Content Detail

• Content META

  Title	Can RFK Jr. Make America Healthy Again?
  ID	5976886
  External ID	7475572444
  Author	Peter Laffin
  Published Date	Jan. 17, 2025, 10:56 a.m.
  Summary	Donald Trump’s pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the swashbuckling environmental lawyer and public-health advocate, to become the next secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has
  Tags	None
  URL	https://www.ncregister.com/news/can-rfk-jr-make-america-healthy-again
  Sentiment	Negative: 0.33903    Neutral: 0.58472    Positive: 0.07626
  Relevance	0.00000

• Content Details

  Content ID	3648643
  Key	4943543b-e557-426e-826b-eb7095f8c6cc
  Content	Donald Trump’s pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the swashbuckling environmental lawyer and public-health advocate, to become the next secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has been making waves across the political establishment since it was announced. Kennedy, who suspended his independent bid for the presidency to endorse Trump immediately following the Democratic National Convention last summer, has vowed to “Make America Healthy Again” by battling chronic health conditions and restoring American health agencies to their “rich tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science.” While Kennedy’s nomination has prompted fierce backlash from figures within the political health establishment, it has also drawn support from unexpected quarters, including from progressive senators such as Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and John Fetterman, D-Pa. In early January, more than 17,000 doctors signed a letter asking the Senate to reject Kennedy’s bid because of past statements on vaccines and indulging what they call “conspiracy theories,” calling the appointment “a slap in the face to every health care professional who has spent their lives working to protect patients from preventable illness and death.” Meanwhile, others, including prominent Catholics, have praised the nomination due to Kennedy’s stated support for overhauling policies related to agriculture and vaccines, as well as reducing the pharmaceutical industry’s undue influence over government. As the next secretary of HHS, Kennedy, a Catholic with a complicated personal life and controversial viewpoints, will be involved with ongoing litigation regarding the abortion pill mifepristone and other life issues. He has signaled to pro-life senators that he will uphold life and even floated the idea of defunding Planned Parenthood — though his statements on the issue have been erratic in recent years. On Jan. 15, former Vice President Mike Pence urged pro-life senators to vote against confirming Kennedy due to his lack of a firm commitment to oppose abortion. A former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Robert Redfield, an outspoken Catholic, has recently heaped praise on the choice of Kennedy for HHS following years of tension and disagreement between the two. “To make America healthy again, you first and foremost have to believe it’s possible,” he recently said in an interview on News Nation. “I’m always reminded about [his] uncle, when he said, ‘We’re going to put a man on the moon’. … We didn’t know how; we didn’t have the scientific capacity. Then he led our nation to act, to accomplish the mission. I think the same is true for Bobby Kennedy. He knows that we can make America healthy again, and he’s prepared to lead our nation to accomplish the mission.” Changing the way Americans eat and drink has been at the forefront of Kennedy’s quest to make America healthy again. This includes eliminating ultra-processed foods, meaning foods that undergo multiple industrial processes to make them convenient and shelf-stable, banning toxic additives such as food dyes, and removing fluoride in drinking water, among other things. “This is what most Americans innocently put into their bodies these days and most alarmingly into the bodies of their children,” Kennedy said in a YouTube video he released in November. “Doritos, Cheez-Its, Captain Crunch, gummy bears … the ingredients include a lot of poisons.” Kennedy attributes poor nutrition to the chronic-disease epidemic currently facing America. According to the United Health Foundation, eight chronic health conditions — arthritis, asthma, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, depression and diabetes — have all reached their highest recorded levels. Today, roughly 20% of children are considered obese, up from 4% in 1963, and more than 70% of all U.S. adults today are considered overweight. Kennedy contends that much of the problem can be traced back to America’s food system, which he believes is constructed to benefit a very few number of wealthy food producers who procure government approval for foods that contain toxins at the expense of public health. He especially criticizes industrial agriculture, which he believes produces substandard food, reduces family farms, and degrades the environment. For Michael Thomas, co-founder of the Catholic Land Movement, which is a grassroots network of Catholic agrarians, Kennedy’s focus on boosting small-scale agriculture is cause for optimism. “I’m very hopeful in the rhetoric I’ve seen coming from him lately,” Thomas told the Register. “In regard to our current farm policy, Kennedy has said that it’s destroying the health of America’s soil and water by tilting the playing field in favor of more chemicals, herbicides and insecticides, and that is destroying the health of