RFK Jr.’s Dangerous Designs for Public Health
Photograph Source: U.S. Secretary of Defense – Public Domain
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. writes that “We’re Restoring Public Trust in the CDC” (WSJ op-ed, Sept. 3). That would be laughable if it weren’t dangerously wrong. In my view, Mr. Kennedy is waging a war against science and the well-being of the American people.
Let’s not forget. At the height of the Covid pandemic, we were losing 3,000 people every day, hospitals were overwhelmed, doctors and nurses were dying for lack of personal protective equipment, and workers were afraid to go to their jobs. President Trump’s initial poor leadership—free-wheeling behind the podium, recommending untested cures and sowing confusion—exacerbated this crisis.
Yet once the president recognized the severity of the situation, he did something extremely important. He initiated Operation Warp Speed, which in record time led to the development of lifesaving Covid vaccines. Oddly, Mr. Kennedy doesn’t have a good word to say about what his boss called “one of the greatest miracles in the history of modern-day medicine” that “saved tens of millions of lives worldwide.”
Did people make mistakes in responding to Covid? No question. But nobody, not least the secretary of health and human services, should ignore that these vaccines were an enormous and beneficial breakthrough.
We shouldn’t be surprised, however, by Mr. Kennedy’s refusal to acknowledge that success. While the medical community has understood that vaccines are safe, effective and have led to the elimination of polio, measles, smallpox and other diseases, Mr. Kennedy hasn’t. Throughout his career, and as the founder of the antivaccine Children’s Health Defense Organization, he has made millions sowing doubt about the efficacy of vaccines.
If the president wants to make America healthy again, great. But he shouldn’t expect to achieve that noble goal with a secretary who looks down on modern medicine and undermines our ability to respond to pandemics.
RFK Jr Doesn’t Care About Long COVID
Photograph Source: Embajada de EEUU en Argentina – CC BY 2.0
During his confirmation hearings to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. emphatically pledged to prioritize tackling Long COVID, a debilitating chronic condition that develops after COVID-19 infections and leaves many patients with lasting symptoms, such as fatigue, brain fog, and respiratory problems. Sen. Todd Young (R-Indiana) asked Kennedy if he would commit to funding research into treatments and diagnostics for Long COVID. Kennedy’s response? “Absolutely, senator, with enthusiasm.”
Fast forward to August 2025, and Kennedy has dismantled not only federal COVID prevention programs but also much of the research infrastructure devoted to understanding and treating Long COVID. He closed the Office of Long COVID Research and Practice, a central coordinating body established in 2023 to unify agency efforts on Long COVID, and failed to meaningfully replace it. His sweeping reorganization of HHS eliminated or consolidated key centers essential for disease surveillance and chronic illness response, including the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Reckless funding cuts have dealt a significant blow to ongoing research, derailing NIH-funded clinical trials on antivirals and immunotherapies for Long COVID, halting large-scale cohort studies that track patient outcomes, and stalling the development of new diagnostics to improve detection and classification.
Long COVID is a chronic, multisystem condition that follows COVID‑19 infection. It can arise regardless of the severity of the initial illness and is characterized by symptoms that may persist or emerge weeks to months after the acute phase of infection. Researchers have drawn parallels between Long COVID’s impact and that of a stroke or Parkinson’s. Long COVID also shares similarities with other post-viral syndromes such as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), which similarly involve long-term fatigue and autonomic dysfunction. Studies have shown that both Long COVID and ME/CFS can lead to quality-of-life impairments that outstrip many advanced cancers.
Additional research suggests that Long COVID may be just the tip of the iceberg. Studies of large patient cohorts have found that COVID infection significantly increases the risk of cardiovascular complications, including myocarditis, arrhythmias, heart failure, and blood clots, even in people without prior heart disease. Other studies have documented a higher incidence of metabolic conditions such as new-onset diabetes. There are also neurological sequelae; COVID infections can cause or accelerate cognitive decline and dementia. Evidence suggests that repeated infection may accelerate cancer risk, in part due to inflammation and immune dysregulation. Taken together, these findings suggest that the long-term burden of COVID may extend far beyond what is captured by “Long COVID” alone.
