Why The Medical Establishment Deserves Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

I don't always agree with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump's nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, but I can't help but feel a bit of healthy schadenfreude at the prospect of America's corrupt health care establishment getting the bitter taste of well-deserved disruptive medicine.

Kennedy isn't exactly a conservative. He's on the record supporting abortion, and he has a long track record of working not just in environmental conservation (which I support), but in advancing climate alarmism, which I consider not only wrong, but disruptive for freedom, prosperity, and environmental protection.

Yet Kennedy also represents the inquisitive spirit that the medical establishment has fought tooth-and-nail to suppress, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Big Health's recent scandals make the kind of shake-up Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promises not only necessary, but also a just retribution.

As a millennial, I remember growing up with the food pyramid--the now-infamous graphic telling children that they need to consume daily: six to 11 servings of grains (bread, cereal, rice, and pasta), a mere three to five servings of vegetables, two to four servings of fruit, and only two to three servings of meat, poultry, fish, etc.

For a long time, the Food and Drug Administration did not encourage Americans to limit their intake of sugar.

Partly due to this advice, and due to my own appetite, I gained weight and my body-mass index reached a level at which I was technically obese shortly after college. In my early 20s, however, I started cataloguing my macros (protein, carbohydrates, sugars, etc.) and realized my problem. I was eating a high-carbohydrate, high-sugar diet, and I wondered why I didn't lose weight.

In recent years, I have prioritized meat and vegetables and indulged more sparingly in grains and sugars. I'm happy to say that--at least for now--I am no longer overweight by body mass.

I had to learn this basic education in nutrition in part because our system is almost engineered to make us unhealthy. From heavy advertising for sugary sodas and carb-heavy snacks to the suggestion that high-sugar orange juice and cereals are healthy for breakfast, Americans have been gaslit into a vicious cycle of malnutrition.

Why did the food pyramid encourage so much bread, rice, and cereal? Well, the U.S. government has been subsidizing grains and sugar for decades. The sugar industry paid scientists to blame fats for diseases like diabetes. How much corruption is responsible for Americans' false assumptions about what is and isn't healthy?

Kennedy's plan to ask questions about the additives in food and to press federal agencies to reconsider nutrition guidelines is long past due. America does need to become healthy again, and an FDA shakeup may help a great deal.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the medical establishment lied to the American people, Big Tech companies censored scientific research and personal experiences that conflicted with Big Health's messaging, and basic rights were taken away on the assumption that people would die if they returned to normal life.

By May 2020, some analysts had concluded that the COVID-19 lockdowns had already cost more in terms of disrupting normal life and damaging mental and physical health than they could possibly save in terms of preventing the spread of the disease. Early data showed that the elderly and those with co-morbidities faced the most risk from COVID-19, yet many schools remained closed well into 2021.

Medical authorities called for lockdowns, but they also seemed to make an exception for "social justice protests" amid the Black Lives Matter riots following the death of George Floyd in May 2020.

The Twitter Files and other revelations showed that companies like Twitter (before Elon Musk bought it) and Facebook suppressed the expert opinions of doctors like Jay Bhattacharya because they disagreed with the government's narrative on COVID-19.

Communications uncovered in Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey's lawsuit against the Biden administration revealed that President Joe Biden's White House pressured Facebook to suppress "often true content" concerning personal experiences with COVID-19 vaccines.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, then head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, insisted in 2021 that "attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science." Yet Fauci and other health officials told a series of what they presented as noble lies in order to control the public amid the unfolding pandemic. He initially said face masks would not be necessary, and he later claimed he had said that to avoid causing a panic. He later told New York Times reporter Donald McNeil that he moved the target estimate for vaccinations enabling herd immunity in order to encourage more Americans to take the jab.

COVID-19 left Americans rightly skeptical of the medical establishment, and another scandal arguably made things even worse.

The medical establishment's worst abuse arguably involves the support of experimental medical interventions for minors and others in the name of affirming a transgender identity and resolving gender dysphoria (the painful and persistent sense of identifying with the gender opposite one's biological sex).

In the name of compassion, medical interest groups have lobbied for "gender-affirming care," despite evidence that this "care" leaves kids stunted, scarred, and infertile. Doctors at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, an activist group masquerading as the authority on transgender health, have acknowledged that this "care" has side effects such as cancer in teens, reduced sexual function, and the lack of informed consent on procedures with lifelong impacts.

Americans viscerally grasp the horror of putting kids through experimental drugs just because Tommy wants to be called Sally. So why does Big Health push this insanity?

Jennifer Bilek has done yeoman's work unearthing how billionaires who made their fortune in medicine have backed the LGBTQ movement, particularly the "T."

Yet, transgender "treatments" also reap rewards for Big Pharma. When a male patient takes cross-sex hormones to appear female, that's a lifelong prescription. When patients get surgery to remove their sex organs and replace them with a facsimile of the opposite sex's organs, that's not just a one-and-done surgery. Not only are there often complications--which can be deadly--but these new organs often require grotesque forms of maintenance. All of this keeps patients coming back.

The medical nonprofit watchdog Do No Harm launched a database last month, revealing the 225 hospitals that provide "puberty blockers," cross-sex hormones, and surgeries to minors.

This is a scandal of epic proportions. Not only is the medical industry promoting an ideology that is at odds with the basic biology of male and female, but it is urging kids down a trail of lifelong harm, apparently in pursuit of profit.

Given the COVID-19 and transgender scandals, it should come as no surprise that American medical associations have become activist groups, intent on pushing leftist agendas.

Yet, even the more cynical among us would be taken aback to hear that out of 28 medical specialty societies, 26 have adopted official positions on contentious political issues such as affirmative action, climate change, immigration, and the conflict between Israel and Hamas since 2010. As my colleague Elizabeth Mitchell exclusively reported, the medical nonprofit Do No Harm performed the essential analysis, showing just how politicized medical institutions have become.

"The politicization of medical societies represents a betrayal of the public's trust in health care," Do No Harm Chairman Dr. Stanley Goldfarb told The Daily Signal. "Dues-paying members of the societies and the public they serve should expect nothing less than institutional neutrality from all specialist groups."

America's Big Health industry needs a come-to-Jesus moment, and the iconoclast Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems like just the kind of guy to shake it up.

Originally published at The Daily Signal