By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – Hawaii’s Democratic Gov. Josh Green, a physician formerly affiliated with the National Health Service Corps, says if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services, he will scare people from being vaccinated and many people, as a result, will die.
Interviewed by Al Sharpton on MSNBC, Green said that was exactly the result when there was a measles outbreak on Samoa in 2019 when Kennedy spoke against vaccination. Green was Hawaii’s lieutenant governor at the time and “I was contacted by the Prime Minister of Samoa to come in with a medical mission team, which we did. We came in with over 70 health care providers, myself included, and we did 36,997 vaccinations over two days and measles stopped,” Green said.
However, what Kennedy did by “destroying the confidence in that nation’s healthcare system directly resulted in the deaths of up to 83 people,” almost all of them children, under the age of 5, Green said. “When you scare people away from getting vaccinated or from other public health initiatives, they run for cover and they expect to get good advice. They rely on good advice. But this person (Kennedy) torpedoed and destroyed their confidence, and those individuals died and we had to come in and save the situation.”
Green predicted that will happen again if Kennedy is confirmed as HHS secretary. “Millions of people won’t get vaccinated … and it will either kill young individuals and our children or will leave them with neurologic damage.”
The Hawaii governor who was elected in 2022 after serving as lieutenant governor also criticized Kennedy’s opposition to treating drinking water with fluoride. He told Sharpton, “When children don’t get any fluoride in their water, they end up with terrible, terrible oral health, which leads to delayed development. They can’t eat properly. There are all sorts of infections that occur.”
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CNN speculated that Jared Kushner, son-in-law of President-elect Donald Trump, will play an important informal role developing Middle East policy in Trump’s second administration. In Trump’s first term, Kushner, then a senior White House adviser, was a key envoy who helped shape the 2020 Abraham Accords, which led to Israel establishing diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.
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U.S. Senator-elect Adam Schiff (D-California) told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Attorney General-designate Matt Gaetz is “not only unqualified, he is really disqualified.” The Congressman, who led the successful impeachments of former President Trump, suggested that, “the whole point with these nominees, several of them, is their unqualification, is their affirmative disqualification. That’s Trump’s point because what he wants to do with these nominees is establish that the Congress of the United States will not stand up to him with anything. … If they will confirm Matt Gaetz, they will do anything he wants.”
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Will Scharf, an attorney on Trump’s legal team who helped to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court that a President is immune from prosecution if his actions were in pursuance of his official duties as the nation’s chief executive, has been designated by Trump to be an Assistant to the President and White House secretary.
Scharf came up through Missouri politics, running unsuccessfully earlier this year against the incumbent state attorney general Andrew Bailey. He was an organizer of “Jews Against Soros,” which contended that the Jewish philanthropist George Soros’ agenda is anti-Israel and supportive of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
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Senator-elect Elissa Slotkin (D-Michigan) told Martha Raddatz of ABC News that she is worried that Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, will politicize the military. “They’ve been very clear that they’re putting together some sort of panel that’s gonna look at generals, people who have served their nations their entire lives, over multiple administrations, Democrat and Republican, in combat, they are now openly talking about dismissing them like some sort of kangaroo court. … You can imagine the stress in the Pentagon about that, but also in the future of who we are as a military, right? Our military and the role of the military is in the Constitution for a reason, and I think we’re really at risk of politicizing the military in a way that we can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”
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INTERNATIONAL
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s home in Caesarea was once again targeted by bombs. Two incendiary bombs were discovered Nov. 16 in the garden of the home, at which neither Netanyahu nor members of his family were present. Last month, the residence was attacked by a drone launched from Lebanon by Hezbollah.
Israel’s President Isaac Herzog was prevented from attending the Nov. 11-29 climate change summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, when Turkey denied permission for his aircraft to cross its airspace. Herzog said the cancellation was due to security concerns. Called the COP 29 summit, it is the 29th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Chage.
Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum told a news conference in Mexico City last week that notwithstanding President-elect Trump’s plan to mass deport undocumented migrants to their countries of origin, she anticipates that relations between the U.S. and Mexico will remain very good. “We’ll continue the high-level dialogue we’ve had on the issues of fentanyl, migration and the economy, which is fundamental to strengthen our economic relationship,” she said. The United States is Mexico’s largest trading partner.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has received permission from U.S. President Joe Biden to use American-supplied long-range missiles to strike deep within Russia, which had been banned previously.
South Africa’s Tony Leon, founder of the Democratic Alliance (DA) and MP Glynnis Breytenbach won Absa Jewish Achiever Awards on Sunday night in the Sandton neighborhood of Johannesburg. Leon, who was part of the DA’s negotiating team for a government of national unity, won the award for professional excellence. Breytenbach, recently elected to co-chair Parliament’s Constitutional Review Committee, was this year’s Europcar Women in Leadership Award winner.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.