The Lancelet recently published an editorial condemning RFK jr, titled Robert F Kennedy Jr: 1 year of failure. That link will give you the entire thing — I might as well, since quoting the parts that tear into his record and his policies gives you about half of the whole article anyway. He has been a disaster.
10 days after his speech about trust and openness,
HHS rescinded a 54-year-old policy of soliciting public
comments for new rules and regulations, silencing
the voices of many of the stakeholders he pledged
to serve. Kennedy has summarily dismissed advisers
and experts, communicated policy changes on pay-
walled media, fired a whistleblower, and overseen
the revisions of guidelines and recommendations,
contradicting decades of established science, often
to the benefit of industries he formerly condemned.
Under Kennedy’s leadership, the National Institutes
of Health (NIH) shuttered programmes studying the
health effects of air pollution, HHS withheld a report
linking alcohol consumption to cancer, and the Food
and Drug Administration (FDA) withdrew warnings
of potential harm from consuming products (such
as raw milk and chlorine dioxide) falsely marketed as
treatments for autism. His changes at CDC have driven
26 states to reject official guidance on vaccine policy,
and in December the CDC awarded an unsolicited
$1·6 million grant to conduct a vaccine study in Guinea-
Bissau that raised so many ethical concerns—the design
would have risked exposing thousands of unvaccinated
children to hepatitis B—that it has been compared to
the infamous Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee.
HHS under Kennedy has made a habit of throwing
good money after bad science. Amid the Trump
administration’s cuts to research funding and personnel
there has been a harmful shift in priorities. Cutting-
edge discoveries and clinical investigations—on
subjects ranging from mRNA vaccines to diabetes and
dementia—are denied crucial resources while junk
science and fringe beliefs are elevated without justifiable
explanation. Under Kennedy’s leadership, politicisation
at the NIH, FDA, and CDC is imperilling the future of US
science and innovation and throttling the public health
enterprise that keeps the country safe today.
And then, the consequences! Growing measles and pertussis epidemics, worsening maternal morality rates, ridiculous campaigns against food dyes while ignoring capitalisms malignant promotion of processed food. He’s a train wreck that leaps from track to track smashing every benefit of the scientific and educational infrastructure of the country. We’ve replaced NIH and NSF with TikTok.
We have to get rid of this guy.
Despite these developments, Kennedy has continued
to spread misinformation and push politicised agendas
at the expense of the country’s most vulnerable. When
called to account for his decisions by Congress, he has
been evasive and combative. The destruction that
Kennedy has wrought in 1 year might take generations
to repair, and there is little hope for US health and
science while he remains at the helm. Calls for his
resignation now number in the thousands. Congress
must exercise its duty of oversight and hold Kennedy
accountable for his record, or else accept responsibility
for endorsing President Trump’s decision to let him “run
wild on health”.
Unfortunately, even if we drop-kicked his leathery ass into a sewage pool today, Trump has another fraud queued up for the position of surgeon general, Casey Means (she is not a doctor, despite the media habit of gluing that prefix on her name). Don’t let her get any power, or we’ll have to go to all the trouble of excising her like an infected cyst.
