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robert f. kennedy jr
When it Comes to Women’s Health, The Trump Admin’s Hypocrisy is on Full Display
President Donald Trump and his cronies are peddling lies about abortion care while touting their farce advancements for women’s health.
Nov 22, 2025
Earlier this month, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made an announcement regarding the removal of broad “black box” warnings from Hormone Replacement Therapy products for menopause.
As an OB-GYN PA with more than a decade of experience in reproductive care, I know what decisions women and patients are grappling with when it comes to their health and maternal care. I also know first hand the devastating consequences of denying patients critical care when they need it the most and stripping access to care that’s been proven to be safe and effective after decades of research.
President Donald Trump and his cronies are peddling lies about abortion care while being hypocrites when touting their farce advancements for women’s health. Right now, Trump and his anti-abortion administration are pulling every string possible to ban abortion and that includes banning abortion medication.
Ironically, Commissioner Makary said in a statement that “women and their physicians should make decisions based on data, not fear,” and anti-abortion extremist Kennedy Jr. said that the administration is “returning to evidence-based medicine and giving women control over their health again.”
Contrary to their assertion of trusting research and doctors, right now, the Trump administration is working to roll back access to mifepristone and reproductive care, with Makary and Kennedy Jr. at the helm.
At the press event for this announcement, while responding to a question from a reporter, Makary said that the administration is “sticking with our philosophy that the government is not your doctor.”
So, which is it? Does this administration trust women and patients to consult their physicians for what’s best on making personal medical decisions, or is that only convenient messaging when it’s pushing forward their extreme agenda?
The healthcare crisis in America is a dire one, and yet, the Trump administration continues to play political games and feign ignorance as to how their efforts to ban abortion nationwide will have a catastrophic impact on women and patients across the country.
It has been 25 years since the FDA approved mifepristone, a safe, effective medication that has reshaped abortion care in the US.
Contrary to their assertion of trusting research and doctors, right now, the Trump administration is working to roll back access to mifepristone and reproductive care, with Makary and Kennedy Jr. at the helm.
At the urging of anti-abortion politicians and junk science, the FDA has agreed to revisit its approval of mifepristone, because extremists condemned the FDA approving a generic abortion pill just last month.
We must continue to call out this hypocrisy, because Republicans know that imposing Project 2025’s abortion agenda risks significant political backlash, particularly in battleground states where abortion is either legal or popular. More than 6 in 10 Americans support keeping medication abortion available. Even many Trump voters oppose new restrictions.
Let’s be clear—this administration’s attacks on mifepristone are a national abortion test.
Project 2025, spearheaded by Trump, Kennedy Jr., and Makary, would dismantle access to one of the safest, most widely used medications in the country. Medication abortion accounted for nearly two-thirds of all US abortions in 2023.
Will women and families retain the ability to make private medical decisions—or will patients have their rights ripped away and be forced to jump through unimaginable hoops just to receive care?
If Republicans were actually committed to prioritizing women’s health in their agenda, they would invest in healthcare so expecting mothers across the country have access to the most comprehensive care available, including abortion care.
If Republicans were actually committed to protecting women and advancing medical research, they wouldn’t pull funding from clinics and hospitals dedicated to providing care for women and patients nationwide, especially in rural communities where resources are already sparse.
I’m not buying this feigned effort toward showing allyship toward women, when everything that this administration has done since January has been an assault on women’s health and the care we undoubtedly need. Physicians and providers like me spend years in schooling and training so we can provide the best care to our communities, and yet this administration undermines those years of dedication and expertise to appease an extreme anti-abortion minority.
If Trump, Makary, and Kennedy Jr. want to walk the walk in advancing women’s healthcare, they should start with looking at themselves and acknowledging the harm that they are doing across the country to the detriment of the American people.
Lives are at stake, and we are waiting for them to mean what they say.
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'Absurd Yet Predictable': US Close to Losing Measles Elimination Status Under RFK Jr.
"The CDC is now completely compromised after Trump and RFK Jr. ousted or drove out real, well-intentioned, and intelligent scientists," said one physician.
Nov 21, 2025
US public health officials warned this week that the country is close to following Canada in losing its measles elimination status, a deadly and preventable setback many experts attribute to the vaccine-averse policies and practices of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials have linked the ongoing measles outbreak in Arizona and Utah with the major outbreak in Texas that began in January, both of which are being caused by the same viral subtype. With no signs of slowing, and holiday travel and gatherings fast approaching, experts worry that measles transmission could escalate and the disease will no longer be considered eliminated.
