The Frog-voiced prince of medical malpractice
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the current secretary of Health and Human Services, has become in just a matter of months the Frog-Voiced Prince of Medical Malpractice. His baseless opposition to vaccines, his hobbling of the Centers for Disease Control, his sundering of federally-funded research against cancer, etc., etc., could prove to be an embarrassment to Donald Trump in his open, hungry pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize, something he wants even more than money—something that could, in his mind, finally make him the equal of his Black nemesis, 2009 Nobel Laureate Barack Obama.
It's a safe bet Trump has little chance for a Nobel as a peacemaker, given his being played like a fiddle on Ukraine by Vladimir Putin and his blind acceptance of genocide in Gaza by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. But he could pin his hopes for an award on his success during his first term in pushing Operation Warp Speed to produce what ultimately became the Covid vaccine, despite the fact that literally thousands upon thousands of Americans died as he dithered for months, touting quack cures and bogus science (like his current health secretary).
Could Bobby's days be numbered because of his continuing and very public skepticism of vaccines, including the Covid vaccine, that he once described as “the deadliest vaccine ever made”?
Who knows? Bobby, Jr.’s presence gives Donald Trump a prominent Democrat to wave over his head like a prized toy on Christmas morning. But it also has let Bobby Kennedy—deranged, conspiratorial, vengeful and wrong—become even more of a threat to the nation’s health than his clownish, junk food-eating boss.
What is beyond debate is the havoc Bobby Jr. has wrought in just the past few months—and what further havoc may yet come:
Last month, HHS under Kennedy canceled $500 million in funding for mRNA vaccine research and development. Along with other budget cuts, this decision, if not reversed, likely will have devastating consequences for medical research, including progress toward a so-called “cancer vaccine”—a field in which the U.S. is viewed as a world leader. Though mRNA medicine has only recently entered the public mind for its use in developing Covid-19 vaccines, mRNA research is decades old. Applications for mRNA medicine have previously covered flu, rabies and other diseases.
On Feb. 14, 2025, agencies including the CDC and the NIH were informed that approximately 5,200 newly hired federal health workers were to be fired that day.
On Feb. 20, 2025, during an unusually severe influenza season, HHS instructed the CDC to suspend its ad campaign promoting flu vaccination. The advertising, in part a response to declining flu vaccination rates, promoted the message that vaccination would result in much milder symptoms and lower chances of becoming severely ill for those with the flu.
In April 2025, Kennedy fired most of the staff of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, shuttering nearly all its departments. Programs including approvals of new workplace safety equipment and research into firefighter health were abruptly canceled.
In June 2025, Kennedy announced that he was removing all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and replacing them with new members, virtually all of whom were either vaccine deniers or vaccine skeptics. At a contentious Senate hearing this week, ousted CDC head Dr. Susan Monarez said she feared for the future of public health in America. Monarez was fired from her job as head of the agency after only a month when, she said, she refused to give Kennedy, her boss, a promise of blanket endorsement of his future vaccine and other pronouncements in the absence of hard scientific evidence. At the hearing she, and Dr. Debra Houry—a top CDC official who resigned in protest after Monarez’ ouster—said they feared the United States was not prepared for a future pandemic. Dr. Monarez warned that if vaccines became harder to get, preventable diseases would surge back, and American children would be harmed. The United States has already had a measles resurgence this year (see below), and whooping cough cases are higher now than they were before the Covid pandemic.
Kennedy's tenure began during a measles outbreak in the southwestern U.S., including the first measles death in a decade. The state of Texas reported 146 cases, 20 hospitalizations and one death in late February. Kennedy responded as if this were old news—"We have measles outbreaks every year.” But in fact, such outbreaks of the disease had been declared domestically eliminated, prior to the resurgence of measles in the U.S. that started in the 2010s. Kennedy then cited fringe theories blaming poor diet and health. He also promoted cod liver oil, steroid inhalation, an antibiotic, Vitamin A and other questionable treatments that he called "almost miraculous.”
Thundered U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.): "Nothing about kids dying from measles is normal. Anti-vaxxers like RFK Jr. and the Republicans who enable them are responsible for every single one of these deaths."
Never forget Bobby’s and Donald Trump’s similarities: their shared history and facility to lie. Though one seems rugged and fit (despite that voice) and the other is an obese tub of guts, they are in fact peas in a pod.
