Get your yucks out. Worm guy is funny. Worm guy is ridiculous. Ha ha ha ha ha therewasafuckingworminhisbrainorsohesays.

Last week, the Senate actually confirmed  as Secretary of Health and Human Services. A vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist is the most powerful health official in the United States, and therefore one of the most powerful health authorities in the world.

The Secretary of Health and Human Services has a big job. Kennedy’s decisions will affect your health, the health of everyone you know, the health of the millions and millions of Americans you do not know, and the health of hundreds of millions more people in other countries who’ve received aid from the US.

Kennedy’s MAGA slogan is “Make America Healthy Again,” the least-true slogan imaginable for the “medical freedom” movement that he’s become the face of. Freedom from what, exactly? Pasteurized milk? Settled science that helps avoid devastating epidemics?

Kennedy is dangerous and ignorant. He disregards experts and scientific consensus, has no medical or scientific training, and he’s now in a position where Americans could take his dangerous health advice at face value. Experts worry Trump and Kennedy could pull vaccines off the market, or they will further erode Americans’ trust in public health institutions. They worry Kennedy will bungle emerging threats like bird flu. They worry about preventable disease and death. Look no further than today’s news that Kennedy will investigate the childhood vaccine schedule for dangerous diseases like measles and polio he promised not to touch.

“Nothing is going to be off limits,” Kennedy told thousands of HHS workers today. As the Associated Press noted, this came after a weekend of HHS firings and a serious measles outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico.

As Secretary, Kennedy oversees 13 divisions including the Administration for Community Living, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Diseases Registry, the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and the Departmental Appeals Board, as well as the familiar Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Administration for Children and Families. That’s a lot of shit, isn’t it? Especially if you have kids, or want healthcare when you’re old, or eat food—oh wait, I guess that’s all of us.

Kennedy says he’s no vaccine skeptic, he’s just a data guy. As he told Joe Rogan in 2023, “I have a critical mind—if somebody shows me where I’ve got it wrong, I’ll change. I’m not dug in, I’m not hard headed in that sense.” But during Kennedy’s confirmation hearing, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont attacked him for supporting some classic bullshit: the widely-discredited pseudoscientific theory that vaccines cause autism, and praising Andrew Wakefield, the British scientist whose debunked work fueled that skepticism in the first place.

After Kennedy said he wouldn’t “rest on a single study,” Sanders introduced to the record 16 studies that showed no link between vaccines and autism. “Are you happy?” Sanders asked, waving the papers. Kennedy also wouldn’t tell Sanders if the COVID vaccine saved lives. It undoubtedly did.

Washington State Senator Patty Murray told The Seattle Times her customary, private meeting with Kennedy ahead of the hearing was the single most troubling she’d had with a Cabinet nominee in her 32 years in the Senate. She walked out on him.

“He threw out so many nonsense, nonsensical questions and statements that it was head spinning,” she told the Times . They included: 99% of people who died of COVID were Vitamin D deficient, that we haven’t done safety studies on vaccines (we have), and that “there is an entire generation of damaged children.”

It’s more accurate to say there’s an entire generation of children who lived . Kennedy’s confirmation was nearly a party-line vote, save 83-year-old Senator Mitch McConnell, a guy we rarely hand it to around here. A polio survivor, McConnell remembers when children regularly died of old-timey sounding illnesses like diphtheria, a bacterial infection which killed 13,000 American children a year during the 1920s and 1930s. Today, only one or two die, and vaccines are the reason why. In countries where vaccines are not as readily available, diphtheria is still a significant killer, a miracle completely lost on a country so fortunate that it has forgotten a basic fact of life for most of human history.

Kennedy should know differently. As NBC reported last month, RFK Jr. tested his dangerous, pseudoscientific theories about vaccines in Samoa during a measles outbreak. Government officials there had suspended vaccination for two months after an improperly prepared vaccine killed two children. Kennedy then pushed those officials to study the outcome of the “natural experiment” created by this lapse. Predictably, 83 small children died for no reason at all.

