Beyond vaccines, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Co. have a public health outrage for just about everybody | Editorial
The secretary and the Trump administration keep choosing special interests over Americans’ well-being.
The utility of a slogan calling for making America “great” or “healthy” again is that all who hear it may reach their own conclusions about what exactly it means. But there can’t be many Americans whose picture of health is an artificially overtanned teenager puffing on a mango-flavored vape, snacking on a pesticide-coated apple, and fighting a raging measles infection.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-scientific views on vaccination are well-known and believed by many of his followers, so it’s disturbing but not surprising that he is pursuing a deadly anti-vax agenda regardless of its political and epidemiological repercussions. What’s more remarkable is all the other patently unhealthy policies he and the Trump administration have implemented in the service of special interests. Their offenses to public health have proliferated to the extent that even some of their supporters are dismayed.
Last week, for example, the administration contradicted decades of federal policy to side with nicotine purveyors by clearing the way for fruit-flavored e-cigarettes. Such flavors had been restricted in an effort to prevent the industry from cultivating young, new addicts while allowing adult smokers to switch to vaping products that are not as dangerous as traditional cigarettes.
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This about-face was outlandish enough that one of the administration’s own senior officials, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary, reportedly resisted unleashing blueberry and other enticing flavors on young Americans. Just after the new policy emerged, Makary was ousted under pressure from Kennedy, President Donald Trump, and legacy tobacco companies that have helped fund the president’s campaigns.
Speaking of encouraging bad habits at a young age, Kennedy also recently revoked a proposal to ban artificial tanning among those under 18. Tanning beds dramatically raise the chances of developing skin cancer for everyone who uses them, but they’re particularly dangerous for those who start young — a risk compounded by adolescents’ limited capacity for gauging long-term consequences.
Perhaps any adult drawn to Kennedy’s almost crispy level of bronzing should be free — if not wise — to seek it out. But making it available to children can only benefit the tanning industry, and it certainly won’t do anything to make anyone healthy.
Remarkably, tanning technology isn’t the only potential carcinogen the Trump administration has been caught coddling of late. Last month, when the U.S. Supreme Court heard a crucial case concerning the labeling of Roundup, an herbicide the World Health Organization and other experts suspect of causing lymphoma and other diseases, the Environmental Protection Agency threw its weight behind the manufacturer, Bayer. This wasn’t an anomaly: The president previously moved to boost production of glyphosate, the weedkiller’s active ingredient, on purported national security grounds.
Despite the administration’s habit of choosing Big Business over little people, this may be among the least expected of these outrages. Glyphosate, along with crops that are genetically modified to survive the chemical, is an age-old nemesis of many in Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement. Among those who have objected to the administration’s position on the subject are prominent MAHA influencers known as “Glyphosate Girl” and “Food Babe.” The latter told demonstrators outside the Supreme Court, “You cannot claim to care about health while protecting poison.”
Indeed, the available evidence might lead a reasonable person — and perhaps quite a few unreasonable ones — to conclude that Kennedy and his colleagues don’t care about health, or at least not as much as they do about money and power.
