Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Season 12 Episode 9
Aired on April 27, 2025
Main segment: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and cuts made to the Department of Health and Human Services
Other segments: Death and funeral of Pope Francis
John Oliver discusses the budget and staffing cuts being made to public health agencies in the U.S. under RFK Jr.’s new leadership, the many ways those cuts will impact all of us, and how WWII really ended.
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JOHN: We’re going to dive straight in with our main story tonight, which concerns public health: one of the many good reasons to wash your hands. Some do it for the length of two Happy Birthdays or Row, Row, Row Your Boat. Personally, I do it for the length of one My Name is Keith Rock, and that feels enough.
On the campaign trail, Trump loved to talk about who he was going to put in charge of public health and what that person was then going to do:
[TRUMP] “Robert F. Kennedy cares more about human beings and health and the environment than anybody. And uh, I’m going to let him go wild on health. I’m going to let him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on medicines.”
JOHN: Look, even if he wasn’t talking about RFK, I don’t like the idea of anyone “going wild” on health. The same way I don’t want anyone to go apeshit on water, get wasted on the census, or go full Armie Hammer on agriculture. It sounds bad.
Unfortunately, RFK is now the Secretary of Health and Human Services and has indeed gone wild. In the run-up to the election, he pushed the slogan “MAHA” — Make America Healthy Again. And just a month into his tenure, he made this big announcement:
[KENNEDY] “We’re going to streamline HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective. We’re going to eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments and agencies while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America, or AHA.”
JOHN: Uh, no thank you. I do not like any of that. I don’t like him calling agencies “alphabet soup.” And I definitely don’t like how he just said “AHA,” which is such a dumb name. It sounds less like a government agency and more like Manhattan real estate jargon used to describe the neighborhood above Hank Azaria. If you are north of wherever Hank Azaria is at any given moment, then guess what? You’re in AHA.
In practice, what that’s meant is a radical downsizing of HHS. That same day, Kennedy announced a dramatic restructuring that would shrink the agency to 62,000 employees from 82,000, including about 10,000 layoffs and another 10,000 people who retired or resigned and now won’t be replaced. Which is alarming, because HHS is an absolutely vital agency, handling just about every high-stakes job related to health you could think of.
That “alphabet soup” includes the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, alongside 23 other divisions. Together, they cover around 28% of all federal spending. So these cuts are going to have a huge impact on our day-to-day lives.
And no one knows that better than some of the workers who just got fired:
[JULIE FONG] “We oversee child welfare. We oversee federally funded, uh, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, which is welfare. We oversee federally funded child care, child support enforcement. These are the services that serve the taxpayer and they are gone right now. It’s… it’s this kind of, ‘Oh, someone else.’
It will impact all of you, the greater public.
I think we’re going to have a lot of people die needlessly, honestly.”
JOHN: Yep. And it is pretty alarming to hear a fired government employee say, “We’re going to have a lot of people die needlessly,” especially while wearing a t-shirt that says, “The horrors are never ending.” Now, would you feel any better if I told you that apparently the bottom of that shirt says, “Yet I remain silly”?
I mean, probably for a bit, right? But then you remember the man wearing it just told you people are going to die needlessly. So you’d feel like shit again.
So, given a critical government agency is in the process of being gutted, tonight let’s talk about public health, what RFK is doing, the many ways it’ll impact us, and the troubling direction this is all going.
Let’s start with the sheer scale and chaos of these cuts. They actually began before RFK announced his AHA plan, because HHS, like most government agencies, suffered an initial round of Doge cuts in February, when over 3,600 probationary employees were fired. Around then, there were also a string of other freezes that hampered operations. At one point, Doge instituted a $1 spending limit on credit cards, meaning researchers couldn’t do things like pay for gas for vehicles used to transport patients’ blood samples.
And in the words of one scientist: “We can’t order mice.”
Which is bad, because you don’t have to be a scientist to know that lab mice are a key part of research. I’m actually pretty sure that the full scientific method goes: observation, hypothesis, order a mouse, don’t name the mouse, don’t get attached to the mouse, experiment, analysis, conclusion, and finally, cry because you got attached to Colonel Nibbles.
But then came the big AHA cuts, which were as sudden as they were cruel. Some federal workers didn’t even know they’d been fired until they turned up to work and tried to use their badges to get in. If the light turned green, they still had their job. If it turned red, they didn’t.
Some fired workers were told to contact an employee named Anita Pinda if they wanted to file a discrimination complaint, which was hard to do given she died last year. One former staffer even said: “This bloodbath was so fucking bad I had multiple officials asking me if I thought this was an April Fool’s joke.”
Because, on top of everything else, this happened on April 1st, which has to be the most confusing April Fool’s Day ever — second only to the one in 1945 when U.S. troops landed on the shores of Okinawa. And the Japanese troops were like, “Wait, is this an April Fool’s thing?” And the Americans were like, “No, it’s actually World War II.” And the Japanese were like, “Oh right. It’s just confusing because of the date.” And the Americans were like, “Well hang on, you guys do April Fool’s Day too.”
And that’s how World War II ended.
Now, RFK initially insisted that these cuts were made for efficiency and that nothing important was being lost. But it soon became clear some crucial stuff had been defunded, and he didn’t know about it:
[INTERVIEWER] There’s like more than 50 pages of, you know, of cuts that I actually went through.
[KENNEDY] All the cuts were mainly DEI cuts, which the President—
[INTERVIEWER] There were a lot. But I’ll give you, for example, about $750,000 of a University of Michigan grant into adolescent diabetes was cut. Did you know that?
[KENNEDY] I didn’t know that. And that’s something that we’ll look at. There’s a number of studies that were cut that came to our attention and that did not deserve to be cut, and we reinstated them. Our purpose is not to reduce any level of scientific research that’s important.
JOHN: Okay. It’s not great that that’s how he’s finding out. The health secretary should not be learning what he just did like some guy at a bachelor party being told what happened the night before:
“Do you not remember, bro? You spoke French, well! Then you pissed on a grave, fuck the bike rack, and cut $750,000 of research money for kid diabetes. You went wild!”
JOHN: And for the record, simply reinstating studies isn’t as easy as he’s making it sound. Some studies, once disrupted, can’t just be restarted.
So that’s already infuriating before you hear him try to justify why the cutting of the wrong studies or staff is actually fine:
[INTERVIEWER] Wouldn’t it have been better — or was thought given — to say before firing them, going through and saying, what is that job, what is that job, line by line by line, and saying, ‘I think that person’s job maybe isn’t needed, you know, this has to be eliminated’?
[KENNEDY] That would have been another approach, and it’s the approach that has been — has failed for 60 years.
[INTERVIEWER] Because you mean it takes too long?
[KENNEDY] It takes too long and you lose political momentum.
JOHN: Okay, so the question he was asked there boiled down to: do you think you should have figured out what you were cutting before you cut it? And his answer was no, which is not good.
The rules for restructuring HHS should be the same as the ones for a bris: it is crucially important to know exactly what you are cutting. Speed is just not the most important thing.
And it’s one thing to hear about that in theory. It’s another to see how these cuts are playing out. And let’s start with the National Institutes of Health. Its research and funding are key reasons why the human genetic code was deciphered, hepatitis C was discovered, the AIDS virus was isolated, and the first drug to treat it was discovered. It’s where the basic research that helped lead to the COVID vaccines was done.
It is by far the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, and in particular, the largest funder of cancer research. The NIH has been called the crown jewel of American science — which, if anything, is understating it, because it’s clearly better than a crown jewel. Those things don’t really do much aside from bedazzle a puffy hat that we occasionally balance on top of a collection of recessive genes. The NIH, however, is really important.
But it’s now in trouble. Because within weeks of Trump taking office, it stopped considering new grant applications entirely, which instantly stalled about 16,000 of them. It then announced hundreds of existing grants would be terminated, many seemingly for including terms like “minorities,” “transgender,” “AIDS,” and “vaccine hesitancy.” In fact, they’ve reportedly cut about $750 million in HIV-targeted grants alone.
And while that is clearly bad enough, all research is now threatened, especially because in addition to these cuts, this administration has a disastrous new proposal to cap what are sometimes called indirect research costs. Here is a Doge guy in a group interview with Elon explaining the rationale:
[BRAD SMITH, SENIOR DOGE MEMBER, HHS] So if I take NIH as an example, today if you’re an NIH researcher and you get a $100 grant at your university, today you get to spend $60 of that and your university spends $40 of that. The policy that we’re proposing to make is that you get to spend $85 of that and your university spends $15.
