President Harry Truman famously wished he could find a one-armed economist, a counselor who wouldn’t constantly say, “but on the other hand…” Covering the chaotic course of U.S. health policy under the direction of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I can sympathize with Truman’s ambivalent advisers. It’s impossible to discuss the mess at HHS without resorting to a multi-handed analysis.
On one hand, RFK Jr.’s stewardship of America’s massive health bureaucracy is turning into exactly the kind of train wreck his critics feared. Just before Labor Day, RFK Jr. and his deputy Stefanie Spear told Susan Monarez, the newly confirmed head of the Centers for Disease Control, that she would have to go. Apparently, the University of Wisconsin– and Stanford-trained microbiologist—who was nominated by President Trump soon after his return to the White House—wasn’t MAHA enough for the new secretary of HHS. Soon after Monarez left, four other senior CDC officials submitted their resignations. Then nine previous CDC leaders (who served under both Republican and Democratic administrations) penned a joint New York Times op-ed stating that Kennedy’s actions “should alarm every American, regardless of political leanings.”
Kennedy’s purge was a shameful attack on the independence and scientific credibility of the CDC. But here comes that other hand: The CDC was not some celestial realm of rigorously apolitical scientists prior to Trump’s second term. In fact, it was too often a domain where dubious science was recruited to serve nakedly political goals. One of the signers of the New York Times op-ed was Rochelle Walensky, who had led the agency during the Biden administration. Under her rule, the CDC shamelessly caved to pressure from teachers’ unions to recommend extended school closure and advise that children should remain masked.
The press portrayed the officials who resigned in Monarez’s wake as selfless public servants putting their honor above a paycheck. And maybe some of them are. But I noticed that one was the deputy to the egregious Walensky. I don’t think we should be sorry to see her go. Another was Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. I first learned Daskalakis’s name during the 2022–2023 U.S. outbreak of monkeypox, a disease that was spreading almost exclusively among promiscuous gay men. The Biden team decided the out-and-proud Daskalakis—a man whose social media feed is crammed with BDSM and satanic images—would be the ideal spokesman to warn the gay community about this scary new threat. But Daskalakis didn’t want to tell gay men that anonymous hookups in sex clubs might be unwise at that moment. Quite the contrary. Doing so might cause “stigma,” he told MNSBC. Instead, he wanted to “support people’s joy,” he said. “One person’s idea of risk might be another person’s idea of a great festival or Friday night.”
I’m not saying the CDC is corrupt from top to bottom. I’m sure most scientists there strive to implement scientifically valid policies. But, like so many institutions, the CDC became riddled with woke dogma. When Biden took office, his appointees easily repurposed the CDC as a vehicle for progressive policies. Most notoriously, in 2021, the agency adopted an eviction ban, forbidding landlords from kicking out tenants who stopped paying rent. Did the CDC have legal authority to nullify property rights in all 50 states? Of course not. But the Team Biden ideologues weren’t about to let the Covid crisis go to waste. The eviction ban was a “moral imperative,” Walensky told NPR.
The examples of public health overreach during Covid—Anthony Fauci’s deceptions, the draconian shutdowns of businesses and religious centers, the abusive vaccine mandates—are burned into our collective memory. For many on the right today, this litany of abuses justifies any strong counterreaction. When they recall the Biden team’s shameless power grabs, they don’t say, “Let’s try to do better.” Oh no. They say, “Let’s do the same thing to them, but gooder and harder.” It’s a natural human reaction. Why should Republicans follow the rules when the other team flouts them? But it’s a trap. When you excuse any incompetence by saying The other guys were worse!, you begin to reward chaos and performative showboating.
And that’s how we got RFK Jr. running the biggest bureaucracy in the U.S. government.
Earlier this year I wrote a column detailing how Kennedy’s core beliefs are rooted in a far-left, anti-capitalist, anti-modern worldview. Now, let’s look at Stefanie Spear, RFK Jr.’s longtime associate and HHS deputy. According to Spear’s LinkedIn profile, she began her career as an activist with Earth First!, the radical green group the U.S. government said was linked to ecoterrorism. Her social media history is full of posts attacking fracking and pipelines, and applauding Jane Fonda and Greta Thunberg. She joined Kennedy’s anti-vax group Children’s Health Defense in 2020. She’s been with him ever since, battling, as she puts it, “Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Tech, Big Energy, and Big Chemical.” Now, after a lifetime as a radical environmentalist outsider, she’s on the inside, helping run Big Government.
By all accounts, Spear and her boss are making a hash of it. According to the Wall Street Journal, the pair is struggling to contain the “fractious and increasingly unwieldy” MAHA coalition. Many of Kennedy’s supporters feel he’s not moving fast enough to ban vaccines or shut down the U.S. chemical industry. They were mad that RFK Jr. appointed vaccine centrist Dr. Vinay Prasad—instead of a fire-breathing anti-vaxxer—to run the Food and Drug Administration. Prasad’s critics convinced the White House to fire him, but he was soon back at his post.
Under the cover of all this chaos, Kennedy and Spear are chipping away at the medical consensus supporting vaccines in general. In June, Kennedy fired all 17 members of a panel that advises the CDC on vaccines. He replaced them with his own handpicked advisers, skipping the usual vetting process and laying the groundwork for a more restrictive approach in the future. On his watch, the FDA dramatically limited the categories of people eligible for Covid vaccines, which will likely make it harder for many people to get access to the shots or to get their insurance companies to pay for them. Kennedy also recently announced that HHS would eliminate $500 million in funding for research into mRNA technology. I suspect these moves are just opening salvos in a wider war.
But here comes yet another on the other hand. You can make a case that U.S. vaccine policies could use some careful review. After all, many other medically advanced countries have slightly different vaccine regimens. The CDC’s initial Covid vaccine recommendations were certainly too broad. And perhaps it is time for private industry to take the lead in funding mRNA research. But the idea that RFK Jr. is the right person to lead a good-faith, scientifically based reevaluation of vaccine policy is laughable. The guy is a sucker for every conspiracy theory and woo-woo health fad that comes down the pike. And no amount of scientific data can sway him from his paranoid convictions. Kennedy still clings to the repeatedly debunked theory that vaccines somehow cause autism. When it comes to the scientific review of vaccines, I’m afraid, the only answers he’ll accept are ones that confirm his crackpot worldview.
Kennedy’s anti-vax bias has already undermined our defenses against the next potential pandemic. In May, he ended a program funding testing of an avian flu vaccine for humans. Avian flu is rampant among U.S. poultry and dairy cows. So far it has only occasionally made the jump to humans. If it ever evolves to jump between humans, we could be looking at a pandemic that would make Covid seem like a stubbed toe. By cutting funding, the government loses the ability to stockpile the vaccine quickly in the event of a major outbreak. I guess we’ll have to keep our fingers crossed.
You’d think Secretary Kennedy might make some effort to downplay his nuttery. But that’s not his style. Just the other day, he was claiming that he could diagnose children’s “mitochondrial challenges” just by looking at them in airports. HHS desperately needs reform after the excess of the Covid era. But instead of putting health policy in the hands of judicious experts, the Trump administration decided to anoint a dangerous nut. So maybe the other guys were worse! Or maybe they weren’t. Either way, we are in a race to the bottom.
Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
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