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Tag: robert f. kennedy jr.

Watch AOC And Democrats Strip The Bark Off RFK Jr. In House Hearing

House Democrats dragged Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during a hearing on Tuesday in which he attempted to defend President Donald Trump’s latest budget proposal. While last week’s hearings focused on RFK Jr.’s failures to protect public health, this round focused on his complicity in the corruption of the administration’s health care policies.

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York led the charge, highlighting the contradiction between Kennedy’s rhetoric and his recent policy decisions—specificially, sending billions to major health insurers he has previously accused of fraud.

“United [Healthcare], CVS, Aetna—they’re defrauding the American public to the tune of $80 billion a year,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And so I was surprised to see, about two weeks ago, you had decided to give them another $13 billion, and it was used through the mechanism of the MA [Medicare Advantage] reimbursement rates, but I want to know, why did you do that?”

After Kennedy acknowledged concerns about the industry, he offered up a meandering response, which Ocasio-Cortez politely threw back in his face.

“The industry is saying that they’re increasing these costs, but the industry is defrauding the public. So we know they’re lying,” she responded. “They’re lowering their reimbursement rates, they’re increasing denial. So we know that these folks are lying. We know that they’re bad actors. And if I’m hearing you correctly, we are giving them more money because they’re saying that they need it?”

Things didn’t get easier when Rep. Greg Landsman, Democrat of Ohio, pressed the health secretary on the nearly $1 trillion in health care cuts the Trump administration has used to give tax breaks to the wealthy.

“You had mentioned the rural-hospital piece—$50 billion, largest investment—but there’s a reason why the Senate Republicans asked for a $50 billion rural-hospital investment,” Landsman said. “[It’s] because of the nearly trillion-dollar cut to Medicaid.”

“There’s no cut in Medicaid,” Kennedy replied. “Look at the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] report from this week.”

“Then just do the math with me,” Landsman responded. “That means that they added $3.5 trillion to the deficit. You gotta find a trillion dollars. You either added a trillion dollars to the deficit, or you cut Medicaid by a trillion dollars.”

Finally, Democratic Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts took off the kid gloves, focusing on the Food and Drug Administration’s National Priority Voucher Program—an initiative widely criticized for being vulnerable to corruption. Auchincloss pointed to the recent controversy involving podcaster Joe Rogan, who boasted about texting the president in order to get the FDA to fast-track research for the psychedelic ibogaine.

“Secretary, this flies in the face of your stated commitment to putting science over politics,” Auchincloss said. “We are literally seeing politics put over science.”

“Do you want to grandstand, or do you want an answer?” Kennedy interrupted.

“I want safety and efficacy to be the standards by which psychedelics are approved, not the president’s attempt to shore up support from his base for a disastrous war in Iran,” Auchincloss shot back.
Like all of Trump’s unqualified cabinet members, Kennedy’s glaring inadequacies continue to haunt Americans.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Kennedy's Promotion Of Unproven Peptides Undermines Science And Public Safety

Journalists are often accused of using the following aphorism to determine the newsworthiness of a story: “Once an accident. Twice a coincidence. Three times? A trend. Go for it!”

Using that habit of mind to drive journalism is a bad idea. People will be misinformed. Using it to drive the practice medicine is worse because people will get hurt.

This past weekend, I read a recent story in The New Yorker about “the seductive world of unapproved peptides,” written by Dhruv Khullar, an outstanding medical journalist. The physician-writer visited several clinics run by board-certified physicians pushing these protein snippets on gullible people looking to heal ailing muscles, improve memory and live longer lives, among other alleged benefits.

The testimonials offered by physicians promoting various peptides defied every standard of medical evidence developed since Founding Father Benjamin Rush gave up bloodletting. Charleston, South Carolina’s Craig Koniver, trained in family medicine, called one peptide used for tissue healing (BPC-157) “supersafe” and said “almost everyone I could think of” will benefit from it. A few paragraphs later, he says, “I’m not a big vaccine guy. A lot of them don’t have the data.”

What’s the data behind BPC-157? There are exactly two clinical trials for that peptide in the federal government’s clinical trials database. One is an early-stage safety trial of unknown scope and status that is taking place in Tijuana. The second is an efficacy study based in Shenzhen, China, which is still recruiting patients. Vaccines, on the other hand, have undergone extensive testing and they’ve gained FDA approval, which means there are reams of data documenting both their safety and efficacy.

