What changed? He is close to finally getting the government legitimacy he has craved, but escaped him in 2008. So he has flipped to things Republicans like. It is all for show. He has not changed.
Dave Mastio in The Kansas City Star wonders how Kennedy can be both an equity partner in a lawsuit against a vaccine while controlling the government agency that funds vaccine basic research?
"he’s switched from being a respectfully treated loony bin Democrat to being a respectfully treated basket-case Republican, but what hasn’t changed is his embrace of all kinds of dubious theories that have little consonance with the reality most Americans live in."
NIH and FDA wield so much power because his political party wanted control over private sector medicine development - if he is confirmed we will all pay the price. An anti-science progressive will control the most important science funding agency in the world.
His anti-vaccine beliefs were once so endemic to the Democratic party that his employer, that unimpeachable pillar of progressives called Natural Resources Defense Council, dismissed my criticisms of him as fringe because he was "mainstream" and he was such a beloved insider that a year after President Obama agreed with him that vaccines cause autism, he said he wanted him running EPA.

His more experienced advisors told him that was a bad idea, and his transition team had multiple UFO believers, a government conspiracy theorist, and a guy who thought girls can't do math.
Even they thought Bobby Jr. was nuts. His cousin calls him a "predator" and stories of him doing bizarre things like dumping animal carcasses in New York City's Central Park and then agreeing there should be an investigation into it, because it was probably a Republican gun nut, are legendary. He even invented a brain disease and diagnosed himself with it to claim he wouldn't be able to work so he could get lower alimony payments for the woman who left him due to his infidelity. His alimony did end, when she committed suicide.
That's who Republicans want representing them?
America was one of only two civilized countries that allowed abortion on-demand at any time, France caps it at 14 weeks, for example, but Kennedy wanted to keep it up to the moment of birth, and Democrats cooed he was a "champion" of women's right to choose because he defended late-term abortion for any reason. They have railed at a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy because the Supreme Court said Roe V. Wade was simply bad law, a position that President Biden agreed with when he was a Senator.
Kennedy no longer believes that. It is all about an opportunity to dismantle American trust in science and health, an agenda he has been joined in by Russia, who have spent two decades using offshore donor-advised funds to send money to groups that also hate American science and medicine.
When President Obama had to walk away from Kennedy, he gave his solar panel company $1.4 billion. Not bad for a tiny outfit with $17 million in revenue. Trump should cut him a check and send him on his way as well.
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