Can RFK Jr. Make America Healthy Again?

By The Free Press | Created at 2024-11-19 11:10:24 | Updated at 2024-11-19 13:21:14 2 hours ago

It’s Tuesday, November 19. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: Catherine Herridge’s day in court, Honestly panelists debate the future of the right, letters to the editor, and more. But first: Will RFK Jr. Make America Healthy Again?

Last week on Honestly, Peter Thiel described “Make America Great Again” as “the most pessimistic slogan that any presidential candidate—certainly any Republican candidate—had in a hundred years.”

Why? Because it acknowledged that America was no longer great.

So it is with “Make America Healthy Again”—the slogan pushed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while he was campaigning for Trump this election. It’s another way of saying America is no longer healthy.

Consider just a few depressing data points:

Nearly 40 percent of American adults have prediabetes. Prediabetes rates have doubled among adolescents over the last 20 years, and now more than one in four 12- to 19-year-olds are prediabetic.
Nearly three-quarters of Americans are overweight or obese. The obesity rate for adults doubled between 1990 and 2021, to 40 percent. It has tripled for girls and women aged 15 to 24, to 29 percent.
More than 107,000 Americans died of a drug overdose last year, and America’s rate of drug overdose deaths far exceeds that of any other wealthy country, and has jumped 50 percent since 2019.
U.S. life expectancy has plateaued. It was the same in 2022 as it had been in 2004: 77.5, five years shorter than the average life expectancy in comparable countries.

Then there’s this chart, which speaks for itself:

It’s not all bad news. Overdose deaths have finally started to fall from their recent record highs, as has America’s obesity rate (thank you, Ozempic!). And on other indicators, such as cancer survival rates, Americans have it better than most Europeans.

But the bottom line is that, on all kinds of measures, America isn’t as healthy as it used to be—or should be, given how much we spend on our health.

So it’s not hard to see why so many people think something, somewhere has gone horribly wrong. Nor is it hard to see the appeal of Trump and RFK’s promise to Make America Healthy Again.

But it would be nice if the MAHA messenger, who also happens to be Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services, didn’t come with quite so much baggage. The man the president-elect wants to put in charge of medical research, public health, Medicare, and Medicaid has strong views on science and medicine—including some that you might generously describe as outside of the mainstream.

The prospect of RFK Jr. at HHS will fill some readers with excitement, and others with terror. I find myself running through a bizarre cost-benefit analysis. Maybe polio will make a comeback. But on the plus side, maybe there will be Mexican Coke in every McDonald’s, and I really would like to try some tallow fries.

To put it in slightly more serious terms: RFK Jr. has shown an ability to talk with empathy and insight about the chronic health problems ailing Americans. And he deserves credit for pushing these issues closer to the top of the political agenda. But he also holds some views that appear to have no basis in science. He has continued to invoke the thoroughly debunked idea that there’s a link between MMR vaccines and autism. Rather than celebrate the millions of lives saved by HIV treatments, he has cast doubt on the Nobel Prize–winning research behind it. “There are much better candidates than HIV for what causes AIDS,” he said in a 2023 interview with New York magazine. Oh, and then there are his strange musings about whether Covid-19 was engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.

In our lead story today, Vinay Prasad writes that “after looking at the whole range of RFK Jr.’s positions, I’ve come to the view that while some are extreme, others are genuinely worthy of debate—and still others are correct.”

And Vinay offers a simple guide on how to navigate Kennedy’s various positions. When you hear one of RFK Jr.’s ideas, ask yourself a simple question: “Do other nations do what he thinks the U.S. should do? If the answer is yes, then the HHS nominee’s idea is not necessarily apocalyptic, and we should be able to discuss it openly.” Vinay applies that test to some of RFK’s most controversial and important views.

Read the results here: “A Simple Litmus Test for RFK Jr.’s Ideas.”

