Stephanie Grace: Bill Cassidy and the art of wishful thinking

As the vaccine conversation up in Washington moved from measles to COVID to hepatitis B, a thought occurred to me: Maybe the people who are now, somehow, in charge of our nation’s public health are just trolling U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy.

Cassidy, of course, is a doctor who has long been an eloquent, sober-minded proponent of safe, proven vaccines across the board. More specifically, Cassidy’s a gastroenterologist, a specialist in debilitating and potentially deadly liver diseases such as hepatitis B, which has an effective vaccine that’s been administered to newborns since 1991.

He’s also, in a twist that’s starting to feel downright Shakespearian, the man behind that “somehow.”

It was, of course, Cassidy’s support for confirming anti-vax conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services that set in motion the vaccine chaos that has now fully infected the country, certainly including those now trying to get COVID shots despite new, more limiting government recommendations. This although Cassidy assured us all that Kennedy had promised him he’d cause no such thing.

Here’s some of what Cassidy, who chairs the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said on the Senate floor in defense of his confirmation vote:

“After seeing patients die from vaccine-preventable diseases, I dedicated much of my time to vaccine research and immunization programs.”

And this:

“Regarding vaccines, Mr. Kennedy has been insistent that he just wants good science and to ensure safety. But on this topic, the science is good, the science is credible. Vaccines save lives. They are safe. They do not cause autism. There are multiple studies that show this. They are a crucial part of our nation’s public health response.”

And this:

“(Kennedy) has also committed that he would work within the current vaccine approval and safety monitoring systems, and not establish parallel systems. If confirmed, he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes. CDC will not remove statements on their website pointing out that vaccines do not cause autism.”

And yet.

Kennedy fired all members of that committee.

He then fired the head of the CDC after she refused to promise she’d rubber-stamp recommendations by the replacements he’d chosen.

The new committee then met and proceeded to sow mass confusion by changing recommendations on the combined measles, mumps, rubella and varicella vaccine and the COVID shot, in both cases in ways that will likely limit access and coverage. It tabled a proposal to change the recommendation for the hepatitis B vaccine to newborns, but not before sending out all kinds of conflicting signals.

And that was before last week’s big news conference, in which President Donald Trump himself took the lead on making a public connection between acetaminophen and autism, despite the fact that there’s zero scientific evidence of a causal link.

If all this didn’t already leave Cassidy squirming, there’s the added element of his rationale for backing Kennedy in the first place: He was trying to make nice with Trump and his most fervent supporters ahead of next year’s Republican primary, four years after Cassidy voted to convict Trump at impeachment for instigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress.

The really crazy twist here is that while Cassidy pushes back against Kennedy, he’s trying still trying to make nice. Even as he held a blistering Senate hearing on the CDC situation recently, he loudly insisted that Trump deserves a Nobel Prize for Operation Warp Speed, the first-term COVID vaccine development initiative. In criticizing Kennedy’s moves, he regularly sets up the idea that the secretary is actually undermining the president’s goals around transparency and making America healthy again, which is, of course, Kennedy’s catchphrase.

Not that Trump is helping Cassidy out there. At last week’s bonkers news conference, the president came out with dangerously unfounded medical recommendations of his own, saying repeatedly that pregnant women should tough it out rather than take Tylenol — he went with the brand name after struggling mightily to pronounce the active ingredient — even though doctors say high fever is dangerous to the baby. Trump also claimed that children don’t need the Hep B vaccine until they might become sexually active, although the reason for giving it at birth is to prevent transmission from mother to child.

It’s almost as if Cassidy thinks he can argue so persuasively that Kennedy’s not doing what Trump wants him to do that he’ll stop with the unfounded fearmongering. That this medical nightmare will end — and that when it does, he’ll no longer be the guy who sold out in the hopes of saving his own job.

That somehow, against all evidence, Trump is not very much in on the troll.