Dwain Northey (Gen X)

It was a dark day for science — the kind of day when reason itself packed up and left Washington for good — when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was sworn in as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Yes, that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — the man who once confessed to picking up a dead bear and hiding it in Central Park like some macabre trophy. The man who cut off the head of a whale and strapped it to the roof of his car, as though he were auditioning for a role in Moby-Dick: The Reckoning. And now, somehow, he’s the nation’s top health official — our grimly smiling guardian of vaccines, viruses, and vital signs.

Only in modern America could we hand the keys of public health to a man who’s spent decades waging war against it.

This is the man who solemnly insists that American children receive 75 vaccines, a number plucked straight from the fevered swamps of social media, bearing no resemblance to reality. The man who declares that no vaccine has ever been placebo-tested or verified for safety — a claim so false it would make a CDC scientist faint dead away.

And now, he lectures us about medicine, as if the last century of immunology were some grand pharmaceutical hoax.

This is a man who could sit in a lifeguard chair — whistle in mouth, zinc on his nose — and argue, without irony, that water doesn’t cause drownings. That what really kills swimmers is the government, the chlorine, or maybe a plot by Big Pool.

And yet this man, this oracle of misinformation, now stands atop the Department of Health and Human Services, gazing down on a nation he’s spent years convincing to distrust the very science that keeps it alive.

Why should we trust him? Because he’s a Kennedy? Because he once loved whales so much he decapitated one? Because he’s an environmental lawyer who thinks vaccines are a global conspiracy?

No — we shouldn’t trust him. Not with the truth. Not with our children. Not with a thermometer.

Public health depends on data, not delusion. Vaccines are tested, verified, and continually monitored. They are why our kids don’t die from polio or diphtheria or measles — not because of luck, but because of science. The same science that the new Secretary of Shadows mocks from his lifeguard chair of denial.

And that’s what makes this story terrifying. Not because it’s fiction, but because it’s happening in real time — a conspiracy theorist in charge of the nation’s health, rewriting reality, one falsehood at a time.

If he can convince you that vaccines cause harm, why not that water doesn’t drown? Or that gravity is a hoax?

Welcome to the new age of American health — where the Surgeon General will soon need an exorcist, and the CDC might as well stand for Conspiracy Denial Center.

The rest of us can only hope that science survives the storm.