RFK’s individualist rhetoric hides a deeper public health threat

In less than a year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken a bonesaw to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. While his supporters have touted it as the liberation of public health that will “make America healthy again,” a growing chorus of doctors and medical organizations are sounding the alarm that it will cost the lives of children, older adults and disabled people, mangling our medical system for generations.

Kennedy, 71, has no medical or government background, but since his appointment in February, he has undertaken massive changes to the nation’s many agencies tasked with keeping people alive and healthy. That includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which monitors for disease outbreaks, and the Food and Drug Administration, which approves new medications and treatments.

Last week, at Kennedy’s behest, the CDC removed the statement “vaccines do not cause autism” from its vaccine safety page, tweaking it with “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” Apparently, Kennedy has never heard of the burden of proof or the extreme difficulty in proving a negative. This is no minor revision — it not only broke one of many promises Kennedy made to Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., the deciding vote in Kennedy’s confirmation, but it drew widespread outcry from doctors, scientists and other public health experts. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told KFF Health News that Kennedy and his “nihilistic Dark Age compatriots have transformed the CDC into an organ of anti-vaccine propaganda.”

This is only one of dozens of ways in which Kennedy has crusaded against standards in science and health. Kennedy has fired thousands of employees across the board (including mere weeks after a mass shooting at CDC headquarters), gutted billions in research funds, attacked medications from antidepressants to acetaminophen (Tylenol), and dismantled and recast vaccine advisory bodies with “noted vaccine skeptics and conspiracy theorists,” as PBS reported. Kennedy has long railed against these institutions because, he says, they have been co-opted by industry and are dedicated to extracting profit from public health instead of fortifying it.

There’s no denying Americans’ health is dismal, and a big part of that is major conflicts of interest between pharmaceutical giants, corporate agriculture and the departments that regulate them. Kennedy is absolutely right that this system needs reform — but his prescriptions aren’t well-informed by evidence and seem poised to exacerbate the problem.

Still, Kennedy is beloved by many, and not just on the right. When he suspended his bid for president in 2024 and endorsed then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, many saw it as a perk that the current president would let him “go wild on health,” as Trump put it. And that’s just what he has done.

Yet so much of the media coverage around Kennedy, especially lately, has focused more on his personality and lurid life history rather than the chaos and destruction he has sown. The Atlantic graced their latest cover with Kennedy, complete with a glamour shoot, fawning at the camera with a rosary in hand like a choir boy. The accompanying headline, “The most powerful man in science,” is more than a little misleading. Saying he’s the “most powerful” is a little like saying the fastest driver in NASCAR is a nuclear bomb. What are we even comparing here? Kennedy isn’t in science in the literal sense and certainly not from any sort of merit. He’s never run a clinical trial, treated a patient or published academic research. He landed his position because the current president returns favors like a Mafia boss and is enamored with the idea of a Kennedy being in his cabinet, not to mention the disdain Trump has for public health, as demonstrated during the botched reponse to COVID-19 in 2020.

To his credit, author Michael Scherer professes good intentions in featuring Kennedy in such an adulatory light: to help bridge some of the political division plaguing our country. Maybe if we can step inside Kennedy’s mind, we can find some middle ground and actually work toward a healthier America.

It’s a lofty goal, but it might not be very relevant, just like the absurd details of Kennedy’s melodramatic history. Even Scherer finds it hard not to profile the secretary without at least glancing at his many bizarre escapades, from dumping a dead bear in Central Park to allegedly eating barbecued dog, to hand-waving away sexual assault allegations with the explanation “I am not a church boy.” The article paints Kennedy’s long struggles with addiction and infidelity leading to his current position of influence as a sort of Dantesque excursion, “back from hell, still fighting to fulfill his birthright.”

It’s a fascinating profile, but we really don’t need any of these details any more than we need New York Magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi gushing about her inappropriate personal relationship with Kennedy. Again, flush with cosmopolitan snapshots, the recent New York Times profile of Nuzzi glosses over some severe problems.

“Nuzzi did not want to discuss Kennedy’s tenure as secretary of health and human services,” Jacob Bernstein reports in the Times profile, while Nuzzi says, “I don’t have any interest in offering punditry.”

That might be fine if people’s lives weren’t at stake. There are multiple public health crises stacked on top of each other, from overdose deaths to declines in life expectancy to heart disease and dementia to unnecessary deaths from abortion bans to still circulating COVID and ongoing measles outbreaks. It’s hard to argue Kennedy is doing much to address any of this when he’s busy firing people, dousing scientific research and picking fights over his convictions that mainstream medicine is wrong about nearly everything.

His credibility is worsened by numerous conflicts of interest, including receiving money from anti-vaccine organizations that he has worked for while positioning himself to profit from anti-vaccine lawsuits. Since becoming health secretary, Kennedy has distanced himself from these ventures, but there’s more at stake.

“His entire political project — his campaign, his hiring by Trump, his role at HHS — is entwined with his ability to prove that scientists were deceiving the public about vaccines. He would lose a lot if he changed his mind,” Scherer writes.

In contrast, conflicts of interest among federal vaccine advisers are at historic lows and have been for years, according to research published in August in JAMA. “Secretary Kennedy is right that conflict of interest is an important issue, but he is wrong that it is present at substantial levels on HHS vaccine advisory committees,” study co-author Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest and former FDA associate commissioner, said in a press release.