Kennedy is not a solo actor in this. Closing the Long COVID office, for example, coincided with a Trump executive order to “reduce the federal bureaucracy.” The involvement of others does not absolve Kennedy — the head of HHS — of responsibility for what takes place in his agency on his watch. It does, however, suggest that this is not a one-man problem but something more systemic and entrenched. The issue is not limited to HHS; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), for example, is currently seeking to remove the few remaining emergency reporting requirements for hospitals.
Creating Barriers to COVID Vaccines
Of course, one of the best ways to avoid Long COVID is to avoid getting infected with COVID. Kennedy has spoken about wanting to address root causes, and the root cause of post-COVID complications is infection with COVID, making prevention efforts a key way to prevent new health problems. Unfortunately, Kennedy has approached COVID prevention the same way he has approached measles prevention. He has gone after COVID vaccines, both the currently available shots and promising research into improved versions.
As a form of protection from Long COVID, the current vaccines appear to be useful, albeit insufficient on their own. Most studies indicate that vaccination reduces the risk of Long COVID, and several find additional benefits from boosters, although this varies by timing and variant. One meta-analysis found that COVID vaccination reduces the risk of developing Long COVID by around 30 percent, depending on variant and timing of vaccination. A more recent study suggested that vaccination had played a major role in observed declines in new cases of Long COVID during later infection waves. Primary series vaccinations appear to be the most effective in reducing the risk of developing Long COVID following infection. Subsequent variant-specific shots appear largely helpful as a means of preventing infection (as imperfectly measured by symptomatic disease), which in turn lowers the downstream risk of Long COVID. However, such protection is limited and short-lived. Vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic disease peaks at 50 to 70 percent within a few weeks of administration and declines substantially over the following months. It often approached negligible levels within six months, particularly in the face of immune-evasive variants like XBB and its descendants. Taken together, the evidence suggests that vaccines, although far from a silver bullet, are a useful tool for reducing Long COVID. Cutting off access to vaccines will almost certainly mean more Long COVID cases and more people with lasting complications.
Unfortunately, Kennedy’s leadership thus far has culminated in new barriers to COVID vaccination that threaten to severely limit this year’s uptake (assuming new vaccines become available at all). The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declined to approve COVID vaccines for those under age 65 without high-risk conditions, instead requiring randomized controlled trials in those groups before considering future approval. This includes both primary series vaccinations and additional variant-specific shots for those who have already received their primary series. The FDA also revoked the Emergency Use Authorization for Pfizer’s vaccinein children under the age of 5, leaving Moderna’s formulation as the only authorized option for high-risk children in this age group. For healthy children under 5, the only remaining path to vaccination is now through off-label use by a healthcare provider. The new framework imposes similar restrictions on adults: as of August 22, individuals under the age of 65 without high-risk conditions became ineligible to receive COVID vaccines through standard authorization channels.
The effort was touted as a cautious, evidence-driven approach, but its effect is to delay and potentially deny broad access to vaccines that were previously available (if not always affordable) to a much wider population. Limited access for children younger than 5 years old could be especially devastating. This age group has experienced some of the highest COVID-19 hospitalization rates of any pediatric cohort. Emerging data suggests that Long COVID may have overtaken asthma as the most common chronic illness affecting US children, with nearly 5.8 million affected by post-COVID conditions.
Kennedy has gone after public health officials who don’t share his approach to vaccination. Earlier this summer, Kennedy fired every member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a critical advisory body, replacing many of them with known vaccine skeptics. The ACIP’s role is to make recommendations within the boundaries of FDA approval; its personnel shake-up suggests that even within the FDA’s more restrictive framework, the CDC’s recommendations will be guided by an anti-vaccine political agenda rather than science. While ACIP had not always taken Long COVID seriously before, it did greenlight broad COVID vaccine eligibility in 2024, even if said vaccines remained financially out of reach for far too many.
Kennedy, CDC Firings, and Massive Research Cuts
And this past week, President Trump (at Kennedy’s behest) fired Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A wave of protest resignations followed across senior leadership, including Chief Medical Officer Dr. Debra Houry, Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, and Director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases Dr. Daniel Jernigan. In his resignation letter, Daskalakis opined, “Having worked in local and national public health for years, I have never experienced such radical non-transparency, nor have I seen such unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end rather than the good of the American people.”
