On February 13, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was sworn in as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This agency is charged with ensuring the health and well-being of people in the U.S. and oversees agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration. His brief tenure has been nothing short of chaotic.
RFK Jr. stepped in the role in the wake of mass firings across federal agencies (a spree so reckless that some staff have already been rehired), targeted orders to silence public health scientists and researchers, and a freeze on dissemination of critical federal funds, including NIH grants that support life-saving biomedical research. We are witnessing the dismantling of the use of science in the federal government, and the systems and people that uphold our nation’s public health policies are at the top of the target list.
UCS has been firm in its opposition to RFK Jr.’s nomination. He is a lawyer, without any scientific or clinical experience. What he has, instead, is a long history of promoting false and deadly claims about vaccines and spouting racist pseudoscience. He has claimed to value “radical transparency” but his tenure at HHS is marked by the destruction of data and the exclusion of the public from its decisions.
It’s beyond insulting that RFK Jr. calls his agenda “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA)—an ironic slogan that’s a distraction from the actions that RFK Jr. and the rest of the administration are taking that endanger people’s health.
“MAHA” is smoke and mirrors
On the day RFK Jr. took the helm at HHS, President Trump signed an executive order, Establishing the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission. The order cites the nation’s rates of chronic diseases and claims a need to “restore the integrity of the scientific process by protecting expert recommendations from inappropriate influence and increasing transparency regarding existing data.” It directs federal agencies to promote transparency and eliminate conflicts of interest in health research; prioritize “gold-standard research on the root causes of why Americans are getting sick;” ensure that U.S. food is healthy and affordable; and ensure expanded health insurance coverage. The commission is also tasked with studying childhood disease, including the impacts of “toxic material” and “environmental factors,” and developing a strategy for ending “childhood chronic disease.”
At face value, it sounds great! Who wouldn’t want healthier kids and transparent and science-based government processes? But if you dig in a little deeper and look at what the administration is actually doing, you’ll see that it’s nothing but a smoke screen. While it is certainly important and necessary to study and address chronic diseases, the order echoes the misinformation and conspiracy on which RFK Jr. has built. For example, the White House posted a video of RFK Jr. fumbling through a list of supposedly harmful ingredients on packaged food items, including riboflavin. Riboflavin, also known as vitamin B2, has not been deemed harmful as a food additive. Despite RFK Jr.’s rhetoric about opposing corporate influence, the administration has packed agency positions with industry executives.
And despite the administration’s vows to protect America’s health, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced last week that it would undertake 31 actions to roll back environmental protections, including regulations for polluting chemical facilities. One such rollback includes mercury pollution limits, an issue which RFK Jr. has historically been very vocal about. And just this month, the administration dropped an enforcement action against a Louisiana plant that emits the carcinogen chloroprene, contributing to some of the highest cancer rates in the nation. These actions make a mockery of RFK Jr.’s purported interest in preventing disease and premature death.
Furthermore, at the same time that the administration states the importance of the integrity in the scientific process, they have systematically targeted efforts to promote scientific integrity within the federal government and have proposed to eliminate EPA’s scientific research office. And across the government, the administration is firing or censoring scientists who in theory should be the ones carrying out public health research.
“MAHA” is smoke and mirrors, cynically hiding a dangerous agenda that will leave people worse off. While the administration distracts us with conspiracy theories and misinformation—rather than systematic investment in our nation’s health—agencies are literally eliminating our safeguards from toxic pollution and the scientists who research and implement these regulations.
Lies that cost lives: Silencing vaccine science in the wake of a deadly measles outbreak
Despite efforts to distance himself from anti-vax rhetoric during this confirmation hearings, RFK Jr. has spent his first month at HHS dismantling the systems that uphold vaccine science and safety within the federal government. And unfortunately, this kind of misinformation is having deadly consequences.
Just days into his tenure at HHS, two federal advisory committees—the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which advises the agency on vaccine schedules, and the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, which reviews vaccine safety data—were directed to cancel their meetings. These independent advisory committees are comprised of academic researchers, scientists, and clinicians charged with developing science-based recommendations for agency leadership. It remains unclear when the committees will be allowed to meet again, but RFK Jr. has already indicated that he plans to remove existing members due to “conflicts of interest.” However, ACIP members, for example, already disclose their conflicts of interest publicly, and the committee has a long history of open and transparent decision-making. Rather than working to implement HHS’ existing scientific integrity policy, which already addresses conflicts of interest, RFK Jr. is fabricating outrage toward these committees to serve his political agenda.
