I Shudder to Imagine Kennedy Running Our Health Agencies.

Opinion|When ‘Just Asking Questions’ About Science Turns Into 300,000 Dead

The Senate has just confirmed as health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, a science denialist who once said there is no vaccine that is safe and effective, who has suggested that Covid might have been genetically engineered to spare Jewish and Chinese people and who spent more than 100 pages in his recent book breathing new life into the idea that H.I.V. does not cause AIDS.

All of this is nonsense, of course, but hardly a laughing matter. I am afraid for our country because I know what happens when science denialism comes into power.

In the mid-2000s, I lived in South Africa, then governed by President Thabo Mbeki, who was also no stranger to the ideas of AIDS denialists. Amid an explosive AIDS epidemic in the late 1990s, Mr. Mbeki stumbled, most likely in late-night surfing of the internet, onto the fringe view that H.I.V. doesn’t cause AIDS and that the antiretroviral drugs used to keep it in check — the same type of drugs I take every morning and have for almost 30 years — were poison.

Mr. Mbeki, in thrall to these ideas, many of which came from America, refused to allow antiretroviral therapy to be used in the country’s health system. His health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, recommended healthy eating, with lots of beets, ginger and garlic, to ward off sickness.

A Harvard study later found that at least 330,000 people died, and over 35,000 children were born with H.I.V. as a result of Mr. Mbeki’s reign of error on AIDS treatment policy.

We are at risk of seeing history repeat itself in the United States, with our own Manto Tshabalala-Msimang-in-waiting in Mr. Kennedy Jr., whose science denialism is a more pernicious variant of the South African version.