RFK Jr. All Sizzle and No Steak On ‘Real Food’ Rhetoric: Public Health Project Newsletter

Trump health secretary RFK Jr. is out and about again after shoulder surgery, sliding right back into his ‘eat real food’ routine that slips further and further from economic reality. Appearing on The Bossticks podcast this week, Kennedy suggested ‘smart’ Americans “eat for $10 a day, three meals a day. Really good, tasty, delicious, wholesome, real food.” The multi-millionaire put a finer point on his out-of-touch advice: “We don’t need more money, we just need to be smarter about how we buy and how we cook.”

How dumb millions of American families must feel not being able to eat within Kennedy’s $10/day limit with ground beef prices at “$6.74 per pound, up 19.3% since December 2024” and vegetable prices up a stupefying 48.9 percent in the latest Producer Price Index, costs that inevitably get passed onto consumers.

Speaking of empty rhetoric, the HHS took to social media to boast RFK Jr’s biggest accomplishment: “Ended the war on protein.” That’s right, we all remember how the Keto diet and high-protein marketing on every item package in the grocery began the day Kennedy was confirmed.

MAHA Ready to Move On: Fully endorsing Trump’s executive order bringing back a harmful weedkiller chemical was apparently just the tip of RFK Jr.’s problems for his allyship with the MAHA movement. A new Politico poll found most Americans believe the Trump administration hasn’t done enough to “Make America Healthy Again” — including a 41 percent plurality of Trump’s own 2024 voters.

By No Means: WSJ reports that Trump’s anti-vax, no-medical-license-having Surgeon General nominee has run into opposition even among Senate Republicans, leaving “no obvious path for Casey Means to be confirmed to the role.”And the vultures are already circling overhead with replacement ideas.

Those Who Know Best: The NYT Magazine interviewed 43 current and former C.D.C. employees on the changes at the Trump-RFK Jr. CDC that “they say are replacing science with ideology — and making Americans more vulnerable.” Daniel Jernigan, former director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases sums it up nicely: “I’ve never seen an agency that is responsible for the health of 340 million Americans be so willy-nilly.”

Women Need Not Apply: A new academic paper published this week found that among the 2,291 active grants that were unceremoniously cancelled by the Trump-RFK Jr. NIH last year — cuts that cost far more than they saved — “women, particularly those early in their careers, were disproportionately affected by terminations [57.9% vs. 48.2% for men].”

Trump Can’t Be Bothered With The Little Things Like Picking Someone Permanent to Protect Nation From Deadly Disease Amid Historic Outbreaks: This week, Trump blew off the generous 210 day deadline to nominate a new CDC Director, leaving NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya to continue simultaneously running the NIH and CDC very poorly, just without the title of acting CDC director. This could be the plot of the next virus apocalypse flick, ‘210 Days Later’.

Speaking Of Not Doing Their Job: The NYT reports 19 senators are demanding that RFK Jr. stop holding up the work of a key preventive health panel that he’s blocked from meeting for a year. The Preventive Services Task Force is an independent panel of experts tasked with reviewing evidence and making recommendations for what screenings, counseling, and preventive medications should come at no cost to patients under most insurance plans by law. Kennedy’s obstruction risks higher costs and worse health outcomes for insured Americans, but what else is new for this administration.

In The News

RFK’s Disastrous Tenure At HHS