In the following weeks, the CDC was also directed to study a supposed link between vaccines and autism. This claim is a lie. It is based on a widely discredited 1998 study that used falsified data and has been disproven by dozens of studies since, including a large study showing no link between the measles vaccine and autism spectrum disorder. Researchers should certainly continue rigorous protocols to test vaccine safety and improve guidance accordingly, but the agency’s resources may be better spent focusing on the priority research areas outlined in HHS’ Vaccines National Strategic Plan. It is also unclear how he expects the agency to take up this work when, in the same breath, this administration has terminated some 750 CDC employees.
At the same time, the NIH was ordered to cancel any research related to vaccine hesitancy and uptake. If RFK Jr. is so concerned about vaccines, why would he direct public health researchers to ignorethe reasons why people may be hesitant to get them? This action leaves researchers and regulators without the information they need to help address those concerns, and, I fear, will allow RFK Jr. and his anti-vax posse to stoke the fires of damaging misinformation. President Trump even signed an executive order that withholds federal funding from schools, universities, and other educational institutions that require students to be vaccinated.
The tragic backdrop to these actions is the worsening measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico, where the majority of cases are children. This outbreak has already claimed the lives of two people, both unvaccinated, and one a school-aged child. The outbreaks are concentrated in communities with lower-than-average vaccination rates, in part due to growing rates of vaccine skepticism and misinformation following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Rather than expand efforts to promote uptake of the measles (MMR) vaccine, RFK Jr. has instead focused his efforts on wishy-washy op-eds, promoting unproven treatments and theories about preventing measles, and directing CDC to remove some of its vaccine communications campaigns. This is extremely troubling, especially for the families who, in the wake of the outbreak, rely on the government to provide clear scientific guidance on vaccines. Instead, the faces of our national public health agencies, like RFK Jr., are repeating alarmist, confusing, and simply false claims that are costing children’s lives. If our country’s leaders trusted scientists and cared about children’s health, they would be broadly investing in vaccine education campaigns nationwide, especially in those communities affected by measles.
A sicker future: Dismantling funding for life-saving research
The NIH, which distributes billions of dollars of grant funding for biomedical research each year, came to a grinding halt when the Trump administration announced it would slash the agency’s budget by at least half by limiting so-called “indirect costs.” While a federal judge blocked this order for now, the agency was also slammed with a hiring freeze, travel pause, and cancellation of committees tasked with reviewing grant applications, yielding chaos and confusion among agency staff and the many researchers whose work is funded by the NIH.
NIH is the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, focusing on a broad range of topics from cancer treatments to drugs for heart disease and depression. Many universities rely heavily on NIH funding, with roughly 60 percent of NIH-funded research happening at academic medical campuses. It is difficult to overstate the immense impact that NIH has on scientific research worldwide, and how interruptions of this scale could stifle life-saving research.
While the effects of these sweeping, chaotic actions will reverberate for months and likely years to come, we are also seeing direct interference with NIH research. In addition to the halt on vaccine hesitancy research noted earlier, NIH officials have also directed researchers to remove references to mRNA vaccine technology—the same technology used in developing the COVID-19 vaccine, a vaccine that has saved millions of lives—from grant applications. Furthermore, grants related to gender, diversity, and environmental justice are expected to be terminated. Among other things, this makes understanding how different medicines or health conditions affect different populations nearly impossible. It is yet another example of inappropriate political interference in science-based processes.
Removing our access to reliable and science-based public health information
In addition to disrupting the work of federal scientists, the Trump administration has also directed federal health agencies to remove or distort science-based information. As part of the administration’s broader attack on gender identity, databases with information related to gender and sexuality were removed altogether, or altered to eliminate words like “women”, “LGBTQ”, and “transgender.” A federal court required CDC to restore certain websites, which now include a disturbing and inaccurate disclaimer. HHS, under RFK Jr.’s leadership, also issued guidance with new definitions of sex that ignore the broad spectrum of gender identify and differences in chromosomes and anatomies of human beings. Ignoring scientific fact will not make people’s gender identify fit neatly into the two boxes that this administration so desires – it causes harm. Without research and programs focused on impacts across sex, gender, race, disability, and class, we all stand to lose.
RFK Jr. has also signaled that he’ll eliminate public comment opportunities from HHS decision-making—allowing the agency to pick and choose what information it will listen to, and shutting people out of the process. So much for “radical transparency.”
We are all tired, and nobody has time to fact-check every claim made by the leaders of our nation, especially those in science-based agencies. We need leaders who communicate honestly, follow the science, and act in the public interest. Make no mistake: RFK Jr. is rushing us in the opposite direction. His continued effort to silence scientists and scientific processes is causing harm.