RFK Jr. is wrecking public health -- but we can (and will) survive this

RFK Jr. is wrecking public health — but we can (and will) survive this
There really is a way to make America healthy again. It's just not Kennedy's way

By Troy Farah
Science & Health Editor
Published April 13, 2025 5:30AM (EDT)


(Salon) The greatest invention of the Industrial Age isn’t the iPhone or lithium-ion batteries or even the internal combustion engine — it’s public health. Unfortunately for our “see it to believe it” culture, public health works best when it’s practically invisible, just humming along in the background. Thus, there are few things Westerners take for granted more than reduced child mortality, reduced death in child birth and the eradication of history’s most brutal diseases like polio and smallpox.

....(snip)....

For anyone paying the slightest attention, it’s clear our global society is quickly devolving, reverting back to a time before antibiotics and widespread sanitation. It sounds extreme, but little else would explain the fixation on raw milk, for example. A combination of engrained ignorance and political interests is eroding the foundation of something that made our capitalist society possible in the first place. It’s hard to build an international trade empire if your customers are too sick to work or die often.

....(snip)....

Maybe Kennedy wants to give lip service to the MMR shot after attending the funeral of an unvaccinated victim of the Texas measles outbreak, but actions speak louder than words: earlier this month, dozens of free measles vaccine clinics were shuttered in Texas due to federal funding cuts. And Kennedy still won’t let go of this ridiculous notion — debunked again and again — that vaccines are a cause of autism. That hasn’t stopped Health and Human Services from recently appointing a discredited vaccine skeptic to investigate this link. On April 10, Kennedy said we’d “know by September” what has “caused the autism epidemic.”

....(snip)....

If top-level public health basically doesn’t function anymore, where does that leave the public? At least 23 states and the District of Columbia are currently suing Kennedy and the HHS, The Guardian reported, “alleging the abrupt terminations of $11bn in public health funding were ‘harmful’ and 'unlawful.’” A judge later blocked these cuts. But more than staunching the bleeding is necessary, as Valles explained that public health improvements take hard work and investment.

“Today, we need to be a period for rebuilding the public health workforce, so that we have the next generation of public health workers of all sorts, from community health workers who help people to sign up for benefits like food assistance for their children, to CDC researchers vigilantly watching for the next pandemic,” Valles said. “Instead, the federal government is now trying to lay off hundreds of probationary employees at the CDC, rescinding some of the layoffs, and now many of them are caught in legal limbo as courts decide whether their layoffs were illegal. Meanwhile, federal grants that support the work of public health around the US are being haphazardly canceled. This is not how to rebuild or reform an effective public health workforce, it is how to destroy one.” ............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/04/13/rfk-jr-is-wrecking-public-health--but-we-can-and-will-survive-this/