How RFK Jr. and His Underlings Will Make America Sick Again
As Ranking Member of both the House Appropriations Committee and of the Labor-Health and Human Services-Education Subcommittee, I oversee funding for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the largest department in the U.S. government. This pillar of our government administers the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), an agency that provides health coverage for nearly 160 million Americans, as well as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the nation’s crown jewels of biomedical research and public health.
HHS is about to undergo the most sustained, withering assault we have seen in its entire existence. This attack will come from within. And it is led by a group that can aptly be described as the Four Horsemen — war, famine, pestilence, and death.
The incoming administration has declared war against the very idea of civil service, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. David Weldon, and Dr. Mehmet Oz are a group dispatched by President-elect Trump for a single purpose: to blow up our health system as we know it.
They will orchestrate famine, starving essential programs of funding and cutting benefits for millions of Americans. They will unleash pestilence by suspending work on critical vaccines and firing the scientists hard at work finding cures to infectious diseases. And make no mistake — Americans will die as a result, whether it is from an outbreak of preventable disease, rollbacks of insurance coverage, or the termination of lifesaving medical research.
We cannot let the right claim the HHS organizations they deride as “bureaucratic” do not perform life-saving actions every day.
Let us start with the NIH, the world’s leading funder of biomedical research. It supports life-saving research on drugs and disease treatments, which has led to over 100 Nobel Prizes. It is no surprise, then, that Trump’s pick wants to demolish it. RFK Jr. has claimed he will try to fire 600 NIH employees on his first day, and reallocate half of the agency’s budget to “preventative, alternative, and holistic approaches to health.” He said, “We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.”
Leaving aside the fact that the NIH already spends tens of billions of dollars annually on chronic disease research, with institutes dedicated to diabetes, obesity, neurological disorders, and heart disease — this lurch away from ongoing research would have far-reaching consequences, pushing experienced researchers and scientists out of promising fields and creating a chilling effect for new graduates choosing their research tracks. It would amount to throwing away years of research and wasting investments that would not easily be restarted. We are on the cusp of so many breakthroughs, cures and life-sustaining therapies, and throwing that progress away is not just short-sighted, but deadly.
Furthermore, chronic and infectious disease research does not occur in silos, where one can be gutted without affecting each other. Infectious disease research often yields information that helps us understand chronic conditions, and vice versa. For example, immunotherapies that are now used to treat cancer were first discovered from NIH research on infectious diseases that target the immune system. When you take a wrecking ball to one pillar, you weaken the entire building.
And Trump’s nominee for NIH Director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who gained fame as the author of a Covid-era manifesto that called for letting vast amounts of Americans die in order to more quickly achieve herd immunity, has indicated he will be a willing foot soldier for this plan. Bhattacharya has called for a dramatic restructuring of the agency, which he claims is led by small-minded bureaucrats. This utter mischaracterization of one of our most important research institutions should be disqualifying in itself, let alone his acquiescence to these plans for mass firings and organizational amputation.
Next, let us turn to the CDC, which was created to track and respond to infectious disease outbreaks as well as prevent and reduce chronic diseases.
RFK Jr. and Dr. David Weldon, Trump’s pick to lead the CDC, would undermine one of the pillars of public health. When he was in Congress, Dr. Weldon introduced a bill to relocate most vaccine safety research from CDC to a separate agency in HHS, due to a claim of “inherent conflict of interest.” This will no doubt be well received by RFK Jr., who has already claimed that the lifesaving Covid vaccines successfully produced by Trump’s Operation Warp Speed were “the deadliest ever made.”
Claiming the CDC has a conflict of interest in vaccine safety is like claiming the Social Security Administration has a conflict in processing benefits. These organizations exist to do what Congress gave them a statutory obligation to do. I do not understand how you can lead a government agency and think otherwise, and it does not give me any faith in his ability to run the nation’s premier public health agency.
Weldon’s disinterest in the work of the agency he plans to oversee is perhaps due to his fixation on his true passion: pursuing phantom cases of religious discrimination throughout the government. In Congress, he authored the Weldon Amendment, which barred HHS from funding federal or state programs that “discriminate” against health insurance plans that do not cover reproductive health care, which has the effect of forcing the government to spend more money on plans that create worse and more dangerous health outcomes for women.
