Residents of the Gret Stet of Louisiana will recognize the guy on the right, our relentlessly wingnutty and deeply stupid Attorney General Jeff Landry. The guy on the left is best known for being the spitting image of his father. The son is pictured testifying before the Louisiana lege in opposition to a school vaccine mandate sought by Governor John Bel Edwards. The unholy alliance between Landry and the son of a liberal legend is why Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a repeat offender as malaka of the week.

In his appearance before the Gret Stet lege, Kennedy claimed that the COVID vaccine is the deadliest vaccine ever. Really? As of this writing, 790,000 and counting Americans have died from the virus and NONE have died because of the vaccine. Nada. Rien. Zip. Zilch. Bupkis.

After hearing Malaka RFK and Disphit Jeff, the House Health and Welfare Committee voted against the Edwards administration’s effort to add the COVID jab to the list of mandatory vaccines. There’s good news: the vote was performative. The Governor plans to veto the measure and will move forward with the vaccine mandate. It was all for show. That’s how Republicans roll in 2021.

Malaka RFK has been toiling in the anti-vaxx vineyards for many years. He went from being a respected environmental lawyer to a crackpot anti-vaxxer. He’s a particularly dangerous crackpot because of his family name. It’s a reminder that there are left wing anti-vaxxers out there to whom the Kennedy family name is meaningful.

The Kennedy family is famously close and clannish. Not in this instance. Before the pandemic his sister, brother, and niece wrote an op-ed criticizing his opposition to vaccinations. In that case, the MMR vaccine that protects against measles, mumps, and rubella. The safety and efficacy of MMR is long established., making Malaka RFK an equal opportunity crackpot.

As the COVID-19 vaccines began to roll out at the end of last year, RFK’s physician niece, Dr. Kerry Kennedy Meltzer wrote this in the New York Times:

I recognize, with some trepidation, that people may wonder why I feel I need to speak out publicly about vaccines and against my uncle. The truth is, his name and platform mean that his views carry weight. After three hours, his Facebook post accusing government regulators of abdicating their responsibility to protect the public had 4,700 reactions, 2,300 shares and 641 comments.

As a doctor, and as a member of the Kennedy family, I feel I must use whatever small platform I have to state a few things unequivocally. I love my uncle Bobby. I admire him for many reasons, chief among them his decades-long fight for a cleaner environment. But when it comes to vaccines, he is wrong.

I usually play this feature for laughs at the expense of the idiots and hypocrites who litter our political landscape. This is different: there are lives at stake. We’ve all been vaccinated at some point in our lives Polio was eradicated by a vaccine. Yet anti-vaxxers like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would have us turn the clock back on scientific and medical progress.

Malaka RFK has gone from scion to family outlier to public menace. He quite simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. His opposition to the MMR vaccine proves that. It’s been around since the 1960’s: the era in which his uncle and father inspired idealistic Americans to make our country a better place. RFK Jr. would have us turn back the clock because of his crackpot theories and hostility to science. And that is why Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is malaka of the week.

The last word goes to Jackson Browne with a song that’s an anti-war anthem, but whose title applies by analogy to the pandemic: