This article first appeared in Volume 54, Issue 1 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled The forgotten patients: Lost voices in the global healthcare system. Read more about the issue here. The issue was published on 11 April 2025.
Even before the Senate confirmed Robert F Kennedy Jr as US health secretary, the Trump administration was wreaking havoc with government agencies vital to medical research and equitable healthcare.
Ignoring Title IV of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, colour or nationality, the White House removed swathes of data from the websites of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) overnight, in an effort to purge the agencies of what Elon Musk has dubbed “the woke mind virus”.
Gone were vaccine guidelines for “pregnant people” and regulatory guidelines on increasing diversity in clinical trials. Even the Department of Veteran Affairs felt the impact of Musk and Donald Trump’s anti-DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) crusade, deleting advice on LGBTQ+ veteran care.
This was followed by a 90-day freeze and stop-work order on the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), jeopardising the lives of millions of people around the world who depend on its programmes for the prevention of diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis and malaria.
How precisely this will make America – or the world – “healthy again”, to quote the slogan of Kennedy’s MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement, is a question that he may now wish to ponder. In his new role as director of Health and Human Services – a $1.7 trillion agency with 80,000 employees – Kennedy will be responsible for everything from medical research and pandemic prevention to regulating the cost of medicine and health insurance for the poorest Americans.
On the campaign trail, Kennedy also promised to lift safety regulations on unpasteurised “raw” milk – a potential source of bird flu – and take a “break” from infectious disease research (including for Covid-19) by having the National Institutes of Health (NIH) pivot to chronic diseases such as diabetes.
But it is Kennedy’s well-documented antipathy to vaccines that could have the most far-reaching impacts. Asked during the Senate Health Committee hearing whether he accepted studies debunking the theory that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine caused autism – a theory he has supported – Kennedy promised to be “an advocate for strong science”, adding that “if the data is there, I will absolutely do that.”
But for those who have followed the activities of Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defence non-profit closely, his efforts to roll back on previous anti-vax statements are not to be trusted. Indeed, even as Kennedy was testifying, a lawyer for Informed Consent Action Network – a non-profit whose founder is a close ally of Kennedy – was petitioning the FDA to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine. The vaccine is estimated to have prevented 20 million cases of paralysis globally and is widely regarded as one of the greatest achievements of US medicine.
Nor would Kennedy agree to sever his stake in ongoing litigation on behalf of people claiming to have been damaged by Gardasil, the Merck vaccine that protects against the human papillomavirus. According to financial disclosure documents filed ahead of his confirmation, Kennedy’s arrangement with law firm Wisner Baum guarantees him 10% of payouts from successful Gardasil settlements – an arrangement from which he has earned more than $2.5 million in the past two years.
Ascertaining what Kennedy believes and understands by “science” is a fool’s errand. As the editorial board of the New York Post concluded when it met him in May 2023, when it comes to medical issues his views are “a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories”.
The Committee to Protect Health Care, a pro-patients doctors’ group, agrees. In a letter opposing Kennedy’s nomination, it said that, as health secretary, his policies would hit vulnerable communities particularly hard, putting millions of lives at risk.
Kennedy is reportedly considering axing or changing a key vaccine advisory committee – a move that could prompt healthcare providers to offer fewer jabs to children and inspire states to repeal recommended vaccination schedules. According to the CDC, over the past 30 years childhood vaccines have prevented an estimated 1.1 million deaths and 32 million hospital admissions in the USA. The fear is that disruption to these schedules could harm community immunisation levels, which are already down on pre-pandemic numbers.
Just as worrying is Kennedy’s record of aligning himself with propaganda films such as Medical Racism: The New Apartheid, which specifically targeted Black Americans to discourage them from getting vaccinations. In the past, Kennedy has suggested that Black people do not need to follow the same vaccine schedule as white people “because their immune system is better than ours” – a view that drew a stinging rebuke from Angela Alsobrooks, the Democrat senator from Maryland, during cross-examination.
Equally dangerous is Kennedy’s record of intervening in public health crises. In 2018, he flew to Samoa to support a campaign that falsely suggested the MMR vaccine was unsafe. Several months later, a massive measles outbreak hit more than 5,700 people in Samoa and left 83 dead, most of them young children.
And during the Covid-19 pandemic he reportedly suggested that the coronavirus could have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people – a claim that is both antisemitic and scientifically highly implausible.
During the hearings, Kennedy displayed a tenuous grasp of Medicaid and other US federal healthcare programmes he would oversee. In particular, he didn’t seem to understand the role of community health centres, where many low-income Americans receive care, or that cuts to Medicaid would be particularly harmful to Black and Hispanic people, who are more likely than white people to be uninsured.
But perhaps the most revealing exchange came when Bernie Sanders, the independent senator for Vermont, asked Kennedy whether he agreed that healthcare was a fundamental human right. Kennedy’s response that healthcare should not be treated the same way as free speech and that long-term cigarette smokers were “taking from the [insurance] pool” tells you everything about his eugenicist and libertarian mindset.
Listening to Kennedy’s often-incoherent replies, it is hard not to conclude that he is someone who has studied a little medical history but has failed to absorb the lessons of germ theory or the role of social and economic conditions in determining health. Along with antibiotics, vaccines have saved more lives than any other technology in medical history. And while Kennedy’s desire to wean Americans off processed foods would no doubt go some way to addressing chronic conditions such as obesity, his plan to remove fluoride from community water would not be helpful. On the contrary, his claims that fluoridation is connected to lower IQs is based on very flawed science.
Indeed, fluoridation is one of the most beneficial public health interventions in history. Prior to its introduction in the 1940s, Americans suffered from high levels of tooth decay. For those who cannot afford fluoride toothpaste or regular visits to the dentist, de-fluoridation would likely result in a surge in dental cavities. Not so much MAHA then as MATA – Make America Toothless Again.
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