Shortly after birth, newborns in the United States receive a few quick procedures: an Apgar test to check their vitals, a heel stick to probe for genetic disorders and various other conditions, and in most cases, a hepatitis B vaccine. Without that last one, kids are at risk of getting a brutal, and sometimes deadly, liver condition. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana happens to know quite a lot about that. Before entering Congress in 2009, he was a physician who has said he was so affected by an 18-year-old patient with liver failure from the virus that he spearheaded a campaign that vaccinated 36,000 kids against hepatitis B.

Cassidy, a Republican, will now play a major role in determining the fate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick for health secretary, whose confirmation hearings begin today on Capitol Hill. Kennedy has said that the hepatitis B vaccine is given to children only because the pharmaceutical company Merck colluded with the government to get the shot recommended for kids, after the drug’s target market (“prositutes and male homosexuals,” by Kennedy’s telling) weren’t interested in the shot. Kennedy will testify in front of the Senate Finance Committee, where Cassidy and 26 other senators will get the chance to grill him about his views. Though it might seem impossible for an anti-vaccine conspiracist to gain the support of a doctor who still touts the work he did vaccinating children, Cassidy has not indicated how he will vote. Similar to the Democratic senators who have come out forcefully against Kennedy, Cassidy, in an interview with Fox News earlier this month, said that RFK Jr. is “wrong” about vaccines. But he also said that he did agree with him on some things. (Cassidy’s office declined my request to interview the senator.)

That Kennedy even has a chance of winning confirmation is stunning in its own right. A longtime anti-vaxxer with a propensity for far-fetched conspiracy theories, RFK Jr. has insinuated that an attempt to assassinate members of Congress via anthrax-laced mail in 2001 may have been a “false flag” attack orchestrated by “someone in our government” to gin up interest in the government preparing for potential biological weapon threats. He has claimed that COVID was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” and that 5G is being used to “harvest our data and control our behavior.” He has suggested that the use of antidepressants might be linked to mass shootings. Each one of these theories is demonstrably false. The Republican Party has often found itself at war with mainstream science in recent years, but confirming RFK Jr. would be a remarkable anti-science advance. If Republican senators are willing to do so, is there any scientific belief they would place above the wishes of Donald Trump?

A number of Republicans have already signaled where they stand. In the lead-up to the confirmation hearings, some GOP senators have sought to sanewash RFK Jr., implying that his views really aren’t that extreme. They have reason to like some of what he’s selling: After the pandemic, many Republicans have grown so skeptical of the public-health establishment that Kennedy’s desire to blow it up can seem enticing. And parts of RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda do in fact adhere to sound scientific evidence. His views on how to tackle America’s epidemic of diet-related diseases are fairly well reasoned: Cassidy has said that he agrees with RFK Jr.’s desire to take action against ultra-processed foods. Kennedy appears to have won over the two other Republican doctors on the committee, Senators Roger Marshall of Kansas and John Barrasso of Wyoming. Marshall has been so enthusiastic about Kennedy’s focus on diet-related diseases that he has created a “Make America Healthy Again” caucus in the Senate. Although Barrasso hasn’t formally made an endorsement, he has said that Kennedy would provide a “fresh set of eyes” at the Food and Drug Administration. (Spokespeople for Barrasso and Marshall did not respond to requests for comment.)

[Read: Everyone agrees Americans aren’t healthy]

Meanwhile, Kennedy appears to have gone to great lengths to sand down his extremist views and present himself as a more palatable candidate. “He told me he is not anti-vaccine. He is pro–vaccine safety, which strikes me as a rational position to take,” Senator John Cornyn of Texas told Politico. He has also done more to drum up unnecessary fear about COVID shots than perhaps anyone else in the country. Nearly four years ago, Kennedy petitioned the federal government to revoke authorization for the shots, because “the current risks of serious adverse events or deaths outweigh the benefits.” (COVID shots are highly safe and effective. A spokesperson for Kennedy did not respond to a request for comment.)

Especially on the right, Kennedy’s conspiracy theories have not consumed his candidacy: With concerns about conflicts of interest, his support of abortion, and generally strange behavior (such as dumping a dead bear in Central Park), there is much to debate. If Republican senators skirt around his falsehoods during today’s confirmation hearings, it will be evidence of their prevailing capitulation to Trump. And it also may be a function of Kennedy’s rhetorical sleights. As Benjamin Mazer recently wrote in The Atlantic, Kennedy is not simply a conspiracy theorist, but an excellent one. He’s capable of rattling off vaccine studies with the fluency of a virologist, which boosts his credibility, even though he’s freely misrepresenting reality.

