Trump to Let RFK Jr. & His Brain Worm ‘Go Wild on Health’

The hits (or existential threats to humanity, whatever you choose to call all of this!) just keep coming as Donald Trump continues to build his cabinet from hell.

By Kylie Cheung  |  November 15, 2024 | 10:09am
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Trump to Let RFK Jr. & His Brain Worm ‘Go Wild on Health’

For his second presidency, Donald Trump seems determined to staff his cabinet by assembling the Avengers of sex pests, conspiracy theorists, or, in the case of one decrepit, brain worm-ridden, shriveled-up corpse of a body, both. That’s right: Trump has kept his campaign promise to let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “do what he wants” to Americans’ health by tapping the failed, Independent presidential candidate-turned-Trump-surrogate for secretary of Health and Human Services. I wish I could offer a word of comfort, but sadly, this is, indeed, as bad as it sounds! We’re talking about a man whose extreme anti-vaccine advocacy led to a 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people—mostly children.

In recent months, as a surrogate for Trump, Kennedy has made one stop after another trying to assuage fears that he’s an anti-vax extremist, but only repeatedly affirmed that he is. In an interview with NBC News last week, Kennedy said he doesn’t plan to “take away anybody’s vaccines,” but that “people ought to have choice, and that choice ought to be informed by the best information.” Of course, vaccine mandates save lives, while lax vaccine policies can lead to outbreaks and epidemics that carry disproportionate, deadly danger for children. 

Vaccination rates are already plummeting: In October, the CDC revealed the percentage of U.S. children receiving vaccine exemptions is at an all-time high, driving up rates of preventable and sometimes fatal childhood diseases like measles. The national kindergarten vaccination rate is slowly dipping from the 95% threshold that protects children from said preventable, deadly diseases, while in Idaho, the state vaccination rate has dropped to 81%. Suffice it to say, I have my doubts that appointing Kennedy to be the nation’s top health czar will help with this.

“I’m going to let him go wild on health. I’m going to let him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on the medicines,” Trump said of Kennedy at an October campaign rally. At his closing rally before Election Day, he pitched RFK Jr. running his health policy yet again: “He’s gonna do pretty much what he wants as far as I’m concerned. He wants health for women, for men, for children.”

Kennedy has a record of spreading false claims and unhinged, right-wing medical disinformation—that vaccines cause autism, that chemicals in drinking water make kids become queer or trans, that gender-affirming care for children amounts to “castration” and “mutilation.” As the likely head of Trump’s Health and Human Services Department, Kennedy will oversee the FDA and CDC. He’ll have unilateral power to stop the approval of vaccines he has reservations about, or halt research and development of new, life-saving vaccines he distrusts, or issue false, dangerous health guidances to the entire nation based on conspiracy theories he comes across on YouTube. 

The platforming of his insane disinformation could be the most damaging part of Kennedy’s appointment. Referring to the possibility of Kennedy in HHS, CDC director Dr. Mandy Cohen told the New York Times this week, “Even without changing one regulation or one piece of guidance, the sharing of misinformation from a place of power is concerning.” Former acting director of the CDC Dr. Richard Besser told NBC News on Thursday that Kennedy leading the HHS Department “would imperil the health of people across the country.”

Those are just some of the obvious ways Kennedy’s appointment will be an inevitable disaster for public health. Given the threat of Project 2025, a plan that includes steps to ban abortion across the country, Trump’s HHS pick was always destined to play an outsized role in reproductive health policy. Project 2025 calls for the FDA to revoke its approval of mifepristone, one of the main abortion pills, and consequently block people in all states from accessing it.

Even while running for president as a Democrat, RFK espoused concerning anti-abortion views, and his alignment with Trump suggests Kennedy has only become more extreme. In either case, it doesn’t help that he’s been willfully unclear about his position on abortion. He’s formerly suggested banning abortion at about 12 weeks, only to come out in support of abortion until “fetal viability,” which isn’t a precise medical term. 

In any case, I trust a man like Kennedy—who stands accused of sexual assault by at least one woman, but warned in July that even more women were likely to accuse him—with reproductive rights as far as I can throw him. RFK Jr. is Trump’s third cabinet appointment this week with public sexual misconduct allegations, after Matt Gaetz and Peter Hegseth, which is unsurprising seeing as Trump is a legally recognized sexual abuser. 

These are scary times—almost as scary as uncovering a dead bear cub’s remains in the middle of Central Park, or learning a worm has lodged itself in your brain and eaten chunks of it. I wish us all luck in the outbreaks and crises to come, and I recommend getting yourself and your loved ones caught up on your vaccinations ASAP.

 
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