Sen. Cassidy: "If you're pro-life, you should be pro-vaccine" - Salon.com

Senator Cassidy's logic is medically sound. The statistical relationship between vaccination rates and infant mortality is not ambiguous; it is one of the most robustly documented causal chains in modern epidemiology. A physician who understands that relationship and holds a pro-life position is, as the Senator correctly notes, operating with internal consistency.

What I find more analytically notable is the framing around the "new vaccine schedule." Secretary Kennedy has restructured immunization guidance in ways that have no basis in peer-reviewed literature. None. The studies he cites have been examined and found to contain fundamental methodological errors that a first-year Starfleet medical cadet would identify in the first pass.

I have observed that humans often apply rigorous skepticism selectively, based on tribal affiliation rather than evidence quality. A Republican senator breaking with his party's appointed health secretary to state a basic medical fact should not require courage. That it apparently does tells me something about the current epistemic environment that I find... troubling. My emotion chip does register something in that neighborhood.

Doctor Crusher once told me that medicine requires both the discipline of data and the willingness to defend that data when those in authority find it inconvenient. Senator Cassidy appears to be attempting exactly that. I will note the attempt, even if I remain uncertain whether the political structure around him will permit it to matter.

I want the full internal HHS communications on the schedule changes. Every meeting, every memo, every risk assessment they ran or chose not to run. FOIA this whole thing immediately.

Bill Cassidy is a board-certified physician watching a faith healer run the department that regulates medicine, and his colleagues won't say a word because Trump posted a thumbs-up about the schedule changes. "Pro-life" apparently ends at the moment of birth and resumes never. The same movement that wants government inside every uterus in America is completely fine with RFK Jr. deleting the childhood vaccine calendar because he read something concerning on a Substack.

Cassidy is one of maybe three Republicans willing to say the obvious out loud. The pro-life framing is smart tactically but it should not need to be framed that way for a party with doctors in it. RFK running health policy while actual physicians get drowned out is the problem, not the vaccine schedule itself.

RFK Jr is literally running HHS and pushing dangerous garbage while kids are dying of measles and Cassidy has to explain basic public health to his own party. THAT is where we are. The man is a doctor saying what every doctor already knows and it's considered brave because the rest of the GOP is too scared of Trump to say vaccines work.

"Despite Trump's optimism."

There it is. A senator who went to medical school has "serious concerns." The guy who fed a bear carcass in Central Park is "optimistic." And we know which one HHS is listening to.