[Read: RFK Jr. is an excellent conspiracy theorist]

During his recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Kennedy claimed that thimerosal, a preservative containing mercury used to protect vaccines from contamination, was found to cause “severe inflammation” in the brain of monkeys. Kennedy was able to quickly name the lead author and introduce the methods as if he has read the study hundreds of times. But Kennedy’s central claim—that the brains of monkeys given thimerosal were severely inflamed—is a “total misrepresentation” of the study, its lead author, Thomas M. Burbacher, told me. The problem is that Kennedy gets away with these claims because very few listeners are going to log onto PubMed to track down the study Kennedy is referencing, let alone read through the entire thing.

In theory, senators should be equipped to push back on his schtick. RFK Jr.’s positions are hardly a mystery, and senators have advisers to help them prepare for such hearings. Regardless of Kennedy’s pseudoscientific beliefs, some Republicans may support him simply because they are wary of bucking their president. Before Kennedy even makes it to a full vote from the Senate, he has to receive approval from the Senate Finance Committee: Given the tight margins in the committee, Kennedy can’t afford to lose a single vote from Republicans sitting on that panel, assuming that no Democrats support his nomination. I reached out to the offices of seven Republican senators on the committee who haven’t already backed Kennedy for clarity on where they stand; none of them gave me a straight answer on how they’d vote.

In all likelihood, the first big decision in Kennedy’s nomination will fall to Cassidy. He has proved willing to oppose Trump before. Cassidy was one of seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump during his second impeachment proceedings. That led Louisiana’s Republican Party to formally censure him, and has drawn him a primary challenger for his 2026 reelection bid. Although Cassidy criticized Trump during the 2024 campaign, he now seems eager to support him. “Today, the American people start winning again,” Cassidy wrote in a statement on Inauguration Day.

Perhaps Cassidy will still dissect Kennedy’s views with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. He likes to dive deep into health-care minutiae any chance he gets. (I would know: He once pulled out his iPad and lectured me and other reporters about some arcane drug-pricing policy.) But if today’s meeting is full of softball questions, it could put RFK Jr. on his way to confirmation. That would send a message that, science-wise, the Senate is willing to cede all ground. Trump could pursue the most radical parts of the Project 2025 agenda, such as splitting up the CDC, or Kennedy could launch a full-blown assault on vaccines—and the Senate would be in a much less powerful position to stop it even if it wanted to. If senators hand the keys of a nearly $2 trillion health-care agency to a known conspiracy theorist, anything goes.

Just outside New York City’s Central Park Zoo, not far from where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once stealthily deposited a dead bear cub, stands a bronze statue to another animal: Balto, the husky that, 100 years ago this month, played a leading role in a daring and perilous rescue that captured the world’s attention.

Nome, a small town in the northwestern reaches of the Alaskan territories, had been hit with an outbreak of diphtheria, a highly contagious and cruel respiratory infection that can be particularly deadly to the young. As the children of Nome and surrounding communities fell ill, and some died, the town’s one doctor sent a desperate plea to state and national officials for a fresh supply of the antitoxin serum needed to treat the infected and stem a larger epidemic.

But Nome, with its subarctic climate, was icebound in winter and nearly unreachable. With little time to waste, locals organized a relay of dogsleds to transport the needed doses across 674 treacherous miles of Alaskan wilderness in temperatures as low as 50 degrees below zero. In all, 20 heroic men and 150 dogs braved the unsparing elements to deliver the lifesaving serum. Balto anchored the final lap.

The centennial of this heroic expedition is particularly timely, coming as the United States Senate considers President Donald Trump’s nomination of Kennedy, a serial purveyor of dangerous disinformation about vaccines, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

[Read: We’re about to find out how much Americans like vaccines]

It is not too obvious, in 2025, to state that vaccines work. In 1921, before the scientific breakthrough that led to the Tdap vaccine, approximately 200,000 Americans were infected with diphtheria, and 15,000 died. By the turn of the century, thanks to compulsory vaccination of schoolchildren, the number of cases dwindled to almost nothing. From 1996 to 2018, America experienced an average of fewer than one case a year. Polio, measles, and many other potentially deadly diseases also were virtually eradicated by vaccines.

