A year into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s takeover of the Department of Health and Human Services, is America actually healthier? The secretary seems to think so, and he gives all the credit to Donald Trump for letting him execute his quack “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.
“It’s a joy to work for him,” he said of the president while speaking Monday at a Heritage Foundation event to commemorate the year since the Senate confirmed him to lead the nation’s health systems. “He lets me do stuff that I don’t think anyone else would let me do.”
Kennedy’s HHS, like the rest of Trump’s government, has centered its mission around the obsessions of the hyper online, conspiracy-minded right, while largely rejecting established science. Outside of the social media posts and RFK workout videos, the first year of MAHA has brought potentially catastrophic damage to the nation’s health infrastructure. Let’s rewind.
Gutting the nation’s health systems
The Department of Health and Human Services, along with virtually every other government agency, was the subject of severe staffing cuts after Trump retook office. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and the National Institute of Health (NIH) — both of which were targets of criticisms and conspiracies related to the government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic — lost thousands of employees. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health was also stripped of staff and programs into a virtual nonexistence.
Kennedy has also made a point of systemically removing researchers and experts. Kennedy for example fired the more than a dozen experts who comprised the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, a panel that helped determine annual vaccine recommendations and coordinate national vaccine campaigns with insurers and providers. The independent panel’s members were replaced with a slew of vaccine skeptics. Kennedy ousted critical figures in the leadership of HHS and its subsidiary organizations, including former CDC Director Susan Monarez, who left the organization after being pressured by Kennedy to approve unscientific vaccine guidelines.
The first year of Kennedy’s tenure also featured funding cuts to a slew of programs and agencies — in some cases through fiscal hatchet jobs that drew enough public outrage to force a reversal. Cancer research, childhood health care funding, and addiction resources and treatment were hit, as were grants and funding to university research programs across the country.
Earlier this month, Congress rejected another round of $33 billion proposed financial cuts to HHS. It seems even Republicans agree enough damage has already been done.
Making vaccine skepticism government policy
Kennedy built much of his profile in the “alternative” health space on the back of vaccine conspiracy theories, and his commitment to undermining decades of proven science has been central to his first year at the helm of HHS.
Kennedy has delivered on his promises to codify vaccine skepticism into the nation’s health care policies, purging vaccine advisory committees of qualified experts and researchers, and replacing them with anti-vaccine influencers. The secretary canceled annual CDC-funded advertisements promoting the flu vaccine, and instructed the CDC to insert language on its website falsely claiming that there was no evidence to back assertions by experts that vaccines do not cause autism.
It’s not just marketing and digital copy. Kennedy commanded the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to end most of the body’s research on mRNA vaccine development, a move former Trump-era Surgeon General Jerome Adams said would “cost lives.”
In January, Kennedy announced an overhaul of the nation’s childhood vaccine schedule, which had long been a target of anti-vaccine advocates. Vaccines for hepatitis A, hepatitis B, meningitis, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), rotavirus, Covid-19, and influenza, were removed from the CDC’s universal recommendations. The changes were made without an independent review and outside of the standards and without the endorsement of major medical groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The return of measles
In 2000, the World Health Organization declared measles had been eliminated from the United States. Well, it’s making a comeback, and Kennedy has been wishy-washy on recommending Americans vaccinate themselves against the disease.
“There are adverse events from the vaccine. It does cause deaths every year. It causes all the illnesses that measles itself causes — encephalitis, blindness, et cetera,” Kennedy told Sean Hannity last March. “So people ought to be able to make that choice for themselves.”
The disease has continued to spread as Kennedy has refrained from giving anything resembling a full-throated recommendation for the vaccine. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was pressed by CNN’s Dana Bash over the weekend about whether the current outbreak in South Carolina is a result of the administration undermining the vaccines.
“I don’t believe so,” Oz said. “We’ve advocated for measles vaccines all along. Secretary Kennedy has been at the very front of this movement.”
“Oh, come on,” Bash replied.
The skepticism is more than warranted, not only because of Kennedy’s comments since measles began to take hold in the United States last year, but because of a controversial trip to Samoa in 2019, shortly after which a measles outbreak hit the island, killing 83 people. Kennedy insisted during his confirmation hearings that the trip had nothing to do with his anti-vaccine advocacy. The claim, which was dubious at the time, has now been undermined by newly uncovered emails.