Under World Health Organization guidance, "eliminated" means an absence of endemic virus transmission for 12 months or longer in a defined geographical area under a well-performing surveillance system.
Many public health experts blame the administration of President Donald Trump—and particularly Kennedy's policies—for the measles resurgence. Kennedy, who initially downplayed the seriousness of the Texas outbreak, has endorsed vaccines, but has also made unsupported or misleading claims about the safety and efficacy of measles shots.
"Absurd yet predictable," Dr. Michael O'Brien, an urgent care pediatrician, wrote Thursday on X. "The CDC is now completely compromised after Trump and RFK Jr. ousted or drove out real, well-intentioned, and intelligent scientists. As measles approaches endemic status in the US for the first time since 2000, the CDC has abandoned science and reason."
The anti-vaccination movement is largely to blame for the continuing measles outbreak and the fact that the U.S. is going to lose our measles elimination status. Until RFK Jr. is removed from office, things are only going to get worse. @jimalwine.bsky.social and I wrote about here:
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— Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD (@elizabethjacobs.bsky.social) November 19, 2025 at 2:18 PM
The United States declared measles eliminated in 2000. However, with 1,753 confirmed cases and three deaths in 45 reported outbreaks so far this year, experts say the US is at risk of following Canada, which announced earlier this month that it has lost its elimination status, which it enjoyed since 1998.
As in the US, experts attribute Canada's measles backsliding to declining vaccination rates, mis- and disinformation, and vaccine aversion—especially among religious groups. The West Texas outbreak began in the close-knit, unvaccinated Mennonite community in Gaines County, while the Arizona/Utah outbreak originated among members of a fundamentalist Mormon offshoot.
More than 9 in 10 reported US measles cases this year are among people who have either not been vaccinated or whose vaccination status is unknown.
"We are in this dire situation primarily due to the explosion of the anti-vaccine movement since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic."
Writing for LiveScience, University of Pennsylvania molecular virologist James Alwine and University of Arizona professor emerita and epidemiologist Elizabeth Jacobs warned Wednesday that measles is "a bellwether of declining vaccination rates—a wailing siren that other vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks are just around the corner."
"We are in this dire situation primarily due to the explosion of the anti-vaccine movement since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic," Alwine and Jacobs asserted. "The movement is responsible for undermining trust in scientists and vaccines via a tsunami of misinformation coming from social media accounts and podcast appearances."
The authors continued:
This was made worse when Senate Republicans confirmed Kennedy as secretary of HHS, despite the objections of tens of thousands of scientists, healthcare providers, and public health practitioners. Kennedy is an avowed anti-vaccination proponent who chaired Children's Health Defense, an organization that regularly promotes vaccine misinformation. He is also a conspiracy theorist and has claimed that Covid-19 is a "bioweapon" engineered to "attack Caucasians and Black people" while sparing Ashkenazi Jews; that WiFi causes brain cancer; and that drug use, not HIV, causes AIDS. His appointment opened the door to install anti-vaccine proponents as leaders in public health, such as replacing the members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) with several individuals with links to the anti-vaccine movement. In confirming Kennedy, Senate Republicans utterly failed the people of the US and demonstrated a cavalier disregard for decades of scientific achievement.
In June, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) launched an investigation into Kennedy's ACIP purge. The following month, six major US medical organizations sued Kennedy, alleging his vaccine policies are placing children at grave and immediate risk.
"As the anti-vaccine movement continues to be nurtured by Kennedy and his followers, this threat will only continue to expand and grow more severe," Alwine and Jacobs warned. "Removing state vaccine requirements for school entry—as has happened in Florida—is demonstrative of this, and represents an unacceptable risk."
"Kennedy must be removed from office," they added, echoing a September demand by more than 1,000 current and former HHS officials. "There can be no improvements in public health or vaccination rates as long as he continues his destructive reign."
In September, Congresswoman Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) filed articles of impeachment against Kennedy, declaring that he "has violated his oath of office and proven himself unfit to serve the American people."
Advocacy groups and medical organizations have gathered more than 150,000 petition signatures calling for Kennedy's removal.
On Friday, Congresswoman Kim Schrier (D-Wash.), who chairs the Democratic Doctors Caucus, led 65 colleagues demanding that Kennedy "immediately correct" the CDC website "after it was updated to promote the widely disproven and dangerous claim that vaccines may cause autism."
