Shortly after Donald Trump was elected to a second Presidential term, he announced his nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for the post of Secretary of Health & Human Services. I can imagine few men more ill-suited to leading our nation’s public health department.
It’s not because he’s a supremely odd man, though he is odd, in the flavor of oddity that seems unique to those born into dynastic wealth. Normal people do not have multiple press stories about them transporting carcasses of large, dead mammals hundreds of miles — be it for a dark, practical joke or for sheer fascination.
Kennedy is particularly ill-suited for this role leading a science-driven public health department because he has such disdain for science. RFK Jr.’s notoriety ascended rapidly through the COVID years as America’s most prominent “vaccine skeptic,” but that’s not an accurate moniker. A skeptic asks questions and seeks answers, but given the scientific evidence about the safety and efficacy of vaccines is published and publicly available, yet RFK refuses to integrate it into his understanding, better descriptors would be “science denier” (if you’re feeling charitable) and “a bullshitter” (if not.)
When you commit to breaking paths with empirical science and medicine, you venture into the world of alternative medicine and conspiracy theory. Those two may not sound necessarily intertwined into a single ideological sphere, but they are: they both flow from a foundational distrust of systems and expertise.
It might seem puzzling why the alternative medicine and spiritual healing MAHA movement (“Make America Healthy Again”) led by RFK would find alliance with the fascistic, nationalist MAGA movement, but the historical reality is that fascists and white supremacists thrive where trust in systems and expertise is low. There’s an overlap between the movements that seek the purity of body, free from contamination and the pollution of modernity, and the movements that seek purity of the volk, free from contamination of “others.” The Nazis embraced astrology, pagan festivals, organic farming, forest conservation, ecological education, nature worship, and alternative medicine. The past is romanticized against the ills of modernity; progressivism promotes disease.
Growing up Jewish, I have a different relationship with conspiracy theory than gentiles, because what we know very well is that, in every conspiracy theory, all roads eventually lead to “It’s the Jews.” The world of alternative medicine, rejecting modern medicine and public health measures, is not different. Jewish people have been stereotyped as globalists, modernists, doctors, scientists, and shadowy puppet-masters, with allegiance to no nation or people, poisoning the blood of pure white cultures in order to make them weaker.
For example, Ryke Geerd Hamer, a physician whose medical license was revoked for malpractice, born in Germany in 1935, continued to espouse Nazi rhetoric that Jewish doctors were poisoning their patients with modern medical treatments. He was particularly focused on chemotherapy, arguing it wasn’t a treatment administered in Israel (false, obviously) and that hypodermic needles were used during chemotherapy to implant “chips” which would deliver “chambers of poison” to kill the patient. He devised the Germanic New Medicine school, which pathologized all illness as psychological in origin, thus obviating the need for modern medicine.
This is not at all to say a person interested in unconventional health and wellness practices is fascist or fascist-enabling. Living here in Asheville, I know many well-meaning people disillusioned by modern systems of medicine, often for very good reasons, who embrace naturopathic and non-science-based remedies and practices. I have friends who are trained in GNM practices — they themselves are not Nazis or antisemitic, but they resonate with the school of thought anyway, despite its origin from and proximity to antisemitic and white supremacist forces.
However, RFK Jr. has found comfortable coalition with antisemitic, white supremacists, even dabbling in Nazi dog whistles. He joined neo-Nazis from the AfP party in Germany for a protest against COVID-19 public health measures. He’s maintained cordial working relationships with antisemitic conspiracy theorist James Corbett and neo-Nazi Andrew Torba, including active participation on Torba’s far-right social network, Gab. He suggested that COVID-19 was engineered to be less infectious for Jewish people. In a tweet about Secret Service protection for political candidates, he invoked the white supremacist numerology dog whistle 14/88. He’s vocally opposed the removal of Confederate statues and the renaming of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day, calling it “erasing history”.
RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine campaigning is unquestionably harmful, as vaccines have been miraculously effective at wiping out illness.
And the rising popularity of science denialism fueled by folks like RFK Jr. will cause death and suffering, particularly among children. Parents seeking exemptions for their children from mandatory vaccinations to attend school have resulted in measurable decreases in vaccination rates, and consequently, preventable disease is returning, with measles and pertussis outbreaks in Oregon and Florida. Even where I live in Western North Carolina is not immune (literally.)