So that’s more money going directly to the scientists who are discovering new cures.
JOHN: Okay, set aside the fact that that group looks like a regional choir of orphaned businessmen. What he just said there is extremely misleading. For starters, indirect costs don’t come out of grants to researchers — they’re issued on top of them. Essentially, right now, if you get $100 to fund your research, your university gets an additional $40.
And it’s not ideal that he doesn’t seem to know that, especially as under this new plan that $40 would be capped at $15, which is a real problem because that money goes to cover costs that make research possible, like buildings, utilities, lab equipment, animal caretakers, and other support staff.
As one expert pointed out: if you’re going to use mice for your experiment, you actually need a mouse facility — which does make sense. You cannot have your lab mice commute into work, however adorable that might turn out to be.
And scientists will tell you: capping those expenses at 15% of a grant is a requirement that would make it functionally impossible for them to do high-quality work. Here is one scientist explaining what it would mean for his research on pneumonia:
[DR. THEODORE IWASHYNA] If there are no indirect costs flowing, we can’t keep the computers running.
If we can’t keep the computers running, we can’t do the science that we’re doing.
If we’re supposed to work without buildings, without computers, without centrifuges, there’s no way to get that done from someone else.
JOHN: It should go without saying, but scientists need buildings and computers. I mean, maybe they can get by without centrifuges. I mean, I guess Carl can spin around pretty fast, but you know what? No. I actually think they’re going to need those too.
The point is, you wouldn’t ask a research scientist to do their job without a computer or lab equipment the same way you wouldn’t ask a Doge employee to do their job without an iron deficiency and a deep-seated conviction that they are the smartest boy in the world. They need that for work.
But the attacks on research don’t end there. There have also been wholesale cuts to grants at institutions across the country — not just at Ivy League schools that you might have heard about, but also at flagship state schools in places like Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Nebraska, and Texas — which is very bad because virtually all of modern medicine relies to some degree on research that was supported by federal dollars.
Interestingly, the same day as those mass layoffs, NIH published a paper about a breakthrough in using a person’s own immune cells to fight gastrointestinal cancers — which is absolutely amazing. Unfortunately, two patients’ treatments using that therapy have already had to be delayed due to these cuts.
And that is just one example of many. As one Alzheimer’s researcher put it: “Disruptions delay discovery.”
And it’s impossible to know how many breakthroughs have already been delayed — or that may now never happen.
And while this is all supposedly being done in the name of saving money, I will point out a recent report found every dollar of research funded by NIH delivers $2.56 in economic activity. And not that we should be investing in health research purely for economic gain, but it is still worth noting that that kind of return on investment would make the sharks on Shark Tank shit their EMS chairs.
And so far I’ve just been talking about the NIH. But RFK also oversees the FDA, where the cuts range from communication specialists who alerted the public to urgent safety recalls, to veterinary division specialists who were investigating bird flu transmission.
So now it’s going to be much harder to get answers to important questions that you may have about bird flu, like:
“Is it in milk?”
“Is my pet vulnerable?”
Or “I fucked Big Bird two weeks ago and now I have a sore throat. Do I need to get tested?”
RFK also now oversees the CDC, and cuts there range from the firing of all 20 members of an office focused on Alzheimer’s awareness and prevention, to the shuttering of a lab that tracked STIs — meaning the U.S. has apparently just lost its ability to detect drug-resistant gonorrhea.
One former CDC staffer said: “Shitshow is an understatement for what just happened.”
Which seems right, doesn’t it? Because “shitshow” is a word you use to describe Anne Hathaway and James Franco hosting the Oscars, or Fergie performing the national anthem — not, “Hey, look out everyone, Turbo Gonorrhea is on the loose and it is pissed.”
And the thing is, the impact of cuts like that reverberates far beyond the CDC. Just take Wisconsin, where they’ve been dealing with a burgeoning lead paint problem in schools in Milwaukee. They’ve already had to close four of them for cleanup.
And normally, a city can lean on the federal government for help in responding to lead contamination — but not right now:
Milwaukee health officials turned to the federal government for assistance.
To see that all of our partners at the CDC had been let go was pretty, pretty difficult.
Totoraitis received a CDC response saying: “My entire division was eliminated today.”
Two days later, the health department received another follow-up email saying: “I sincerely regret to inform you that due to the complete loss of our lead program, we will be unable to support you.”
