"Make America Healthy Again" is a Dumb, Rich Guy's Idea of Public Health

If you're not naming capitalism as the culprit of America's health crisis, you're just complaining.

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his bid for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, I decided to give him his least favorite thing: a shot.

I had qualms about his anti-vax stance, but his message was more focused on criticizing corporations and foreign wars, which I’m highly sympathetic to. I’ll also admit I never heard out the anti-vax case, so it couldn’t hurt to lend an ear. As I was looking for someone to replace the demented Joe Biden, I opened myself to the possibility of an RFK Jr. candidacy. It quickly became apparent that was a mistake.

What I found in Kennedy was nothing more than the standard obscure challenger candidacy: seeing an opportunity to elevate their stature and launch their next business venture, a notable individual runs for president with little concern for the causes they speak about. As the campaign continued, RFK Jr.’s true persona emerged, eradicating his claims to be a crusader for the ordinary people. It’s the highest hypocrisy for a man who lectures others about healthy choices to pump himself full of HGH and spray his children with dead whale juice. The story of how he drove his ex-wife to suicide and admitted to the violent rape of his nanny is probably just the tip of the iceberg on Kennedy’s psychopathic tendencies. But the cherry on top was his claim COVID was “ethnically targeted” to spare Jews and Chinese people while targeting Black and White people.

After repeatedly trying to join the Harris campaign — and, to her credit, being left on read by Harris — Kennedy tried his luck with Trump. His second choice bore fruit, as he’s now slated to become the Secretary of Health and Human Services and has repositioned his campaign as “Make America Healthy Again.” Earlier this week, he testified before Congress as part of his nomination.

Like most of the quacks out there, there are cornels of truth in RFK Jr.’s politics. The pharmaceutical industry is a behemoth dripping with the blood of opioid victims, and it’s fair to question why McDonald’s serves Americans chemicals that are banded in other nations. Yet, one look under the hood of “Make America Healthy Again,” and we see nothing more than the tired, pro-capitalist nonsense that will never cure the source of America’s health crisis.

MAHA & Other Stay-Rich-Quick Schemes

Since joining Trump, Kennedy has adopted MAGA framing towards a “health” focus, even rebranding his campaign website as “mahanow.org.” It will come as no surprise that the MAHA agenda is vague and open to interpretation. There’s no policy platform on the site, only a collection of platitudes reading:

1. End Corruption in Health Agencies,

2. Bring Back Real Science, and

3. Reverse America’s Chronic Disease Epidemic.

Kennedy also throws his hat in with the rightist grifter class, claiming MAHA includes “the rejection of censorship, war, and Big Money control over our government.” While such messages are light on policy, they’re heavy on driving donations to the aristocrat worth $14 million.¹ Every — and I mean every — message on Kennedy’s site encourages followers to give money. Kennedy claims these donations are to “retire the debt” he accrued hiring personal security, as he was “unjustly denied Secret Service protection.” This isn’t new, as Kennedy has been fundraising off this lie for over a year and a half. (Notice the date in the tweet below.)

Just because the campaign ends doesn’t mean the grift does.

The primary target of Kennedy’s ire, which the American people share, is the pharmaceutical industry, a.k.a. big pharma. As titans of American capitalism, the pharmaceutical industry was worth over $600 billion last year and is on track to cross a trillion-dollar annual value by 2032. Many Americans despise the industry, and rightfully so. Drug lobbyists push predatory policies that make brand-name drugs up to 3x the price in the U.S. compared to Canada.² For over a decade, they encouraged doctors to push addictive opioids, fueling the opioid crisis that devastated working-class communities and reduced America’s life expectancy by .67 years in 2022 alone.³

---

---

By targeting big pharma, Kennedy is echoing a genuine American pain. Unfortunately, his contribution to fighting corporate power is entirely disingenuous.

It doesn’t take much to recognize Kennedy’s anti-pharma rhetoric is a repackaging of anti-vaxism to make it more palpable for a broader audience. “Vaccine skeptics,” as he insists on being called, have a weird history in American politics. Before COVID, anti-vaxism was mostly held by upper-income liberals with too much time on their hands. The face of the movement was talk show host Jenny McCarthy, a far departure from the MAGA anti-vaxers we see today. As vaccines became synonymous with defeating the pandemic and resuming life, RFK Jr. and his ilk began selling their proposals as a populist, anti-corporate program. Still, his anti-vaxism can easily be disproven.

The claim vaccines cause autism has been routinely debunked. As anti-vaxers argue any medical study disproving their claims is untrustworthy, I’ll point out autism advocacy groups, which have no financial interest in vaccine manufacturing, are staunch opponents of this theory.⁴ While I understand why some might be skeptical of newly-developed medicines, Kennedy takes issue with all vaccinations, even the most validated ones. His current legal advisor, Aaron Siri, has petitioned the government to remove the approval of the polio vaccine, a effort RFK Jr. supports.⁵ To quote from his appearance on The Lex Friedman Podcast, Kennedy claimed the polio vaccine “killed many, many more people than polio ever did.” That’s a claim that makes the flat earthers look reasonable.

