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Why picking RFK Jr. to lead HHS is raising alarms among many public health specialists

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Why picking RFK Jr. to lead HHS is raising alarms among many public health specialists

With President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, numerous public health leaders are voicing fears that the nation’s premier health agencies will be weakened at a time when the country faces rising threats from infectious diseases, emboldened industry lobbyists and the dangerous consequences of medical misinformation.

If confirmed as secretary of HHS, Kennedy — a proponent of fringe medical conspiracies and a self-described “poster child for the anti-vax movement” — would have oversight of institutions including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the National Institutes of Health.

Like the two most recently confirmed HHS secretaries, Xavier Becerra and Alex Azar, Kennedy is an attorney with no formal scientific or medical credentials. His purview would include programs and departments he has fiercely criticized in the past, often in ways that opponents say distort or ignore facts and misinterpret science.

Many of the problems Kennedy has publicly said he wants to tackle are concerns shared broadly by healthcare providers, public health officials and members of the public. They include pervasive chronic disease, poor nutrition and the ubiquity of processed foods containing artificial chemicals.

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But his nomination has alarmed many public health and medical officials who say they are worried that the solutions Kennedy might deem appropriate could undermine Americans’ health in the long run.

“Putting somebody in charge who is unable to discern the difference between good and bad science is really dangerous for the American people,” said Dr. Peter Lurie, president and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

“Yes, there are some things that he supports that we would agree with, but they feel more like the stopped clock that’s right twice a day,” Lurie said, citing food additives as one example. “There are opportunities for small victories. … But overall, it’s dissolved in so many bad ideas that it’s absolutely not worth it.”

Kennedy declined to discuss his plans for HHS with The Times, but he has indicated some priorities for the agency in previous public statements.

For instance, he said Trump would advise against water fluoridation on his first day in office. He told NBC News he wouldn’t “take away” vaccines, but he would “make sure scientific safety studies and efficacy are out there, and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is going to be good for them.”

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More than half a dozen experts who spoke with The Times said Kennedy’s suggestions that the science around vaccines is unsound would undercut public health.

The United States has “the best vaccine safety system in the world,” said said Dr. Richard Besser, a former acting CDC director who now leads the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “RFK Jr. has done a lot to undermine confidence in that.”

Indeed, cases of measles have been rising in the U.S. as childhood vaccinations lag, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. The CDC has identified 277 measles cases this year, up from 59 in 2023.

“I don’t want to have to see us go backwards in order to remind ourselves that vaccines work,” Dr. Mandy Cohen, the CDC’s director, said this week at the Milken Institute Future of Health Summit in Washington, D.C.

Kennedy’s zeal to remove fluoride from drinking water on the claim that the mineral causes neurodevelopmental disorders and other health conditions is another example of shirking the best science, said Dr. Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

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“That has been looked at carefully and there has not been evidence of a link,” Willett said. “On the other hand, there are serious problems with lead in water systems.”

Vaccines and fluoride are just two areas where Kennedy will have an opportunity to implement ideas that lack strong scientific support.

Last month, he decried the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of unproven health remedies like dietary supplements and ivermectin and warned: “If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.”

But food safety advocates who have shared many of Kennedy’s criticisms about lax regulation said gutting the agency is not the answer. Any effort to reduce or eliminate chemical additives in foods would require experienced staffers to draft new rules and shepherd them through the required regulatory process, said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group.

“If you’ve gotten rid of all the bureaucrats, who’s going to write the regulation?” Cook said.

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Or consider FDA’s reliance on user fees from companies that want the agency to approve its medical products. Such fees make up nearly half of the agency’s operating budget. Kennedy and others have criticized such fees, but if those dollars went away, Congress would be unlikely to backfill them, Lurie said.

“Ending user fees is tantamount to starving the agency,” he said. “That would mean a food program that’s limited in what it can do, drugs coming to market more slowly, and vaccines that are even less well-monitored for safety.”

Lurie said he wouldn’t be surprised to see Kennedy task researchers at the National Institutes of Health with looking for damaging side effects of vaccines and elusive benefits of potential therapies that have already been shown to be ineffective, such as chelation as a treatment for autism and ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19.

“He seems to think these hold great promise,” Lurie said. “Most of those ideas are sinkholes for government spending, which is ironic given the Trump administration’s purported devotion to efficiency.”

Significant as the HHS role is, Kennedy would still find his powers curtailed by the limits of the agency’s reach — and potentially by the whims of his boss.

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Willett said he agrees with Kennedy that the nation’s health is in decline, and that our food and healthcare systems are “in many ways dysfunctional.” He would welcome efforts to crack down on the amount of salt allowed in foods and to curtail consumption of added sugars, refined grains and sugar-sweetened beverages.