The move left the health department without any federal guidance.
“So right now, you do not have any contacts with the CDC when it comes to lead poisoning?”
“Correct.”
“Has that ever happened before?”
“No.”
JOHN: That is awful. And the CDC’s responses there showed some superhuman restraint.
“My entire division was eliminated” and “I sincerely regret to inform you we will be unable to support you” are incredibly diplomatic versions of what I’m pretty sure they wanted to say, which is: “Our shit just got rocked, and buckle up because your shit’s about to get rocked too.”
Now, RFK has since said, in his classic style, that: “If we make mistakes, we’re going to admit it and we’re going to remedy it.”
And that eliminating that lead program was one of the mistakes. But as of right now, that has not been remedied. And the thing is, even if it had, I doubt he’d even know about it. It seems that he only finds out what’s going on in his agency whenever he appears on an episode of This Bitch Brings Receipts.
And that’s not even getting into the fact that HHS has also abruptly canceled more than $12 billion in grants to states for their health services. And while some states are fighting that in court, in many cases, the damage has already been done. In Minnesota, their health department was told that they’d be losing more than $220 million in previously approved funding. They’ve warned that they may now have slower response times to infectious disease outbreaks — which is bad enough before you learn the cuts could even compromise their Team D.
Now, what is Team D, you ask? It’s Team Diarrhea — a group of public health students who interview people who’ve had diarrhea to track food poisoning outbreaks. And I love that name so very much because it’s straight to the point.
If someone calls and says: “Hi, I’m from Team Diarrhea.”
You don’t say: “And what is this regarding?”
Because you know things are about to get personal. You’re about to talk about force and viscosity with a stranger. Team Diarrhea is the best team name since the interdepartmental softball team on Law and Order: SVU that was literally called Sex Crimes.
Sex Crimes is still number one, but Team Diarrhea is a close second.
And that’s the impact on a big health department. In smaller rural communities, losing even a relatively small amount of money can be devastating. The head of a mental health initiative in Kansas said, after losing around $50,000 in federal funds: “That is nothing to the federal government, but it is massive to this agency and it is massive to the people we serve.”
And I’m still not done, because HHS grants also help support programs that might not immediately come to mind — from this one, which provides things like heating and cooling assistance to more than six million low-income families, to public services like Meals on Wheels.
Yeah, Meals on Wheels. They get funding from the Administration for Community Living, and nearly 50% of the staff there was just terminated. One of those people actually tried to confront Indiana Senator Jim Banks about the cuts — and it didn’t go well:
“Hi, I was a worker at HHS. I was fired illegally on February 14th. There are many people who are not getting social service programs, especially people with disabilities. Are you going to do anything to stop what’s happening?”
“Uh, you probably deserved it.”
“I deserved it?”
“You probably deserved it.”
“I deserved it. Wow. Yeah, that’s great to hear. Why? Why did I deserve it?”
“Because you seem like a clown.”
JOHN: Ohhh!! Fuck off! All else aside, do you even know what a clown is? Can you imagine how disappointed people would be if they thought they were going to see a funny clown and instead they got a guy lecturing them about the dire lack of social services for people with disabilities?
Trust me, they wouldn’t like it. Sure, they’ll tolerate it for around 12 seasons. They’ll even come and see it filmed every once in a while, but that doesn’t mean they like it — believe me.
And look, these cuts are dangerous on their face. But it gets so much worse when you remember who is in charge of all this — which brings us back to RFK.
As we’ve talked about before, he has some extreme views on public health. Although, in his confirmation hearings, he tried hard to distance himself from them, pushing the idea that if confirmed, he’d steer away from his controversial views on things like vaccines and would instead prioritize health and wellness:
[KENNEDY] Should I be so privileged as to be confirmed, we will make sure our tax dollars support healthy foods.
We will scrutinize the chemical additives in our food supply.
We will remove financial conflicts of interest from our agencies.
We will create an honest, unbiased, gold standard science at HHS, accountable to the President, to Congress, and to the American people.
JOHN: Yeah, that was his pitch. Which does make sense, doesn’t it? It would probably be harder to get confirmed if he admitted that he’s a rabid conspiracy theorist who, among other things, has:
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Suggested psychiatric drugs may cause school shootings,
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Claimed that Anthony Fauci was engaged in a historic coup d’état against Western democracy,
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Insisted that he won’t take sides on what happened on 9/11,
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And thinks it’s acceptable to go barefoot on an airplane.