Beyond the havoc his anti-vaccination stance will wreak once enshrined as HHS policy, Kennedy has proposed sending people reliant on anti-depressants and stimulants for their mental health to forced labor on organic farms. He denies the scientific consensus that HIV causes AIDS. He promotes the thoroughly discredited conspiracy theory that vaccines or non-ionizing radiation from Wifi/5G cause autism and is “just asking questions” about whether transgenderism and gender dysphoria are caused by pollutants in drinking water. He rejects fluoridation of drinking water, despite cities like Calgary finding doing so had a devastating effect on childhood periodontal disease and required an explosion of dental treatments under anaesthesia and IV antibiotics.
What encapsulates RFK Jr’s general science denialism is an underlying romanticism that by focusing the mind’s attention and by clinging as closely as possible to “natural,” all disease can be prevented, all ailments can be cured, and everything can be fixed. This is a common dogmatic belief in the more extreme ends of the healing and wellness community: the implication that if you are acutely or chronically ill, it is entirely within your power to correct and not doing so is a moral failing. Have you tried eating more organic fruits and vegetables, practicing more yoga, using frog poison, taking folk remedies like colloidal silver or apple cider vinegar, or buying more essential oils?
— Bad Medical Takes (@badmedicaltakes.bsky.social) November 17, 2024 at 10:47 AM
And what happens if those remedies don’t work and your illness persists? Your mind wasn’t right. You weren’t sufficiently open, or you simply didn’t manifest hard enough. There must be some part of you that still wants to be sick.
His ascendance to Secretary of HHS comes at an ironic time. While RFK Jr. proposes an eight-year cessation of research into infectious disease in favor of research into chronic disease, we’re in the midst of a sharp rise in Long COVID: a chronic disease caused by an infectious disease.
Our society is terrified of aging, of our bodies and minds falling apart over time. Disabled people and people with chronic illness activate that terror, as an uncomfortable demonstration of how one’s health could fade at any moment.
The fundamental promise RFK Jr. promotes is that it’s all within our control, and it really is not. For a person like me, with celiac, autoimmune disorders, autism, and ADHD — disabilities requiring accommodation and medication — I’m deeply afraid of an approach to health that concludes it’s my fault. That’s the mindset that has no issue sending me to a forced labor camp to “fix” my neurodivergent brain through hard work and organic food. Arbeit macht frei, right?
I have no qualms with or judgment of individuals choosing to pursue naturopathic remedies or alternative medicine. My closest friends and family do so on the regular. Many are professional practitioners of non-science-based practices. I do not consider this irrational; while I prefer imperfect public health systems to the absence of public health systems, there’s a long history of discrimination in our public health history against women, people of color, and queer folx, and their damaged trust is reasonable to me. If you find that apple cider vinegar makes you feel better, if you get something out of practicing reiki, or if you want to ensure you only eat organic fruits and vegetables, I will defend and support your liberty to do so as a free human. Those are individual choices, with no negative impacts to others, and we each get to make our own.
Except the HHS under Kennedy would not defend or support your liberty to make individual choices when it conflicts with the naturopathic religion he holds. Taking Adderall gives me a measurably higher quality of life, from my ability to do my job to the richness of social interactions with the people I care about most. Anti-depressants improve the lives of people struggling through depression, saving thousands of lives from suicide every single day. Adherents of this naturopathic religion want the legal right to drink raw milk despite the significant danger to health of doing so, yet would take aim at Doritos whether you like it or not. Individual determinations on personal health and wellness are not the business of the federal government.
Public health, however, is a collective action problem. Whenever a group of people would do better for themselves through cooperation, but it’s easier for them to do whatever they want, that’s the place where government has a role: to balance the individual expression of liberty against the collective benefit. Wearing masks during the height of the COVID pandemic is a demonstrative example: you may not want to wear a mask, it may feel uncomfortable or restrictive, but everybody will collectively fare far better if we all mask up to prevent the spread of respiratory illness. It’s no longer a simple, individual choice.
Vaccinations are also a collective action problem. Vaccination is only really effective when everybody capable of being vaccinated gets vaccinated. Governor Jared Polis of Colorado argued it’s hypocritical to be pro-choice and pro-vaccine-mandate but abortion is not a collective action problem. Vaccines are a textbook case.
A federal Department of Health and Human Services that does not believe in collective action or collective responsibility, that selectively tramples on individual liberty to personal health decisions based solely on vibes, that axiomatically believes all illness can be prevented through naturopathic wellness, and that rejects science and modern medicine — that is a department that’s abdicating its duty to create public health. People will suffer. People will die. Mainly children and the chronically ill.
And it will not be their own fault; it will be Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s.