Yet a rising anti-vax movement, fueled by click-hungry demagogues and a growing populist revolt against experts, institutions, and mandates, threatens to drag America backwards. The movement was turbocharged by political resistance to the COVID vaccines, whose development Trump helped speed and deservedly heralded. Near-universal vaccination rates among America’s schoolchildren are dropping. Even slight declines threaten the herd immunity that protects entire communities from the spread of disease. Predictably, potentially deadly childhood diseases are becoming more common again.

For two decades, RFK Jr. has stood at the forefront of this anti-vaccine movement. In books, speeches, and social-media posts, he has championed a widely discredited theory that certain vaccines promote autism and suggested that life under America’s COVID-vaccine mandates was worse than under Hitler’s fascist regime (he apologized for the latter remark).

In 2021, The New York Times recently reported, Kennedy’s Children Health Defense organization petitioned the FDA to withdraw its authorization of the COVID vaccines, which already had saved hundreds of thousands of people and would allow Americans to resume their normal lives. In the petition, Kennedy’s organization argued that the vaccines were not only harmful but unnecessary, and embraced disproven and dangerous theories about alternative treatments.

[Read: What going ‘wild on health’ looks like]

In 2022, the attorney Aaron Siri, a top Kennedy adviser, filed a petition asking the FDA to rescind its approval of the polio vaccine, which, since its inception in the 1950s, has been used by billions of people and has helped subdue that dreaded scourge. For a time, Siri reportedly helped Kennedy screen candidates for future HHS positions and was thought to be in line for one himself, but a transition spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal last week that he was no longer involved.

Kennedy presents the Senate with an interesting dilemma. He bears the name, if not the outlook or gravitas, of his famous father. His emphasis on healthy eating and physical fitness to combat obesity is as sensible now as it was when First Lady Michelle Obama championed those causes in the previous decade, to the scorn of many Republicans. His environmentalism is so pronounced that Trump has publicly assured the “drill, baby, drill” crowd that Kennedy won’t “touch the oil and gas.” His anti-corporate bent and deep suspicion of government bureaucracy appeal to populists on the left and right. And government bureaucracies, which are particularly prone to inertia and special-interest influence, should be challenged.

But their renewal must be guided by facts, not exotic, debunked claims. If confirmed, Kennedy will oversee the FDA, which approves vaccines. He will have authority over the National Institutes of Health, which funds and underwrites essential research that leads to vaccines and cures, and the CDC, which plays a central role in quelling public-health threats. It is an awesome responsibility and a crucial platform, dangerous in the hands of a charlatan who places conspiracy theories over science.

[Read: RFK Jr. is in the wrong agency]

Vaccines and medications should be rigorously tested and scrutinized for their efficacy and side effects, free of pressure and lobbying from the firms that develop them. The public needs and deserves that confidence. But those tests and standards should be based on proven science and not quackery.

Kennedy will face intense questioning about all of this, as well as his stability and judgment, at his confirmation hearing, which is slated for Wednesday. If he is confirmed, his promotion of junk science and vaccine hesitancy could prove as threatening to American public health as the barriers posed by an unforgiving, frozen Alaskan wilderness were to the desperate children and parents of Nome a century ago.

At the foot of Balto’s memorial in Central Park are three words: Endurance, Fidelity, Intelligence. Can enough United States senators overcome political pressure and demonstrate those same qualities in the coming days?

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.

Few things are more satisfying than watching a show pull off a clever and high-octane episode. For those looking to revisit some greats, our writers and editors answer the question: What do you think is a perfect episode of TV?

The following contains spoilers for the episodes mentioned.

“The Panic in Central Park,” Girls (streaming on Max)

Maybe this is the former theater critic in me coming out, but the thing I love most is when a television series tells a complete story in miniature—a stand-alone short that puts a particular dynamic or relationship or cast member front and center. Girls, which revolves around four friends in New York City, has always been brilliant at this, and never more so than with “The Panic in Central Park,” a Marnie-centered episode that deals with the particular moment in young adulthood when fantasy becomes untenable.