Koniver goes on to say “anecdotal data means a lot to me. Two days after a vaccine, someone has a stroke. Two days later they’re dead. … You see enough of that, it makes an impression.”

There’s no shortage among his 1,000 patients, who pay $15,000 a year for the services of his concierge medical practice (it doesn’t take insurance), willing to attest to peptides’ benefits. After all, wait long enough and most tissue tears eventually heal. Koniver (is a Charles Dickens doppelganger now the resident fact-checker at The New Yorker?) has 6,000 people on his waiting list.

Many of the people lining up to spend their hard-earned money on peptides may have heard the siren call of the ultimate peptide guru, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who sits atop the Health and Human Services Department. He frequently claims he benefited from injecting peptides to cure injuries sustained during body-building exercises.

He appeared earlier this year on the Joe Rogan podcast (the world’s most popular with 11 million listeners). Rogan frequently touts peptides on his show. The field also received an unexpected boost from the FDA’s approval of semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound), a peptide for diabetes and weight loss. If that one works, won’t they all?

Semaglutide is the exception, not the rule when it comes to data on peptides. There is almost no evidence beyond individual anecdotes that most of the peptides now in circulation, mostly produced by compounding pharmacies, actually benefit patients or are safe.

Earlier this year, Kennedy removed the limited regulation of unapproved peptides that had been put in place during the Biden administration because their manufacturers failed to submit data to the FDA proving they could be safety injected in patients. The Kennedy reversal hurled peptides back into the regulatory vacuum enjoyed by dietary supplements, where the only rules that apply involve purity (does it contain what it claims to contain) and a ban on making medical claims (which is routinely violated by industry advertising).

For a dispassionate dissection of Kennedy’s views on peptides as expressed on the Joe Rogan podcast, watch this YouTube video by Matt Kaeberlein, a professor pathology at the University of Wisconsin Medicine and co-founder of UW’s Health Aging and Longevity Research Institute. “There are numerous cases out there where people have been harmed by peptides … Nobody has come forward with any good data on the safety of these peptides.," says Kaeberlein.

Good data on peptides, whether for efficacy or safety, requires someone conducting randomized clinical trials that test whether the products are better than a placebo or the current standard of care. The tests need to be in a sufficiently large population to show statistical significance in any outcomes differences between the two groups. Absent clinical proof of efficacy in such trials, there will only be the risk of harm or unpleasant side effects.

The Biden administration upheld evidence-based medicine when it required most peptides undergo such tests. The Trump administration via Kennedy opted instead for allowing money-hungry physicians and compounding pharmacies to conduct what amounts to an uncontrolled science experiment on gullible Americans, where no one takes a measure of the outcomes except the individuals and families who will be harmed both physically and financially.

The peptide craze is following the same trajectory of the anti-vaccination movement (also championed by Kennedy); the evisceration of National Institutes of Health research into the many social causes of disease; and the degradation of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention’s ability to promote population health. It is anti-science, pitch perfect for a society addicted to addictions, promoted by someone who admits he once snorted cocaine off a toilet seat, who now jabs needles in his body in the evidence-free pursuit of faster healing and better health.

Peptide proponents claim it is their right to try unapproved substances based on claims made by family, friends,or their concierge physician. It’s my body. I willingly take the risk. Whom else does it harm?

Actually, everyone. Who pays when you end up in the hospital and wrack up huge treatment bills? Two people fell desperately ill during a Las Vegas “anti-aging” event after injecting peptides and had to be intubated. Widespread allergic reactions to the shots, some of which were life-threatening, forced regulators in Australia to issue a safety alert. Health Canada has issued a warning that unauthorized peptides can cause blood clots and liver and kidney damage.

The U.S. used to have a regulatory agency that the rest of the world awarded a gold medal for how to manage the entry of medical products into the marketplace. Today, under this government, it isn’t even in the race.

Merrill Goozner, the former editor of Modern Healthcare, writes about health care and politics at GoozNews.substack.com, where this column first appeared. Please consider subscribing to support his work.

Reprinted with permission from Gooz News

Judge Rejects RFK Jr's Unfit Vaccine Committee In Sweeping Decision

So much damage has already been done.

Measles outbreaks are raging in four Red states. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has dramatically scaled back its vaccine recommendations. Vaccination rates among young children are plummeting, especially in the South and rural West. Manufacturers are backing away from developing new vaccines.

