Our hyperpolarized politics as well as a malfunctioning Congress may end up making Americans much less healthy.
The Senate confirmation and recent actions taken by the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., highlight the utter dysfunction in our politics and within the legislative body strangled by partisanship.
Prior to being elected to the Senate, Sen. Bill Cassidy was a practicing physician, who not only believed in vaccinations, he promoted them to patients living in his home state of Louisiana. Cassidy now chairs the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) in the Senate.
Long-time vaccine skeptic Kennedy appeared in front of the HELP committee before moving on to the full Senate for confirmation. Kennedy needed Cassidy’s vote to win confirmation as HHS secretary.
Kennedy met with Cassidy several times before his confirmation vote and reassured Cassidy that he would “maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes.”
To be fair, Cassidy was attempting to do his advice and consent role as a U.S. senator in good faith, but it comes as no surprise, even probably to Cassidy, that Kennedy did not maintain his word.
On June 9, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Kennedy announced that he planned to fire all 17 members of the panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on vaccines.
The CDC advisory group, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), holds hearings on vaccine safety and efficacy, and makes recommendations about who should use the shots approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Kennedy said the firings were a way to restore faith in vaccines and wrote: “The committee has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine.”
This claim as well as other accusations that Kennedy made against ACIP have been debunked by publications, including Barron's.
Just two hours after the publication of the op-ed, members of the ACIP panel received termination notices from the CDC, according to a copy of the email seen by POLITICO.
Following the ACIP terminations, Cassidy posted on X: “Of course, now the fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion. I’ve just spoken with Secretary Kennedy, and I’ll continue to talk with him to ensure this is not the case.”
Kennedy is playing Cassidy for a fool as The Washington Post reported on June 11 that Kennedy has chosen eight replacements, including Vicky Pebsworth, who is on the board of the National Vaccine Information Center, the nation’s oldest anti-vaccine group.
Another member, Robert W. Malone, a biochemist, previously sued The Washington Post, alleging defamation over the newspaper’s reporting on his advocacy against the coronavirus vaccine. The case was dismissed in 2023.
The ACID panel is scheduled to meet on June 25-27. Recommendation votes are scheduled for coronavirus, influenza, meningococcal, HPV, and RSV vaccines for adults, pregnant women, and infants. A quorum of at least eight ACIP members is required to hold a vote.
The following medical and professional organizations have condemned Kennedy for firing the previous committee members. These include the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians, the American Association of Immunologists, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the American Nurses Association.
During its annual meeting on June 10, the AMA called for Kennedy to immediately reverse his decision and called for a Senate investigation into his actions.
There is almost no one who thinks that will happen and there is no chance that the Senate will investigate Kennedy, especially given that Republicans are in the majority in both the House and Senate, despite Kennedy lying under oath during his Congressional confirmation hearings.
Cabinet members can be impeached, and, in our history, two cabinet members have been. They were the Secretary of War William W. Belknap in 1876 and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in 2024. Neither was removed from office following the impeachment trials.
Cassidy tried to uphold his responsibilities at the front end of Kennedy’s confirmation, and it remains to be seen if Cassidy will do anything stronger than talking to Kennedy on the back end.
Because of hyper partisanship and polarization, Congress no longer conducts its good governance responsibilities, and in the case of Kennedy and HHS, it may harm the health and well-being of countless Americans.
While no one is surprised by Kennedy’s actions in the highest position of our top health agency, we should be no less alarmed by the consequences.
Lynn Schmidt is a columnist and Editorial Board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She holds a master's of science in political science as well as a bachelor's of science in nursing.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.