Neither man had any preparation for the office they now hold. Trump was a real estate developer from the outer boroughs of New York who always dreamed of making it big in Manhattan. He also had a rich father who groomed him and helped bankroll him through multiple bankruptcies. (Remember Trump University? Trump Steaks?) And of course Trump the son had absolutely no experience in elective politics and government.
Bobby Jr., is a nepo baby from a fabulously wealthy Democratic political family (Besides being RFK’s son he also is JFK’s and Teddy Kennedy’s nephew.) He has absolutely no experience or academic background in science or medicine.
Like Trump, Kennedy is a delusional self-assured bully, who, until he developed spasmodic dysphonia of his larynx, used to love the sound of his own voice decades ago when he drew deserved fame as an environmentalist. For what it’s worth, Kennedy also is a convicted felon for heroin possession, and had been addicted to the drug for 14 years. In 2012, in a deposition during one of his divorces, Bobby also made note of “a worm that got into my brain and ate part of it and then died…”
Kennedy grew up in the cosseted lap of Kennedy wealth (Hyannis Port, Cape Cod, etc.) and, like Donald Trump, developed a reputation as a spoiled entitled rich kid who traveled in a pack called the “Hyannis Port Terrors” that engaged in vandalism, theft and drug use. Years later, his cousin Caroline Kenndy would call him a “predator.”
As an adult, Kennedy—like Trump—had multiple wives and, also like Trump, appears to have been a serial philanderer.
Is it any wonder that the two of them hit it off?
Kennedy already was long viewed as a conspiracy-spouting whack job by the medical and scientific communities when Trump enticed him to abandon his Democratic/then Libertarian presidential campaign in 2024 and endorse him. Bobby had put out feelers to both the Harris and Trump campaigns, seeking a cabinet post in return for an endorsement that presumably would have persuaded his followers to switch their allegiance. Harris told him to take a hike, but Trump said he’d think about it.
Trump finally nominated him to head HHS (his nomination was approved by the Senate, 52-48, with Republican Mitch McConnell, a polio survivor, voting with every Democrat to oppose him.) Trump told Kennedy to “go wild.” He has.
But Trump’s directive to Kennedy should not surprise. It’s what Trump himself did when he first took office.
After his election in 2016 Trump and his “drain the swamp” minions decimated much of the federal response mechanism for dealing with any pandemic. But that was mere prologue to Trump’s stubborn refusal to act on multiple reports from within the federal government and his own administration that a specific virus, the novel coronavirus, was real and not, as he termed it at campaign rallies, a Democratic “hoax.”
It also should be remembered that, even before all this, Trump willfully ignored warnings from the outgoing (and despised) Obama administration that the world faced a huge threat of pandemic—bolstered by the former administration’s largely successful fight against Ebola in Africa
Noted Robert J. Shapiro, former undersecretary of commerce for economic policy under Bill Clinton: “Trump’s transition leaders dismissed warnings by Obama officials that a new pandemic was a serious threat … In 2017, he proposed deep cuts in funding for the NIH and the CDC that even some congressional Republicans rejected. In 2018, his administration disbanded the formal White House pandemic task force, ended maintenance on stockpiled respirators, and reduced stockpiling of protective medical equipment . …”
A worldwide pandemic of near-biblical proportions finally forced Trump to abandon his talk of hoaxes and Clorox enemas. He finally let the scientists (and, to be fair, Big Pharma) do their job—and they did, in record time, God bless them. One might argue that the Covid vaccine was developed in spite of Donald Trump, not because of him.
So where does that leave us now under Bobby Kennedy, Jr.?
Virologist Rick Bright headed the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) — the agency that pioneered mRNA research in the U.S. — until he was ousted by Donald Trump in May 2020 for a whistleblower complaint about his first administration's promotion of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment.
"If the United States abandons mRNA, it will not simply be forfeiting a public health advantage. It will be ceding a strategic asset," Bright wrote recently. "In national security terms, mRNA is the equivalent of a missile defense system for biology. The ability to rapidly design, produce and deploy medical countermeasures is as vital to our defense as any military capability.
"Adversaries that invest in this technology," he continued, "will be able to respond faster to outbreaks, protecting their populations sooner than we can."
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Frank Van Riper is a Washington-based photographer, journalist and author. For 20 years he was a reporter and editor in the Washington Bureau of the New York Daily News, and for 19 years after that was the photography columnist of the Washington Post. He was a 1979 Nieman Fellow at Harvard and holds the 1980 Merriman Smith Award (with his colleague, the late Lars-Erik Nelson) from the White House Correspondents Association.