The insufficient protection afforded by current vaccines makes ongoing research into the next generation of prophylactics that much more crucial. But this month, Kennedy unilaterally slashed $500 million from mRNA-related research, which encompassed, among other things, vaccines targeting COVID, H5N1 bird flu, and RSV. Kennedy justified the cuts in part by suggesting that mRNA technology is inherently unsafe, an assertion not supported by scientific evidence. Earlier this year, Kennedy’s HHS issued a stop-work order to CastleVax for its development of an intranasal COVID vaccine. Intranasal vaccines have shown promise in inducing the mucosal immunity necessary to better prevent transmission. The Trump government, however, has declared COVID “over” (despite evidence to the contrary), and thus all further research related to it is considered expendable.
This month, Kennedy’s HHS also took aim at wastewater surveillance, a crucial tool for people trying to use real-world data to calibrate their preventive measures. Wastewater monitoring provides an early warning system for spikes in COVID and other infectious diseases, helping immunocompromised individuals — such as those recovering from cancer — decide when it may be safer to risk exposure from necessary activities like visiting the dentist. Kennedy’s HHS has doubled down on a favorite minimization tactic of the previous administration, and has changed the thresholds for transmission categories, such that virus levels that were previously categorized as “high” are now considered “very low.” More alarmingly, under Kennedy, the CDC has quietly stopped normalizing wastewater data (that is, adjusting for things like rainfall levels), a technical change that will significantly degrade its quality and comparability over time. Without normalization, raw viral counts are misleading, making it far harder for individuals, communities, and health systems to gauge real infection trends. This change threatens to undermine one of the most important and cost-effective surveillance tools still available.
Kennedy is clearly not interested in keeping the promise he made to the American people to tackle Long COVID. His behavior does, however, track with the ableist healthism that Julie Doubleday lucidly identifies as the beating heart of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement. Ableist healthism is an ideology that equates being healthy with virtue and reframes public health as an individual lifestyle project rather than a collective obligation. It also conflates “natural” with “good,” which explains why MAHA advocates seem so unfazed by preventable deaths from ‘natural’ diseases like measles. Given MAHA’s complacency in the face of preventable death and disability from measles, it’s unsurprising that they would shun interventions like vaccines and other preventative medical interventions for COVID.
To be sure, Kennedy has capitalized on the earned mistrust of his predecessors. That mistrust was fueled by a series of blunders, including but not limited to downplaying the threat of long-term COVID sequelae, failing to fully grapple with the reality of airborne transmission, and an unwillingness to meaningfully revisit the “vax and relax” strategy even as evidence increasingly failed to support that approach. Many but not all of these blunders appeared to originate from corporate pressure to return to a “normal” with a weaker social state and fewer protections for workers.
However, rather than building back trust based on sound science, Kennedy has doubled down on misinformation. Rather than leveling with people about both the benefits and limitations of existing COVID vaccines, for example, he has cast ill-founded aspersions on their safety profile (and the safety profile of other preventative medicine). He has also actively made it more difficult for those who want to use vaccines to protect themselves to do so. Where the agency once sowed confusion through poor messaging, Kennedy has actively weaponized that communications weakness to recast scientific uncertainty as evidence of conspiracy, replacing cautious half-truths with clear falsehoods.
It is abundantly evident that Kennedy does not intend to prioritize the well-being of Long COVID patients. Instead of using his immense power to expedite research to help current patients and prevent new cases, he has taken a hatchet to the limited systems of care that were already in place. But disabled lives are not expendable. Millions of people living with Long COVID and other post-viral and chronic conditions deserve dignity, care, and a government that values their survival and well-being. Investing in scientific research and robust public health infrastructure is not charity, but a commitment to a collective future that values and includes everyone in our community. The Trump government’s abandonment of Long COVID patients and disdain for prevention is not acceptable and should be recognized for what it is: a political choice to deepen suffering rather than relieve it.
This first appeared on CEPR.
MAHA Madness: Bob Kennedy’s Cruel New Gospel of ‘Fitness’”
Former Republican strategist and operative Rick Wilson called out Bob Kennedy as a “heroin addict, sex addict, anti-vaccination lunatic and aspiring architect of millions of deaths” who’s dedicated to replacing real scientists with “radical eugenicists.”
