The RFK Jr. Times
Deep State warnings. What flu vaccine? Autism cause instacart. FDA sock puppets. Let the states eat costs. Anyone know who actually works here? #FreeNorovirus. And The Fertilization President emerges.
(To correctly interpret this, you’ll need to know that /s is a tone indicator for sarcasm.)
While he isn’t generating as many headlines as the tariff fiasco, RFK Jr. and his worm are just working away every day to make us forget what health looked like in the olden days of the 21st century.
As women, we lead the healthcare charge for a lot of family and friends. In the past, we could count on our world-renowned Health and Human Services (HHS) to help us research, plan, prevent, treat and cure. That was then. In the midst of the DC idea-of-the-minute chaos, where strategy is vastly overrated, HHS Secretary RFK Jr. —a lawyer, not a doctor or a scientist—continues to “go wild,” as directed by the president, forging ahead on his bucket list. Here’s a summary of the most recent RFK Jr. news, best read with something appropriately medicinal in hand.
The Fertilization President guts the CDC IVF research team while bragging about how great his presidency will be for fertility. See it (and gag) on this video —do not miss this!—with a following discussion of what his policies are doing to women’s health, defined only as birth or unbirth.
RFK Jr. warns FDA staff of ‘Deep State’ in all-hands meeting. To make sure everyone knew the worm hole is still very much there, he said FDA employees are sock puppets, and warned of the deep state influence of the Central Intelligence Agency at the same “viewing party,” encouraging whistleblowers to speak up if their supervisors push to approve “unsafe products”—whatever those are in RFK’s eyes.
“Because of my [Kennedy] family’s commitment to these issues, I spent 200 hours at Wassaic Home for the Retarded when I was in high school. So I was seeing people with intellectual disabilities all the time. I never saw anybody with autism.” —Well, of course not. He was in high school in the late 60s/early 70s. The DSM-III1 didn’t included infantile autism as a distinct disorder separate from childhood schizophrenia until 1980. So, he’s right. Kids that were autistic carried a diagnosis of schizophrenia, not autism, at the time.
By September, we will know what caused the autism epidemic, according to RFK Jr. (👏/s) The federal government spent more than $300 million on autism research in 2023 alone without answering that question—but Bobby will settle it all in 6 months. He’s hired David Geier—a discredited vaccine skeptic you may know from Retraction Watch—to lead the study and settle the question forever (also /s), never mind vaccination has been debunked as a cause of autism many times over. As ASAN says, it’s a clear signal that HHS intends to produce rigged and fraudulent research that supports Kennedy and Trump’s pre-existing beliefs in a connection between autism and vaccines.
When you want to know what causes autism, that’s the research question—not “prove vaccines cause autism.” You’d also have an experienced scientist researcher lead it, not some dude with who got an undergrad degree (only) in biology a quarter century ago and who was disciplined for practicing medicine without a license, including giving autistic children dangerous, unapproved drugs and improperly prescribing puberty blockers, of all things. (Has the gendering opposition heard that one?)
It’s key here to remember Kennedy is a lawyer, and lawyers research what supports their case in order to defeat the opposition’s case. That mindset has RFK Jr. barreling down the road to what is called ‘Happy Ending Research’ road—research that gives you the answers you want. Scientific research never ends, and the CDC was never perfect, but you really, really have to be seriously committed to your bias to do this. #LawyerPlaysDoctor
So much for the world’s leading health research source: HHS ordered to cut 35% of spending on contracts. The Trump administration is requiring the Department of Health and Human Services to cut spending on contracts by that much on top of nearly 25% staff reductions. And Kennedy is giving senior staff a choice: quit or be reassigned to BFE: Laid off HHS leaders offered transfers to remote Indian Health Service regions to strengthen the HHS presence in “underserved communities.” (This time, it’s their /s.)
In the midst of the firings, lay-offs, and reassignments, HHS has no clue how many people they’ve actually lost. This from an agency that previously gave us health data we could reliably trust was at least at the 95% confidence interval if not higher—no easy feat.
CDC is pulling back $11B in COVID-era funding sent to health departments across the US. The funds were being used to track COVID-19 trends and other emerging diseases, modernize disease data systems, respond to outbreaks, and provide critical immunization access, outreach, and education—leaving communities more vulnerable to future public health crises. States are already reporting the loss of critical funds2 and this is more of a largely unspoken but obvious Trump plan to decrease the Federal budget by passing costs back to the states, like FEMA, an expansion of his “let the states decide” approach to abortion.
The measles message is…???? Republicans don’t have a cohesive message on measles—except that they support RFK Jr. Meanwhile, we’re up to 712 confirmed measles cases across 24 states. That’s an increase of 105 reported cases—a 17% increase—since last week alone if you’re counting. And that’s reported cases. The three deaths so far—our first in over a decade—would indicate there are likely thousands more unreported cases, since the death rate is 1-3 per thousand cases.
What flu vaccine? The February meeting of the ACIP committee that determines what flu strains to include in next year’s vaccine was cancelled “to allow more time for public comment.” Now it’s been rescheduled for mid-April, but determining the flu strain has been removed from the agenda or he hasn’t figured out his public comment, a reasonable sign Kennedy isn’t interested in that vaccine, either. (He had some trouble figuring out his public comments on measles deaths, too.) Despite vaccine protection, this year’s flu season was one of the worst in recent history, with the highest number of hospitalizations in the past 15 years. Death data are still pending, but expected to be high, particularly among children.
All CDC full-time cruise ship inspectors were laid off. Norovirus? If you’ve ever had it, you’ll remember it—and this year was a particularly bad year for it on ships. The best part? There was no cost to the CDC; fees from cruise ship lines paid for the inspections.
The DSM-III, published in 1980, was the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the first to recognize infantile autism as different from schizophrenia. Doctors are required to use the DSM to identify and diagnose disease. If it's not in the DSM, it doesn’t officially exist.