OPINION — For the last year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has worked to dismantle a decades-old, bipartisan consensus on the basics of public health. It’s long past time that the public asks why.
Kennedy likes to position himself as a public-health crusader and champion of consumer rights, but his actions as HHS secretary paint a more complicated, conflicted picture. For decades, Kennedy was a trial lawyer, a member of an industry that profits from the public’s pain and fear.
And under Kennedy’s leadership at HHS, America’s public-health system has gotten weaker while the public gets sicker. Vaccinations are down and highly contagious, once-eliminated diseases, such as measles, have resurged with terrifying speed. For several decades, measles was considered effectively eliminated in the United States. However, in 2025, the U.S. recorded 2,288 confirmed measles cases, the most since the early 1990s, and as of May 2026, we have surpassed 1,900 cases.