consumers. He’s really speaking to the consequences of highly centralized industrial agriculture.” Second only to his famous surname, Kennedy is known for his activism in the realm of vaccinations, particularly his decades-long crusade to warn of the dangers of modern vaccines and vaccination schedules for children. While his critics often accuse him of being an “anti-vaxxer” who spreads dangerous falsehoods about vaccine safety, Kennedy maintains that he merely advocates for vaccine safety and transparency. Notably, he has argued that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative found in some vaccines, contributes to neurodevelopmental disorders like autism. The American scientific establishment, including federal agencies such as the CDC, National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), all reject this claim. Kennedy, however, maintains that scientific consensus is often mistaken for scientific proof in this instance and that none of the 72 vaccines mandated for children were subject to pre-licensing safety trials. “When you hear that ‘the science says this’ because CDC says it, that is a debating technique that is known as ‘appeals to authority,’” he said on the topic of vaccine research during an appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show podcast in 2023. “Ask them to show you a scientific study for each vaccine that shows that this vaccine is averting more harm than it’s causing. That’s all I ask.” For Aaron Kheriaty, a Catholic professor of psychiatry who ​​was fired from the University of California-Irvine for refusing to comply with the university’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, Kennedy’s nomination is bad news for pharmaceutical companies who enjoy liability protections. Under current law, pharmaceutical companies are liable for their medications but not their vaccines. This is a situation Kheriaty hopes Kennedy will help undo. “The analogy I like to use is: Suppose that Congress decided Toyota was going to be liable for safety issues, except for their minivan,” he told the Register. “Why do they need a special carve-out for their minivan? It would naturally raise questions. To me, we can bracket all the scientific arguments about vaccine safety, and if we take that one policy step, the pharmaceutical companies will take good care of vaccine safety because they know they’re going to be responsible for harms.” Ramesh Ponnuru, editor of National Review, recently wrote in The Washington Post of his “concerns about [Kennedy’s] character to his dangerous lies about vaccines causing autism to his lack of administrative experience.” Kennedy has promised not to “take away anyone’s vaccines.” “If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away. People ought to have choice, and that choice ought to be informed by the best information,” he recently told NBC News. “So, I’m going to make sure scientific safety studies and efficacy are out there, and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is going to be good for them.” Immediately following Trump’s announcement of picking Kennedy to run HHS, shares in major pharmaceutical companies such as Moderna and Pfizer began to plunge. That’s because Kennedy has vowed to remove corporate influence from federal health agencies, including the FDA, CDC and NIH. The well-documented revolving door of people who serve in government health agencies and the pharmaceutical industry, many have argued, leads to decisions and policies that favor the priorities of industry over public health. For Kennedy, closing it is key to making America healthy again. “If you work for the FDA and are a part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you,” Kennedy recently posted on X. “1. Preserve your records and 2. Pack your bags.” Additionally, Kennedy believes that pharmaceutical companies should not be funding federal research, which should instead be funded, he argues, entirely by American taxpayers. That’s because, he believes, industry-funded research leads to bias. “Right now, 75% of FDA’s budget is coming from pharmaceutical companies. That is a perverse incentive,” he recently told Fox News. “We have these agencies that have become sock puppets for the industries they’re supposed to regulate. They’re not really interested in public health.” For Kheriaty, Kennedy’s path through life makes him especially suited to pulling off heroic tasks like these. “He was a young boy when his uncle was murdered. His father tells him the government was involved in the murder. And then, when he was 9, his own father was murdered. This is a kid who was traumatized,” Kheriaty said. “And there were one of two life paths open to him. He could coast on the family name, be a New York City playboy, go to galas. And he dabbled in drugs, but he got cleaned up and went to law school. He cleaned up the Hudson River and pushed back against corporations. He kept doing it for decades because he believed it was the right thing to do.” “To me,” he added, “that shows something about his character.”
  Content Reference URL	None

• Publisher

  Publisher Name	National Catholic Register (#2530)
  Publisher URL	https://www.ncregister.com/
  Description	None
  Trust Flow Score	66
  Citation Flow Score	57

• Data Source

  Data Source Name	Quantexa News (#5)
  Data Source Type	news
  Data Source URL	https://app.aylien.com/dashboard
  Description	Welcome to Quantexa News API — the most powerful way to aggregate, filter, and integrate global news data into your apps and models.
  Weight	10