The number of baffling claims Kennedy has made is unknowable. Take his AIDS theory. We’ve known since 1983 that HIV causes AIDS. It’s settled science. There’s nothing to speculate on. But in 2021, RFK Jr. suggested a quite dated explanation at a Health Freedom Ohio event: HIV was an opportunistic “passenger virus” that attacked an immune system weakened by amyl nitrate, or poppers: “100 percent of the people who died of the first thousand were addicted to poppers … which is known to cause Karposi’s Sarcoma in rats,” or the purple lesions associated with AIDS.

Poppers are not addictive, and they do not cause Karposi’s Sarcoma. Poppers cause ten silly seconds. But AIDS denialism isn’t silly, especially coming from the man now responsible for mitigating the AIDS epidemic in this country.

Kennedy also told Elon Musk that school shootings, another public health epidemic, may be linked to the introduction of Prozac and other psychiatric drugs to youth. During a “Latino Town Hall” last summer, RFK suggested that people could kick their antidepressant “addictions” by spending a few years growing organic vegetables on government-funded “wellness farms.” Kennedy has said Fluoride, a mineral we add to drinking water so our teeth don’t rot, causes arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, thyroid disease and developmental disorders. At a press event, Kennedy said COVID was “targeted to attack” white and Black people, but somehow, Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people had more immunity to it. Given the racial hate for Asian people during COVID, and the anti-semetism since forever, that implies something he’s explicitly denied. It’s all complete bullshit, and reminds me of something I’d hear from my friend’s older brother in a room with a blacklight, a weed smell and a couple fuckin’ sickkkkk nudie posters, man. It’s idiotic.

Kennedy wasn’t always like this. The world first knew him as the president’s nephew, then a grieving son. Then a heroin addict. Then a lawyer who used his family name to fight polluters and save the environment.

Infuriating as he is, it’s easy to see why people like and trust Kennedy. On the many, many podcasts he’s been a guest on, he sounds like he knows what he’s talking about—if you don’t know enough to know that he, in fact, does not. He's also a Kennedy. Kennedys have a reputation for doing good, and they’re born with eminently charming, electable faces (even though, in Irish, Kennedy means “ugly-head”).

How did RFK Jr. go from fighting for the environment on the side of science to fighting science on the side of a guy who says climate change is a “hoax”? The Kennedy family has a guess.

As they told a reporter at Vanity Fair , it’s not that Kennedy isn’t the smart, charming, and generous guy he appears to be. It’s that his worst traits overtook him: he blends fact and fiction and can’t, or won’t, acknowledge the harm that causes. When the magazine asked sister Rory Kennedy about RFK Jr.’s motivations and psychology, she rebuffed the writer: “Well, you’d need to have a degree, which I don’t have.” The family guessed his unusually troubled life had something to do with it. His uncle, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. His father, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968. He struggled with heroin and sex, and, his family said, another addiction to public attention. (They begged him not to run, worried his campaign would make Trump’s victory more likely; obviously, they were not successful).

Why Him?

RFK Jr., like so many of Trump’s Cabinet picks, is a relative political outsider, know-nothing, and crank, with few friends in Washington. This is deliberate.

His cabinet picks’ lack of knowledge and experience does not put them “above” a system, it puts them in opposition to a system and the success of the agencies they lead. Considering Trump’s cabinet picks in 2017, none of this should surprise us: He selected Scott Pruitt to head the EPA, the agency he’d sued 14 times as Attorney General of Oklahoma, and Betsy Devos, a billionaire opponent of public education, for secretary of education.

President Trump’s health priorities have been destructive so far: For example, he withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization, which experts say threatens global health and security. He’s also let loose Elon Musk and his merry band of DOGE teenagers put USAID in “the woodchipper,” shutting down sexual health clinics and allowing medications for tuberculosis and HIV to go undistributed. One popular USAID program called PEPFAR, or the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, was given a temporary humanitarian waiver. But one USAID worker told WIRED that a temporary pause on the antiretroviral treatments given to HIV-positive mothers has led, at a minimum, to 300 babies who wouldn’t otherwise have HIV, having HIV.

Trump and his cronies make the ridiculous argument that the US spends too much on global health aid. But that spending accounts for about one percent of the budget. There’s also the moral cost of allowing people to die, and the obvious consequence if we do nothing: Cutting people off of their medications could lead to drug resistant strains of deadly microbes. When disease spreads, it hops borders easily and kills indiscriminately when it arrives, more so if we render our defenses ineffective.