And why would Kennedy be doing this?
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis — one of the top scientists and physicians who quit the CDC in protest over the anticipated replacement of Dr. Susan Monarez with an anti-vax crank — was unambiguous:
“I really hear the echoes of the word, ‘superior genetics.’ He referred to very high members of this administration and their improving health status. And said, well, that person has superior genetics… That is eugenics. Wake up. This is a red flag.”
And, Daskalakis wasn’t condemning Kennedy for some obscure rant or policy about cub bears, sawed-off whale heads, or research animals. He was, instead, horrified that the seniormost Trump administration health official is again paraphrasing Hitler, this time in the Fūrher’s insistence that Germany could only become strong if the state employed eugenics to prevent the weak and hereditarily ill from reproducing.
Kennedy — the guy in charge of our entire nation’s health policies and their implementation — was, the CDC doc told MSNBC — explicitly boosting the idea of “weaker” Americans dying so those left will create a genetically superior America. As Dr. Daskalakis said:
“So, fast forward to West Texas and measles, where he [Kennedy] says, you know, getting the infection is fine, really, because only the strong will survive.”
And it was all wrapped in a level of weird that left doctors around the world aghast. At a marathon press event this Wednesday in Austin, Bob Kennedy, standing beside Texas Governor Abbott as MAHA‑inspired laws were signed, claimed that he could detect serious illnesses in kids just by glancing at them:
“I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airports today, as I walk down the street and I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation, you can tell from their faces, from their body movements, and from their lack of social connection, and I know that that’s not how our children are supposed to look.”
Kennedy — an attorney with no formal medical training — is dressing up an old poison in new clothes and calling it the MAHA movement. It’s not about health, though, not really. It’s about resurrecting the old, toxic doctrine of social Darwinism and giving it a fresh coat of populist paint.
The message, stripped down, is the same one plutocrats have always used to justify their privilege: if you’re rich, powerful, and healthy, it’s because you’re “fit.” If you’re poor, struggling, sick, or broken, well, that’s just nature’s way of weeding out the weak.
It’s a twenty-first century neo-eugenics scheme, a moral excuse for selfishness, and Kennedy and Trump have found a way to wrap it in the language of health freedom and liberty. But it’s the oldest con in the book.
My old friend, the late David Loye (and his wife, Riane Eisler), spent decades trying to undo this exact lie. Loye pointed out that Darwin himself never reduced human progress to “survival of the fittest.” That phrase wasn’t even Darwin’s; it was Herbert Spencer’s. Darwin did pick it up later, but by then industrialists were running wild with it, twisting his science into an ideology to prop up inequality.
Darwin himself, in The Descent of Man, was explicit: it’s not just competition that defines humanity, it’s compassion, cooperation, and the moral sense. He worried that “survival of the fittest” was being misunderstood, that it would be used to excuse cruelty. And Loye was right: Darwin would have rejected men like Kennedy out of hand, because they’re not standing up for science or truth but for a brutal pseudo-economic philosophy that elevates greed above care for others.
This worldview is nothing more than a justification for screwing the average and the needy while cutting government spending so morbidly rich people like Trump and Kennedy can get more tax breaks. It’s Reagan’s ghost rising again, whispering Ayn Rand’s catechism of selfishness, telling us that “greed is good” and compassion is weakness.
And just like Reagan, Kennedy is trying to pass this off as the “American way.” But it’s not.
The real “American way” has always been rooted in looking out for one another. Even the first president of our republic, George Washington, was personally involved in caring for the poor: he gave funds to the Alexandria Poor Relief Committee. That sense of noblesse oblige, that duty to help those in need, was fundamental to the American experiment from the start.
That’s not socialism; it’s basic decency. It’s also Christianity. The Sermon on the Mount doesn’t say “blessed are the billionaires.” Jesus didn’t say, “render unto those with the best lawyers.” He didn’t say, “let the strong crush the weak.” He said, “whatever you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” The gospel couldn’t be clearer: our moral worth is measured not by how much we hoard for ourselves, but by how we treat the poor, the sick, and the stranger.