That is true. He took off his shoes and socks on — wait for it — a trip to the bathroom. Here is a photo of it.
And I know, I literally just said “9/11” out loud. But RFK dragging his urine-soaked, free-range piggies through first class is literally the worst thing to ever happen in American airspace.
But regardless, that whole “I just care about Americans’ health” argument appealed to a lot of skeptics at that hearing. He even won over Senator Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor who previously expressed concerns about Kennedy’s stance on vaccines.
And I know there are some out there who still think: “Well, RFK is weird about vaccines, but he knows a lot about health-related issues.”
But you would be surprised by just how wildly wrong he can be when he is spouting alarming, official-sounding statistics:
[KENNEDY] We are 4.2% of the world’s population.
We buy 70% of the pharmaceutical drugs on Earth.
15% of American youth are now on Adderall or some other ADHD medication.
When I was a kid — I always say this — a typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes in his lifetime. Today, it’s one out of every three kids who walks through his office door.
20 years ago, there was no diabetes in China. Today, 50% of the population is diabetic.
Okay, so here’s the thing: all the numbers you just heard him say are wrong.
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Americans don’t buy 70% of the drugs on Earth. We buy around 6%.
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15% of American youth aren’t on ADHD meds — estimates put it closer to 5%.
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One in three kids don’t have diabetes — it’s actually 0.35% or 1 in 285 kids.
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And the rate of diabetes in China is roughly 12% — not, as I think you already know, 50%. Half of all the people in China do not have diabetes.
And look, we have asked our researchers to fact-check some dumb shit before on this show. Last year, we literally emailed JD Vance’s team to ask: “Has Senator Vance ever had sex with a couch? And has Senator Vance ever had sex with any other furniture or household items?”
But somehow that was still less embarrassing than writing to multiple diabetes experts this week and asking: “Do half the people in China have diabetes?”
And in return, getting a bunch of versions of “no,” and one response from a doctor that called Kennedy’s statement “ludicrous,” adding: “These stats might be related to the worm in his brain.”
And when you get key information about problems that wrong, you’re probably going to fuck up any attempt at a solution.
And that’s not even the biggest issue with Kennedy’s approach. Because for all his loud talk of making America healthy again, some of the cuts he’s overseen are going to do the exact opposite of that.
Because while he made a big show this week of claiming he’d eliminate eight dyes from foods like Froot Loops — which, fine — he’s been much quieter about his decision to fire everyone at the CDC’s Office of Smoking and Health, even though smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death and disease.
As one former head of that agency has said: “Shutting it down is the greatest gift to the tobacco industry in the last half century.”
With another former worker saying: “If you’re really worried about the ingredients in cereal, wait until you find out about the thousands of chemicals that are contained in cigarettes.”
Exactly. Just ask the Trix rabbit. He smoked three packs a day for the last 30 years. And he was just diagnosed with lung cancer. And it wasn’t eating Trix that did it. He has three months to live. He’s going to die!
In fact, for all RFK‘s self-promotion as being a scourge of big pharma and big food, he has just taken a buzzsaw to the regulatory agency whose job it was to keep them in line.
And yet, there is one area where he is flooding attention and resources, despite it being the area that he had promised he’d stay away from — and that is sowing doubt about vaccines.
He pushed out the top vaccine regulator at the FDA, who claimed Kennedy’s team requested he turn over data on cases of brain swelling and deaths caused by the measles vaccine — something that was hard to do, since, as he pointed out, that data doesn’t exist because there have been no such confirmed cases in the U.S.
But that is not all. Kennedy has also been making some very bold promises like this:
[KENNEDY] We’ve launched a massive, uh, uh, testing and research effort that’s going to involve hundreds of scientists from around the world.
By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures.
JOHN: Okay. So, first — there is no autism epidemic. There are autism diagnoses for people who are autistic.
And it is pretty bold to claim you’re going to get a definitive answer to something that people have been studying for decades by September. Almost as bold as admitting to dumping a bare corpse in Central Park, your daughter telling the world you decapitated a whale with a chainsaw, and yet still having the audacity to make a highlight reel on Instagram that simply says animals. Keep their fucking name out of your fucking mouth.