RFK Jr.’s willingness to substitute his vision of the world for a shared reality based on facts unites him with Trump and the MAGA movement. The President signed an executive order last Thursday to create the Make America Healthy Again commission. With the stink of freedom so thick in the air, we can expect RFK Jr. to bring his “medical freedom” and “Make America Healthy Again” movement to the rest of us Americans.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg explained it well on an episode of The Daily: MAHA sounds like MAGA, but it’s not MAGA healthcare. It’s its own thing. An ideological brackish water of libertarian market-worshippers, right-wing MAGA types, and crunchy liberals who buy into the trendy “natural,” aka non-FDA approved and useless, health shit they see on TikTok. In a chorus, they cry, in unison, in red hats and yoga pants: “Raw milk now.”

While this crosses traditional political and class lines, uniting people who otherwise wouldn’t have much in common, this is not what we’d call “good” consensus. In a basic sense, the “medical freedom” movement is skeptical of modern medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. It takes any valid criticisms to an anti-science “I do my own research” extreme, in which research means a personal set of facts they, personally, believe in, for personal reasons.

Anti-vaccine activism started in the late 1990s, and was galvanized by legislative attempts to make vaccine exemptions harder to obtain. People on the right generally made the argument on the basis of personal liberty–don’t tell me and mine what to do. People on the left made a similar, granola-flavored case that they believed vaccines were toxic, and should have a right to keep toxins out of their kid’s body. Once again, the horseshoe of conspiratorial thought meets almost in the middle.

This reached new heights with the COVID pandemic. People were being told to wear masks they didn’t want to wear. They are losing their jobs over vaccine mandates. They were reading misinformation about the supposed danger of the COVID vaccine on social media and hearing about new “cures” like horse medicine, which the government didn’t “want you to know about,” like those “Doctors Hate Him!” ads.

People drew new conclusions about the world around them: Dr. Anthony Fauci wasn’t just a public health official we disagreed with, he was suddenly the evil ringleader of a criminal gang. COVID wasn’t just a virus, it was a bioengineered act of war. President Joe Biden wasn’t trying to reign in “misinformation,” he was trying to suppress the truth, censor people, and control the population for the benefit of pharmaceutical profit, or depending how far you go, a secret world shadow government.

There are legitimate criticisms for how the US government handled COVID, like messaging: People felt cheated and lied to when the vaccine did not rid the world of the virus. Then later felt abandoned when the government suddenly lifted restrictions, and withdrew assistance, when they were still vulnerable to illness. That’s not driving this. What’s driving this is a desire to understand the incomprehensible.

When catastrophe strikes, it is appealing to believe that the government, or a Pharmaceutical company, is behind it. That this evil entity developed a master plan that, somehow, we were smart enough to discover on a public Facebook page, or from our friend. But since we’ve discovered this dastardly plan, the perpetrators can be stopped, and justice can be served. Complicating matters are examples of real wrongdoing: the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, tobacco companies, the opioid crisis. Conspiracy theories, as wild and interesting as they often are, are just stories that make the world seem less complicated. In those stories, we can often be the heroes.

It’s less appealing to accept the reality. We couldn’t control the virus completely, and failed to act quickly enough at the start. It killed millions and millions of people. Policy mistakes enabled it to kill more, maybe people we loved. If someone pulls at the seams of their logic long enough, their thinking can unspool completely: Distrust in one institution, based on lies, can inspire distrust of all institutions. Disbelief of one scientific fact can metastasize into a total distrust of science, scientists, and doctors.

True “medical freedom” would be a right to medical care, and freedom from a for-profit health system that prioritizes income over (health) outcomes. This has led to unnecessary death and debt, a precipitous decline in US life-expectancy, and a well of unhappiness and suffering for Americans so deep, that many search the fringes for answers. They are not stupid. They are isolated, standing on an island of personal fact, vulnerable to the influence of bad actors.

If those bad actors become powerful health officials, we’re all vulnerable. But truth, like health, remains our collective responsibility.