If RFK Jr. Actually Gave An F About Health, Here’s What He’d Focus On Instead

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the country’s health and human services secretary, talks a lot about the things he feels directly threaten the health of Americans — artificial food dyes, seed oils and fluoride tend to be common talking points.

He also focuses on the country’s “chronic disease epidemic,” with the goal of putting an end to it. But experts say his hyper-focus on things like food dyes actually take away from big-picture health problems that hugely impact morbidity and mortality.

“RFK Jr. will focus on that at the expense of other things that are very, very, very, very much contributing to the ‘chronic disease epidemic,’” said Dr. Eric Burnett, an internal medicine doctor at an academic medical center in New York and a health communicator on social media.

The chronic disease burden in the U.S. does exist and is high, but “the things that he’s focusing on … he can wave a magic wand and then make fluoride and food dyes disappear entirely — it would not grossly impact the burden of chronic disease in this country because there’s so many other things that are heavy contributors to this that he’s not even addressing at all,” said Burnett.

If Kennedy really wanted to “make America healthy again,” he’d switch his focus (and prioritize funding) to a number of other areas, said experts who spoke to HuffPost. Below, doctors and medical experts share what the health secretary should actually focus on.

“If he could just start with supporting vaccines, letting go of this autism nonsense that ‘oh, vaccines cause autism’ … [we have] hundreds of studies that have shown there’s absolutely no association,” said Dr. Anita Patel, a pediatric critical care doctor in Washington, D.C.

In light of the current measles outbreak in West Texas and beyond, Kennedy has made statements recommending vaccines, only to backpedal and tell parents to “do their own vaccine research.”

“If he cared about human health, he would not be undermining vaccine confidence,” added Jessica Malaty Rivera, an infectious disease epidemiologist.

“It’s just so unfortunate that, because we’re in this world where we have modern medicine and we have antibiotics, antivirals, amazing vaccines, people have simply forgotten that these viruses used to kill hundreds of thousands of people,” Patel added.

“They’re prioritizing these talking points that are very glamorous for the wellness industry, like food dyes and fluorides and vaccines, but things that are actually contributing to chronic disease in this country, like tobacco, alcohol, drug use, obesity, I don’t see them offering any practical solutions,” Burnett said.

Alcohol and tobacco use are “two of the largest contributors to chronic disease,” he said. “And yet, we’re not doing anything to address those things.”

Alcohol and tobacco use can lead to heart disease, lung disease and liver disease. “Alcohol is linked to several different types of cancer,” Burnett said. And it’s well-known that smoking cigarettes also causes cancer. “But we don’t talk about that, right?” Burnett said.

In recent months, the Trump administration has cut funding to any federal research that relates to “diversity, equity and inclusion,” which means that any research that includes the words “women,” “trans,” “diversity” and more can face funding cuts.

This is a far cry from where research ended under the Biden administration.

“Jill Biden had spearheaded this [White House Initiative on women’s health research] … something like billions of dollars was going to be dedicated to women’s health. Not just gynecologic conditions, but also cardiovascular health, brain health, these sort of things,” said Dr. Karen Tang, a board-certified gynecologist and the author of “It’s Not Hysteria.”

“And we had all been very hopeful that that was going to lead to improvements in a lot of these areas where we have a complete lack of research,” she said.

(Women were largely not included in clinical research studies until 1993.)

“I’ve heard from other doctors … funding has been shut down for research projects that have to do with women’s health because of these concerns that it’s favoring women, like it’s not being equitable — all this crazy stuff,” Tang said.

“The concern is, we’re already at a severe, severe disadvantage when it came to lack of research and data, and now we’re going to be even worse off because people are losing funding,” she added.

The same goes for research that focuses on racial disparities in health care and LGBTQ+ health care, which will also have devastating impacts.

“Even if you look at it from a purely cost effectiveness perspective, cutting all this funding is actually penny wise, pound foolish … you’re actually potentially leading to higher health care costs because we’re not figuring out ways to optimize health and to prevent all of these chronic conditions that, with a little bit more research or understanding, we could have,” Tang said.

“I think one of the primary drivers of chronic illness in this country is poverty, and I have never once heard RFK Jr. or anyone from HHS talk about poverty and how social determinants of health — like someone’s ability to afford food, someone’s ability to afford health care — impact chronic disease,” Burnett said.

If you can’t afford to go to the doctor, your chronic disease is only going to get more severe. If you don’t have access to nutritious food, the likelihood of developing a chronic disease like diabetes only increases.

“If he cared about food and nutrition, he would focus on resolving the issue of food insecurity in food deserts, in communities that don’t have enough resources to provide nutritious food, instead of these red herrings of food dyes and preservatives,” said Malaty Rivera.

