Failing to Make America Healthy Again
In the face of the worst outbreak of measles this century - due to vaccine mistrust he himself sowed - US Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr is gaslighting America, argues Matt Bernardini
You might think that the country which led the world in developing technology that stopped a once in a lifetime pandemic would be touting its achievement, and expanding its efforts to other areas as a way to improve the health of all its citizens.
You might think that, but you probably don’t live in the United States.
Just a few years after the COVID-19 vaccines were produced and saved millions of lives, America is now doing a one-eighty and turning its back on scientifically developed medicine, in favor of conspiratorial solutions led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who has previously admitted to scooping up roadkill on the side of the street and bringing it home to eat.
RFK Jr put out a statement in June claiming that he was attempting to maintain public trust in vaccines.
“Vaccines have become a divisive issue in American politics, but there is one thing all parties can agree on: The US faces a crisis of public trust,” the HHS secretary said. “Whether toward health agencies, pharmaceutical companies or vaccines themselves, public confidence is waning.”
This kind of gaslighting normally would only come from Donald Trump. Kennedy worked hard to ensure that vaccine misinformation and the accompanying mistrust went mainstream. Now, he is blatantly telling the American people that we collectively need to fix something that he broke.
And nobody should be fooled by his attempt to portray his actions as working to shore up a collapsing system. Already his agency has quickly moved to destroy some of the most important vaccine technology. Earlier this month, HHS said that it would terminate 22 contracts for mRNA-based vaccines, claiming that the vaccines had failed to properly combat upper respiratory infections like COVID-19 and the flu. Ironically, Kennedy is saying that Operation Warp Speed, which occurred under Trump’s first term, was a complete disaster.
Of course, the complete opposite is true. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, the “COVID-19 vaccinations averted 2.5 million deaths during 2020-2024.” Furthermore they also saved up to 15 million life-years.
Tragically, many of the deaths that could have been averted were from among Kennedy’s own party. Because of the sheer number of conspiracy theories that circulate amongst the right-wing, there was a noted increase in deaths among Republicans compared with Democrats.
It’s clear that Kennedy’s goal is to make the concept of vaccines alien to more Americans, essentially removing the shots as a viable treatment option in the eyes of many citizens.
Unfortunately the damage he is doing goes beyond vaccines. So far he has made massive cuts to HHS as a whole, firing 10,000 workers and scrapping the disaster preparedness agency. Because when would we ever need that? The effects of this will reverberate throughout much of our daily lives.
One employee with the Food and Drug Administration told Politico “I wouldn’t trust not one FDA-approved drug after they are done with us.”
The cuts went so well that it took only two months for Kennedy to rehire almost 1,000 employees who he had terminated. This chaos comes as the US is facing outbreaks of illnesses that it had previously virtually eliminated.
So far this year, a measles outbreak of a scale not seen this century has hit some states, most notably Texas, hard. The only time since 2000 that the US saw a measles outbreak even close to what it has dealt with this year was in 2019, also when Trump was President. An unvaccinated child died from the respiratory disease for the first time in a decade.
And how did our nation’s top health leader respond? He was hawking treatments like cod liver oil, and ignoring the most obvious solution which is to get vaccinated.
Kennedy’s appeal to many people was his vow to “Make America Healthy Again”. And there are legitimate reasons to want to overhaul our health system. The US is notorious for having the highest obesity rates of any developed country in the world. Much of our food is filled with chemicals and far unhealthier than what you can find in much of Europe, along with portions that are double what many other nations eat.
Therefore it’s understandable that a policy of making Americans healthier would have broad appeal. However, Kennedy doesn’t view the problem as systemic, rather he ascribes it to individual choices. He has frequently criticized people who eat unhealthily as exhibiting a personal failure, instead of addressing the systemic causes and wealth inequality that forces people to eat cheap food that is often not nutritious. For many Americans, a quick meal from McDonald’s is more practical than creating an unprocessed meal at home that could take several hours. When you work a minimum wage job and have limited time to feed yourself and your kids, you often go for the most easily accessible option. Kennedy’s bogus science seems to understand none of this.
He has claimed that Americans have lost the most basic freedom, the freedom to be healthy. But tellingly, he hasn’t come out and advocated for a Universal Healthcare system that would allow Americans the freedom to see a doctor without breaking the bank and ensure they can get affordable medicine. In fact, he’s aligned himself with the administration that just passed a bill that will kick 10 million people off of Medicaid.
Kennedy isn’t Making America Healthy Again. He’s simply using the country as a test case for the quack medicine that he has promoted and profited from over the years. The US certainly has an ailing public health system, but Kennedy’s conspiratorial solutions are only going to be one more disease that the country will need to overcome.