Well, the voters have spoken, and despite all of our recommendations to the contrary, they seem to have voted for Trump. Yeah, we’re pretty sad/scared/pissed off/trying to cope by dissociating and stress eating as well. Regardless, once again, it’s Trump’s America and we’re just living (or dying) in it. We know from experience that a Trump presidency is bad for our health, but now he has a surprising new ally in making our lives shorter and more dangerous: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

RFK is a former presidential candidate and critic of Trump, an expert falconer, an eater of roadkill, a source of shame for the entire Kennedy family, and a “superspreader” of false information about vaccines. And now he’s about to bring his mission to Make America Healthy Again to the masses as the Secretary of Health and Human Services for the entire USA. In this episode, we’re going to try to figure out what the hell that means.

RFK Jr has some wild ideas about medicine and public health, making some strange connections between cause and effect in our health. Let’s play a game! We’ll give you some health outcomes, and you guess what RFK has said is the cause of the problem (or “problem” in several cases). (Sources: BBC, HuffPo, Daily Beast) 

Problem: Autism, cancer, autoimmune disorders, and ADHD
Cause: Vaccines!  

This assertion is primarily based on the fact that SOME earlier vaccines included a preservative thimerosal, a compound that contains mercury, even though it’s been debunked AND hasn’t been included in children’s vaccines since 2001.

Problem: Arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease
Cause: Fluoride in drinking water!

Problem: Fatness, depression, and cancer
Cause: Ultra Processed Foods 
Solution: Raw milk!

Problem: AIDS
Cause: Not HIV! (See his book about Anthony Faucci)

Problem: Increasing concentrations of bioavailable aluminum in the environment
Cause: Chemtrails

This one’s a trick question because in a 2016, a survey of scientists showed that most of them didn’t even believe that aluminum levels were increasing, let alone that chemtrails exist.

Problem: Gay and Trans Kids
Cause: Pesticides (atrazine) in tap water. Amazing logic here: “[atrazine can] chemically castrate and forcibly feminize [frogs]… If it’s doing that to frogs, there’s a lot of other evidence that it’s doing it to human beings as well.”  

Problem: COVID 19
Cause: Chinese bioweapon. His logic (from a campaign video leaked to the NY Post): “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. We don’t know if it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic differential and the impact of that. We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons.” A heaping helping of anti-Asian racism with a side of antisemitism!

Problem: RFK Jr’s own problems with memory loss and cognition
Cause: He said in a 2012 divorce deposition, “a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.” Also, tuna fish. He hasn’t ever provided medical records to document this, but doctors say it might have happened?

Despite the fact that he’s about to be nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr. isn’t a doctor or a medical researcher. The brain worm explains a lot about RFK Jr’s thinking, but neural parasites aside, how did this guy get to be a “public health expert” to begin with?

He started as a well-respected environmental lawyer. In 1984, he began volunteering with The Hudson River Fisherman’s Association, later renamed “Riverkeeper,” which inspired the global “Waterkeeper” movement. He sued big polluters, helped formulate a model for sustainable development, and defended communities of color disproportionately impacted by environmental contamination.

In the 2020s, even after he had begun his second career as an aspiring politician and reliable source of health misinformation, at least some part of his brain was working right: He supported the Green New Deal, criticized Trump for his “hostility towards the environment” and he criticized geoengineering and carbon capture as “disastrous from an environmental point of view, and it also is just a subsidy for big carbon.”

While working on a case against a polluter contaminating drinking water with mercury in the early 2000s, he met a persistent group of mothers who claimed that the real problem was mercury in vaccines. He was eventually persuaded. He told Joe Rogan in 2023 “I thought, even if they’re wrong, someone should listen to them.”

RFK then hooked up with the anti-vaxxers who eventually founded the “World Mercury Project” in 2007. By 2015, he became the chair of the board for the organization, which rebranded as “Children’s Health Defense.” (Not the Children’s Defense Fund, a legit child welfare non-profit that has already put out a statement clearing up any confusion between them and Children’s Health Defense.)

In 2019, RFK Jr brought his anti-vaxx message to Samoa, where he met with government officials and spoke out publicly against the Measles vaccine. By 2020, at least 83 people had died in a massive measles outbreak caused by lowered rates of vaccination. RFK blamed the vaccine itself for the outbreak.

By 2021, a study identified RFK Jr’s personal Twitter account was as the top “superspreader” of vaccine misinformation on Twitter, responsible for 13% of all reshares of misinformation, more than three times the second most-retweeted account.

RFK Jr started out with a great deal of insight about the actual, well-documented conspiracies between big corporations and the US government to disempower people and destroy their communities. Then he fell down the rabbit hole of invented conspiracy. It’s a real problem for folks on the left. We know that corporations are evil, that the government colludes with corporate oligarchs, that the government and corporations both have a history of lying to the public about health and medicine. So it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing everything negative you hear.

What kind of actual damage can RFK Jr. do as the Secretary of Health and Human Services? Unfortunately, he will have jurisdiction over the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Indian Health Service (IHS), and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). So get ready for snake oil, grifting, and block grants. 

Now, there’s no guarantee he will be confirmed to this role, but that will depend on a handful of GOP Senators growing a spine. We have to keep our attention on Congress, who can do even more damage: cutting Medicaid, cutting access to food stamps, and revoking all the reforms of the ACA. While the damage RFK can do at HHS is reversible when (if?) we elect a Democrat to the White House, but the damage Congress will inflict is much harder to undo.

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