The real worries about President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy as secretary of health and human services have nothing to do with his support of raw milk.
Yes, the Food and Drug Administration says that drinking raw milk can be risky. It can contain dangerous bacteria and viruses. Hundreds of Americans do get ill, some seriously, every year from drinking it. Some die. But many millions do drink it. Before Louis Pasteur, most everyone on Earth drank it. This is not the big problem with Kennedy overseeing American health services.
Nor is the problem his emphasis on healthy eating and exercise rather than overreliance on Big Pharma and prescription drugs. For over 60 years, at least from the beginning of the presidential administration of his uncle, President John Kennedy, the federal government has properly pushed good diets and staying physically fit as key to human health. He’s on the right track there.
It isn’t even his aversion to putting fluoride into our tap water that is at issue. While fluoridation has greatly increased children’s dental health by dramatically reducing cavities in recent decades, it’s true that too high a dose can cause its own problems.
With Kennedy, as with drugs, it’s the dosage — the overdosage — in his public statements and public life in recent years that give pause. Barnstorming the country expressing your thoughts on matters of importance is one thing. Everyone — or every American, at least — has the right to free speech, eccentric or otherwise. But a person who oversees the Department of Health and Human Services runs an organization that administers 115 programs with 13 operating divisions aiming to “protect the health of all Americans and provide essential human services, especially for those who are least able to help themselves.”
Whereas Bobby Kennedy is an environmental lawyer by training and practice who formerly did important work cleaning up the polluted Hudson River. But he has no expertise in public health, and yet chooses to promulgate discredited theories about the safety of vaccines that have saved and lengthened millions of American lives. When he began his own presidential campaign before closing it down and endorsing Trump, his own siblings released a statement calling their brother’s ideas “dangerous for our country.”
He’s even threatened bringing legal action against the nation’s leading medical journals for publishing research with which he disagrees. “I’m going to litigate against you under the racketeering laws, under the general tort laws,” he said in January of respected journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine. He told officials at the National Institutes of Health to “preserve your records” and “pack your bags.” He just makes stuff up: “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” he said on the campaign trail. “The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
“This is the first time we’ve ever had someone walking in the door whose public views, you just can’t trust,” Dr. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, which represents 25,000 public health professionals, told The New York Times. He called Kennedy “totally unprepared, by skill and by training,” for the job of secretary.
The president-elect should seek out a professional for the secretary’s job; if not now, then when the Senate properly fails to confirm Kennedy.