I’ll admit that I, along with Robert Kennedy, lack the scientific aptitude to dissect the methodology of biological studies examining vaccination makeups. That is why I rely on material, real world evidence to judge the effectiveness of vaccines. Unfortunately, we have proven case studies of where anti-vax ideology leads. When RFK Jr. was given the opportunity to put his theories into practice, he killed over sixty children.

In 2018, two nurses in American Samoa incorrectly mixed measles vaccines with muscle relaxers instead of water. Two children died after receiving the injections, and the nurses were sentenced to five years for manslaughter.⁶ Kennedy and other anti-vaxxers seized the opportunity, flooding the island with anti-vax nonsense, mostly through targeted Facebook ads. Kennedy even visited Samoa to discourage parents from vaccinating their infants.⁷ As a result, the infant vaccination rates plummeted from 85% to 31% in just a few years, the exact result RFK Jr. wanted. When a measles outbreak spread throughout the South Pacific a year and a half later, Samoa, with its 31% infant vaccination rate, was hit the hardest.⁸ By the time the virus was contained, 3% of the population was infected, and eighty-three people — more than three-fourths of children — had died. The neighboring nations of Nauru, Niue, and the Cook Islands, which had infant vaccinations rates of close to 99%, experienced no such phenomenon.

Did Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the founder of The Children’s Health Defense, take this new evidence into account and revisit his positions? Don’t be silly. During the outbreak's height, when the 200,000-person island was struggling to save its children, Kennedy wrote a letter to the Samoan prime minister claiming the measles vaccine caused the outbreak. Because, it couldn’t possible be his fault. No sir. It’s the doctors who are wrong.*

*sarcasm

A one-year-old receives a measles vaccination in Poutasi, a small Samoan town during the 2019 outbreak.

It will come as no surprise that, outside of deadly anti-vax beliefs, Kennedy is not really against big pharma. He has repeatedly promotes ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to fight COVID, two drugs made by… vaccine manufacturers Pfizer⁹ and Merck.¹⁰ The idea that we should fight these companies by buying one of their less-proven products is nonsensical, like claiming you’re boycotting Starbucks by purchasing a medium coffee instead of a big one. (I don’t know the tri-lingual Starbucks sizes, and at this point I refuse to learn them.) This is a common tactic of RFK Jr., one that echos the rightist attempt to turn reactionary, personal grievances into the mainstream politics by making them sound like issues deep and dear to working families.

Outside pharmaceuticals, Kennedy claims to be “anti-censorship, anti-war, and anti-Big Money control of the government.” This will be tricky for Kennedy to enact, as it is the exact opposite of the administration he’s poised to join.

Despite the claims of some writers here on Substack (I’m sure you can guess who), Donald Trump is the most pro-war, pro-censorship, pro-big money candidate politician of the decade. He’s currently suing the Des Moines Register for publishing a poll that showed him losing,¹¹ and he recently stated his administration would outlaw flag burners, the lowest hurdle ostensible “free speech advocates” have yet to clear.

As for opposing wars, I’ll remind Kennedy it was Trump, not Obama nor Biden, who first sent American arms to Ukraine, cementing America’s presence in the European war. In an insanely hawkish act, Trump assassinated Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, who was on an Iraqi airport and traveling under a diplomatic passport on a mission to ease tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran. (Four leaders of the anti-ISIS Popular Mobilization Forces were killed in the blast.) At his mind-numbing RNC speech earlier this year, Trump claimed it was a mistake to leave Afghanistan because it would have made it easier for the U.S. to bomb China. If someone can explain how Trump’s ceaseless blood lust is “anti-war,” I’m all ears.

Then there’s the fact that Donald Trump, himself a billionaire, has stacked his incoming cabinet with big money. Over thirty of Trump’s cabinet picks are high-dollar donors to his campaign. Elon Musk, who gave Trump over a quarter billion dollars, is the single largest campaign donor in the cycle.¹² But again, Kennedy’s program is “anti big money.” Sure dude.

I fail to see how letting oligarchs run the government, advocating for war with China, and jailing Americans for speech is anti-big money, anti-war, or anti-censorship. Then again, unlike RFK Jr., I don’t have a dead worm in my brain.

Brain worms. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. literally has brain worms.

---

---

The Real American Health Crisis

As you can likely tell, I loathe people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Here is a member of America’s ruling class, who, recognizing the public is genuinely unhappy with the way our health, economic, and military systems function, decides to harness that very real, very valid, frustration and make it all about himself. Of course, he has to do so in a way that doesn’t threaten the system that created these problems and made him extremely wealthy, so he never once utters the words “Medicare For All” or “Repeal Citizens United.”

It’s clear that, like the many other fail sons who occupy the upper echelons of the American media-political-business environment, he’s just another spoiled rich kid, so insecure he’ll never outgrow his father’s shadow that he’s claiming to be a trailblazer while walking a path to nowhere. Actually, as the colonized people of American Samoa discovered, that path leads to dead children. But Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isn’t one to be stopped by global medical consensus, so why let a few dead brown babies get in the way of his narcissism?

