing concern about refusal to vaccinate at all. Part of the reason that whooping cough faded from public life is because those who still remembered its impact — as well as the ravages of other transmissible pathogens like polio — were more than eager to receive a therapeutic treatment to prevent it.

It’s only now, when the memory of those consequences has faded, that the anti-vaccine movement has gained increasing steam. It now seems difficult to put the genie back in the bottle, particularly when even the fresh horrors of the COVID-19 pandemic, which killed 1.2 million people in the United States and sickened something like a third of the population, has not reversed and even accelerated the strength of the killer conspiracy.

Nonetheless, state and local health officials, advocates, journalists, community leaders and others with some influence must push ahead and do everything in our power to uplift the life-saving truth of vaccines, especially in the context of what seems like will be a hostile federal government.

Kennedy has made his name on vaccine denial, not just in theory but in distressing action.

In addition to the broader conspiracy advocacy work of his ill-named Children’s Health Defense organization, Kennedy’s efforts can best be exemplified by what he did in American Samoa some five years ago, when he took advantage of a tragic medical vaccination error that killed two babies to spread his poison. RFK Jr. wrote a vaccine-skeptical letter to the Samoan prime minister and then visited the island in late 2019, roughly four months before a measles outbreak that would go on to kill at least 83 people as vaccination rates plummeted.

The preventable deaths of 83 people are a tiny fraction of the fatalities that could come from a Secretary Bobby Kennedy discouraging parents from vaccinating their kids against all kinds of pathogens.

Kennedy can talk all he wants about healthier food and better school meals, but undermining the essential public health that vaccines provide is not worth the tradeoff.

Hopefully, Kennedy’s nomination will be withdrawn or rejected and then Trump — who helped save countless lives worldwide with the rapid development of the COVID vaccine — will name some who will support and encourage vaccines. It’s a matter of life and death.

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