Column: Another Big Lie: RFK Jr. wants to make America healthy again

What do you think would happen, I asked my daughter, a nurse practitioner who works in addiction medicine, if Narcan, the drug that reverses opiate overdoses, were suddenly to disappear from pharmacy shelves?

“More people would die of overdoses,” she replied. Pretty simple.

Now, maybe you are the sort of person who thinks it’s OK for people to die from overdose because they shouldn’t be taking drugs like fentanyl in the first place. If you are that callous, I don’t have much to say to you.

But if you consider addiction a disease, as most medical experts do, then you would certainly be in favor of anything that helps preserve lives, and helps avoid the grief of those whose loved ones have died accidentally from a drug overdose.

And if you had spent, say, 14 years as a heroin addict, you would surely push as hard as you could to make Narcan, the trade name of naloxone, as widely available as possible, especially at a moment when fentanyl continues to kill Americans in depressingly high numbers.

That, at any rate, is what I would expect from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the aforementioned heroin addict. However, a leaked version of President Trump’s budget proposes cutting the department’s $56-million program that distributes naloxone kits and trains people on how to use them.

The leaked document is a preliminary plan, and Kennedy has not specifically addressed the proposed cut. In fact, in late April at a drug summit in Nashville, he spoke about his addiction and acknowledged that solving the addiction crisis requires strategies including maintenance treatments using suboxone and methadone, which lessen drug cravings; fentanyl detectors to prevent unwitting ingestion of the drug; and Narcan, which has saved countless lives.

But in the face of numerous news reports about the proposed cuts, Kennedy has not offered full-throated, public support for the naloxone program. Maybe he simply doesn’t have time, busy as he’s been overseeing what the Washington Post described as “a sweeping purge of the agencies that oversee government health programs.”

In his quest to “make America healthy again,” Kennedy — with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — has slashed 20,000 of the agency’s 82,000 employees for an estimated annual savings of $1.8 billion. Here are some of the Health and Human Services programs that have vanished amid the cost-cutting frenzy:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s lead poisoning prevention staff was sacked. “They played a key role in addressing lead contamination in applesauce pouches,” reported the Post.

The black lung screening program for coal miners was briefly killed off before an outcry led to a temporary reinstatement.

Programs on smoking cessation, diabetes prevention and cancer screenings have all been canceled.

The Food and Drug Administration lost senior veterinarians who worked to keep milk and pet food safe during the bird flu outbreak.

Scientists at the U.S. labs that track sexually transmitted diseases, such as drug-resistant gonorrhea and viral hepatitis, were laid off.

The list goes on. But the most worrisome development in all this bloodletting is how Kennedy’s antipathy toward vaccines is playing out.

For years, he has promoted conspiracy theories and undermined public confidence in vaccines.

Last month, he announced that in September, he will reveal the cause of autism, which has eluded actual experts for decades.

Chillingly, he has reportedly hired David Geier, who has no medical license, no scientific training and has been described as a “vaccine cynic and fraudster,” to conduct a study on whether vaccines and autism are linked. This is insanity masquerading as science.

The question has been studied, you might say, almost to death. The scientific consensus is clear — vaccines do not cause autism.

But can you imagine the damage Kennedy’s war on vaccines is going to do to the health of American children? These days, it takes very little to shake the public’s faith in vaccines.

After all, the misconception about vaccines and autism took flight after a single, fraudulent 1998 study involving only 12 children. The study was retracted, and its author Andrew Wakefield, guilty of ethical breaches and scientific misconduct, lost his medical license over it.

And yet the lie lives on.

Just last week, Kennedy told American parents to “do your own research” on vaccines as if the average American mother is capable of running a double-blind study at her kitchen table in her abundant downtime.

“It seems the goal of this administration is to prove that vaccines cause autism, even though they don’t,” Autism Science Foundation president Alison Singer told the Post. “They are starting with the conclusion and looking to prove it. That’s not how science is done.”

We are at a sad moment in American history for so many reasons. But putting a charlatan like Kennedy in charge of the nation’s health is like hiring an arsonist as your fire chief. It’s not going to end well.

Bluesky: @rabcarian.bsky.social Threads: @rabcarian