"RFK Jr.’s decision to spread fringe conspiracy theories and misinformation on the CDC’s official website is reckless," Schrier said in a statement. "He’s scaring parents, undermining trust in the CDC, and putting children at risk.”
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We Can Build a Healthier World, But Don't Expect RFK Jr. to Lead the Job
How we construct society significantly determines the ways different groups live—and die. Unfortunately, despite some rhetoric to the contrary, Trump's health secretary seems content to let corporations continue to sicken us.
Oct 20, 2025
The Senate Finance Committee hearing with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was explosive. The Secretary of Health and Human Services was accused of “reckless disregard for science and the truth,” and senators from both parties were openly hostile as they questioned him extensively on his vaccine policies, as well as the firing of scientific advisory board members and agency heads and their replacement with ideologically driven anti-vaccine supporters. During that more than three-hour session, he was called a charlatan and a liar, and he returned the insults.
The distrust of his honesty and integrity was palpable. The public health community already mistrusted his views on vaccines and the role of science. There was, however, some modest hope that he would at least follow through on his views on the environmental causes of chronic disease and the food industry’s disastrous impact on obesity and diabetes, as well as other diseases. Sadly, that’s been anything but the case and there’s quite a history behind that reality.
A Long History of Public Health Disasters
In focusing on the environmental causes of disease, Kennedy was building on a public health tradition that saw disease, suffering, and death as, at least in part, a function of the worlds we’ve constructed for ourselves and others over time. Historically, some instances of unnecessary suffering are glaringly obvious. Take, for instance, the exploitation and often premature death of Africans enslaved and transported to the New World under conditions so inhumane that approximately 10% to 20% of them perished during what came to be known as the Middle Passage. And don’t forget the suffering and early deaths of so many who survived and were consigned by whites to forced labor in the American South, where the average life expectancy of a newborn slave child was less than 22 years, or about half that of a white infant of the same era.
Or, to take another example, in her famous 1906-1907 study Work-Accidents and the Law, Crystal Eastman, the feminist cofounder of the American Civil Liberties Union and a social reformer, wrote of 526 men who were killed in accidents in the steel mills of Pittsburgh and another 509 who suffered serious injuries in—yes!—a single year, arguing that many of those accidents would have been preventable had work conditions been different. As she grimly reported:
Seven men lost a leg, sixteen men were hopelessly crippled in one or both legs, one lost a foot, two lost half a foot, five lost an arm, three lost a hand, ten lost two or more fingers, two were left with crippled left arms, three with crippled right arms, and two with two useless arms. Eleven lost an eye, and three others had the sight of both eyes damaged. Two men have crippled backs, two received internal injuries, one is partially paralyzed, one feebleminded, and two are stricken with the weakness of old age while still in their prime.
Some aspects of the inevitable—fatal disease or other devastating genetic and biological conditions—are clearly affected by how societies care for their members. Historically, race, social class, geographic location, gender, age, and immigrant status have all been shown to have a tremendous impact on access to medical care and the quality of that care. The social and economic arrangements Americans created have shaped patterns of disease prevalence, distribution, and recovery over the course of our history.
Most obviously, a system dependent on slavery produced untold suffering and death among those most exploited; a commercial economy involving trade between various regions of the country and the world often lent a significant hand to the transmission of diseases from mosquitoes, rats, and other sources of infection. The development of cities with large immigrant populations gave landlords the opportunity to profit from renting airless tenements without adequate sewerage or pure water, producing epidemics of tuberculosis and cholera, among other diseases of poverty. Similarly, the disfiguring accidents and diseases caused by toxic chemicals were often a reflection of the rampant expansion of a laissez-faire industrial system that put profits above human life. And the Trump administration’s decision to promote the use of coal and ignore the impact of a fossil-fuel-based economy on the climate and on health is perhaps the most glaring example today of the urge to maintain a world that is (all too literally) killing us.
Smallpox in the 18th century, along with typhoid, typhus, yellow fever, and cholera epidemics, and a plague of childhood diseases in the 19th century, were all exacerbated by the squalid conditions in which people lived. The industrial revolution created conditions for the development of epidemics of silicosis, lead poisoning, and asbestosis. In more recent decades, agricultural workers in the vineyards of California and elsewhere were regularly showered with pesticides while harvesting the food that agricultural companies packaged and sold to the nation. In that process, millions of people have suffered diseases and deaths that could have been avoided.
