Americans Are Dying Younger: Will RFK Jr.’s Policies Help or Harm? + More
Source: Children’s Health Defense
Americans Are Dying Younger: Will RFK Jr.’s Policies Help or Harm?
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has never been afraid to challenge conventional wisdom — sometimes acting in alignment with the best science, other times rejecting it. Now, as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Kennedy has significant influence over national healthcare policy.
In this role, many will judge his success by whether he can reverse the country’s most troubling metric: an alarming decline in life expectancy.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Americans now live four years less than citizens of other high-income countries. The U.S. premature death rate is nearly twice that of comparable nations, and the gap has only widened in recent years.
KFF data points to three primary drivers, accounting for 68% of the gap:
-
-
- Chronic disease (accounting for 32% of the gap)
- Deaths of despair, including those from substance abuse (12%)
- The lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic (24%)
-
Of course, Kennedy can’t address every factor contributing to premature death. Many “social determinants of health” (think: income, education and housing), would require sweeping reforms across multiple government agencies, well beyond the scope of HHS.
But when it comes to direct medical interventions, Kennedy can enact meaningful reforms, ones that could significantly improve life expectancy and the health of millions.
Dozens of Free Measles Vaccine Clinics Close in Texas as Federal Funding Is Cut
Steep federal funding cuts have forced public health officials in one of Texas’ most populous counties — Dallas — to cancel dozens of vaccination clinics and lay off 21 workers on the front lines of combatting the state’s growing measles outbreak.
“I just had to tell our commissioners this morning that we’ve had to cancel over 50 different clinics in our community,” said Dr. Philip Huang, director and health authority for the Dallas County Health and Human Services Department. Many of the clinics had been planned for schools in areas with low vaccination rates, he said. The vaccines, which included measles, mumps and rubella shots, were meant to be given free to families.
The money being cut — $11.4 billion nationwide — was originally allocated to aid community health departments during the pandemic. Local public health officials have more recently been using the COVID-19 funds for other public health initiatives, such as measles prevention, surveillance and testing.
RFK Jr. Putting HHS on Long Overdue, Painful Diet
Well, do tell.
The federal agency packed with “Branch Covidians” responsible for thousands of job losses during the “Great Pandemic Panic” is going to experience some job losses itself.
We can only hope the right fanatics are fired.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has announced that about 25% of the employees there will find out first hand what it’s like in an unemployment line. This announcement catches us fresh out of sympathy for an organization that supported closing businesses, was enthusiastically behind vaccine mandates and gave us the “clot shot” to boot.
But that’s enough gloating.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explained the department will initially lay off approximately 10,000 employees with, according to Fox News, “a total downsizing [from] 82,000 to 62,000 full-time employees when combining this latest effort with early retirement and the results of the Fork in the Road, the deferred resignation offer of full pay and benefits until September.”
Kennedy added, “We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic. This Department will do more — a lot more — at a lower cost to the taxpayer.”
Dem AGs Take Trump-Kennedy HHS to Court Over Cuts to COVID-Era Grants
More than 20 Democratic attorneys general are joining forces to take Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to court to halt spending cuts he has authorized within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in alignment with President Donald Trump’s goal of cutting waste and downsizing the federal government.
“I cannot overstate how reckless and illegal these cuts are,” Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a statement Tuesday. The cuts, which were announced last week and began Tuesday, include firing some 10,000 federal health employees across its major agencies — roughly 20% of its workforce — as well as slashing billions of dollars in public health grants.
Those public health grants, amounting to $12 billion, were earmarked for states during the COVID-19 pandemic for testing and vaccinations. The HHS justified the cuts because the “COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.”
Musk, DOGE Created New HHS Org Chart
Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team created the new org chart for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during an interview on News Nation. The HHS secretary said when he arrived at the department, the org chart was “incomprehensible,” and Musk “came in for the first time with a real org chart for the agency.”
“What Elon is doing is he’s using AI [artificial intelligence] to improve health, to improve efficiency, to improve delivery,” Kennedy told News Nation. “He had a bunch of geniuses come over to the department, create an org chart that worked, and consolidated.”
Kennedy’s statements were confirmed during a Fox News interview with Musk and the DOGE team. DOGE member Anthony Armstrong — a former Morgan Stanley banker who is now a senior advisor to the Office of Personnel Management — outlined the team’s approach to agency reorganizations.
“We literally go in — and this is mostly at night and over weekends — with the secretaries of those agencies, and their senior staff, and we’re going line by line in the employee org charts…from the bottom up, talking about every function,” Armstrong said.
FDA Taps Insider Scott Steele to Lead CBER on Acting Basis After Peter Marks Departure
Amid a dramatic reshaping of the federal healthcare apparatus, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has named an acting leader of its Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER).
Agency adviser Scott Steele, Ph.D., will take over the key center for the time being, the FDA said on a post on X late Monday. Steele has been a full-time adviser to CBER since late 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before that, he advised the FDA’s Office of Medical Policy Initiatives from June 2020 to September 2022.
“Dr. Steele is a science, technology, and policy professional at FDA with extensive experience in multiple disciplines, including emerging science and technology, translational science, public health preparedness, and biodefense and medical countermeasures,” the FDA said in the post.
The appointment comes a few days after longtime CBER director Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., abruptly resigned. Late last week, Marks authored a resignation letter blasting HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for “misinformation and lies” surrounding vaccine efficacy and safety.
Supreme Court Sides With the FDA in Its Dispute Over Sweet-Flavored Vaping Products
The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in its crackdown on sweet-flavored vaping products following a surge in teen electronic cigarette use. But the justices’ unanimous decision throwing out a federal appeals court ruling is not the final word in the case, and the FDA could change its approach now that President Donald Trump has promised to “save” vaping.
The high court ruled that the FDA, during President Joe Biden’s administration, did not violate federal law when it denied an application from Dallas-based company Triton Distribution to sell e-juices like “Jimmy The Juice Man in Peachy Strawberry” and “Suicide Bunny Mother’s Milk and Cookies.” The products are heated by an e-cigarette to create an inhalable aerosol.
Yolonda Richardson, president and CEO of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, called the decision “a major victory for the health of America’s kids and efforts to protect them from the flavored e-cigarettes that have fueled a youth nicotine addiction crisis.”
The FDA has rejected applications for more than a million nicotine products formulated to taste like fruit, dessert or candy because their makers couldn’t show that flavored vapes had a net public benefit, as required by law.
