What’s going on with RFK Jr.? Has he been threatened? Is he being blackmailed? Did he take Big Pharma’s 30 pieces of silver?
These are questions long-time supporters of RFK Jr. have been asking this week after their man came out and said 14 words they never thought they’d hear him say.
No, not those 14 words.
These 14 words: “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.” That’s what Kennedy, Secretary of the Department for Health and Human Services, posted on Twitter.
And just like that, the heavens opened, the dam burst—pick your metaphor.
“What’s the point of writing an entire book about dangers of long term side effects of untested vaccines if you aren’t going to mention it once in power?” one Kennedy follower wrote in response to the post.
“You really make a great poster boy for Big Pharma. So much for ‘MAHA.’ GROSS,” wrote another.
Del Bigtree, who was Kennedy’s communications chief and now heads a vaccine-advocacy group, blasted his former boss. “Your post got cut off. The MMR is also one of the most effective ways to cause autism.”
Even Kennedy’s very own health nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, which he founded and served as chairman of, distanced itself from him.
“What he says does not speak for Children’s Health Defense in any way at this point,” said the organization’s CEO Mary Holland.
I could carry on listing the angry responses. There are thousands of them. The mood in the various Twitter health groupchats I’m in was no less furious. I generally avoided commenting, preferring to let cooler heads prevail, but it took some time for people I know care deeply about the success of the MAHA agenda to calm down. These are people who want Kennedy to succeed, because they want America to succeed. They want their children and all American children to grow up in a nation where they’re not poisoned from cradle to grave and where sustaining them in ill health is not a multi-multi-billion-dollar industry. I’m with them.
I can understand the anger. Kennedy’s statement is in marked variance to years of comments and detailed work on the dangers of vaccines and the MMR vaccine in particular. It’s a complete 180, a U-turn—again, pick your metaphor.
What makes it all the more worse is, of course, the fact there could hardly be a more qualified man to Make America Healthy Again. Kennedy gets it in a way no other candidate for the job could. He’s lived it for pretty much his entire adult life, fighting against corrupt entrenched interests to expose the truth about America’s unprecedented health crisis, however ugly the truth may be. The man doesn’t just see this as a job. He sees himself as being on a mission from God. That’s exactly what he said on the campaign trail: “For 19 years, I asked God to put me in a position where I could end the chronic disease epidemic and bring health back to our children. And in August, God sent me Donald Trump.”
So what gives?
I don’t think Kennedy is being blackmailed; that’s a dumb suggestion. Like pretty much every male member of the Kennedy family, RFK Jr.’s a pussy-hound, and we’ve all heard the crazy stories about dead bears and dead whales and brain worms and roasted dogs in Guatemala and how heroin improved his grades at Harvard. I don’t think there’s anything else lurking in the man’s closet that could surprise us at this point, frankly. We know Kennedy’s led a colourful life, and he’s not embarrassed to admit it. Good for him.
To me, the MMR comments look much more like a sop to his critics, and a pretty weak one at that. Kennedy’s comments come in the face of a large measles outbreak in Texas that may be linked to migrants. In the initial stages of the outbreak, Kennedy didn’t promote vaccination. Instead, he said vitamin A was an effective treatment. It’s only now, months into the outbreak, as new cases keep emerging, that he’s been forced to make a statement in favour of the MMR vaccine.
It’s worth noting that his critics don’t believe he’s changed his mind on vaccination. One, a scholar at Johns Hopkins, told The Wall Street Journal he’s just “ticking a box.” He is. He hasn’t changed his mind. He doesn’t want the measles outbreak—which is still small and geographically confined—to overshadow everything else he’s doing.
At this stage, I think the man’s earned a little slack. If he were a Big Pharma or Big Ag candidate, of course things would be different. But he’s not and we know that. This is just the reality of exercising power, as anybody who’s ever had access to power, or even tried to do anything involving other people, will know. Sometimes you have to compromise, even if only temporarily, to achieve some greater goal.
Look beyond this storm in a teacup, this mountain being constructed from a you-know-what, and you’ll see much stronger indicators that the MAHA agenda is still on track.
For one thing, Kennedy has announced that the FDA’s Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) system for certifying food additives will be subject to wholesale reform, if not abolished. I’ve called GRAS “Generally Recognized as Insane” because it is—it’s insane. It’s the reason why nobody knows how many food additives there are in the American food supply. Estimates suggest as many as 10,000. In the EU, by contrast, there are about 2,000.
GRAS was introduced in the 1950s as a way to “grandfather” through safety testing food additives that were already in use, but over decades it mutated into something it was never intended to be: a system that allows food manufacturers to come up with new additives, claim they’re safe without independent testing and then introduce them to the food supply. The FDA never lefts a finger. This started informally, with the FDA’s tacit approval, but in the last decade, the FDA moved to formalise it retrospectively. It’s now totally above board.
So Americans just have to take the manufacturers’ word these additives are safe. Insane, like I said.
And when independent testing actually is done, studies show clear links between these food additives and the whole gamut of chronic diseases that have exploded in the last seventy or so years. Autism, ADHD, diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, obesity—you name it.
Here’s another thing RFK Jr. has done. He’s just announced a huge scientific inquiry into the real causes of autism. Not the superficial causes—not improved diagnostic criteria and greater awareness of the condition—but the real causes, whatever they may be. We already have a good idea of what Kennedy thinks causes autism, and that almost certainly includes vaccines, but this will be an objective, rigorous examination that can stand up on its own two feet, independent of Kennedy himself.
And it will have to, because its findings will be explosive. Big Pharma, Big Food and their shills are already beginning their campaign to discredit the inquiry and the man directing it. They know what’s at stake. Kennedy has promised the inquiry will report its findings by the end of September.
I’m not saying there aren’t reasons to be dissatisfied with Kennedy himself or with the current shape of MAHA now he’s actually in power.
One thing the MAHA movement needs, sooner rather than later, is a detailed policy document, some kind of guide that tells the American people, in simple language, exactly what it will mean for the nation to be healthy again. True health goes beyond any metrics or data points you could plot on a graph, but even so, Americans need something they can measure so they can know if they’re really heading in the right direction. After all, the health crisis is framed in statistical terms: the number of children with autism diagnoses; the number of obese people; the proportion of children and adults on anti-depressants; and so on. Tell Americans exactly what kind of changes they can expect.
Tell them how long it’s going to take, too. During the election campaign RFK Jr. said he’d Make America Healthy Again in four years, but that’s just wishful thinking—a soundbite designed for a four-year election cycle. Really, MAHA will need to be a generational, multi-administration agenda. It’s taken a century for Americans to become this unhealthy, and so it’s probably going to take a decade or more to do something really meaningful about it. That means Vance 2028, Vance 2032, Barron 2036…
Ultimately, we have to give Kennedy time—he’s barely stepped through the door and taken off his coat—and we have to understand that he’s going to have to compromise at times to achieve his broader goals, like any politician.
We have to let the man cook.