Kennedy’s MAHA movement and the post-Reagan Revolution GOP spit in the face of that teaching. As John Kenneth Galbraith once put it:
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
That’s exactly what’s happening here. RFK Jr. and his billionaire allies are recycling the same fraudulent morality used by the robber barons of the Gilded Age, the same poisonous reasoning that told factory owners it was fine to work men and women to death because if they couldn’t hack it, they weren’t “fit.” The same warped logic that defended child labor, starvation wages, and opposition to Social Security and Medicare.
And it’s been accelerating since the Reagan Revolution. Reagan idolized Ayn Rand’s brand of ruthless individualism, elevating selfishness as a civic virtue. He gutted government programs for working people while slashing taxes for the rich, and in the process rewrote the American social contract.
Ever since, Republicans and their wealthy patrons have been trying to drag us back into a society where only the wealthy thrive while the rest are left to rot. Reagan sneered at government itself, calling it the problem. But what he really meant was that government that works for the people is a problem for the morbidly rich who don’t want to pay for it.
Kennedy and the people he’s installing at the CDC and throughout our public health system are now running the same scam, draping their project in the rhetoric of “health” while selling the same poisonous brew of deregulation, disinvestment, “individual responsibility,” and cruelty.
Just look at the results. The United States today has the worst life expectancy in the developed world. Our people die younger, sicker, and with more preventable disease than citizens of countries that see healthcare as a right rather than a privilege. In Japan, in Canada, in most of Europe, people live longer and healthier lives because their governments take seriously the responsibility to ensure access to healthcare, clean food, and safe living conditions.
Here in the U.S., the rich buy themselves concierge doctors and organic diets while millions of working families can’t even afford insulin. That’s not “fitness.” That’s systemic cruelty.
Darwin understood that our species didn’t survive and flourish because the strong crushed the weak, but because we cared for each other, because we developed the instincts of sympathy and cooperation. David Loye called it “Darwin’s Theory of Love,” and Rianne Eisler documented across her many books how societies across history embraced egalitarian principles and so often rejected the kind of brutal patriarchy that Trump and his followers celebrate.
Anthropologists tell us that when early humans tended to the sick, shared food with the injured, and supported the elderly, that was when civilization began to take root. Dr. Margaret Mead told us she saw the beginning of civilization in a healed human femur from hundreds of thousands of years ago, something that only could have happened if the entire tribe had cared for its wounded member.
That’s the evolutionary advantage that made us who we are. Strip that away, and you don’t have a healthy society: you have a jungle ruled by predators.
And that’s what Kennedy and his MAHA movement — and the entire GOP for the past 44 years — appear to want: a jungle where the predators can get tax cuts while the rest of us lose healthcare, pensions, clean air, and safe food. They want to call it “natural” when kids get asthma from polluted air or cancer from toxic pesticides. They want to say it’s “survival of the fittest” when working people die ten years earlier than their wealthy peers because they spent their lives exposed to poisons in the workplace or because they couldn’t afford a doctor’s visit.
That’s not natural law. That’s man-made cruelty funded by the morbidly rich and justified by pseudoscience.
We can’t let them get away with it. We can’t let this neo-eugenics movement masquerade as patriotism or health reform. America was built on the promise that “We, the People” look out for each other, that we form a government to promote what the Constitution calls “the general Welfare,” not to serve as a handmaiden for the rich.
Washington knew it. Lincoln knew it. FDR knew it. Every generation that has bent the arc of history toward justice has known it. The question today is whether we’ll remember it in time.
Because this is not just about RFK Jr., or Trump, or Reagan’s long shadow. It’s about what kind of country we want to be. Do we want to embrace the morality of Jesus, of Washington, of Lincoln, of Roosevelt and LBJ, who all understood that caring for the vulnerable is the essence of civilization? Or do we want to embrace the morality of the jungle, where selfishness is recast as virtue and cruelty is excused as “fitness”?
Should America continue to be the only developed country in the world where healthcare is a privilege instead of a right? Or are we truly called — both by our Founders and our religious leaders — to be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers?
David Loye dedicated his life to rescuing Darwin from the distortions of men like Kennedy, and to reminding us that our evolutionary destiny is not competition to the death but moral progress. We ignore his warning at our peril. If we let Bob Kennedy, MAHA madness, and his billionaire patrons redefine America as a place where only the strong survive, we will lose not just our health but our souls.
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