Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used to impress me. In the early 2000s, he did excellent work as an environmental lawyer taking on industrial hog farms that were fouling creeks and rivers, and we talked about making a visit together to North Carolina to document the pollution.

But then Kennedy began to urge me to write about childhood vaccines, citing discredited arguments that they caused autism. I had read the vaccine research and considered his views uninformed, conspiratorial and dangerous, and his dogmatism soured me on his judgment in general. I decided it would be inappropriate to quote someone with such a mind-set.

And if a person isn’t qualified to be quoted in a column, he probably isn’t the best choice to run America’s health programs.

That’s particularly true because one of the biggest potential threats to this country — albeit one difficult to gauge — is an avian flu pandemic, for bird flu is mutating and spreading to cows and other mammals. If there is a pandemic, then vaccines will be essential. Perhaps the single best thing that President Trump did in his first term was to start Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership that accelerated the development of Covid-19 vaccines and saved many lives.

What would happen if there were a need for another Operation Warp Speed, but this time the point man on health was suspicious of vaccines — including those that arrested the last pandemic?

The coronavirus vaccine is “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” Kennedy falsely claimed, and in May 2021 he petitioned the government to revoke authorization for it — even though by then the vaccine already had saved 140,000 lives, one study found.