If RFK Jr. leads the Department of Health and Human Services, he could radically reshape public health priorities in America, from vaccines to fluoride in the water. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during a UFC event at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
What does RFK Jr. represent in public health?
If you expose frogs to atrazine, male frogs, it changes their sex and they can actually, they are young. And so the capacity for these chemicals that we are just raining down on our children right now
He has linked antidepressant use with mass shootings not founded in evidence.
NIH needs to be studying to see if there's connections to some of the SSRI and psychiatric drugs people are taking, whether there's connections to video games.
There are a lot of non-scientific beliefs that he has espoused publicly and just cast doubt on how much we know about the causes of a whole bunch of health conditions.
So I feel like the most controversial thing you could say about RFK is not that he's totally right or he's totally wrong, but this guy has some good ideas. And truthfully, am I in that camp? Perhaps. Where does he overlap with the scientific consensus?
Yeah, it is funny. You know, when somebody is a shapeshifter the way he is, a lot of people can find a lot of things he said to agree with. You know, he fundamentally distrusts big institutions. And I think a lot of Americans across the
big institutions, big government institutions deserving of distrust, including in the eyes of a lot of scientists, is that they are to some degree under the influence of the lobbies for big business interests that they interact with a lot. Pharma and agriculture have a lot of interactions with the FDA, and their lobbies do too.
And so they drive some of the policy that comes out of FDA that drives the way Americans eat, the drugs Americans have access to. So on that, he and a lot of legitimate scientists and members of the public in the United States agree.
It's that the agency, the USDA, the FDA have been captured by the industries they're supposed to regulate. And they all have an interest in subsidies and then in mass poisoning the American public.
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