by Brian Robertson
“Trump really could empower RFK Jr. to wreck public health” proclaims the headline in Vox.
“RFK Jr. Wants to Reshape US Health Policy. Good Luck With That” mocks a banner in Wired.
Likewise, the Wall Street Journal joined the frenzy, noting that “industry, doctors, and their supporters in Congress probably will resist Kennedy’s unconventional health ideas.” The alarmist reporting exposes the strategy to discredit Kennedy, claiming he’s a “conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic” who supports “dubious and unproven therapies,” and if Trump follows his dangerous agenda, “preventable diseases like measles and polio could make a comeback.”
These hit pieces against the Make America Healthy Again – MAHA – movement backed by Kennedy, the first two dropping a week before Trump’s victory, were a red light flashing the abject fear of the revolving-door lobbyists and their corporate media allies over the prospect of the former Democrat ending the K-Street scam that has led to the capture of our federal agencies by the very industries they are supposed to be regulating.
The palpable fear crosses party lines. As the Washington Post notes: “The prospect of Kennedy holding any senior administration role has increasingly alarmed public health leaders and federal workers who say that he should not be allowed anywhere near the nation’s public health infrastructure.” The reason for the dread: Kennedy’s goal of liberating the federal agencies from the grip that corporate and financial interests, from Big Pharma to Big Food, have exerted over them for decades. He’s ‘Public Enemy Number One’ in the eyes of the lobbyists and bureaucrats who have been complicit in the continuing degradation of American health.
Kennedy has insisted that he would do nothing to prevent access to vaccines; he only pledged to carry out the safety studies that the pharmaceutical industry has prevented the health agencies from conducting with objectivity. Thus, armed with “informed consent,” Americans could weigh the risks and make the decisions for themselves and their children without compulsion. That’s a welcomed change from the current regime of a federally decreed vaccine schedule for children, enforced via hospital and school mandates.
Ironically, the same health establishment — sounding alarms about potential harms resulting from Trump giving RFK Jr. a central role in ending the conflicts of interest determining health policy in the United States — remains utterly silent about exploding autism rates among children in recent decades, the mental health crisis and soaring rates of teens on mood-altering prescription drugs, and a new USDA study revealing that a shocking 38 percent of teens now suffer from pre-diabetes. The same crowd panicking over the alleged dangers to public health were RFK Jr. able to remove conflicts of interest in the system show absolutely no interest in determining the cause of our epidemic of chronic childhood disease in this country.
While skepticism about the oversized influence of the pharmaceutical industry used to be standard on the political left, the Democratic Party is now the locus of pro-Big Pharma propagandizing. The COVID pandemic, coupled with a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, seemed to change that skeptical attitude virtually overnight, to the point that today we take it for granted that the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for the latest unsafe and ineffective Pharma product will be found on the left.
We should therefore not be surprised by liberals taking potshots at RFK Jr.’s planned reforms. Zeke Emanuel, a key architect of Obamacare and COVID lockdown advocate, warns that “appointing RFK Jr. to a major public health leadership role could have serious and damaging consequences…making him a disastrous choice.” Dr. Paul Offit, a critic of Kennedy’s who had a leading role in amplifying Dr. Fauci’s COVID measures, cautions that “his science denialism makes him the wrong person for any kind of progress.”
But the Republican Party establishment forms a more insidious political opposition. Many in the old guard with strong ties to Big Pharma exerted an outsize role in the first Trump administration — they have much to lose in a disruption of the dysfunctional status quo. Now they are preemptively calling wolf: “It will be hard for a Trump administration to focus on other priorities, if government agencies are busy dealing with resource intensive and preventable measles and polio outbreaks” claims former US Surgeon General Jerome Adams, echoing the scaremongering on the pro-Pharma left. RFK Jr. shaping health policies raises “concerns about misinformation and harm,” he warns. Other GOP players are anonymously quoted in the Washington Post article urging “the Trump transition team to consider more traditional options to lead federal health agencies,” naming several options who toed the Big Pharma line in the first term.
The GOP opposition also includes members of the “conservative” punditry who hearken back to a pre-Trump brand of Republicanism. The institutionalist Right, already hostile to Trump for his apostasy from the post-Reagan “conservative” consensus in favor of mass immigration, globalist trade schemes that subsidized the mass movement of U.S. manufacturing overseas coupled with the easy importation of cheap foreign goods and labor, and interventionist adventurism abroad. Add to that a Make America Healthy Again agenda of directly tackling the corporate capture of government, and these self-appointed gatekeepers start seeing red more than they would at a MAGA rally. Curbing Big Pharma in setting policy and in buying off any potentially critical news coverage (through the intimidation factor of their enormous investment in advertising) is characterized as an attack on the sanctity of the Free Market.
While these political fossils may be failing to read the populist room after the electoral victory for MAGA and MAHA last week, no one should underestimate the ability of Big Food and Big Pharma — and their allies in the corporate-backed think tanks and media outlets — to gin up opposition to the very health agenda Kennedy has been given the mandate to advance. But the campaign may fail to gain political traction in the wake of the collapse in public trust for the healthcare establishment after the COVID debacle. Appeals to credentialed health experts no longer carry much weight with a public that was lied to and manipulated by this same crowd over the last four years. Many Americans are waking up to the fact that blind faith in medical and scientific experts lies at the very root of the chronic disease epidemic afflicting our once-healthy nation.
The time is opportune for a radical revamping of our corrupt health establishment, and RFK Jr. is just the right person at the right time under Trump to pull it off.
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Brian Robertson served for over a decade in the U.S. Senate as a senior policy advisor and worked for the Trump administration at both HHS and the Department of State.
Photo “Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
