The pandemic has ended, but the malady lingers on in a social disease: generalized distrust of public health officials. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a price we are still paying for the collapse of confidence in government that accelerated during covid-19.

Donald Trump, ever transactional, has nominated Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. This is Kennedy’s reward for his Damascene conversion from Trump despiser (July 2, 2024: “a terrible president”) to Trump endorser (Aug. 23, 2024). HHS has more than 80,000 employees, a budget of more than $1.84 trillion, and responsibilities encompassing matters of life and death: medical and other health policies.

The vaccinations that conquered smallpox were arguably humanity’s most suffering-reducing, life-enhancing technology in three millennia. Kennedy has said, and later denied saying, “No vaccine is safe and effective.” He has said polio vaccinations have caused soft tissue cancers that “kill many, many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.” Ample research refutes this, and his assertions linking vaccines to autism, and many other comparably reckless pronouncements. Presumably, had Kennedy been in the first Trump administration, he would have opposed the administration’s finest achievement: Operation Warp Speed. This produced the anti-covid vaccine, which Kennedy has called “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”

Kennedy’s flights of medical fancy are too numerous and, by now, too familiar to reprise here. They are, however, intensely interesting because they will soon test the degree of abject devotion, or paralyzing fear, that Senate Republicans feel regarding Trump. Kennedy himself, however, is interesting as a social type, and as a symptom.

Indifference to evidence, and an appetite for startling hypotheses, are well-known characteristics of cranks. Kennedy is a man-child incubated in an era saturated by social media, which are a banquet for perpetual adolescents hungering for affirmations of shocking beliefs, and indignant when contradicted.

Many normal Americans are understandably still smoldering about the behavior of some senior public health officials and institutions during the pandemic. Their clanging but mutable certitudes were brandished as excuses for the bullying that these officials obviously enjoyed doing. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offered spurious “public health” reasons that helped teachers unions avoid teaching and extort additional benefits from compliant state and local governments. And the National Institutes of Health anathematized those who wrote and subscribed to the Great Barrington Declaration. It correctly argued for pandemic measures that target the most vulnerable — not children, but the elderly and others with co-morbidities.

Kennedy’s nomination is receiving the scrutiny of two Senate committees this week, a week after the CIA announced that it, like the FBI and the Energy Department, believes a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China, was the likely source of the coronavirus that killed more than 7 million people, 1.2 million of them Americans. When Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) and others suggested this several years ago, the idea was denounced by those in the upper reaches of government and government-funded science as disinformation and, of course, racist.

An aroma of lunacy surrounds Kennedy’s enthusiasm for smashing the crockery of widely accepted scientific propositions that have been validated by scores of millions of lives saved. Nevertheless, many Americans are now indiscriminately skeptical, in reaction against the recent authoritarian dogmatism of, and censorship by, “experts.” They consider Kennedy’s aroma a breath of fresh air.

The self-discrediting of government experts did not begin with the pandemic. Armed with metrics imagined far from battlefields, “the best and the brightest” made Vietnam a social scientists’ war, waged for the “hearts and minds” of those on whose behalf we engaged in “nation building.” Experts knew Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Experts had “a government in a box, ready to roll in” to an Afghan province.

Some senators think it safe to confirm Kennedy because they assume that he, like a figurehead on the prow of a ship in the age of sail, will have prominence but no practical function. However, this crank with a messianic streak would probably surround himself not with talent but with the like-minded. He and they would influence what research is funded, and how its results are evaluated.

Finally, one of the most cost-efficient things government does is disseminate public health information. It saved millions of lives by stigmatizing smoking as demonstrably lethal, and therefore dumb. Kennedy, however, is still giving redundant evidence of terrible judgment. So, when on the rare occasions he is right, as he is about unhealthy aspects of Americans’ diets, he is often dismissed as a weird scold. Which he is.

George Will writes a column for the Washington Post.