Get ready to welcome back polio and welcome back measles and other preventable viruses if Donald Trump has his way and makes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the secretary of Health and Human Services, endangering us all. Bobby Kennedy is a dangerous crank, a vaccine-denier who is a threat to public health and who should not become the top person in charge of public health for the country. There are few government departments that have as direct a role in Americans’ daily lives, in ways they notice and in many ways they don’t. The food we eat, the medicines we take, the research that gets conducted to support the development of pretty much every pharmaceutical in the country, tracking emerging diseases, combating the opioid epidemic, resettling refugees, setting rules for and disbursing Medicare and Medicaid, establishing foster care standards and much, much more all run through HHS. RFK is not a manager or a bureaucrat interested in steering the department towards its mission; he’s a committed ideologue who’s made his career out of very publicly wanting to torch just the sort of functions HHS does. He isn’t just anti-establishment, he’s an arsonist let loose on a dry forest. There’s a certain mistrust of Big Pharma and their regulatory agencies that RFK can easily exploit here — some of it justified due to a historically over-cozy relationship between the industry and the government. And while many lives have been saved, there have also been disasters. We don’t mean Kennedy’s wild contention that childhood vaccines cause autism, something for which there is no zero credible evidence, but how pharmaceutical companies like Purdue got consumers hooked on opioids while knowing these were highly addictive. Other companies have engaged in dangerous pharmaceutical and food production practices, often unimpeded by regulators that were too slow or too deferential. The solution to that problem, though, is certainly not to have the enormous government department that oversees it all headed by someone who wants to combat the power of the pharma industry by targeting not monopolization or unscrupulous business practices but science itself. Kennedy could very realistically help bring back all-but-eradicated diseases. He could attempt to yank certification for approved pharmaceuticals ranging from abortion drugs to vaccines. He could try to use the vast reach of the department’s research funding and the buying power of Medicare and Medicaid to try to stop the development of certain pharmaceuticals altogether, effectively stopping them from existing at all. Think of another pandemic of anywhere near similar magnitude and severity to COVID. The impact of having RFK at the helm could potentially be measured in millions more dead, a statement that is impossible not to make sound like an exaggeration but which is perfectly plausible. Here is a man whose most salient political position is that perhaps humanity’s greatest-ever and most-lifesaving public health invention — preemptive inoculation against pathogens — is dangerous. This is not damage that could be quickly reversed by a subsequent administration; we would be potentially setting public health back by years in ways that would be hard to address. If smallpox and polio come back and alternative scam remedies are allowed to further proliferate, this is going to be a hard genie to put back in the bottle. For the health and safety of their own constituents, senators must be a firm no on RFK.