In recent months, the Trump administration’s CDC, under the thumb of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has stopped recommending six routine childhood vaccines, including the flu, hepatitis A, rotavirus and meningococcal shots.

It will take years to undo the damage this already has done and will continue to do to public health until those policies are reversed. Here’s hoping this week marks the beginning of a turnaround.

Yesterday Massachusetts federal judge Judge Brian E. Murphy forbade the CDC’s newly-appointed Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices from taking further action to dismember U.S. vaccine policy. He ruled Kennedy violated federal law last June when he summarily fired the standing 17-member Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and appointed eight replacement members, most of whom are avowed vaccine skeptics or critics of the Biden administration’s Covid policies. Another two appointed in January are similarly biased.

That’s not how Kennedy described his action nine months ago. He called the standing committee “a rubber stamp for industry profit-taking agendas.” He promised his hand-picked replacement committee would follow “unbiased science—evaluated through a transparent process and insulated from conflicts of interest.”

Kennedy violated both of those legal requirements, the judge ruled in a suit filed last year by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Public Health Association. “There is a method to how these decisions historically have been made—a method scientific in nature and codified into law through procedural requirements,” the 45-page order said. “Unfortunately, the Government has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions.”

He continued: “The Government bypassed ACIP to change the immunization schedules, which is both a technical, procedural failure itself and a strong indication of something more fundamentally problematic: an abandonment of the technical knowledge and expertise embodied by that committee.”

A Law Nixon Signed

The Federal Advisory Committee Act, signed into law in October 1972, requires agencies vet potential members of outside advisory committees for bias and conflicts of interest. It also requires the public be allowed to review and comment on the nominees. If an agency chooses someone with a conflict of interest, which can include a demonstrated intellectual bias, it must issue a waiver that documents why that particular person’s expertise is necessary before allowing them to serve.

(Full disclosure: I spent 2004 to 2009 at the Center for Science in the Public Interest monitoring science-based federal advisory committees’ compliance with FACA. I also served on Food and Drug Administration advisory committees. I am familiar with the law.)

Kennedy did none of that, drawing a black curtain around his promised “transparent process.” There was no public input before Kennedy made his choices. And there is no evidence (the FACA database, operated by the General Services Administration, has been non-operational for months) that any received waivers despite clear evidence that many had preconceived notions about the direction the committee should take.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs hailed the judge’s ruling. “This is a tremendous victory for science, for public health, and for the rule of law,” Richard Hughes IV, a partner at Epstein Becker & Green, told Stat News. A spokesperson for HHS said the agency would appeal.

Not 'A Reckless Ideologue'

The vice chairman of the new ACIP committee is Robert W. Malone, a physician and adjunct professor at Louisiana State University who has posted numerous articles on his Substack expressing doubts about current vaccine policy. He claimed in his post yesterday that “Kennedy’s reforms are not the work of a reckless ideologue (but) represent a serious effort to apply rigorous scrutiny to vaccine recommendations that have gone largely unquestioned for decades.”

Rigorous scrutiny? The evidence presented at the early December meeting of the reconstituted ACIP compared the U.S. to Denmark, a small, homogeneous country with far fewer health problems. It elevated patient and parental “choice” to a core principle of vaccine policy, not adherence to medical science.

The committee recommended the CDC scale back its vaccine recommendations. The administration formalized that action in a long memo a month later when acting CDC head Jim O’Neill unilaterally reduced the number of recommended childhood vaccines from 17 to 11. That step was taken “without public comment, and without initial review of the evidence by designated advisory bodies,” according to former public health officials now at Manatt Health, a consulting firm. (The CDC only makes recommendations; states are free to set their own policies when it comes to public health.)

It’s likely Trump administration lawyers will find a friendly appeals court to lift the order. Any formal reversal in the destructive vaccine policy that is now official will have to await a change in administration, if and when it comes.

I’ll leave the last word to Families USA executive director Anthony Wright. “When politics override science, our children pay the price. Today’s decision helps ensure that medical evidence – not ideology – guides how we protect kids from preventable diseases. With this decision, patient and consumer advocates will continue to advocate for clear, evidence-based advice and access to key vaccines, fully covered without cost-sharing or other barriers…

“We commend the court for this ruling, but families should not have to depend on litigation to ensure their child can receive a routine vaccine. Evidence-based medicine keeps children alive and in school. Preventing disease should be the foundation of any healthcare system serious about confronting the next disease outbreak or finding the next cure.”

