Post #5146

📰 Make America Healthy (and Confused) Again Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent a year as Trump’s health secretary trying to turn a MAGA government into a Goop newsletter with subpoenas. He launched a “Make America Healthy Again” commission, blasted ultraprocessed food, and briefly terrified Big Ag by naming glyphosate and atrazine as “alarming” threats in kids’ blood — right up until farm‑state Republicans dragged him into the Roosevelt Room, the meeting turned heated, and his next report magically forgot pesticides exist. For a movement that promised to “take on poisoners,” it took one round of GOP table‑pounding to learn that, in this White House, corn and campaign cash are still a food group. Where Kennedy hasn’t backed off is vaccines. In a single year he’s purged CDC advisory panels, stacked them with skeptics, and hacked the childhood schedule down to a Denmark‑style list, dropping shots for hepatitis B, hepatitis A, rotavirus, flu, meningitis and Covid in the name of “informed consent.” Kids can technically still get the vaccines, but when the federal government stops recommending them, red‑state lawmakers hear it as an invitation to weaken school requirements, and measles and other preventable diseases are already resurging. Republicans who thought they were getting a culture‑war mascot now find themselves defending an HHS chief whose signature policy polls terribly even with Trump voters — 80‑plus percent say they want vaccine guidance from doctors, not influencers with Cabinet badges. Inside the system, RFK’s war on “captured” public health has just produced a different kind of capture. Research grants he doesn’t like get frozen or canceled; money is rerouted toward autism studies built around his vaccine theories; elite medical centers are punished in the name of “heartland” redistribution; and the NIH and FDA are yanked between right‑to‑try deregulation and sudden, selective purity tests on drugs and shots. One month, Kennedy’s FDA lieutenants slow novel approvals and try to pull a muscular dystrophy drug on safety grounds; the next, a political backlash gets his tough vaccine regulator briefly fired, then quietly rehired after a round of West Wing drama. The result isn’t principled rigor or principled libertarianism; it’s chaos — a health system jerked around by a secretary who can win a news cycle but can’t write durable law. Trump, for now, lets him run. RFK Jr. brings him a crossover brand, a wedge into wellness populism, and an army of MAHA loyalists the White House believes helped juice the 2024 vote. But every “win” Kennedy clocks — fewer vaccines, softer language on pesticides, a CDC too politicized for blue states to trust — is a policy that can be reversed in a memo the moment he’s gone, and a little more trust burned in the meantime. If year one was upheaval, year two is the test: does MAHA actually become Republican orthodoxy, or was this just a one‑term experiment in letting an anti‑establishment crusader redesign public health from inside the very machine he’s been promising to blow up? #usa#trump#RFKJr#health#vaccines#fakeDemocracy 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