But if Kennedy takes steps like these, “we know for sure he will run into resistance from industry,” Willett said. “It would be interesting to see if he’s prepared to take on Coca-Cola.”

Although Kennedy is passionate about reducing pesticides and other chemicals in foods, it’s up to the Department of Agriculture to regulate pesticide use on crops, and it’s the job of the Environmental Protection Agency to determine what exposure levels are considered safe for people, Cook said. Nor would Kennedy have the power to reform farm subsidies to encourage organic and regenerative agriculture.

“He doesn’t have much purchase on pesticides from his perch,” Cook said. “That’s not really an HHS thing or an FDA thing.”

The FDA does have the authority to regulate the chemicals that come off of food packaging and can find their way into food, and Kennedy could prioritize that, Cook said.

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It’s also possible that Kennedy could protect the budgets of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Cook said.

To help him achieve his goals, Kennedy has invited the public to weigh in on people who could fill important roles within the federal government’s health agencies.

Names that have garnered thousands of votes in the “America’s Health” category of his “Nominees for the People” website include Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, who claimed COVID-19 vaccines made people magnetic, and Dr. Simone Gold, the anti-vaccine Beverly Hills physician whose medical license was suspended after she pleaded guilty to unlawfully entering the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Her license has since been restored.)

Kennedy’s own accession to the HHS secretary post is not yet certain. Cabinet positions are supposed to be confirmed by the Senate, though Trump has suggested that he may use recess appointments to bypass the need for lawmakers’ approval.

Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Assn., said that even if Kennedy wins confirmation, it’s uncertain how long he would remain in Trump’s good graces.

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“I remind folks that his first health secretary didn’t last a year,” Benjamin said. “We’ll see what happens here.”

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A tale worth telling of four women scientists whose names you should know but don't

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A tale worth telling of four women scientists whose names you should know but don't

Book Review

Sisters in Science: How Four Women Physicists Escaped Nazi Germany and Made Scientific History

By Olivia Campbell
Park Row Books: 368 pages, $32.99
If you buy books on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.

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You might have heard of Lise Meitner. A native of Austria, she was the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany. She also helped discover nuclear fission. Yet the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for that accomplishment went solely to her longtime collaborator, Otto Hahn.

Meitner battled misogyny and sexism at every stage of her illustrious career. But growing antisemitism and the 1933 Nazi takeover of Germany were an even higher-order problem. Although she was a convert to Lutheranism, her Jewish heritage endangered her. With the help of friends, she was able to flee in 1938 to neutral Sweden, where she was safe but scientifically isolated. “I can never discuss my experiments with anyone who understands them,” she wrote to fellow physicist Hedwig Kohn.

In “Sisters in Science,” Olivia Campbell tells the intertwined stories of Meitner and three other notable, but lesser known, women physicists from Germany: Kohn, Hertha Sponer and Hildegard Stücklen. Only Kohn was Jewish, but the Third Reich’s hostility to women academics cost the other two jobs as well.

Cover photo of “Sisters in Science”

(Park Row Books)

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All three eventually made it to the United States, where they pursued their careers and continued to support one another (and Meitner too). Kohn, the last to escape, didn’t make it out of Europe until 1940. She endured two months of arduous travel through the Soviet Union and Japan and across the Pacific Ocean, barely surviving the ordeal.

Theirs is an inspiring tale, and well worth telling — all the more so because, as Campbell notes in her dedication, so many other women academics were murdered by the Nazis. “Their absence haunts this book; the rippling impact of their loss affects us all,” she writes.

But its intrinsic interest notwithstanding, “Sisters in Science” is a sometimes frustrating read. Part of the problem is its ambitious scope. Group biography is a tricky genre. Campbell has to meld four narrative arcs: parallel at times, overlapping at others, but also divergent. A more elegant stylist, or a true adept of narrative nonfiction, might have managed to integrate these stories more seamlessly. It doesn’t help that Campbell refers to her protagonists by their first names — and three of the four begin with the letter “H.”

Explaining the physics to a lay audience is another challenge, perhaps an insuperable one. Campbell attempts it only nominally. The idea of fission, the splitting of atomic nuclei and resulting production of vast amounts of energy, is more or less intelligible. But the accomplishments of the other three physicists, who worked in spectroscopy, optics and astrophysics, are harder to grasp.