“‘Trusting the experts’ is not a feature of science,” Kennedy says in The Atlantic story. “It’s not a feature of democracy. It’s a feature of totalitarianism and religion.”

Rich words given the overt totalitarianism happening under Trump’s watch. Kennedy is conveniently ignoring the real mass surveillance in this country, and it’s not vaccines. Every major social media platform is owned by the richest people in history, who suck up so much data on you that they can weaponize it to sway elections and dull us with doomscrolling. Flock automatic license plate readers are being used to monitor protests and enable ICE raids. American citizens are now regularly detained by homeland security adviser Stephen Miller’s masked police force, while migrants are whisked away to dungeon-like prisons in El Salvador. Yeah, the Department of Homeland Security is threatening anyone who dares film them snatching people, but “trusting the experts” is pure Stalinism. Kennedy is no fool — he knows that his efforts are more antithetical to democracy than he lets on.

And we knew all of Kennedy’s corruption long before he was appointed. But if we needed any reminder, we only need to look at his family relationships. Last week, Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of former President John F. Kennedy, published a moving essay in The New Yorker detailing her battle with a terminal form of leukemia. It reads almost like an obituary, detailing the suffering and grief she’s experienced as she pushes through treatment she knows will do little to save her life. But she also took space to express the horror she’s felt witnessing her cousin’s ascent to power:

Bobby is a known skeptic of vaccines, and I was especially concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get mine again, leaving me to spend the rest of my life immunocompromised, along with millions of cancer survivors, small children, and the elderly. Bobby has said, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” Bobby probably doesn’t remember the millions of people who were paralyzed or killed by polio before the vaccine was available. My dad, who grew up in New York City in the nineteen-forties and fifties, does remember. Recently, I asked him what it was like when he got the vaccine. He said that it felt like freedom.

…

I watched as Bobby cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers; slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest sponsor of medical research; and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings. Hundreds of N.I.H. grants and clinical trials were cancelled, affecting thousands of patients.

Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump shocked and dismayed his family, but it’s really not all that surprising that the two are bedfellows. Kennedy isn’t the reality TV showman Trump is, but they share many of the same apparent narcissistic tendencies. Consider the performative flourish and hubris it requires for Kennedy to have announced in April that the nation’s top health agency would find the cause of autism in mere months, then blaming it on Tylenol in September, despite there being no evidence for his claim. A month later, Kennedy backtracked on these remarks, saying “The causative association between Tylenol given in pregnancy … is not sufficient to say it definitely caused autism, but it is very suggestive.”

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You really don’t need to sympathize with Kennedy’s tragic backstory or his apparent charm to certain political correspondents to understand why he approaches public health with the gravitas of a rabid raccoon. The Atlantic story and other accounts of Kennedy make it clear he views himself as the lone hero of a great battle, a Beowulf intending to slay a dragon of dogma and lies. Kennedy has indeed faced a lot of opposition in life, perhaps now more than ever. But he’s more of a Don Quixote tilting at windmills because his solutions amount to the same level of self-delusion.

Take, for example, Kennedy’s staunch rejection of germ theory in favor of “miasma theory.” In his 2021 book, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” Kennedy defines this as “preventing disease by fortifying the immune system through nutrition and by reducing exposures to environmental toxins and stresses.” He posits that “Miasmists argue that malnutrition and inadequate access to clean water are the ultimate stressors that make infectious diseases lethal in impoverished locales. When a starving African child succumbs to measles, the miasmist attributes the death to malnutrition; germ theory proponents (a.k.a. virologists) blame the virus. The miasmist approach to public health is to boost individual immune response.”

There’s some truth to this, but the overarching emphasis on miasma theory fundamentally ignores how the immune system works. It’s not a zero-sum game. Katherine Wu explained in a recent Atlantic piece: “The reality is that both environment and pathogens often influence the outcome of disease, and both should be addressed.”

When you wipe away all the chaos and arguments over scientific data, or the lack of it — and do your best to ignore the salacious nature of Kennedy’s persona — the true mission behind Making America Healthy Again becomes apparent. It’s not about whether vaccines really work; it’s whether the government should have any say in an individual’s health at all. What that translates to, intentionally or not, is you’re on your own now, bub. Health insurance, guidance, research — you don’t need that. Instead, there is an overwhelming emphasis on the individual. Eat better, exercise and take some supplements and you won’t even need a shot or a doctor. Anyone who can’t follow this advice is doomed to just die, I guess.

There are sometimes valid reasons to distrust experts. There were numerous institutional failures during the COVID pandemic and the tendrils of capitalism embedded in public health have given people good cause for skepticism. But just because a medicine or vaccine can be profitable does not mean it’s useless. Just because some advice was unhelpful or counterproductive during a global pandemic — school closures being an oft-cited example — does not mean that a novel virus is safe to breathe in.

But instead of strengthening the structures at HHS that work and encouraging the public to trust them, Kennedy has given people even less reason to trust the government on these issues. It’s becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the “public” in public health is erased, ignoring the deeply rooted fact that an individual’s health cannot and never will be isolated from everyone else. That’s exactly why we train people to deeply study these problems and trust their judgment based on data that is transparent and peer-reviewed. We need more of that, not less. The lone warrior battling against insurmountable foes makes for a nice fairy tale, but it does not translate to protecting a nation’s health.