Covid-19 has killed more than a million people in the United States, but in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday, US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that lockdowns were “the thing that did the most damage to our country.”
This assertion kicked off more than 20 minutes of contentious back-and-forth, in which Kennedy made a number of false and misleading statements about a range of topics including measles, autism and Lyme disease.
“It’s just fraught with misinformation. Lies,” said Dr. Jake Scott, an infectious disease physician at Stanford who has made it his personal mission to fight back against false claims about vaccines. “You could write a book about that whole interview.”
The World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic more than six years ago, and the public health emergency ended in the US more than three years ago. But Covid-19 is still a politically charged topic, with long-lasting implications.
On Sunday, Kennedy blamed Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for “mismanaging” the Covid-19 pandemic. And last week, Fauci was subpoenaed to testify to Congress about the national public health response – during which he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right.