Most people agree: the vast majority of the rise in autism diagnoses is due to there being more research, better awareness, and more access for people to get an accurate diagnosis. That is what can happen when you put time and money into health services.
But RFK has persisted in treating the rise in diagnosis as a tragedy. And the way he talks about autistic people in general can be utterly dehumanizing:
[KENNEDY] Autism destroys families. And more importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which are our children.
These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet on a system. And we have to recognize we are doing this to our children and we need to put an end to it.
JOHN: Fuck you! And I’ve got to say — it is pretty telling that you are so divorced from any semblance of humanity that paying taxes is your first example of a fulfilling life.
It may surprise you, but most parents don’t actually hold their newborn baby for the first time and say: “There’s my future taxpayer. I can’t wait until you get your first 1099 and therefore have any value as a human being. A Gucci Gucci goo.”
And to be clear: lots of autistic people can do the things RFK listed there. In fact, Marian Eloise, an autistic poet, responded to those remarks with: “I would love to read RFK’s poetry if you could share it,” adding, “I am not familiar with his work.”
But also — even if someone can’t play baseball, or write a poem, or needs assistance using the toilet — they’re still a person, and their life still has dignity and value.
And as autistic advocates and journalists have noted, if Kennedy actually wanted to improve their lives, there are things he could be prioritizing — from research into how autistic people die needlessly from epilepsy episodes, to fixing our own system to provide around-the-clock care services.
You know — the sort of programs he’s been taking a fucking hatchet to.
So yeah, there are good reasons to have doubts about RFK’s plan to tackle autism even before you learn who he’s bringing in to help him. Because among those he’s turning to is David Geier.
He’s a longtime vaccine skeptic who Kennedy recently hired to head a study of immunizations and autism. Geier and his dad — seen here moments after telling each other “I love you” — have published papers claiming vaccines increase the risk of autism.
Something that has been thoroughly debunked, as we’ve already walked through at length before on this show.
Much of their research was conducted in what his dad called a world-class lab every bit as good as anything at NIH — but apparently, it was in his house, in a room that had wall-to-wall carpeting and faux wood paneling. Here is the two of them in that home lab.
So no red flags there. Just two regular dudes knocking out experiments in what looks like a 1970s Jack Shack.
And their conclusions have been shockingly transparent bullshit. Geier’s dad was often called to testify in court. Over the years, judges called his testimony, among other things, “intellectually dishonest” and “at best negligent, if not a fraud on the court.”
In fact, by the time he died, his medical licenses had been suspended or revoked in at least ten states.
As for his son — that is luckily not a concern because, fun fact, he was disciplined by Maryland regulators for practicing medicine without a license. And while I do not know what the ideal qualifications are to run the nation’s new inquiry into vaccines and autism, I’m assuming playing doctor for a while before getting caught isn’t one of them.
Not only is he not a doctor, he doesn’t even play one on TV. Now, more than ever, this is literally just some fucking guy.
And if you are thinking this is all going to end badly — it’s already heading that way.
As you undoubtedly know, measles is currently ripping across the country. As of taping, it has spread to at least 30 states — which is obviously bad because it can cause pneumonia, swelling of the brain, and one or two deaths per thousand people.
So far, three people have died — two of them children — meaning the country’s now seen the first pediatric measles death in 22 years.
And RFK’s response has been a long way from ideal. He initially called the outbreak “not unusual” — which it very much is.
And even when he wrote an op-ed acknowledging the benefits of the MMR vaccine, he made sure to say that:
“The decision to vaccinate is a personal one.”
And he has been recklessly pushing alternative theories and remedies:
“While Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says the vaccine does protect children against measles, he also touts vitamin A as an effective therapy, writing in an op-ed last week: ‘Vitamin A can dramatically reduce measles mortality.'”
[KENNEDY] “What is the cure for measles? Your measles is chicken soup and vitamin A.”
JOHN: Okay, first — chicken soup is not a cure for anything. It is floating meat water parents trick their kids into eating by saying that it’ll make them feel better.
And that is only because the only way to get a child to eat anything is just to lie to them: “Spider-Man eats broccoli all the time. Apples make you jump high. Santa Claus made these eggs and if you don’t eat them, he will kill himself.”
Kids will believe the dumbest shit. And apparently, so will the head of the nation’s health services.
