This Trump crank is less welcome — and way, way more dangerous — than a full colonoscopy

I got a colonoscopy the other day: something everyone who has one seems to complain about. They bitch about being required to drink the prep that cleans you out, then about having a tube up the nether regions, albeit while unconscious.

Quite frankly, I look forward to it. This is, after all, a medical marvel that can prevent cancer or catch it in the earliest stages. This time, I had a single benign polyp removed and was told to come back in seven years’ time.

Colonoscopy is a preventive measure every adult from middle-age onward should schedule at regular intervals, to stave off colon cancer. This is simple common sense and one of many reasons why we now live longer than ever before.

Think about this: in 1826, the average American adult could expect to live to about 38 years old. Yes, extremely high infant and child mortality was largely responsible for bringing that number down, along with rampant infectious disease and lack of sanitation. But in general, you often died pretty young.

By 1926, U.S. life expectancy had risen to roughly 58, a two-decade jump. A hundred years later, that number stands a few ticks above 78, another 20-year leap.

In other words, the average time each of us has on earth has effectively doubled over the past two centuries. All things considered, that’s not too shabby.

Enter Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Assuming the role last year, he saw not a human population doing pretty well, and a medical establishment making astonishing progress against maladies that once killed by the millions, but a toxic hellscape of death from which only he could save us.

Remember: this man has no medical background, no formal medical education, and no conventional medical expertise. His knowledge of medicine is no greater than yours or mine or that of any other layman. He’s a lawyer, specializing in environmental cases.

And yet he claims to know more than the medical and scientific establishments combined.

It’s frightening just how dangerous this guy is. His crackpot views in declaring war on vaccination have exploded into a genuine crisis, because he’s convinced a not-insignificant portion of the U.S. population that all vaccines are hazardous – considerably more perilous than the diseases they’re designed to prevent.

This is, in a word, insane. And it’s threatening us all.

Kennedy likes to believe that this is all about individual choice. In fact, it involves so much more. Misguided or irresponsible parents who listen to him and decide not to vaccinate their child may help spread a pathogen that can infect and kill other kids and adults — entire communities, even.

This makes RFK Jr. as great a menace to mankind as any we face in our actual environment. In working so diligently to fix a system that isn’t broken, he puts all our lives in danger.

Last week, Kennedy made headlines with his mind-boggling admission that he used to “snort cocaine off of toilet seats,” apparently seeking to make the point that he isn’t scared of germs and in fact sees them as his friends, key to strengthening the immune system.

That is all well and good, as are his ideas around nutritious diets, eliminating processed foods, and reducing contaminants. But then off he goes into nutzo land with things like “terrain theory” (focusing on body environment as a defense against infection) and eschewing established biomedical science and core principles as hopelessly flawed.

What RFK Jr. and those who follow his warped thinking fail to acknowledge is that America, and the world, was not too long ago caught in the grip of crippling and often deadly epidemics involving smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, and polio, events that spurred massive suffering and mortality.

Through vaccines, in tandem with antibiotics and other medical advances, we have largely defeated these sources of significant misery. Modern miracles of scientific know-how abound — vaccines very much to the fore. And yet a small but growing percentage of the population now sees them as unsafe.

I’ll tell you what’s unsafe: actually being stricken with these dreadful conditions, as those who must now endure measles as part of various outbreaks are finding.

In spring 2020, when we were all consumed with fear over COVID-19, I was one of some 40,000 people who volunteered for the Pfizer vaccine trial. Friends praised me as “courageous” but I didn’t see it that way. I felt fortunate to be jumping the line, secure in the idea that ingesting an unproven serum was likely safer than contracting the actual virus, which was killing by the thousands.

I didn’t get sick, the vaccine graduated to widespread use, and millions of lives were saved. Do you hear people quaking in fear over COVID anymore? No. The reason is the vaccines. Nonetheless, RFK Jr. seems determined to ultimately pull them off the market, as improperly tested and potentially harmful.

I know Kennedy has no use for data, but here’s some anyway. Per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2020, the first full year of the pandemic, COVID claimed an estimated 350,800 U.S. lives. In 2021, that toll peaked at 416,900, the third-leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer.

By 2024, the last year for which statistics are fully available, the number of deaths from COVID had dropped to 31,400. That’s still significant, but the disease had fallen out of the top 10 U.S. causes of death.

You think that happens without a vaccine? Not a chance in hell.

The bottom line is, we don’t need vaccines to disappear. Quite the contrary. We need RFK Jr. to go away. Now.

• Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.