“RFK Jr. is a liar,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) wrote over the weekend. “He lied to me about his anti-vax Samoa trip. The CDC’s vaccine advisory panel is now stacked with conspiracists and the US is positioned to lose its measles elimination status. RFK Jr. must be removed now.”
Using AI to produce bogus health reports
Kennedy is a big fan of artificial intelligence. He said recently that AI is going to “transform medicine in this country,” and that he is “driving AI into all of our activities.”
He’s not kidding. Kennedy’s HHS apparently used AI to produce a report last year, titled “MAHA Report: Make Our Children Healthy Again,” which purported to expose “the stark reality of American children’s declining health, backed by compelling data and long-term trends.” The report relied on several sources that did not seem to actually exist, and researchers who were cited denied writing the material the MAHA report claimed they produced.
The report raised concerns about whether the American public can trust the agency responsible for its health. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt assured reporters that the administration has “complete confidence” in RFK in light of the report, insisting it was “one of the most transformative health reports that has ever been released by the federal government, and is backed on good science that has never been recognized by the federal government.”
She wrote off the inconsistencies as “formatting errors.”
Autism and Tylenol
Conspiracy theorists have long attempted to establish a link between vaccines and autism, but researchers have found no causal link between vaccines. Instead, the best available research suggests autism spectrum disorders are produced by a combination of genetic, prenatal, natal, and early development conditions, as well as environmental factors.
Early in his tenure, Kennedy — who has repeatedly claimed vaccines cause autism — announced that he would make it an HHS priority to find the “cause” of Autism by September 2025. When the self-imposed deadline came around, Kennedy — at a press conference delivered alongside Trump — blamed not vaccines but, at least in part, the common pain-and-fever reducer Tylenol (a brand of acetaminophen).
Kennedy and Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told the international press that the Food and Drug Administration would
“be notifying physicians that the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy can be associated with a very increased risk of autism.” Trump went even further, advising women to “fight like hell not to take it,” and suggesting women simply “tough it out” through pain or fever during pregnancy.
This is far from a settled scientific consensus. Experts were quick to point out that the existing research on the matter was sparse and contradictory. Doctors advised women to speak to an actual doctor about how to treat fever during a pregnancy, as there is a lot of evidence that fevers (and the various ailments that cause them) are usually far more dangerous to a developing fetus than over-the-counter medication.
“Is it the vaccines? Is it the mold? Is it the Tylenol? It’s looking for someone to blame. But that doesn’t do anything — that doesn’t fix anything for autistic people,” Eric Garcia, journalist at The Independent and author of We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation, told Rolling Stone at the time. “If anything, it distracts from the ability to rebuild the world for autistic people and heal the world for them.”
Revamping the food pyramid to focus on meat
Kennedy was asked on Sunday what he planned to eat during the Super Bowl. He said “yogurt,” noting that he only eats “meat and ferments.”
The health secretary’s “carnivore diet,” as he puts it, is in line with the government’s new dietary guidelines, which prioritize meat and dairy. “Protein and healthy fats are essential and were wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines,” Kennedy said in introducing a revamped version of the food pyramid last month. “We are ending the war on saturated fats.”
The guidance has drawn mixed reviews from experts, who have saluted the emphasis on whole foods while expressing dismay over the heavy focus on meat and dairy. “I’m very disappointed in the new pyramid that features red meat and saturated fat sources at the very top, as if that’s something to prioritize,” Christopher Gardner, a nutrition expert at Stanford University, told NPR. “It does go against decades and decades of evidence and research.”
There were other concerns, given the Trump administration’s whole-of-government corruption over the past year. “What we see when we look at the scientists who created this report is that the majority of them have recent financial ties to the beef and dairy industries,” Lindsey Lindsey Smith Taillie, a nutrition epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina, told PBS. “And so we still have the same question of, is this actually based in gold-standard scientific evidence, or is this essentially food industry propaganda that is kind of coming from the federal government?”
Part of the problem with the MAHA agenda, however, is that it not only doesn’t hew to scientific evidence, it’s openly antagonistic toward it. “We were told by the last administration to trust the experts — that’s not a thing, it’s not a thing,” Kennedy said at the Heritage Foundation on Monday. “Trusting the experts is not a feature of democracy and it’s not a feature of science. It’s a feature of religion and totalitarianism, but not of democracy.”
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
