RFK Jr’s crusade: will he make America healthy again?

Shortly before winning his second term, Donald Trump told supporters he would let Robert F. Kennedy Jr “go wild” on health, medicine and food. He has kept that promise, said Sabrina Siddiqui in The Wall Street Journal.

Kennedy’s stint as US health secretary has been nothing if not turbulent. He has replaced every member of the vaccine advisory panel of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) with his own picks; cancelled $500 million in research on mRNA vaccines; and limited access to Covid jabs. He recently fired the newly confirmed director of the CDC, Susan Monarez, who has accused him of waging “a deliberate effort to weaken America’s public health system and vaccine protections”.

Trump has so far stood by RFK Jr, though he expressed some unease earlier this month about restrictions on vaccines: “I think you have to be very careful...” he said. “Pure and simple, they work.” RFK Jr’s shakeup of health agencies has been “dizzying”, said Nicholas Florko in The Atlantic. But beyond his vaccine moves and his success in pressuring many food companies to promise to remove certain synthetic food dyes from products, his Make America Healthy Again crusade – an attempt to diagnose and explain America’s health woes – has had limited impact.

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Kennedy’s goals for the year include defining ultra-processed food, requiring nutrition courses in medical schools, and closing a loophole that lets firms introduce new chemicals into the food supply. Many of these are “laudable”, but how many will actually be achieved? And many of his aims are not so laudable, said Noah Smith on Substack. Not only is he “an antivax kook”, but he “has expressed doubt about the germ theory of disease itself”, preferring the “miasma theory” popular among medieval peasants.

RFK Jr has many “pet obsessions”, said Kimberley A. Strassel in The Wall Street Journal: a love of raw milk and beef tallow; a suspicion of seed oils. But they may be less significant than his “ineptitude”. Nothing gets done because he “can’t put together or keep a team”. He has presided over endless purgings, resignations, reversals and conflicts of interest – a real “goat rodeo”. Unlike other cabinet members, he’s “pursuing his own agenda, not the president’s vision”, and making even loyalists question the administration’s competence. How long will Trump allow this “exercise in political self-harm to continue”?