On May 16, a health report called The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again, led by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.), was released to the public.
The health report discusses chronic diseases relating to “nutrition, mental health, chemical exposures and children’s mental health…” However, it ignores the two leading causes of death among American children: gun violence and motor vehicle accidents.
The report also includes RFK Jr.’s known personal fascinations, such as fluoride in water and electromagnetic radiation. This is despite the fact that fluoride is overwhelmingly beneficial.
The fluoride in our water has passively protected the oral health of Americans for decades by reducing cavities, tooth decay, and dental health disparities. So much so, that the CDC has declared community water fluoridation one of the 20th century’s greatest public health achievements.
John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Compared to vaccines however, fluoride is hardly an issue in RFK Jr.’s worldview. The memo, without sound scientific evidence, took a swipe at the growth of the childhood vaccine schedule. Not only has the vaccine schedule been proven to be safe and effective, it also goes through a transparent process of public deliberation.
The Trump administration lied about the report, stating that it had a “clear, evidence-based foundation.”
But the report, from the presidential Make America Healthy Again Commission, cited studies that did not exist. These included fictitious studies on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, mental illness and medications prescribed for children with asthma.
The New York Times
The addition of fake reports was blamed on artificial intelligence (AI), though whether or not this is true is unknown. After overwhelming criticism from the media, the MAHA report was revised. NOTUS, in a follow-up article that reviewed the update, found that the problem only became worse- some errors were edited or removed, but were merely replaced with new mistakes and updated citations that “misinterpret scientific studies.” The original MAHA report also misinterpreted scientific studies.
RFK Jr. has refused to release details on who wrote the report.
The report comes as the Trump administration cuts funding for federal health agencies and academic institutions, both of which are actually capable of resolving the issues that the health memo outlined.
Author’s note: Is RFK okay?
Although RFK Jr. led the report, he is not qualified to do so. He is not a scientist or a doctor.
His past actions and behavior are not those of a mentally sane person. He publicly bragged about dumping a bear cub carcass in Manhattan’s Central Park and for having a dead worm in his brain. In 2010, fifteen years ago, he experienced “memory loss and mental fogginess so severe that a friend grew concerned he might have a brain tumor.” The public can only imagine what his cognitive and mental state must be like now.
Most heinously, RFK Jr. lied that Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people were immune to COVID-19. Medical anti-Semitism can be traced back to the European Dark Ages, in which Jews were blamed for the black death. In the 1800s, Chinese-Americans were scapegoated for several epidemics that impacted San Francisco. He has contributed to entrenched yet racist claims about those two peoples.
Since slandering over one billion Chinese people and fifteen million Jews was insufficient, Kennedy turned his attention toward autistic people. He exaggerated the prevalence of severe autism and mischaracterized the challenges that autistic people face.
Kennedy said many autistic children were “fully functional” and “regressed … into autism when they were 2 years old. And 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 unassisted.”
Politifact
Of all examples, Kennedy could not have chosen a worse one than poetry. Edgar Allen Poe and Sylvia Plath are just two of many authors who wrote profound poetry while suffering from intense mental illness.