“If he could talk about that and food dyes, I would say, ‘OK, he does care about the chronic disease epidemic, because he’s talking about some major things and sure, we can work on getting food dyes out, too, as sort of a supplementary thing,’” Burnett noted.

“A lot of my patients suffer from housing insecurity, food insecurity, and those certainly contribute to chronic health, so I really wish that he would focus on that,” said Burnett, who stressed that it’s not an easy task.

“It’s not something that’s glamorous … food dyes have been vilified by the wellness community for decades, so it’s very easy to sort of pick that as a villain boogeyman du jour and say, ‘Yes, this is what we’re gonna focus on. We’re gonna defeat this,’” he said.

“But talking about poverty is a lot more complicated and really makes people reflect on the sort of moral failings of our country and why there’s such an issue with poverty, income inequality, and unfortunately, talking about health care disparities as they relate to things like poverty is now considered DEI, and they’re defunding that, too,” he noted.

“That only exacerbates the issue if we can’t even investigate income inequality and health care disparities,” Burnett said.

“If RFK Jr. cared about making America healthy again, he would understand that defunding infectious disease research actually harms chronic disease research,” said Malaty Rivera.

“Infectious diseases are one of the leading causes of chronic diseases, and to say that they’re separate is showing a fundamental misunderstanding of how human health works,” she said.

Kennedy made a big deal about the amount of money and attention infectious disease research gets, “but he doesn’t realize it is inextricably linked with chronic diseases,” Malaty Rivera noted.

HPV, which is an infectious disease, is an example of this, she said. “[HPV is] also a leading cause, if not the leading cause, of cervical cancer, anal cancer, oral cancer, vulvar, penile cancer … 90% of those cancers happen because of an HPV infection, which is actually vaccine-preventable,” Malaty Rivera said.

“It’s just very disingenuous to say that those two things are separate,” she added.

A draft HHS budget (which is not yet approved) called for the elimination of $56 million in federal funding for Narcan, “which is the opioid overdose reversal agent,” Burnett said.

“And it’s just stuff like that, you focus on Red Dye 40, which is not contributing to morbidity and mortality in this country, but 100,000 people a year die from opioid overdoses, and Narcan reduced the mortality from opioid overdose by 24% last year,” he noted. “That’s incredible.”

“And the fact that they want to remove the federal funding for Narcan kits is just another thing that shows me that they’re not interested in making America healthy again,” said Burnett.

“One really big thing I wish that he would do is stop marginalizing children with any sort of underlying condition, and of course, autism is the one that is on all of our minds because his rhetoric around autism is essentially that it was caused by parents giving their child a vaccine,” Patel said.

“And, he’s not saying that directly, [he’s] saying environmental exposures, but the way that he’s doing it and the way that he talks about these children is already leading to bullying and just a lack of concern for them,” she added.

“As a critical care doctor, I’m the one that takes care of all these children with underlying medical conditions, and they deserve health support and care, and they are removing all of that with their potential budget,” Patel said, referring to the HHS draft budget.

There’s a serious women’s health crisis happening in the U.S. when you look at pregnancy and obstetric safety, Tang said.

“A third, 35% of U.S. counties have no access to obstetric care. There’s no OB-GYN, there’s no labor and delivery unit … at least 2 million women live in places where there’s no access to obstetric care,” Tang noted.

According to the Commonwealth Fund, maternal mortality rates are higher in the United States than in any other high-income country. As of 2022, the United States had 22 maternal deaths for every 100,000 births. By comparison, Norway had 0 maternal deaths out of 100,000, Switzerland had 1 out of 100,000 and the United Kingdom had 5 out of 100,000.

“Among other [high-income] countries, there’s nowhere close to the maternal mortality rate, and especially for Black women, who have [a] significantly higher risk of dying in pregnancy or childbirth compared with white women,” said Tang.

Rates of maternal mortality and infant mortality have increased in states with strict abortion bans, she added. Plus, OB-GYNs are leaving practices in states with abortion restrictions over fears of prosecution, she added, which further limits care for birthing people and their babies.

Focusing on food dyes, seed oils and vaccine research that’s been debunked over and over is actually just distracting from the true betterment of America’s health and the safety of individuals, their families and their neighbors.

Allowing budget cuts to crucial health research, the end of worldwide vaccine programs and the slashing of entire federal health programs sets the U.S. back “in the research he wants so badly to champion, and that’s [the] irreparable harm,” said Malaty Rivera.

“It tells me health is not the priority, and that’s been just abundantly clear,” she added. “So I’m trying to let people know ‘make America healthy again’ is actually making America sick again — and that’s really the TL;DR.”