IT IS not hard to construct a scenario in which Donald Trump’s plans to “Make America Healthy Again” (or MAHA) do the opposite of that. His proposed secretary of health, Robert F. Kennedy junior, is one of the country’s more prominent vaccine sceptics. The man who would be in charge of the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which provides health coverage for two in five Americans, would be Mehmet Oz, a TV doctor who has talked about the medical benefits of communicating with the dead and invited a Reiki healer to assist him during surgery. Dave Weldon, a former congressman and doctor, who has also cast doubt on the safety of vaccines, would lead the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which oversees the country’s vaccine schedules. Unless the Nixon-to-China theory applies to public health, these are not the people America would want in charge of public health in a pandemic—or even just a regular epidemic.