What makes Kennedy’s schtick so much worse is that America is indeed a deeply sick, unhealthy nation. Our obesity rate is twice that of our peer nations. Life expectancy has plummeted since 2014, a phenomenon not seen in other modernized countries. Over a million Americans died from COVID, and an estimated seventeen million suffer from long COVID with ramifications we won’t know about for decades.¹³ We work more than anyone else, and despite our productivity increasing 75% over the last half-century, American workers collect none of those gains. Wages have stagnated despite the national wealth exploding. So it’s no surprise the U.S. fell to an all-time low in the 2024 World Happiness Report.¹⁴

Unlike our peer nations, America’s life expectancy has struggle for over a decade.

The cause of this is not vaccines, Jewish-engineered bioweapons, immigrants, or fast food (which, according to Kennedy, is deadly but perfectly fine for him and his friends to eat). The cause is capitalism.

Health!

Everything Kennedy claims to be against — war, big money, fast food, censorship — is a product of America’s undying pursuit of profit. The pharmaceutical industry pumped Americans full of unneeded opioids because it made them money. Donald Trump ripped off contractors because it made him money. McDonald’s uses ingredients in America that aren’t allowed in other nations because it makes them money. Tech censorship exists because these communication companies are capitalist. Under America’s beloved doctrine, they get to choose what people are allowed to read and here, because their sites are their “property.” Sure, in 2020 Facebook deleted posts claiming COVID vaccines made you gay. But the overwhelming brunt of their censorship is against leftists who criticize capitalism. Social media sites censor this because they don’t want people moving against the system that made them money. In the above image, Kennedy is sitting across from Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter/X who blocked links to the opposition file on J.D. Vance from being posted on his website. I’ll bet you the net worth of everyone in that picture RFK Jr. forgot about “tech censorship” during that discussion.

Much like the healthcare reality that led many Americans to champion the killer of a health insurance CEO, Americans feel this exploitation in their daily lives. They know they are limitations on their speech, are being served subpar food, recognize the wealthy have vastly more political say than they do, and see their tax dollars used to buy bombs dropped on children (Kennedy, who claims to be anti-war, staunchly supports Israel’s genocide of Palestine, by the way). These are real pains the American people are right to have. The cause is capitalism. Any “solution” to censorship, the pharmaceutical industry, the military industrial complex, or America’s health crisis that does not explicitly name capitalism as the root of the issue is a lie; a fraud designed to steal your energy and siphon it into elevating one particular member of the ruling class that created our problems.

Any healthcare plan that doesn’t address this is a joke.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does not give a flying fuck about your health, saving children, or anything else. If he did, he’d be championing Medicare For All so hard the CIA would put him in an open top convertible and drive him through Dallas. Like the rest of the American aristocracy, he cares about for himself. Solutions to problems caused by Kennedy’s ilk will not come from Kennedy’s ilk. No one is coming to save us, so let’s build our own worker-focused, true populist political power. Only then will we be able to demand true solutions from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his friends, instead of pretending if we buy enough of his shitty “MAHA” merchandise we’ll suddenly overcome our horrible, capitalist healthcare system.

Without power drawn from the collective interest of working Americans, people like RFK Jr. will continue to use, abuse, and discard us. Just ask the people of Samoa.

---

Thank you for reading JoeWrote. If you like this article, please like (click the❤️), share, and subscribe so future essays are delivered to your inbox. JoeWrote is entirely reader supported. So if you’d like me to able to continue creating content that afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted, consider becoming a premium subscriber.

In Solidarity — Joe

1. https://fox40.com/news/national-and-world-news/what-is-robert-f-kennedy-jr-s-net-worth/

2. https://www.verywellhealth.com/america-versus-canada-drug-prices-8567551

3. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-193X(24)00140-6/fulltext

4. https://www.autismspeaks.org/what-causes-autism

5. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/health/aaron-siri-rfk-jr-vaccines.html

6. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-02/samoa-nurses-sentenced-manslaughter-infant-vaccination-deaths/11378494

7. https://www.protectourcare.org/experts-say-deadly-samoan-measles-outbreak-caused-by-rfk-jr-s-disaster-visit/

8. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-02/samoa-nurses-sentenced-manslaughter-infant-vaccination-deaths/11378494

9. https://www.genengnews.com/news/sanofi-pfizer-and-various-manufacturers-hydroxychloroquine-chloroquine-and-azithromycin/

10. https://www.merck.com/news/merck-statement-on-ivermectin-use-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/

11. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/17/us/politics/trump-sues-des-moines-register.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20241217&instance_id=142502&nl=breaking-news&regi_id=89071164&segment_id=185985&user_id=17b4454ce7b796bda7dcba8164ce6c71

12. https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/05/politics/elon-musk-trump-campaign-finance-filings/index.html

13. https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/as-recommendations-for-isolation-end-how-common-is-long-covid/

14. https://www.axios.com/2024/03/20/world-happiness-america-low-list-countries