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 Wellness and Human Services While his supporters have touted it as the liberation of populace soundness that will make America healthy again a growing chorus of doctors and curative organizations are sounding the alarm that it will cost the lives of children older adults and disabled people mangling our curative system for generations Kennedy has no healthcare or authorities background but since his appointment in February he has undertaken massive changes to the nation s a multitude of agencies tasked with keeping people alive and healthy That includes the Centers for Disorder Control and Prevention which monitors for malady outbreaks and the Food and Drug Administration which approves new medications and treatments Kennedy approaches citizens robustness with the gravitas of a rabid raccoon Last week at Kennedy s behest the CDC removed the message 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 multiple 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 populace fitness experts Amesh Adalja a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Medical Precaution reported KFF Physical condition 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 avenues in which Kennedy has crusaded against standards in science and wellness 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 revealed Kennedy has long railed against these institutions because he says they have been co-opted by industry and are dedicated to extracting profit from citizens fitness instead of fortifying it Related RFK Jr s attack on mRNA vaccines will cost lives There s no denying Americans physical condition 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 necessities transformation but his prescriptions aren t well-informed by evidence and seem poised to exacerbate the predicament Still Kennedy is beloved by a large number of and not just on the right When he suspended his bid for president in and endorsed then-presidential candidate Donald Trump plenty of saw it as a perk that the current president would let him go wild on wellness 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 of powerful man in science is more than a little misleading Saying he s the the greater part 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 client 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 citizens fitness as demonstrated during the botched reponse to COVID- in To his credit author Michael Scherer professes good intentions in featuring Kennedy in such an adulatory light to help bridge certain of the political division plaguing our country Maybe if we can step inside Kennedy s mind we can find several middle ground and veritably 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 a large number of bizarre escapades from dumping a dead bear in Central Park to allegedly eating barbecued dog to hand-waving away sexual assault assertions 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 new New York Times profile of Nuzzi glosses over chosen severe problems Nuzzi did not want to discuss Kennedy s tenure as secretary of wellbeing and human services Jacob Bernstein reports in the Times profile while Nuzzi says I don t have any interest in offering punditry We need your help to stay independent Subscribe in contemporary times to endorsement Salon s progressive journalism That might be fine if people s lives weren t at stake There are multiple general healthcare crises stacked on top of each other from overdose deaths to declines in life expectancy to heart malady 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 soundness 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 residents 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 key issue but he is wrong that it is present at substantial levels on HHS vaccine advisory committees investigation co-author Peter Lurie president of the Center for Science in the General Interest and former FDA associate commissioner revealed 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 When you wipe away all the chaos and arguments over scientific facts 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 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 records 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 shield adviser Stephen Miller s masked police force while foreigners are whisked away to dungeon-like prisons in El Salvador Yeah the Department of Homeland Safeguard 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 medicine 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 disclosed There s no vaccine that is safe and effective Bobby presumably 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 Not long ago I sought him what it was like when he got the vaccine He commented that it felt like freedom I watched as Bobby cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines instrument that could be used against certain cancers slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Strength the world s largest sponsor of therapeutic research and threatened to oust the panel of healthcare 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 countless of the same apparent narcissistic tendencies Consider the performative flourish and hubris it requires for Kennedy to have informed in April that the nation s top healthcare 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 Start your day with essential news from Salon Sign up for our free morning newsletter Crash Curriculum 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 society wellbeing 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 book The Real Anthony Fauci Kennedy defines this as preventing condition 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 populace physical condition is to boost individual immune response There s specific truth to this but the overarching emphasis on miasma theory fundamentally ignores how the immune system works It s not a zero-sum challenge Katherine Wu explained in a fresh Atlantic piece The reality is that both circumstances and pathogens often influence the outcome of complaint and both should be addressed When you wipe away all the chaos and arguments over scientific information 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 governing body should have any say in an individual s wellbeing at all What that translates to intentionally or not is you re on your own now bub Vitality insurance guidance research you don t need that Instead there is an overwhelming emphasis on the individual Eat better exercise and take several supplements and you won t even need a shot or a professional 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 society wellbeing 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 particular 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 constituents to trust them Kennedy has given people even less reason to trust the regime on these issues It s becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the society in residents healthcare is erased ignoring the deeply rooted fact that an individual s robustness cannot and never will be isolated from everyone else That s exactly why we train people to deeply inquiry these problems and trust their judgment based on evidence 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 fitness Read more about RFK Jr RFK Jr is laundering Christian right views as MAHA RFK Jr cares more about french fries than US farms The real reason Trump will never fire RFK Jr The hypocrisy of RFK Jr preaching real food RFK Jr tightens his chokehold on the nation s constituents medical The post RFK s individualist rhetoric hides a deeper residents medical threat appeared first on Salon com