Contributor: RFK Jr.’s focus on viral nonsense is putting children’s lives at risk

This week, Secretary of Well being and Human Companies Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — the person entrusted with safeguarding the well being of 330 million People — posted a 90-second video of himself and Child Rock doing shirtless calisthenics in blue denims, driving a stationary bike within the sauna, doing a slow-motion chilly plunge and toasting glasses of complete milk within the pool. The web responded with memes and mockery. I sat in my workplace at UCLA, the place I’ve practiced pulmonary and demanding care medication for greater than 40 years, and I didn’t giggle.

I felt the anger, actual anger.

As a result of right here’s what was not in that video: the more than 2,200 Americans who contracted measles in 2025, in a rustic that successfully eradicated the illness in 2000. The three who died. The greater than 900 confirmed instances already reported within the U.S. in 2026. The youngsters in South Carolina — totaling nearly 1,000 cases from a single outbreak — whose mother and father had been persuaded by rhetoric this secretary spent many years amplifying about how the MMR vaccine was extra harmful than the illness. It’s not. Many years of rigorous science have proven it’s not.

When the absurd reaches a sure pitch, mockery is a pure protection. However I fear we’ve turn out to be so numbed by spectacle, so conditioned to deal with governance as leisure, that we’ve misplaced our capability for the emotion this second calls for: real outrage. The actual factor. The sort that mobilizes physicians, mother and father and legislators to say, “This isn’t acceptable.”

Let me be exact about what Kennedy has carried out in his first 12 months as HHS Secretary, as a result of the shirtless antics are designed to distract you from it.

He fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — the skilled panel that has guided nationwide vaccine coverage for many years — and changed them with vaccine skeptics. He compelled out Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention Director Susan Monarez. He lower Nationwide Institutes of Well being funding, gutting most cancers analysis and habit remedy packages. He stopped federal help for mRNA analysis — probably the most vital advances within the historical past of immunology, being developed for vaccines in opposition to a number of sclerosis, influenza and sure cancers. When the FDA initially rejected Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine this month on what consultants known as ideological grounds, solely public backlash compelled a reversal — throughout one of many worst flu seasons in fashionable historical past.

Then, final month, Kennedy gutted the childhood immunization schedule, lowering universally recommended vaccines from ages 11 to 17. Hepatitis A, hepatitis B, rotavirus and influenza had been relegated to “shared scientific decision-making” — a bureaucratic euphemism for abandonment. Routine suggestions set off computerized prompts in digital medical information and permit nurses to vaccinate below standing orders. Shared decision-making requires a doctor at each vaccination choice, creating bottlenecks that may cut back uptake among the many greater than 100 million People with out common main care entry.

Throughout Kennedy’s 2025 affirmation hearings, he instructed senators below oath: “I help vaccines. I help the childhood schedule.” Sen. Invoice Cassidy, a Republican doctor from Louisiana, voted to substantiate Kennedy explicitly on those pledges. Each pledge has been damaged. The lone Republican who voted in opposition to him — Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a polio survivor — warned his colleagues. They didn’t pay attention. Belief within the CDC has since plummeted from 66% to 54%. Confidence in MMR vaccine faculty necessities amongst Republicans has fallen 27 points in just six years.

These aren’t ballot numbers. They’re harbingers of future outbreaks, future hospitalizations, future deaths.

I’ve seen this earlier than. I used to be an intern at UCLA within the early Nineteen Eighties when the primary instances of what we might come to name AIDS appeared on our wards — younger males dying of infections we had by no means seen in beforehand wholesome sufferers. I watched an establishment and a authorities fail to reply with the urgency a nascent epidemic demanded, and I watched individuals die due to that failure. The lesson was not delicate: When public well being management falters, when ideology supplants science, when the individuals in cost determine that politics issues greater than medication, individuals die. Not within the summary. In beds. In hospitals. In Los Angeles.

I’m watching it occur once more. The US is poised to lose its measles elimination standing — an achievement that took many years to construct. Kennedy’s newly appointed CDC deputy Ralph Abraham responded to this prospect by calling it “just the cost of doing business.” Three individuals died of measles on this nation final 12 months. The price of doing enterprise.

So, after I see the secretary of Well being and Human Companies ingesting complete milk in a pool with Child Rock, I don’t see comedy; nor ought to the response be memes or sarcasm. I see a person who bears direct accountability for the resurgence of vaccine-preventable illness in probably the most medically superior nation on Earth, performing a grotesque pantomime of wellness whereas kids get sick. That isn’t a joke. It’s a scandal. And it’s gone time we handled it as one.

Robert B. Shpiner is a scientific professor of drugs at UCLA David Geffen Faculty of Drugs, with over 40 years of ICU expertise at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Heart.