Besides Food Dyes, What Endangers Children's Health? Bobby's Hypocrisy
Nobody should have trusted Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to "make America healthy again," especially after he sold the slogan to President Donald Trump for a cabinet position. But the events of recent days have exposed the cynicism and contradictions behind that sonorous pledge.
On May 22, the Make America Healthy Again Commission, named by Trump and chaired by Kennedy, delivered an ambitious report on children's health, which warned that our kids are "the sickest in the world" and loudly blamed ultraprocessed foods, environmental poisons, prescription drugs and lack of exercise for their condition. While the report offered few specific solutions to the problems identified, Kennedy promised that policy recommendations would be forthcoming in the next 100 days.
Unsurprisingly, the lengthy MAHA report promoted the HHS secretary's obsessive opposition to vaccines, despite their proven track record in saving millions of lives of both children and adults — and the recent horrific incidents of unnecessary deaths from measles in communities with low vaccination rates. Despite that troubling feature, other aspects of the report — in particular its focus on encouraging consumption of whole foods and reducing the food industry's most destructive production and marketing processes — won praise from respected scientists who otherwise harbor grave doubts about Kennedy (and Trump).
While the nation awaits Kennedy's vague initiatives on child health, however, the Trump administration is moving rapidly to thwart whatever progress might result from banning a toxic food dye or two. The Environmental Protection Agency, with the full support of the president, under the leadership of a far-right former congressman from New York, has set out to prove that its title is a misnomer. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has announced that his agency will drop much of its historic effort to prevent dangerous pollution of air and water.
What Zeldin really aims to protect are the commercial interests of coal, oil and other dirty industries. Boasting that he will oversee "the biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history," the EPA chief plans to roll back dozens of regulations designed to prevent particulate matter, smog, nitrogen oxides, lead and mercury from entering the bloodstreams of Americans and inflicting deadly effects on their brains, lungs and hearts, causing disease and premature deaths.
While he mulls the most efficient means to destroy the regulatory structures that have reduced pollution over the past 50 years, Zeldin is offering special favors to polluting firms on request. His agency has set up a dedicated email account where industrial polluters can request a "presidential exemption" from regulations that are meant to curtail their dumping of poisons under the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. In practice this will mean increased exposure for vulnerable Americans, especially children, to the same toxic chemicals decried by the MAHA report.
Let's recall at this point how Trump, during his campaign last fall, urged the oil industry to give his campaign "a billion dollars" to ensure his victory — so that he could provide policy favors and pliant officials like the execrable Zeldin.
Among the glaring ironies, as noted in Scientific American, is that Kennedy himself suffered a bout of mercury poisoning years ago from contaminated canned tuna. Eight years ago, when he was still working as an environmental lawyer, he railed against the first Trump administration's attempt to roll back mercury regulations of coal-burning power plants. And even during his HHS confirmation hearings, he touted his record fighting polluters. "The same chemicals that kill fish make people sick," he warned last January.
Kennedy was right, but now he is silent about the ruinous policies pursued by Zeldin, who sits beside him on the MAHA Commission. He complains constantly about fluoride in state and local water supplies, but mercury is a far more potent menace to children's physical health and intellectual development. At its core, Make America Healthy Again is a deception — and it is Kennedy's hypocrisy that now endangers children's health.
Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024).
Reprinted with permission from Creators.