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The book also would have benefited from better copy editing and fact-checking. Whatever her bona fides as a science journalist, Campbell is not at home in Holocaust history. One example: Campbell locates Dachau, the Nazis’ first concentration camp, in Oranienburg, a suburb of Berlin. Dachau opened in 1933 in the town of Dachau, near Munich. Oranienburg was actually the site of another eponymous camp and then, in 1936, Sachsenhausen.

There are other errors and infelicities. Campbell continually refers to Kristallnacht, the November 1938 Nazi pogrom, as “the Kristallnacht.” A more serious lapse is her anachronistic suggestion that, in 1938, Meitner feared being deported to a “death camp.” Camps such as Dachau and Sachsenhausen were brutal, often murderous places, but in the 1930s, they mostly housed Nazi political opponents (some of them Jewish). Jews were not yet being deported from Germany, and the six death camps dedicated to their extermination — places such as Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau, all in Poland — did not become operational until the early 1940s.

It is also somewhat crude, and arguably inaccurate, to say that Kristallnacht “exposed the Nazis’ true agenda for the Jewish people: they wanted them all dead.” Despite the growing virulence of anti-Jewish persecution, that goal was not yet clear, and not yet official policy. In fact, though some were killed, most of the 30,000 or so Jewish men rounded up and taken to concentration camps during Kristallnacht were released on the condition that they emigrate.

Presumably Campbell is on firmer ground elsewhere — in noting, for instance, the difficulties that women scientists faced in Germany, including fights for pay, lab space and recognition; and in emphasizing the ways that they, and a few sympathetic male colleagues, helped one another endure, flourish and eventually escape.

When she first became Hahn’s assistant in Berlin, for example, Meitner was exiled from the main lab and stuck in a basement workshop with no nearby restroom. She ultimately rose to head the physics department at Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, a post she retained even after her Nazi-era dismissal from the University of Berlin.

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Some male scientists were dead set against women. Others, such as Max Planck, welcomed collaboration from only the most exceptional of their female peers. One heroic supporter of women in science was the Nobel laureate James Franck. A German Jew, he resigned his post at the University of Göttingen before he could be fired, immigrated to the United States via Denmark, and was later instrumental in aiding colleagues, including women, who remained behind.

Franck and Sponer, his onetime assistant, were especially close — both friends and scientific collaborators. After a stint at the University of Oslo, Sponer accepted a position at North Carolina’s Duke University in 1936, and began working with Edward Teller, the eventual creator of the hydrogen bomb, “on the vibrational excitation of polyatomic molecules by electron collisions.”

Only after Franck’s wife died in 1942 did his long-germinating romance with Sponer come to fruition. He remained at the University of Chicago, and she at Duke. But in 1946, they married, and in Campbell’s sympathetic telling, experienced true happiness amid the sorrows around them.

Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.

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Doctor surrenders license after allegations that he sexually abused patients and employees

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Doctor surrenders license after allegations that he sexually abused patients and employees

A longtime internist who founded a chain of Southern California clinics has surrendered his medical license after an accusation from the state medical board that he sexually assaulted three patients, two of whom worked for his clinics.

Dr. Mohammad Rasekhi signed an agreement to give up his medical license last month, weeks after the Medical Board of California filed an accusation against him detailing allegations that Rasekhi sexually abused three women while they were under his care.

Rasekhi denies all the allegations, his attorney Peter Osinoff said this week. He chose to waive his rights to a hearing and retire from medicine, a decision Osinoff said his client had been considering for some time.

“For him to spend his retirement money litigating over a license he no longer uses is not a good use of money,” Osinoff said. The surrender took effect Dec. 2.

Rasekhi was the founder and chief medical officer of Southern California Medical Center, a group of general practice clinics with locations in El Monte, Van Nuys, Pico Rivera, Woodland Hills, Pomona and Long Beach.

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Sheila Busheri, co-founder of Southern California Medical Center and Rasekhi’s spouse, declined to comment.

In a document filed Oct. 3, the state medical board accused Rasekhi of sexual exploitation and gross negligence in his treatment of three patients.

The first became a primary care patient of Rasekhi’s around 2005, when she was 12 years old. In 2016, she accepted a job at SCMC while still seeing Rasekhi for her medical care.

Soon after, Rasekhi began making sexually suggestive comments to her at work, the document states. These progressed to unwanted sexual contact the woman endured for fear of losing her job, according to the complaint. The abuse continued until she went on medical leave in 2020.

The medical board reviewed records of the woman’s doctor appointments with Rasekhi. According to her chart, Rasekhi performed breast exams on the patient during visits for seemingly unrelated complaints such as back pain and hair loss, the accusation states.

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“Respondent denied performing breast exams during those visits and conceded that the medical record does not accurately reflect the details about the visit or the examinations actually performed,” the complaint states.

