Of all Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks, it’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who attracts the most vitriol, which is saying something.
You could see just how much the Health and Human Services secretary is despised last week at a Senate committee hearing when Democrat after Democrat abused him with slurs like “charlatan” and demanded he resign. There is an orchestrated campaign to force him out that includes the overplayed political ploy of an “open letter from nine former CDC leaders” and another letter from 1,000 current and former HHS employees calling on him to resign.
But why would he resign? He’s only just getting started on Trump’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, which is popular with Americans of all stripes, especially Republicans, 73% of whom rated it favorably in the latest Insider Advantage poll.
It addresses public concern that transcends party lines about chronic disease, food safety and vaccine skepticism, the latter of which can be blamed on the lies we were told during the COVID-19 pandemic, not on RFK Jr.’s six months in office.
MAHA is a threat to powerful entrenched interests, and RFK Jr. is under siege from all sides as he tries to implement his plans to solve chronic disease in the United States.
Conflicts of interest
Take Tuesday’s Oversight Committee hearing focusing on the “severe health crisis” facing American children, with almost one in five classified as obese.
“Better Meals, Fewer Pills: Making Our Children Healthy Again” is the MAHA-friendly topic, which ought to be a no-brainer.
But sinister vested interests are trying to sabotage RFK Jr.’s plans to dismantle the commercial apparatus that “put Froot Loops at the top of the food pyramid,” as he puts it, and eliminate the leftist ideology that has infected the health arena.
In December, after Trump had won the presidential election and announced that he had chosen RFK Jr. to head HHS, the Biden administration rushed through the latest federal guidance on nutrition. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2025-2030, was supposed to incorporate the latest science on diet, nutrition and health outcomes.
But it was yet another last-ditch effort to control Trump from the political grave, tying his administration to unhealthy, woke, industry-driven dietary recommendations like seed oils and reduced meat-eating for climate alarm purposes.
The new Biden dietary guidelines also applied a ridiculous “health equity lens” to food, emphasizing race and income rather than healthy nutrition, and making it much harder to measure and communicate.
The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, which produced the convoluted 453-page report, is portrayed in the media as a group of infallible experts, but it is assessed by US Right To Know, a nonprofit public health research group, as being “plagued” by conflicts of interest, including funding from vegetarian company Beyond Meat.
Of 20 DGAC members, 13 had “high-risk, medium-risk or possible conflicts of interest” with food, pharmaceutical and weight loss companies or industry groups, according to the Right to Know report “Assessing Conflicts of Interest of the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.”
Another 2022 study in the Journal of Public Health Nutrition found that 95% of the committee members had conflicts with the food and/or pharmaceutical industries, including Kellogg, Abbott, Kraft, Mead Johnson and General Mills.
“Trustworthy dietary guidelines result from a transparent, objective and science-based, process,” wrote the authors in their paper “Conflicts of interest for members of the US 2020 dietary guidelines advisory committee.
“Our analysis has shown that the significant and widespread [conflicts of interest] on the committee prevent the DGA from achieving the recommended standard for transparency without mechanisms in place to make this information publicly available.”
MAHA insiders say that the committee has been compromised by woke ideology and industry capture, and that its deep state partners are determined to sabotage the plan by RFK Jr. to revise the dietary guidelines toward natural animal fats, full fat dairy and raw milk, and away from seed oils, ultra processed food and synthetic additives and dyes.
Science, not ideologies
Food is at the center of the MAHA movement, and RFK Jr. has said the Biden dietary guidelines report “looks like it was written by the food processing industry.” The first closed-door meeting of the new MAHA Commission in March resolved to rip up the guidelines and start again.
“We will make certain the 2025-2030 Guidelines are based on sound science, not political science,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement released after meeting.
“Gone are the days where leftist ideologies guide public policy.”
Powerful food and beverage interests are implacably opposed to MAHA’s dietary agenda, so Tuesday’s hearing should show us which members of Congress are beholden to them.
Democrats hate RFK Jr. because he’s an apostate who helped propel Trump to victory last year and because he calls out donations from Big Pharma. Some establishment Republicans don’t care for him either and fear he is undermining faith in vaccines.
But that faith was undermined by the real charlatans during the COVID-19 pandemic who lied that the mRNA so-called vaccine would stop transmission, must be administered to healthy children and had no downside.
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) last week even tried to blame RFK Jr. for recent measles outbreaks in the US, when anyone paying attention knows that the origin was illegal alien shelters in cities like Chicago.
He should blame his woeful leader Joe Biden for allowing in millions of unvetted, unvaccinated people and sending them all over the country. Measles is the least of it.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
