I WAS A teenage (and older) quack (Shutterstock).

Not since James Watt, secretary of the interior in the Eighties, shrugged his shoulders about the environment because he believed that the world was going to end soon anyway, has the U.S. had such an “interesting” Cabinet member as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

A skeptic of vaccination, he is a non-scientific fella without any knowledge of science in the kind of “just common sense” school of medicine that brought us a suggestion to try using Clorox as a treatment for the coronavirus.

RFK Jr.’s qualifications include denying that HIV and/or AIDS are real diseases and suggesting that chemical trails from jet aircraft (commonly called “contrails”) might deliberately be laced with bad stuff for weather modification or population control.

Now comes an announcement from the White House suggesting a link between autism and Tylenol, a discovery sure to cheer the folks from Advil, Bayer aspirin and Aleve.

I feel a kind of sympathy with RFK Jr. because in m my time I have advocated for certain – how shall I put this?– “research-light” – theories about health.

These are – no kidding – things I used to believe, or a least try…

• apple cider vinegar as an antibiotic or antiseptic applied directly to a wound, burn or bite. OWWWWWWThccch!
• wheat germ as a flea-repellant on dog food. All four paws down from Cassie, the retriever.
• more people died from the improper use of mayonnaise (cole slaw, macaroni salad and potato salad) than drunk driving and gunshot wounds. OK, an exaggeration, but not by much.

Those ideas may sound ridiculous, but they said the same thing about malaria being caused by swamp gas. Oh, wait, that was UFOs, wasn’t it? …