Recently, our collective environmental practices have contributed disproportionately to global warming and so to extreme droughts, ever more severe hurricanes, and rising sea levels that threaten to flood entire nations, and we’re sure you won’t be surprised to learn that such events can, in turn, result in compromised resistance to disease. Endocrine disruptors like bisphenyl A, PCBs, and dioxins manufactured in the 20th century turned out to cause a variety of cancers, birth defects, and other developmental disorders. Meanwhile, hundreds of chemicals manufactured in recent decades have undoubtedly led to increased deaths, diseases, and neurological damage globally. And, of course, count on one thing: Issues like these won’t be seriously addressed by Robert Kennedy Jr., despite his occasional claims that he will.
The Poor and People of Color Bear the Biggest Burden of Social Neglect
The Covid-19 pandemic provided us with an example of how unequal the effects of disease regularly are. Over the course of the pandemic’s first few years, Covid-19 killed more than 1 out of every 300 Americans. However, the burden of those deaths was distributed anything but evenly through the population. Those in a weakened state and without access to decent healthcare were the most likely to become ill and die. Although “the greatest number of deaths [were] among non-Hispanic white people… the rate of Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths [was] higher among people of color.”
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, compared to whites, “American Indians and Alaskan Natives were 3.1 times more likely to be hospitalized, Black or African Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be hospitalized and 1.7 times more likely to die, and Hispanic or Latino persons are 1.5 times more likely to get Covid-19 and 2.3 times more likely to be hospitalized” In stark graphs, the Poor People’s Campaign documented that “people living in poorer counties died at nearly two times the rate of people who lived in richer counties.” During the early phase of the epidemic, from December 2021 through February 2022, counties with the lowest median income “had a death rate nearly three times higher… compared to those with the highest median incomes,” a difference that can’t simply be explained by disparities in vaccination rates.
And where will our latest secretary of Health and Human Services be if something like that happens on his watch? While he may call on companies to voluntarily remove food colorings, we should expect that, in a crisis, he’ll ultimately tell Americans to change their behavior and not eat cereals with food colorings.
Who you are, where you live, what you do, and what you earn have always been the key factors determining your lifespan and your health, rather than the technological changes in medical treatment that have become available.
But don’t even count on that since such products are deemed necessary to maintain the profits of a food manufacturing and distribution system largely controlled by a few giant agricultural businesses. Real reform of such a system would undoubtedly benefit the health of Americans. However, in the absence of a strong social movement, the entrenched interests that have promoted such industrial food production will undoubtedly prove to be virtually immune to serious restructuring or change. Indeed, as nutritionist and public health advocate Marion Nestle has written, there is now little resistance to the continuing unchecked growth of the agricultural sector and few challenges to the rights of Campbell’s, McDonald’s, Monsanto, Perdue, Smithfield Foods, and others to conduct their businesses in ways that may indeed threaten the health of tens of millions of Americans.
Of course, there is also real truth to the story of progress toward better health. The average life span of a white boy born in 1900 in a large American city was only 46.3 years, and of a Black boy, only 33 years. By the second decade of the 21st century, however, the average life expectancy for Americans was close to 78 years, although the gap between Black and white remains. Similarly, this country has reduced the number of deaths that used to plague both children and women giving birth, while largely controlling cholera and other water-borne diseases through the introduction of relatively safe water supply and sewerage systems. The last 150 years, writes demographer Richard Easterlin, have seen the “average life span” more than double globally from 20 to 40 years at the turn of the last century to between 60 and 80 years today. And yet Secretary of Health Kennedy seems to be ready to jettison perhaps the single most important technology responsible for rising life spans: vaccines! Rather than mandating that children receive vaccines before entering school, Kennedy said the decisions should be left to the state and to parents. Despite efforts to backtrack on his long anti-vax history, in interviews on CNN and elsewhere, he has insisted that “there are no vaccines that are safe and effective.”
While national and international mortality statistics tell an important story, they often hide wide variations in the health and well-being of those who make up such figures. A closer look at the life spans of industrial workers, women, Native Americans, Blacks, Hispanics, and whites reveals vast differences in disease experience. The persistence of disparities in health and longevity among them may, in truth, be the most enduring health reality of American society. Although new discoveries in medical science, impressive technological interventions, and modest policy initiatives have improved American health, narrowing the gaps described above, those disparities have persisted for more than four centuries.