A second patient began seeing Rasekhi in 2016 at the age of 62. In September 2017, the complaint states, Rasekhi arrived unannounced at the patient’s home.

“After entering Patient 2’s home and without Patient 2’s consent and over Patient 2’s protests, Respondent made sexual advances towards, and had sexual contact with, Patient 2,” the complaint said.

A third patient was employed at SCMC from 2007 to 2017, and became a patient of Rasekhi’s in 2015. Rasekhi made frequent suggestive comments at work that escalated into advances and sexual contact that continued until her resignation, the complaint stated.

A woman whose employment dates matched those of the third patient settled with Rasekhi, Busheri and SCMC for $3.5 million in 2019, according to a report in the Daily Journal.

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Avocados, salmon, strawberry yogurt: Which of these meets FDA's new definition of a “healthy” food?

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Avocados, salmon, strawberry yogurt: Which of these meets FDA's new definition of a “healthy” food?

In an effort to improve American diets, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Thursday released a new definition of what it means for a food to qualify as “healthy.”

Products like fruit-flavored yogurt, fortified white bread and sweetened energy bars will no longer be allowed to label themselves as healthy if they exceed certain limits on saturated fat, sodium and added sugars.

At the same time, foods like salmon, almonds and even water will qualify as healthy for the first time.

The new definition reflects the advice offered in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which are produced by the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services. The hope is that consumers who consider health claims on packaged foods while filling their grocery carts will be steered toward a more nutritious eating pattern, the FDA said.

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There’s no question that Americans can use some help with their diets. For example, less than half of U.S. adults eat a piece of fruit on any given day, and only 12% consume the recommended 1.5 to 2 cups of fruit per day, according to national surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Americans are even further off the mark with vegetables, with only 10% meeting the target of 2 to 3 cups per day.

On the other hand, 90% of us eat too much sodium, 75% eat too much saturated fat and 63% eat too many added sugars, the FDA said.

The new definition of healthy foods aims to turn that around by excluding foods with excess sodium, saturated fat and added sugars even if they also contain valuable nutrients like protein and whole grains.

The specific limits vary depending on food groups. The limits will also depend on whether a product is an individual food (like cheese), a “mixed product” (like trail mix) or a complete meal (like a frozen dinner).

For instance, in order for a dairy product such as yogurt to qualify as healthy, a single 2/3-cup serving can’t have more than 5% of the recommended daily amount of added sugars, 10% of the recommended daily amount of sodium or 10% of the recommended daily amount of saturated fat.

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Those limits translate to 2.5 grams of added sugars, 230 milligrams of sodium and 2 grams of saturated fat. A single serving of Chobani strawberry Greek yogurt would miss the mark because it contains 9 grams of added sugars. So would Chobani’s “less sugar” variety, which has 5 grams of added sugars.

Sugar, salt and fat are only part of the new criteria. To meet the new definition of healthy, foods must contain a minimum amount of protein, whole grains, fruit, vegetables or fat-free or low-fat dairy, the FDA said.

Whole foods like eggs, beans, seafood and nuts will automatically qualify as healthy if they are sold with no added ingredients (except for water). That makes foods like avocados, olive oil and higher-fat fish like salmon eligible to be labeled as healthy for the first time. Fruits, vegetables and fish can make the cut if they are fresh, frozen or canned, making them accessible to people on a range of budgets, the agency said.

However, products like fortified breads, cereals, fruit snacks, granola bars and fruit punch will lose the label unless they are reformulated to meet the new definition.

Nancy Brown, chief executive of the American Heart Assn., said the new definition was long overdue and hopes it will improve Americans’ diets by motivating food manufacturers to create healthier products. However, she added that it would be more meaningful to require products to carry a nutrition label on the front of their packages, which she believes would make it easier for consumers to identify and select healthier options.

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The previous definition of healthy foods, which was issued in 1994, focused more on total fat and cholesterol. Since then, nutrition scientists have recognized that not all fats should be treated the same, and that unsaturated fats found in nuts, seeds, fish and certain vegetable oils can lower disease risk.

The old definition also required foods to provide at least 10% of the recommended daily amount of vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, iron, protein or fiber. The FDA said it is shifting its focus from specific nutrients to larger food groups in order to help consumers build a healthy dietary pattern.

Poor diet is a risk factor for many of the leading causes of death in the U.S., including heart disease, stroke, diabetes and some types of cancer.

Food manufacturers will have three years to conform to the new definition, the FDA said, though those that meet the new criteria don’t have to wait that long to start using the “healthy” label.

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