“The Panic in Central Park,” like the best Girls episodes, is written by Lena Dunham and directed by Richard Shepard. It begins with Desi mournfully reproaching his “cruel” new wife, Marnie, for declining to go get a scone, ends with her asking for a divorce, and riffs on film history, romance, and codependency in between. The high-strung Marnie, out on a walk to clear her head, encounters her ex, Charlie, who’s almost unrecognizable. He whisks her away on a whirlwind New York City adventure involving a consigned red cocktail dress (Millennial Williamsburg’s answer to Pretty Woman), a fake identity, Italian food, a rowboat in Central Park, a robbery, and—finally—the revelation that Charlie is addicted to heroin. A sadder, wiser Marnie walks home barefoot, having accepted the idea that no one is going to save her. The episode is beautiful and incisive about the allure of the stories we wrap ourselves in and the power of shaking them off.

— Sophie Gilbert, staff writer

***

“If It Smells Like a Rat, Give It Cheese,” Survivor: Micronesia (streaming on Hulu and Paramount+)

If I could erase my brain in order to watch anything for the first time again, I would do it for the penultimate episode of Survivor: Micronesia. The 16th season of the reality game show is famously one of the best, and this episode is why. Watching it is like witnessing Alex Honnold climb El Capitan without ropes—except instead of sheer athleticism in the face of seemingly impossible odds, you’re seeing how master manipulators exploit social dynamics to get what they want. It’s the Olympics for those who prefer politics or gossip to sports.

People who haven’t watched Survivor often assume that it’s about “surviving” the wilderness, but it’s always primarily been about surviving human nature. Driven by power and social capital, the show has more in common with Game of Thrones than Naked and Afraid. Explaining exactly what happens in this episode would be like explaining an inside joke; you need to watch the whole season to get why it hits. Just know that it features Red Wedding–level of gameplay, setting the bar high for how far people will go to get ahead.

— Serena Dai, senior editor

***

“C**tgate,” Veep (streaming on Max)

Unlike a perfect movie, a perfect episode of television does not need to surprise you or make you cry. It just needs to move your beloved or loathed characters through the formula in an especially excellent way. But the element of surprise may be why I remember “C**tgate” so many years later. In this episode of Veep, Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) orchestrates two tasks that are both impossibly monumental and petty. She has to decide if she is going to bail out a bank owned by her current boyfriend, and she must find out who on her staff called her a “cunt” so loudly in public that it was overheard by a reporter.

These interweaving plots alone would make a perfectly satisfying episode. What makes it golden are two of the funniest, most unexpected subplots in Veep’s run. One involves a focus group for the bumbling White House liaison Jonah Ryan, now running for Congress in New Hampshire, who is workshopping an ad. The second is a surprise announcement by Selina’s daughter, a recurring sad sack who can never get her mother’s attention. Guess who she’s dating?

— Hanna Rosin, senior editor

***

“Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” The X-Files (streaming on Hulu)

If you’re seeking out a perfect episode of TV, the richest cache to search is the “case of the week” entries of The X-Files. The show wove an elaborate arc about aliens on Earth but saved most of its best material for the smaller stuff. “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” written by Darin Morgan, is a gothic short story, following FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) as they investigate a murder with the help of a tetchy local psychic named Clyde Bruckman (Peter Boyle).

This being The X-Files, Mulder is immediately taken with Bruckman’s clairvoyance, while Scully is skeptical—but Morgan’s script resolves each of Bruckman’s predictions about the future in clever, tragicomic ways, reinforcing Mulder’s belief while also finding ways to affirm Scully’s cynicism. It’s funny, dark, and beautifully acted—particularly between Anderson and Boyle—with an elliptical plot structure that feels wonderfully complex even by today’s TV standards.

— David Sims, staff writer

***

“It’s the End of the World” and “As We Know It,” Grey’s Anatomy (streaming on Netflix and Hulu)

I’ve previously written that after more than 20 seasons, it’s time for Grey’s Anatomy to come to an end. But in its early days, the series was responsible for some of the most memorable episodes of television: The second season’s two-part storyline, “It’s the End of the World” and “As We Know It,” demonstrated the show’s mix of humor and drama at its best.

Colloquially known as the “bomb in the body cavity” episodes, they tell the story of a patient who comes in with live ammunition in his chest. At the same time, the show’s powerhouse resident Dr. Miranda Bailey goes into labor, and two other characters perform surgery on her husband, who crashed his car on his way in. In the midst of some very suspenseful plotlines, the dialogue explores the relationships among, and vulnerabilities of, the characters in a beautifully human way. On a show that’s known for putting people in harm’s way, this pair of episodes focuses as much on the emotions as on the drama: the fear of losing someone you care about, and what it really means to be in love.

