RFK Is Gloating That His Changes to HHS Are Permanent

Por Anna Merlan — Mother Jones Magazine

In remarks delivered before a MAHA audience at the Waldorf Astoria in D.C. last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. proclaimed the changes he’s wrought to HHS are permanent, and praised his allies in the movement for helping to make them happen. 

“Even if I got hit by a truck tonight,” he told the room, “HHS will never go back to what it was before.”

Kennedy’s presence was part of the MAHA Summit, a daylong event, wherein Kennedy also reportedly told an audience that AI is “better informed” than doctors. 

His remarks at the private reception on Monday were relayed later in the week by Claire Dooley, a filmmaker who’s worked on several anti-vaccine movies, including one produced by Children’s Health Defense, the organization Kennedy used to lead. Dooley wrote about the private reception for The MAHA Report, a Substack maintained by the nonprofit MAHA Action, Inc. While the organization is nominally independent, it has primarily served this year to cheerlead Kennedy’s sweeping changes at HHS.

As Dooley wrote, Kennedy used the occasion to praise the room and the broader MAHA movement, telling them, “We’re about to have our day in the sunshine.” MAHA Action proudly circulated a video clip of Kennedy’s remarks boasting that HHS has been permanently changed: 

The changes Kennedy was was referring to at HHS have been, by most people’s metrics, devastating. According to a June New York Times report, Kennedy has shown “minimal engagement” with most of what HHS—the federal government’s largest department—actually does, and instead focused on promoting an inverted food pyramid heavy on animal fats and trying to overhaul federal vaccine policy to fit his anti-vaccine views. The CDC has reportedly lost nearly a third of its staff and is struggling to fulfill its basic mission. Several important bodies including the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and the US Preventive Services Task Force are in limbo after Kennedy’s efforts to gut them and replace them with his ideological fellow travelers have been met by controversy and court challenges. The Preventative Services Task Force, which helps decide which preventative tests will be covered by insurance, has not met in more than a year. ACIP, which helps develop federal vaccine recommendations, is also in legal limbo, leaving other non-governmental health organizations to advise physicians on this year’s COVID shots, among other things. 

Kennedy’s boasts last week are part of a recent victory lap; last month he was also the keynote speaker at Children’s Health Defense’s DC conference. There, he told the room that the anti-vaccine movement has “a friend at the White House.”

Kennedy’s drive to damage U.S. vaccine infrastructure is broadly unpopular. Recent polling shows that six in 10 voters disapprove of his work as HHS secretary. Outside of parties with his friends, Kennedy has sought to downplay his vaccine agenda; as The New York Times disclosed earlier this year, in the lead-up to the midterms, he planned to deemphasize vaccines and spend more time talking about healthy eating. Since that reporting, in a rather queasy irony, the nation has been struck with a wave of serious food-borne illness—with part of the blame going to decreased FDA inspections under RFK Jr.

Fonte: Mother Jones Magazine