And while that clip was from a few years ago, Kennedy is still pushing vitamin A as a measles treatment — which seems to have had consequences, given multiple children in West Texas have been treated for vitamin A toxicity stemming from at-home attempts to treat measles.
And all the while, Kennedy’s funding cuts have hampered states’ ability to mitigate this outbreak.
Vaccination efforts in multiple states have been canceled, including in places like Dallas, which had to cancel 50 vaccination clinics — including events specifically targeting schools with low immunization rates.
Proving once and for all that the city of Dallas and anyone from the Kennedy family simply do not mix well.
And it’s not just measles. Whooping cough cases are also soaring right now, and multiple people have died of it in recent months, including two infants. The CDC’s also been tracing an outbreak of hepatitis in Florida — but their lab that tests samples was just shut down, even though the kind of genetic tracing it performs is not conducted by any other lab in the U.S. or, indeed, the world.
And on top of all that, as we’ve mentioned, there are currently real concerns about bird flu spreading among wildlife and its potential to spread among humans. That could be a total disaster. This Colorado veterinarian has been sounding the alarm about bird flu for a while now, and she’s only getting more concerned:
Do we have enough information about how this virus is spreading?
I would say today no. At present, we’re given a stick, and they put a blindfold on us, and we’re sent into a gunfight — and we’re losing. We’re losing.
JOHN: Well, that is terrifying. And I really hope the worst-case scenario doesn’t happen here — if for no other reason than I so badly do not want to get stuck in that white void again, slowly losing my mind while talking to myself and occasionally a passive-aggressive face that seems to hate me. Don’t send me back in there!
The point is, these are just some of the current crises. The damage that radiates out from the wholesale gutting of HHS is only going to compound over time.
We talked to Dr. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association — not a man given to hyperbole — and he told us:
“When you go to a restaurant, I cannot guarantee that the food you’re going to eat is safe.
And if there’s a foodborne outbreak, I cannot guarantee there’s going to be a mechanism to come in and do the investigative work to understand how you got sick.
I can’t tell you that if there’s a train derailment tomorrow, there will be an entity that can come in and assess both in short and long term what your exposure from toxic materials is.
If there is an Ebola outbreak, we will not have the capacity — federal, state, or local — to get our hands around it quickly enough.”
It was a really uplifting conversation.
And look, I’m not saying that our system was perfect before this. Over the years, we’ve done multiple stories about shortcomings in various parts of HHS. But our solution was always, it needs to be strengthened — and not, hey, here’s a good idea, let’s cut its budget and put a deepshit screaming AHA in charge.
But unfortunately, it feels right now like we’re all about to get a harsh lesson in what each part of our public health system does — as it gets taken away. Which is sort of like finding out what each of your organs does as someone removes them one by one.
I’ll be honest: in the course of working on this piece, we called a lot of people who’ve either worked for these agencies or rely on them. Sometimes, they were people we’ve talked to multiple times over the years on various stories. They include many doctors and scientists who are, by profession, not alarmists. They can be endearingly — and sometimes annoyingly — measured in everything that they say.
But they’ve been utterly shattered by the last few months.
When we started making calls after the election, they sounded alarmed, but they were still holding off judgment, saying: “Well, let’s just see how this goes.”
But more recently, those same people have been telling us flat-out: “This is a disaster. People will die because of the mistakes we’re making right now.”
That leader of the APA recently put out a statement that read, in part: “As a physician, I pledge to first do no harm and to speak up when I see harm being done by others. Secretary Kennedy is a danger to the public’s health and should resign or be fired.”
And look, I am not a physician or a scientist — despite admittedly looking like the child of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker of the Muppets — but I completely agree: RFK needs to go, and by impeachment if necessary.
To the extent any senators like Bill Cassidy were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt — and I still cannot believe that they thought they could do that — that grace period is emphatically over. Because too much damage has already been done.
This is a man who is clearly in way over his worm-riddled head.
He doesn’t know what he’s doing.
He doesn’t know who he’s fired.
He doesn’t even know how many diabetic people there are in China.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, he’s currently spreading dangerous nonsense and gutting life-saving research — all while bringing in a basement quack.
RFK in this job is dangerous. In fact, if I may quote every single passenger in the cabin of his ill-advised piss-footed walkabouts: “There is something deeply wrong with this guy and we need to stop him before he makes us all fucking sick.”
