RFK's individualist rhetoric hides a deeper public health threat

[marmar]

RFK’s individualist rhetoric hides a deeper public health threat
The debate isn’t about “trusting experts.” It’s about who shoulders responsibility for staying healthy

By Troy Farah
National Affairs Editor
Published November 29, 2025 6:45AM (EST)


(Salon) In less than a year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken a bonesaw to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. While his supporters have touted it as the liberation of public health that will “make America healthy again,” a growing chorus of doctors and medical organizations are sounding the alarm that it will cost the lives of children, older adults and disabled people, mangling our medical system for generations.

....(snip)....

Last week, at Kennedy’s behest, the CDC removed the statement “vaccines do not cause autism” from its vaccine safety page, tweaking it with “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” Apparently, Kennedy has never heard of the burden of proof or the extreme difficulty in proving a negative. This is no minor revision — it not only broke one of many promises Kennedy made to Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., the deciding vote in Kennedy’s confirmation, but it drew widespread outcry from doctors, scientists and other public health experts. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told KFF Health News that Kennedy and his “nihilistic Dark Age compatriots have transformed the CDC into an organ of anti-vaccine propaganda.”

This is only one of dozens of ways in which Kennedy has crusaded against standards in science and health. Kennedy has fired thousands of employees across the board (including mere weeks after a mass shooting at CDC headquarters), gutted billions in research funds, attacked medications from antidepressants to acetaminophen (Tylenol), and dismantled and recast vaccine advisory bodies with “noted vaccine skeptics and conspiracy theorists,” as PBS reported. Kennedy has long railed against these institutions because, he says, they have been co-opted by industry and are dedicated to extracting profit from public health instead of fortifying it.

....(snip)....

Take, for example, Kennedy’s staunch rejection of germ theory in favor of “miasma theory.” In his 2021 book, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” Kennedy defines this as “preventing disease by fortifying the immune system through nutrition and by reducing exposures to environmental toxins and stresses.” He posits that “Miasmists argue that malnutrition and inadequate access to clean water are the ultimate stressors that make infectious diseases lethal in impoverished locales. When a starving African child succumbs to measles, the miasmist attributes the death to malnutrition; germ theory proponents (a.k.a. virologists) blame the virus. The miasmist approach to public health is to boost individual immune response.” ...............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/11/29/rfks-individualism-rhetoric-hides-a-deeper-public-health-threat/