A former Obama administration official appeared on MSNBC Monday and used Monday’s school shooting in Wisconsin as an excuse to attack Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over his views on vaccines.
An unidentified shooter killed two people at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wis. before committing suicide. Dr. Kavita Patel told MSNBC host Chris Jansing that guns are a “public health crisis” before she attacked Kennedy’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Patel served in the Obama White House as the director of policy for the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement.
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“First responders know this better than anybody. They are not just the first to the scene, but I’ve been in the emergency room when we have had these shootings and we’re waiting for people, and we don’t get them,” Patel said. “Because… there are no people that can be saved, and then when you look at the aftermath of the violence, Chris, as we’ve seen, an escalation in the ability to print guns, the ease in which you can gain ammunition, the uneven pattern of laws, depending on the state you’re in and what the laws are, and, let’s just be honest, the culture of violence. I see it with my 10-year-old son, the video games his friends play. They normalize so much of this violence.”
“And I want to go back to American health policy. This is awful, but it’s a reminder that I need to keep at the screening that I do with patients on whether they have guns in the household, how they keep the guns safe, whether they have children in the household, what they do when other children visit their household,” Patel said. “I have had parents even say, ‘Should I ask other parents about guns in the household?’ I said you should. It should be a checklist, not even to think about it, but that’s part of what we’re talking about.”
President-elect Donald Trump announced Kennedy as his nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services in November. Kennedy in the past has questioned whether vaccines cause autism, a view popularized by a discredited study retracted by the Lancet in 2010.
“These are not just policies that we have to enact at our local level. They need to be implemented at the federal level,” Patel said. “And as we’re talking about a secretary of HHS potentially, we’re talking about people who are going to be in leadership position. They don’t even support science when we talk about vaccines. How are we going to depend on them to support the science around gun violence, as it’s literally unfolding in front of our eyes, and it’s tragic.”
Featured Image Credit: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America