Catherine’s Herridge’s Fight for Press Freedom

Investigative reporter Catherine Herridge spent Monday in court. She was there to fight for an essential feature of the free press: journalists’ ability to keep their sources confidential. Catherine was ordered to pay fines of $800 a day for refusing to name her sources for a series of stories she wrote as a Fox News reporter in 2017. In other words, she is paying the price to uphold a vital journalistic principle, one we fiercely believe in. Free Press reporter Jay Solomon was at the hearing. Read his report: “A Legal Showdown Over Press Freedom.”

Letters to the Editor

Should we just ignore conspiracy theories? Is it right to encourage high schoolers to protest? And are psychedelics safe? These are some of the questions we grapple with in our latest letters page, which features readers’ thoughts on recent pieces by Peter Savodnik, Abigail Shrier, and Kat Rosenfield. Click here to read them. And if you want to write your own letter to the editor, drop us a line: letters@thefp.com.

Where Will Trump 2.0 Take the GOP?

In the wake of Donald Trump’s extraordinary election victory, and as he assembles a team for his second term, one thing is clear: This is not your grandparents’ Republican Party. The party’s voter base has changed—it is getting more racially diverse and more working-class. So have its policy priorities, with tariffs at the top of Trump’s economic wish list. And the personnel looks a little different too: Trump’s early cabinet picks include two former Democrats, RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.

Host Michael Moynihan and his panelists try to make sense of these changes on the latest episode of Honestly. Michael is joined by Dispatch columnist Sarah Isgur, Commentary columnist and author of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservativism Matthew Continetti, and Newsweek senior editor-at-large Josh Hammer. They talk about Trump’s appointments, how MAGA fits into the history of the Republican Party, and where the right goes next. To listen to their conversation, hit the play button below, or subscribe to Honestly wherever you get your podcasts.

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Trump confirmed that he will declare a national emergency and use the military to deliver on his campaign promise of deportations for illegal immigrants. “TRUE!!!” he said Monday, reposting on Truth Social a claim that those were his plans. The repost came at 4 a.m. Is our president-elect having trouble sleeping? Or is he just starting his executive days earlier nowadays? For more on Trump’s deportation plans, read Free Press reporter Madeleine Rowley’s exclusive interview with the president-elect’s border czar, Thomas Homan.
India has overtaken China as the biggest source of international students at American universities. The number of Indian students surged 23 percent in one year to just over 330,000. The international student population has continued to grow after a pandemic slump, an increase possibly driven by Trump’s promise earlier this year to give a green card to all foreign college graduates: “You graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country.”
The Associated Press has already called the Pennsylvania Senate race for Republican Dave McCormick, but with the contest heading toward a recount, Democratic officials in some counties admit they are counting disqualified ballots. Last week, the state’s Supreme Court ruled on the kind of ballots that were eligible, but officials in blue counties have just ignored the decision. “I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country,” said Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia in a pathetic justification of the move. The incumbent, Bob Casey, has refused to concede. Meanwhile, The Washington Post editorial board calls the Pennsylvania Democrats’ tactics “corrosive to democracy.”
Senior Hamas officials left Qatar for Turkey as the Gulf State ended its role as mediator in the Gazan war, an Arab diplomat told The Times of Israel. It’s the latest twist in the strange story that started with reports of U.S. pressure on Doha to eject representatives of the terror group. Then, as The Free Press’s Jay Solomon reported last week, Qatar denied they had asked Hamas to leave. Many of the Hamas leadership’s family members already reside in Turkey.
Vivek Ramaswamy says there will be “mass reductions” in the federal workforce and entire federal agencies will be “deleted” once he and Elon Musk get to work at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But where should they start? Here are some ideas. The Economist suggests DOGE take aim at discretionary spending before moving on to Social Security and Medicare, which make up a third of the entire federal budget. Economist Arnold Kling would start by shrinking the number of agencies that report to the president from 157 to eight. Tyler Cowen says start with the low-hanging fruit and focus on fighting burdensome regulations.
The union representing workers at the Democratic National Committee has accused the party of “disregard[ing]” the “principles we champion on the national stage” because of large layoffs since the election. Axios reports that “Many DNC employees felt blindsided by the extent of the layoffs.” Sorry, folx, the party used the money that was earmarked for your salary to pay for Oprah’s makeup artist.