Things are going great under RFK Jr.—why do you ask?
Even by the standards of the Trump era, recent developments at the Department of Health and Human Services show an agency spinning out of control. It’s a perfect storm of craven stupidity over there, helmed by a mercurial Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—and it’s profoundly dangerous to the health of the American people.
News broke on Tuesday that Vinay Prasad was out as the head vaccine regulator at the Food and Drug Administration. Prasad made it a whopping 10 weeks or so before leaving to spend more time with his family. No, really. That’s what the HHS spokesperson said.
“Dr. Prasad did not want to be a distraction to the great work of the FDA in the Trump administration and has decided to return to California and spend more time with his family,” the official statement claimed. Somehow you never see real, non-mocking invocations of more “family time” in the wild.
In a better world, the news that Prasad, who got his FDA gig because he is an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, was forced out by right-wing crackpot Laura Loomer for being insufficiently conspiratorial would just be an amusing opportunity for all of us to engage in a little schadenfreude. But we live in the here and now, so the chaotic jockeying as to who can be more anti-science affects us all.
You’d think comparing pandemic-era restrictions to Nazi Germany would count for something, but noooooo. Loomer was mad because apparently, Prasad was a “Progressive Leftist Saboteur Undermining President Trump’s FDA.” Also per Loomer, Prasad admitted to stabbing a Trump voodoo doll to curse Trump.
Given that tapping Prasad was already deep into disqualifying levels of conspiracy, it’s hard to think of who could be worse. What if it is Lyn Redwood, Kennedy’s former colleague at Children’s Health Defense? He already named her to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices after he fired all the actual experts. BRB—gotta google whether the head vaccine regulator has to be an actual doctor or not.
Not content to oust the whole of ACIP, Kennedy is reportedly branching out and may soon be removing all the members of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. Sure, the USPSTF is made up of experts on preventive measures like diabetes screening. And you’d think Kennedy, with all his pretense that he would be focusing on chronic disease prevention, would want to talk with some experts about how to do that, but nope. Per The Wall Street Journal, Kennedy wants to remove the task force members because they are too woke. Sigh.
Related | RFK Jr. keeps finding new ways to push dangerous anti-vax crusade
Well, who knows if there will even be any funding left for anything health-related. No, literally … who knows? Around the close of business Tuesday, via a footnote in a document from the Office of Management and Budget, people learned that the National Institutes of Health would be freezing all funding for science research—all of it, except for internal costs like staff salaries, until the end of the federal fiscal year in September. But less than five hours later, the administration released the roughly $15 billion in funds with the risible explanation that they had been held back as part of “a programmatic review of NIH funding.”
All of this follows on the heels of Kennedy booting two of his own hand-picked aides a couple of weeks ago. As with Prasad’s ouster, the whole thing sounds cringingly, grimily messy. Reportedly, Kennedy’s chief of staff Heather Flick Melanson tried to fire deputy chief of staff for policy Hannah Anderson, but bungled the firing so badly that it resulted in her own firing as well. When reached for comment, Melanson said she wasn’t fired, but had resigned.
So, what gets you tossed from Kennedy’s HHS is botching the proper steps to fire an appointed employee. What gets you rewarded? Being a systemic and dangerous purveyor of medical misinformation. The mass firings and illegal office shuttering that have happened under Kennedy are openly chaotic. But these smaller things—the palace intrigue of who’s in and who’s out—affect us all. America’s health is in the grips of the least-informed, most capricious people imaginable.