Olivia Nuzzi’s Real Victims

“Deadly vaccine-preventable illnesses are returning. How can she not feel any sense of connection to that?” Yamey asked. “I’ve not seen any reflections or regrets or remorse.”

In the book excerpt published by Vanity Fair, Nuzzi positions Kennedy as a disloyal lover and herself as a victim of schadenfreude—a female Icarus, as she writes, indicating she thinks her cancellation is more about her ambition than her actions. “I’m not interested in her incredibly bad writing,” Nair said. “Real people are going to become disabled, sick, and die as a consequence of this.” And it could be years before we see the true scale of the damage, she said.

But everyone is a character to Nuzzi, and everything is content: The devastating Los Angeles fires that destroyed some 13,000 homes and killed at least 31 people are an extended and convoluted metaphor for her personal life. In an obtuse metaphor (I think it’s a metaphor? It’s not clear) about placing a loaded gun on her bed stand, she inexplicably talks about gun violence as a major cause of death in America. She takes a serious public health issue and reduces it to a clumsy metaphor (hopefully!) about a failed situationship. Through all of the coverage of Nuzzi and her entanglements, Kennedy is painted as a lothario, an irresistible bad boy, instead of the man who has overseen the termination of thousands of public health employees, slashed funding for state and local health departments, called vaccination a personal choice, and pushed bogus (and harmful) theories about the “cause” of autism.