Who you are, where you live, what you do, and what you earn have always been the key factors determining your lifespan and your health, rather than the technological changes in medical treatment that have become available. The narrative of ever more improvement that’s been the bread and butter of so much of public health’s self-congratulatory history needs to be modified to acknowledge the millions of years lost through the (too) early deaths of Blacks, Native Americans, and poor and working-class whites since the colonial era.
In the 19th century, the incidence of classic infectious and communicable diseases, including cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis, and typhoid, was at least in part the product of specific decisions, including the way landlords profited by jamming people into tenements and leaving them with outdoor plumbing and a polluted water supply. In short, suffering wasn’t just the inevitable byproduct of urbanization and industrialization, but of a dominant ideology that reinforced a laissez-faire economic system with profit (for the few) as its main goal.
Why, you might wonder, did so few question the logic of crowding so many together when there was nearly unlimited space in which to live in a still sparsely populated nation? Who determined that some people’s health could be sacrificed for the wealth of others, even though there were often no objective reasons why conditions could not have been better?
Who Should Live and Who Should Die?
In effect, leaders then made social and political decisions about who should live and who should die, as they will again in the Trump era. Unfortunately, it’s all too rare to think of diseases not as an inevitable byproduct of a particular exposure or an inevitable outgrowth of modernization or industrialization, but as the byproduct of decisions made by individuals, groups, and societies. In different eras, different conditions have been created that diseased, maimed, or killed people all too unequally.
Isn’t it time, in the era of Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr., when, for instance, the administration’s devastation of the US Agency for International Development might, according to the medical journal The Lancet, lead to 14 million more deaths globally, to broaden the definition of what causes disease and death in the United States (and elsewhere)? Isn’t it time not just to focus on viruses and events in nature, but on the structure of an American society in which the rich are growing ever richer and income inequality is on the rise, a world in which corporations, government, and institutions make decisions that profoundly affect people’s health? Consciously or not, the decisions the dominant groups in a society make determine who lives and who dies, who flourishes and who prospers.
Some disease-related tragedies are unavoidable, but all too many are not. There was no need for children to die in such large numbers from infections in the crowded slums of the 19th century, nor for workers to suffer so extensively from chronic diseases and disabilities in the factories of the early 20th century. Nor is it necessary in the modern era to pollute the environment with synthetic plastics that lead to epidemics of cancer, heart disease, or stroke. Worse yet, it’s anything but necessary, as Donald Trump is determined to do, to continue to pollute the global environment through the endless overuse of fossil fuels, ensuring that this world will someday become so warm that it may no longer support human life across significant swaths of the globe. How we construct society, in other words, significantly determines the ways different groups live—and die.
An understanding of how Americans have built their past should give us the power to shape the future. Companies do not have to continue to introduce synthetic hormones, pesticides, or other materials into the milk American children drink, the wheat in the cereals millions of Americans eat, or the meat that is a staple of our diet. Even simple regulatory changes could have a positive impact on how we, our children, and our grandchildren will live and die. Many positive changes, though never achieved without a struggle, aren’t particularly revolutionary or even massively disruptive of existing social relationships. Europeans, for example, have decided to require chemical companies simply to test their products for safety before being introduced into the stream of commerce.
We as a people should not have to watch helplessly as the Earth’s ecosystem is devastated through habitat destruction, resource depletion, and global warming. We should be able to learn from the horrible global accidents of the recent past. Chernobyl in Ukraine, and Fukushima in Japan are perhaps the most well-known “dead zones” our species has produced through inattention to the risks we humans create—in those cases, of course, with nuclear power. But we can learn from other, less well-known communities where human decisions have resulted in untold health consequences. Take, for instance, the way polychlorinated biphenyls polluted the community around the factory in Anniston, Alabama, where they were first produced in the 1930s, or how the town of Times Beach, Missouri, had to be literally abandoned because of the way that now-banned Polychlorinated Biphenyls, or PCBs, were spread on its roads. A host of polluted landfills across this country and around the world are now Superfund sites in need of massive investment to detoxify.
Simply put, the message we can learn from the past is that we need not continue to build worlds that kill us but can, collectively, make more life-affirming decisions. In the age of Donald Trump, who is now seeking to end women’s use of Tylenol, and Robert Kennedy Jr, we have entered a world of medical quackery. As Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) exclaimed, “Sir, you’re a charlatan. That’s what you are.”
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