— Kate Guarino, supervisory senior associate editor

***

Season 2, Episode 10, The Mole (streaming on Netflix)

The Season 2 finale of Netflix’s reboot of The Mole is made perfect if you first watch all of the other episodes. The show’s formula is simple: 12 people collaborate on Indiana Jones–style missions to earn money for a prize pot, but one of them is a “mole” hired by the producers to sabotage the other contestants. Elimination isn’t based on your performance in missions. It’s about how accurately you identify the mole, according to your answers on a quiz given each round.

What results is sumptuous chaos, set among abandoned buildings and real explosives that make you wonder what the release form for this show must look like. Everyone is pretending to be the mole (to mislead others) while testing their fellow players (to figure out who the mole is) and still, somehow, trying to collect money for the prize pot. Oh, and did I mention that Ari Shapiro of All Things Considered fame is this season’s host?

I won’t spoil the finale, but it involves minefields and three equally mole-like characters. There’s not a single weak link in this episode, and if you correctly guess who the mole is, you’ll have bested much of the internet.

— Katherine Hu, assistant editor

***

“Chocolate With Nuts,” SpongeBob SquarePants (streaming on Paramount+)

At about 11 minutes per segment, SpongeBob SquarePants doesn’t have much room to play around with. But its best episodes use that brevity to their advantage, stuffing in visual gags, one-liners, callbacks, goofy voice acting, and witty repartee. “Chocolate With Nuts,” from the third season, is the greatest example of the show’s “run out the clock” ethos: SpongeBob and his best friend, Patrick, become chocolate-bar salesmen to achieve “fancy living.” Their ensuing door-to-door journey introduces them to a cavalcade of bizarre Bikini Bottom dwellers, including a seemingly immortal, shriveled-up fish and a man who feigns “glass bones” syndrome in one of many efforts to dupe the boys into buying chocolate from him instead.

More than most episodes of this kids’ cartoon, “Chocolate With Nuts” threads the needle between the juvenile hijinks and some more adult themes: the empty promise of the good life, the uphill battle of entrepreneurship, the fallacy of “trust thy neighbor.” That headiness is all conveyed through SpongeBob’s elastic face and Patrick’s gobsmacking vacuousness—the best way to explore any nuanced concept, in my view.

But the primary reason I have been rewatching this episode for more than 22 years now is its unassuming density. SpongeBob is wonderfully breezy, but its hidden strength is how layered each joke is: I laugh at different things every time—a certain line delivery, a certain facial expression—and impulsively repeat its most memorable quotes. “Chocolate,” says the pruned old-lady fish, wistfully. “Sweet, sweet chocolate. I always hated it!”

— Allegra Frank, senior editor

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The anti-social century The army of God comes out of the shadows. The agony of texting with men

The Week Ahead

September 5, a drama film detailing an ABC Sports crew’s efforts to cover the massacre at the 1972 Olympics in Munich (in theaters nationwide Friday) Season 2 of Severance, a sci-fi series about a corporate employee who agrees to surgically “sever” his personal life from his work life (streaming on Apple TV+ on Friday) The JFK Conspiracy, a book by Josh Mensch and Brad Meltzer about the first assassination attempt on John F. Kennedy (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Jackson Gibbs

Parents Are Gaming Their Kids’ Credit Scores

By Michael Waters

Several years ago, Hannah Case decided to examine her personal credit history. Case, who was then a researcher at the Federal Reserve, hadn’t gotten her first credit card until she was 22. But as she discovered when she saw her file, she’d apparently been spending responsibly since 14.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

The reason The Brutalist needs to be so long The payoff of TV’s most awaited crossover What to read when the odds are against you September 5 captures a crisis becoming must-watch TV. The bizarre brain of Werner Herzog The film that rips the Hollywood comeback narrative apart

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Trump’s sentencing made no one happy. Trump is right that Pax Americana is over, Charles A. Kupchan argues. Why “late regime” presidencies fail

Photo Album

A man watches as flames from the Palisades Fire close in on his property in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Ethan Swope / AP)

The Palisades Fire grew quickly in California, burning many structures and sending thick plumes of smoke into the air. These photos show parts of Los Angeles scorched by the wildfire.

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