Robert Kennedy's Senate hearing to review his nomination to head Health and Human Services (HHS) is set to begin next Wednesday. Still, Donald Trump is not waiting for his candidate to get confirmed before launching a full-scale war on public health.
For weeks now, some Democrats have tentatively expressed hopes that the vaccine denialist and former Democrat might not be so bad, pointing to Kennedy's statements about promoting healthy food as evidence that he might have good qualities. Kennedy's critics pointed out that empty rhetoric about nutrition and exercise is a standard deception ploy from anti-vaccine activists. It's designed to make their hatred of preventive medicine seem "reasonable," but is insincere, as evidenced by the lack of interest in doing anything substantive to improve public health.
Kennedy skeptics are swiftly being proved right.
McDonald's-loving Trump has not made even a whisper of a hint of a move toward "better school lunches," but on the real meat of Kennedy's agenda — waging all-out war on public health services — Trump is moving full steam ahead. One of his very first actions in office was to withdraw the U.S. from the World Health Organization (WHO), which Trump has hated since 2020, when they kept undermining his efforts to paint the COVID-19 pandemic as a "hoax." Kennedy has hated WHO even longer, and not just because of his opposition to global vaccination campaigns that save countless lives. He and his organizing partners have fought WHO's efforts to prevent the spread of HIV, improve birth control access, or protect health care access for gay people. Kennedy refuses to accept that HIV causes AIDS, instead blaming it on what he imagines are "lifestyle" choices among gay men, even though, globally, most HIV-positive people are women and girls.
As many folks warned, Kennedy's priority was never going to be "healthy food," but making sure that infectious diseases could spread more easily at home and abroad. On the "at home" front, Trump has already kick-started Kennedy's agenda, which is objectively pro-virus. As Science reported, Trump imposed a large number of restrictions on the National Institutes of Health (NIH), "including the abrupt cancellation of meetings including grant review panels. Officials have also ordered a communications pause, a freeze on hiring, and an indefinite ban on travel."
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The cancelations could destroy a large number of annual research grants, which could slow down or stop important studies in disease treatment and prevention. This, too, is in line with Kennedy's overt hostility towards any scientist working to prevent infectious disease. When he was still a stunt candidate for president, Kennedy spoke at an anti-vaccine conference and promised that, when he was in charge of NIH, "We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years." By which he meant he would block research into preventing and treating infectious diseases. Trump throwing a wrench into the ability of the NIH to fund infectious disease research looks very much like the first step in Kennedy's scheme to lay waste to medical infrastructure to protect people from such illnesses.
Kennedy's bizarre hatred of germ theory isn't the only item on the anti-health agenda. A HHS-run website informing American women of their reproductive rights was taken down mere hours after Trump was sworn in on Monday. The site didn't just help women seeking abortion learn where it is still legal to do so. It reassured women that birth control is still legal and that it's mandatory for most insurance plans to cover it. Kennedy sometimes makes pro-choice noises in public, but his actions suggest he's eager to pander to the religious right on this issue. He's been meeting with anti-choice Republicans and appears amendable to their views. He's signaled a willingness to go with the Project 2025 plan to rescind the FDA approval of the abortion pill.
All this might seem like esoteric policy to most Americans, but it's tied to an anti-health agenda that could dramatically impact millions of people's ability to get even basic health care. The New York Times reported Thursday that congressional "Republicans are passing around an extensive menu of ideas to cover the cost of a massive tax cut and immigration crackdown bill." At the top of the list? What they hope could be a $100 billion cut to Medicaid, a program that now covers nearly 1 in 5 Americans. Similarly, billionaire Elon Musk, with his shady "government efficiency" study group, has been eyeballing massive cuts to Veteran Affairs, as a way to cut taxes for rich people like himself.
Those programs are incredibly popular, creating a political firewall that may tank the plans to lay waste to the health care of millions. But Trump and Musk's hostility to federal employees is already doing damage. On Thursday, Veterans Affairs was forced to issue an exemption from the White House’s federal hiring freeze for the department's health care positions after days of outrage and panic. In one of the more satisfying moments of the week, this reality was even felt by MAGA influencer John Basham, who took to Twitter to plead for the restoration of his wife's nursing job offer, which was initially rescinded by Trump's order.
It's good to see someone who richly deserves it suffering so, but it, unfortunately, points to a larger issue: these hiring freezes will interfere with the lives of those who rely on federal funding. Not that Trump will care, no matter how much whining his voters do on Twitter.
Trump also signed an executive order this week to terminate President Joe Biden's successful efforts to lower the prices of many common pharmaceutical drugs. The drug price move ties off the thread that ties Kennedy and Trump's views together: health care should be a privilege of the wealthy, and not a basic human right. Kennedy's vague words about healthy eating might sound good on paper. In practice, he's setting up a pretext to deny healthcare access to lower-income people, by saying they deserve to be sick because they supposedly didn't take care of themselves. It's why Kennedy is so hostile not just to vaccines, but any acknowledgement of infectious disease. It's a lot harder to blame the victim when the illness is caused by a virus. If he's confirmed to HHS, this attitude will prevail. The talk about healthy eating will almost certainly not translate into helping people access better food. It'll just be an excuse to blame people's "lifestyles" when public health declines on Kennedy's watch.
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