Washington D.C. – Last night, Trump Health Secretary Kennedy fired off a fuming 871-word tweet at the NYT reporter behind the recent bombshell piece on RFK Jr’s disengaged and dysfunctional management of HHS, sourced to “multiple colleagues” who’ve seen it first-hand. Kennedy whined that the reporting did not celebrate “my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues”, curiously without naming a single one.
Meanwhile, NBC News is out with new reporting reinforcing the NYT finding that among the “most urgent problems is Mr. Kennedy’s failure to act more swiftly to address a leadership vacuum.” By NBC’s accounting: “In total, 15 of 33 leadership positions at the NIH, 14 of 26 at the CDC and 10 of 22 at the FDA are being filled by temporary appointees or appear empty — meaning no one has been publicly appointed. Former federal employees said the lack of permanent leadership is highly unusual more than a year into a presidential administration. … Now, experts worry the unusual lack of leadership could hinder the U.S. response to public health threats such as hantavirus, Ebola and measles.”
But RFK Jr. is certainly ‘accomplishing’ one thing: torpedoing public trust in the institutions he oversees. PBS notes a major new poll finding that “Only 50% of Americans say they trust the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations to improve public health right now, down from 77% last year. … About 6 in 10 also said federal public health agencies have cut or scaled back programs or funding for health and medical research “too much.”
Protect Our Care has rigorously documented RFK Jr.’s harmful and misguided tenure at HHS, of which there’s little to be proud of, from: advancing an unfounded anti-vax agenda that throttled vaccination rates and welcomed outbreaks of preventable disease like measles; stifling medical research and innovation by denying NIH research grants; and maintaining a dangerous leadership void across his department that’s put American lives at risk. If RFK Jr. considers revising the food pyramid his signature accomplishment, it is poised to become even more unrealistic and unaffordable under potentially record-high beef prices coming to Americans thanks to Donald Trump’s short-sighted decision to ax funding dedicated to monitoring and containing New World screwworm in Central America.
“Secretary Kennedy is employing a classic strategy for public officials with no real response to well-deserved criticism: attack the messenger,” said Kayla Hancock, Director of Protect Our Care’s Public Health Project. “RFK Jr. desperately wants credit for ‘accomplishments’ that do not exist and wants no blame for the grave consequences of the choices he made, like understaffing his agency, cutting funding to critical programs, and dismissing any qualified leaders, all while spending his time on disproven theories that undermine science, innovation, public health, and public trust. RFK Jr. protests a bit too much for someone whose own colleagues say is out of his depth and manufacturing chaos.”
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