And let us not forget his role as president of the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries, a trade group for “health sharing organizations” which pose as an alternative to health insurance for Christians but are not actually required to pay for legitimate, basic medical expenses. Several of these groups have been investigated and fined for misleading members on this basis.
The nominated director of CDC is more focused on turning health insurance into a culture war issue than fighting disease. Combined with RFK Jr.’s desire to “take a break from infectious disease for about 8 years.” I shudder to think of what horrible diseases will go untracked and untreated. At a time when climate change is leading to the emergence of more novel viruses and expanded ranges of others, it would be a deadly abrogation of duty to relocate, suspend, or delay the critical work of vaccine development.
Third, we must examine another galling appointment — that of daytime TV host Dr. Mehmet Oz to oversee the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which provides health coverage to more than 160 million Americans.
This crucial agency regulates health insurance and sets policy that guides the prices paid for health services. Even small decisions at CMS, which must be made daily, can have major impacts on our health care sector, affecting patients who are struggling with serious illnesses.
This is the place where expertise and experience managing a large staff, setting organization-wide goals, and delegating decisions to trusted experts is not just helpful, it is essential. Yet Dr. Oz has never worked in the federal government before. Not only does he not have a shred of the requisite experience to run an organization like CMS that benefits all Americans, he has spent the better part of his career working to benefit one person: himself.
During the pandemic, he promoted ineffective malaria drugs like hydroxychloroquine to treat the virus. He has been a strong supporter of Medicare Advantage, which is just private health insurance using the Medicare name and brand to trick our seniors and deny care at higher rates. He has been excoriated in front of the U.S. Senate — and forced to apologize — for hyping miracle weight-loss drugs with no proof of efficacy. And in case anyone doubted where his interests really are, he has tens of millions of dollars’ worth of investments and financial ties to the health care sector, including pharmaceutical firms and tech companies from Amazon to UnitedHealth Group, all of which would be in a position to enrich themselves — and by extension, him — from the decisions that he would be responsible for at CMS.
Finally, let us look at RFK Jr., the deadly leader of this band of horsemen.
His record of disinformation and death is long — and global. In 2019, he visited Samoa and spread misinformation about vaccine safety, contributing to a measles outbreak that began a few months later and resulted in the deaths of 83 people, mostly children.
Kennedy claims he will advise the Trump administration to stop all water fluoridation, which has reduced tooth decay in children and adults by nearly 25 percent, according to the CDC.
His organization, Children’s Health Defense, is advised by Dr. Wahome Ngare, who has argued that contraception and health education are part of a global plot to reduce African fertility. It has supported efforts to ban 5G cell phone towers in South Africa over bogus health concerns and paid a British politician to speak at a European conference opposing pandemic measures and promoting vaccine skepticism.
And he has even questioned the science behind the AIDS epidemic and insulted its victims by claiming that it was not related to HIV, but instead to environmental toxins or recreational drug use.
When he talks about pivoting to holistic and preventative medicine, he is really talking about throwing the door wide open for diet supplements advertised on late-night TV, quack doctors pushing false cures for cancer, and health “influencers” who peddle scams to their followers.
For a final clarifying perspective on the risks we would face under his leadership, I yield to Scott Gottlieb, Trump’s first Food and Drug Administration commissioner, who said about RFK Jr.’s nomination, “We’re going to start seeing epidemics of diseases that have long been vanquished, and, God forbid, we see polio reemerge in this country.”
If that does not clarify the stakes of these confirmation battles, I do not know what will. It is past time for Democrats to stop worrying about being seen as hysterical. I have never seen a team so deliberately curated to blow up our health system. The purpose of these picks is to break the system, and their Republican supporters will try to present the sheer incomprehensible damage their plans would do as twisted proof that the agencies were always failing — justifying further cuts to health spending and worse health outcomes for all Americans.
We cannot let them get away with it. I will fight every step of the way to protect the institutions that advance our public health.
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