RFK/J: reformer or quack?

If Americans are being “poisoned” our bodies have a funny way of showing it

Note to readers: I will issue a holiday discount offer next Friday.

The United States is a “toxic swamp,” according to Robert Kennedy Jr., presumptive Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Suddenly people care about that job. Without using a search engine, who’s the current Secretary of Health and Human Services?

Kennedy has made sweeping statements regarding drugs, food and health, among them:

• Vaccines cause autism. Somehow RFK/J knows this although no credible study has ever demonstrated a link between vaccines and autism.

• Government should not have compelled Americans to take the COVID vaccine before it went through safety testing. The COVID vaccine should have been a personal choice. A fair point.

• Processed foods and sweeteners harm health. Maybe, but fresh organic foods are more expensive. The world is full of benefit-cost tradeoffs.

• Pesticides are deadly. Studies consistently show that eating fruits and vegetables, the agricultural products most impacted by pesticides, improves health outcomes.

• Drinking water should not be fluoridated. When my hometown of Buffalo, New York stopped fluoridating drinking water in 2015, incidence of childhood tooth decay shot up. Buffalo resumed fluoridating in 2023. Millions of people don’t have dental insurance or can’t afford the individual treatments that place anti-decay sealants directly on teeth.

• Toxic emissions from industry are out of control. Toxic emissions to air and to land are in decline while land or water disposal of untreated chemicals has been illegal for a generation.

• Cancer is increasing, because of chemicals. Both cases and rates of cancer have been in decline for a generation even as the population ages.

• America spends $5 trillion a year on health care and doesn’t get our money’s worth. This one is hard to argue. Health indicators in America are about the same as the European Union – where per capita health care costs are about half of ours.

They’re lovin’ it! Photo from last week posted by Elon Musk.

Kennedy proposes to Make America Healthy Again. Does that mean no McDonald’s? This did not stop Donald Trump and Elon Musk from digging into QPCs, McNuggets and fries on Trump’s personal plane last week.