Reprinted with permission from Gooz News

Dear MAHA Moms: Don’t Be Surprised When Bobby Sells You Out

The fans and followers of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are now learning what others have known for decades: You can rely on him to lie whenever it is expedient and profitable, and you can’t rely on him to uphold any principle except his own advancement.

That unpleasant jolt of awareness struck the devoted legions of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement when he dropped their priorities in obedience to the corrupt Trump White House. Across the country, stunned “MAHA Moms” and influencers watched their idol Bobby meekly endorse the president’s decision to rapidly increase production of glyphosate – a ubiquitous pesticide they consider deadly.

Back during the 2024 campaign, Trump promised he would empower Kennedy to “ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides,” a category that clearly included glyphosate, known commercially as Roundup. In a June 2024 social media post, Kennedy wrote that glyphosate is “one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic…Shockingly, much of our exposure comes from its use as a dessicant [drying agent] on wheat, not as an herbicide…My USDA will ban that practice.” He noted that across Europe, the use of glyphosate is sharply restricted or even banned.

Flash forward to February 18, 2026, when the president issued a directive that not only failed to reduce the use of glyphosate but will rapidly increase its production. Kennedy responded with a wag of his tail and a press release that echoed the usual Trumpian tropes about “America first” (and downplayed any specific mention of the pesticide’s name). Expanding the availability of the substance he had many times denounced as “poison,” he declared, would “protect American families.”

The reaction of Kennedy’s civilian cadre was swift and horrified. Zen Honeycutt of Moms Across America, a grassroots MAHA organization, accused Trump of placing “toxic farming and businesses” ahead of children’s health – and said he had betrayed “every voter who voted for him to [Make America Healty Again].” Kelly Ryerson, an influencer who goes by “Glyphosate Girl” on X, warned that she was seeing “the bottom drop out of MAHA,” a dire forecast for Republicans already pessimistic about their midterm prospects.

Perhaps the MAHA masses shouldn’t be quite so surprised that Bobby betrayed them, since this double-cross has been in the wind for months. When the Trump White House released its much-publicized interagency “MAHA report” last year, its hundreds of pages barely mentioned pesticides or toxic chemicals and equivocated on glyphosate, noting that human studies of its carcinogenic effects are “limited.”

Evidently the outraged MAHA moms weren’t listening to Bobby last year when he told a Senate committee that “we [the Trump administration] cannot take any step that will put a single farmer in this country out of business…One hundred percent of corn in this country relies on glyphosate. We are not going to do anything to jeopardize that business model.” (Farmers driven bankrupt by Trump’s tariffs may be excused for being skeptical.)

That is a complete reversal of Kennedy’s stance from the years when he was suing the makers and distributors of glyphosate on behalf of cancer victims and earning millions of dollars for himself from those successful lawsuits. He’s still collecting the proceeds, according to his most recent financial disclsoures, which show about $2.4 million in referral fees from a law firm handling lawsuits on behalf of individuals who got sick after glyphosate exposure.

The harsh truth behind his first year as health secretary is that Bobby has succeeded most with the least popular aspect of his agenda, the longstanding campaign against vaccines that first marked his turn toward the far right. Abusing his control of the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health, he has inflicted grave damage on public health and vaccine research.

Kennedy has far less authority over environmental policy, including the use of toxic chemicals and pollutants such as mercury. Indeed, he has kept dishonorably silent while Lee Zeldin, the politician appointed by Trump to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, oversees ruinous deregulation schemes that insure the spread of mercury, “forever chemicals,” and sundry lethal toxins across the American biosphere.

MAHA was always a gauzy construct, serving less as a movement for change than as a handy instrument of deception by manipulative politicians like Trump and his acolyte Kennedy. When Bobby abandoned everything that his family had represented for half a century and pledged fealty to a crooked authoritarian, the eventual denouement should have been obvious: A man who sells out his family legacy is certain to sell out his followers.

He just got there even sooner than we expected.

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). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, will be published in February 2026.

Reprinted with permission from Creators

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Smart. Sharp. Funny. Fearless

Watch AOC And Democrats Strip The Bark Off RFK Jr. In House Hearing

Kennedy's Promotion Of Unproven Peptides Undermines Science And Public Safety

Judge Rejects RFK Jr's Unfit Vaccine Committee In Sweeping Decision

A Law Nixon Signed

Not 'A Reckless Ideologue'

Dear MAHA Moms: Don’t Be Surprised When Bobby Sells You Out

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