Newly confirmed Robert F. Kennedy has a simple but challenging task in leading the Department of Health and Human Services: Restore confidence and trust in public health institutions so that Americans actually feel empowered to take positive steps to advance their own and their families’ health.
Americans’ trust in public health has collapsed. The promise of the MAHA movement isn’t a war on these institutions, but rather a call to reform and restore them as a functioning part of American society. To do that, we need people to be honest about how the American public has been misled—from the origins of COVID to the need to vaccinate the entire population to the science backing up government nutrition guidance. RFK Jr. wants to have that conversation, which is why he has such support from so many people and is particularly beloved by American moms.
The media also needs to be ready to serve as an honest broker in this public discussion. That needs to start with having a thorough accounting of how they have failed the public on these health issues so badly. Last month, CNN’s Chris Cizzilla acknowledged his role in this lingering trust deficit, writing on X, “I screwed up. Back in May 2020, I wrote how Anthony Fauci had ‘crushed’ Donald Trump’s lab-leak theory for how COVID-19 originated. The CIA said over the weekend that they now believed the virus leaked from a lab.”
Yet, Cizzilla went on to defend Fauci, insisting that Fauci likely believed what he said, ignoring clear evidence that Fauci was really attempting to cover up an inquiry that could implicate him in helping fund the research and laboratories that led to COVID. Americans know that COVID wasn’t just, as Cizzilla insists, a moment where no one—including health officials—knew what was going on. Government officials didn’t trust the science and stopped helping people make risk assessments. Rather, they engaged in a political process and crammed their rules down our throats based on political calculations. That’s why teachers unions, not infectious disease doctors, were driving governments to recommend keeping schools closed and riots were greenlighted, but outdoor church services were not.
The politicization of science—and cronyism is another word for it—didn’t begin with COVID. Americans have been misled, lied to, and demeaned for having questions about certain public health recommendations for years. Consider the flourishing of gender theory in medicine. That was another fatal blow to the medical community’s credibility. Scientists, doctors, and psychiatrists were so infected by woke politics that they began lecturing the public that the mammalian sex binary was a social construct. They gaslighted female athletes, insisting that human males aren’t generally physically stronger and suggested women who didn’t want to undress in front of males were the ones with the mental health problem and should seek counseling. They promoted the myth that men can get pregnant and breastfeed just like biological women.
At the same time, scientists quashed evidence that challenged the groupthink in the Biden administration and the woke medical establishment’s lucrative embrace of “affirming” every child’s (sometimes fleeting) desire to start a lifelong medical regime to suppress their bodies’ natural sex characteristics. The study wasn’t released explicitly because it might be used to justify limited access to gender mutilation drugs and procedures. While this evidence was suppressed, parents were bullied into accepting their child’s supposed new identities and told they had a choice between a living medically altered child, or a dead child (if they didn’t automatically affirm).
This obvious foray into promoting medical nonsense builds on decades of dubious nutritional advice flowing from government and public health entities. Those of us born in the 1970s have witnessed public health guidance shifting from demonizing meat, eggs, and fat and promoting the consumption of carbohydrates to the complete opposite recommendations. Americans have also seen how the scientific “peer review” process can be corrupted and abused as unsupported studies find their way through a supposedly rigorous process to be released to the public as some sort of authority.
The dietary guidelines process has also been compromised. No longer ruled by science, today, those serving on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee represent massive conflicts of interest—from environmentalists pushing meat-free diets, to corporations ensuring their products are protected.
Given what we now know about how government health and science agencies were influenced by teachers unions, gender activists, and green energy money, why shouldn’t we assume that regulatory entities and academic institutions weren’t similarly captured by activists and corporate interests? No wonder Americans now question effectively everything sold to them.
This doesn’t mean that the government should ban all modern products or repeal health guidance. Rather, we need to prioritize transparency and accountability within the government as well as the medical and scientific communities so we can begin to have some confidence that what is being sold to us as fact is actually safe. Public officials shouldn’t just dismiss the public’s concerns as conspiracy theories. Instead, robust debate should be the goal where the information is made publicly available and easy to access so that evidence can be debated thoroughly.
This is the only way to restore trust and put us on the road to a healthy citizenry.