Hello.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. keeps fact-checkers busy when he does television interviews, goes on podcasts, and, as he did last week, testifies at congressional hearings.

Among myriad misleading statements he’s made recently, I’ve thought most about his remarks on Covid because I covered it in excruciating detail for years. Along with other journalists and researchers, I’ve analyzed where America went wrong, hoping that detailed critiques would drive changes to defend against a repeat disaster. There’s room for debate on how the response could have been handled differently, but the problems cited by Kennedy, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, don’t check out.

At the hearing, Kennedy told senators he didn’t know how many people died from Covid in the U.S., saying, “I don’t think anybody knows that, because there was so much data chaos.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is pretty clear, however. It counts more than 1.23 million U.S. Covid deaths since the start of the pandemic, adding that Covid is listed as the underlying cause of death in 87% of these — which represents over a million of them. For the others, Covid is listed as a contributing cause.

However many deaths he thinks there were, Kennedy has blamed them on the CDC. At the hearing, he defended ousting the agency’s director, and the high-level resignations that followed, by saying the CDC failed “miserably” during the pandemic. “I need to fire some of those people to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” he said, noting that the people at the CDC who “put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving.”

These accusations are fraught because face masks slow the spread of Covid, meaning they curb infections and save lives. (Many argue the CDC was, in fact, slow to recommend them.) And the CDC didn’t dictate school closures. Rather, states made those decisions.

This isn’t to say the CDC was perfect. Rather than ramp up Covid testing capacity in January and February 2020, like Germany and South Korea did, the CDC followed a historical protocol in which all tests had to be run by the agency, instead of by academic and private labs across the country. That resulted in a massive bottleneck that prevented people from accessing tests as the outbreak exploded in America. Secondly, the CDC struggled to respond to Covid outbreaks because health departments were trying to communicate data through achingly slow technology, like fax machines.

These failings led to initiatives to modernize data collection and revamp the country’s approach to testing for emerging diseases. They were underway when Trump returned to office. But since then, the CDC’s information center has been gutted and funds for disease surveillance cut.

And then there’s the matter of Covid vaccines. Many have criticized the government’s failure to limit the price of mRNA vaccines, despite its enormous investments into their development and manufacturing, and its reluctance to press Moderna and Pfizer to license the technology, so that other countries could have produced shots in time to save millions of lives.

Kennedy, meanwhile, has furthered mistrust in Covid vaccines, without evidence calling it the “deadliest vaccine ever made” in 2021. As health secretary, he’s pulled millions in mRNA research funding.

Other reasons help explain why America fared so poorly during Covid, including vast inequities, overcrowded jails and prisons, and a lack of protection for workers in health care, meatpacking plants, and other essential jobs.

Pandemic experts often talk about a cycle of panic and neglect. What’s happening now is different. It’s more like panic and revision.

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