RFK Jr. has transformed the medical freedom movement into freedom from federal regulation of foods, biologicals, vaccines, and drugs.
| Paul Offit Nov 9 (Thanks to Ed Marcuse) |  |
After RFK Jr. was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), he said that Americans had lost faith in public health agencies during the COVID pandemic. As the nation’s #1 health official, he promised to restore that faith.
In December 2020, COVID vaccines were available to help prevent a disease that was killing thousands of people every day. Most people rushed to get them. But not everyone. About one-third of the American public refused the vaccine. They didn’t think the disease was that bad or they feared that the vaccine was unsafe. Either way, they didn’t want to get vaccinated. RFK Jr. was right there with them. As the head of a virulent anti-vaccine group called Children’s Health Defense, he had been an anti-vaccine activist for more than 20 years. When the COVID vaccine became available, he testified in front of the Louisiana state legislature that it was “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” and argued that vaccines shouldn’t be mandated. The medical freedom movement was born.
As Secretary of HHS, RFK Jr. tried to regain the public’s trust—or at least the minority of the public that rejected vaccines—by dismantling the vaccine infrastructure. He fired all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), replacing them with people who, like him, thought vaccines were unnecessarily harmful. He reduced the number of routinely recommended vaccines from 17-11. He said that HHS would no longer recommend COVID vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women. In response to RFK Jr.’s agenda, public trust in federal health agencies declined even further from 77% to 50%.
Then RFK Jr.’s quest to restore public trust took another dangerous turn. “If you want to take an experimental drug,” he said, “you ought to be able to do that. We want to respect the intelligence of the American public to decide what treatments will benefit them the most.” RFK Jr. warned the FDA not to “tell physicians what they can and can’t prescribe.”
True to his word, RFK Jr. forced the FDA to remove warnings about bogus cures for autism, such as stem cells, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and chelation. He was particularly enamored with stem cells, which he claimed had treated his voice disorder but was angry that he had to travel to Antigua to get them. Children, argued Kennedy Jr., should be able to use stem cells to treat autism even though the procedure costs $20,000, involves sedating the child with ketamine, and has been shown by Duke University researchers not to work.
RFK Jr. also 1) forced the FDA to take down it’s warnings about testosterone, 2) replaced an FDA advisory committee with members of the peptide industry so he could eliminate restrictions on peptides that were unproven or unsafe, and 3) manipulated the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee so that he could promote saturated fats over unsaturated fats in clear contradiction of the American Heart Association’s warnings that saturated fats increase the risk of heart disease—a fact supported by more than four dozen studies.
RFK Jr. was a perfect example of the 19th century German philosopher Georg Hegel’s warning that, “What we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history.” The United States has for decades benefited from federal oversight of drugs and biologicals, most notably in 1957 when the FDA refused to license thalidomide, a sleeping pill made by the German company Chemie Grünenthal because safety studies in pregnant women were lacking. Thalidomide use in other countries damaged 24,000 embryos, more than half of whom died before birth. According to RFK Jr.’s philosophy, the FDA shouldn’t have restricted thalidomide. Rather, it should have “respected the intelligence of the American public” to make their own decisions.
In RFK Jr.’s America, medical freedom has become freedom from federal regulation of drugs, foods, biologicals, and vaccines. The consequences, as forewarned by Hegel, are entirely predictable.