I’m a physician and I’m worried that our health agencies are facing increasing chaos
The American health system is bleeding out, and it desperately needs a real doctor.
Leading Health and Human Services (HHS) today is like navigating a chaotic hospital — patients in every hallway, monitors screaming, seconds ticking away. Yet, instead of a seasoned physician who triages and trusts proven protocols, that hospital is overseen by an activist named Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
A patient’s oxygen level plummets; nurses turn to HHS Secretary Kennedy. Instead of orders, they get a lecture on conspiracies. Chaos follows.
That chaos is now national. Our health agencies are trying to perform open-heart surgery while debating the effectiveness of a scalpel. Scientists who should be developing next-generation cancer vaccines are, instead, defending 60-year-old elementary science.
Conspiracy ideology is beginning to take over, and we’re all going to pay the price.
I’m a board-certified physician and one of the most-followed online, and since Kennedy took office, I’ve been forced to swap from fact-checking Instagram influencers to fact-checking the nation’s top public-health official.
Our nation’s health system is in shambles, and the leadership of HHS plays a pivotal role in fixing this disaster. That’s why it’s deeply alarming that Kennedy, who continues to spread misinformation and denies the fundamentals of medicine, remains at the helm of the agency.
Although he claims he’s ‘not anti-vaccine,’ his words and actions tell a different story. He recklessly attacks vaccine efficacy, spreads disproven theories linking vaccines to autism, and denies fundamental virology — from diseases like HIV, measles, and more. I’m all for healthy skepticism, but scientific skepticism means investigating data, not cherry-picking it … or making it up.
These aren’t privately held beliefs either — a post on his active X account states that the HPV vaccine ‘increases cervical-cancer risk’ all despite mountains of real-world data showing up to 88% drops in cancer among vaccinated teens. Sweden, England, and even the CDC surveillance report plunging pre-cancer rates.
Recently, he claimed, ‘50% of the population is diabetic’ and that ‘one out of every three kids’ already has the disease. In reality, true estimates put China’s diabetes prevalence around 12%, and the U.S. pediatric figure closer to one in 300. If one of my interns inflated numbers by a factor of 10, they’d be sent back to remedial math. Kennedy does it regularly on primetime television.
Worse, he’s now canceled $12 billion in disease outbreak prevention programs, proposed a 26% cut to the NIH budget, and pink-slipped roughly 20,000 public-health scientists and staff.
Those decisions have consequences: dozens of federally funded vaccine clinics in Arizona, Minnesota, Nevada, Texas and Washington were canceled just as measles cases blew past 1,000 — the worst surge in a generation.
He’s dismantling the firehouse while buildings are burning. Public health cannot survive an HHS head who guts the programs that keep us safe and then fans the very myths that make outbreaks explode. Kennedy’s long record of undermining proven public health measures and spreading scientific falsehoods makes him a threat to millions of Americans.
Certainly, he should never have been confirmed to lead the office in the first place, but choosing to leave him in charge is like handing the keys to a driver who continues to insist that stop signs and red lights are optional.
Today, I say that Kennedy is the wrong person to lead HHS. The integrity of our nation’s health agencies demands leadership grounded in facts, research, and transparency — not misinformation.
Doctors like me take an oath to ‘do no harm.’ We must call out leaders like Secretary Kennedy when they cause great harm to public health.
We must stop the bleeding.