RFK Jr. Must Go
74 comments
·October 14, 2025dehrmann
gruez
>He does, but before that happens, the legitimate medical community needs to look in the mirror, reflect on how he happened, why they lost some amount of trust, and look to remedying that.
Okay but surely we can agree that the appropriate response to "legitimate medical community"'s failings shouldn't be RFK, nor should opposition to RFK be conditional on "look in the mirror, reflect on how he happened ..."? I agree such reflection should happen, but the "but before that happens ..." wording is bizarre. It's like having some domestic terrorist kill a CEO, and then responding to that with "before we can stop domestic terrorism, corporate america must look in the mirror about how it failed rural white blue collar workers in appalachia or whatever"
dehrmann
He wasn't elected, but sometimes (spiritual) protest votes win. If Harris had won and appointed a conventional secretary, it would have been a status quo that people haven't been happy with.
> but the "but before that happens ..." wording is bizarre
Biden was very much a status quo president who didn't do much to fix underlying problems. The result was the protest vote winning again.
alphabettsy
Status quo is preferable to regression and destruction in my view.
Building things takes time, destruction does not. The protest vote was in favor of destruction.
I don’t think Biden was status quo so much as he led a deliberate and traditional administration.
rbartelme
>The replication crisis is a growing concern.
This! The amount of clinicians I know who simply read the abstract of a case study, with no real statistical interpretation of results, is a non-zero number.
Whenever I see some hyped up popular press article about a scientific study, my immediate reaction is to go to the primary literature. First, I read the study design and analysis methods, then I determine if its even worth continuing to read the rest. Study pre-registration should be a must and papers need to be more explicit about being exploratory when the sample size dictates it.
cosmicgadget
> before that happens
Keep RFK in place until the entire health sector completes an excercise in introspection?
alphabettsy
I think that’s true and I’m not going to make excuses for the mistakes of the medical community, but I don’t think we should excuse the influence of what is now the wellness community, of which RFK Jr. is a part.
fallinghawks
The administration's sowing of distrust in medical community also played a big part. Recommendations of useless and/or unproven remedies as "cures," claims of big pharma driving the decisions, and hyping up the changes in CDC's recommendations as waffling, have legitimized distrust of medicine.
swed420
> He does, but before that happens, the legitimate medical community needs to look in the mirror, reflect on how he happened, why they lost some amount of trust, and look to remedying that.
Agreed.
Furthermore, the CDC under both parties of capital interests has blood on their hands from the blatant COVID mishandling under multiple administrations, among other things:
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
Until the root causes of this rot are targeted, symptoms like rotating-villain RFK Jrs are going to keep grabbing headlines while societal conditions continue to deteriorate.
giantg2
"Chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes—which I have studied for over forty years—have increased in prevalence despite the fact that many new insights into their pathophysiology have been achieved and new treatments have become available. Changes in nutritional and other environmental exposures are certain to be important contributors, but the specific causes are vigorously debated, and new research insights are desperately needed to address these."
Yes and no. You might need specific causes if you want to solve this with a pill or at a 100% level. You could very well solve this for 90% of people with lifestyle changes. Just look at the Amish for obesity and type 2 diabetes. But being more active and eating less ultraprocessed stuff is too burdensome - we all want to eat our cake and have it too.
deepfriedchokes
Perhaps we should all ask why people want to eat cake, rather than focusing on the cake itself. These high carbohydrate foods stimulate dopamine release. People are eating their feelings, because they don’t feel good. Ultra processed foods existed before the obesity epidemic began. What changed was economic, the cost of living, and everyone’s quality of life.
Food is a readily accessible drug, and everyone is self medicating.
TrnsltLife
Presumably he'll go at the end of Trump's term.
What other mechanisms is the author suggesting? Democrat sweep in the midterms followed by impeachment?
Something else?
jameskilton
This is just beating around the bush. The only reason anyone even knows about RFK Jr, much less his current job, is because of Trump.
The actual solution is that Trump must go. But America voted for this. Get RFK Jr removed, and Trump will put someone just as bad, or worse, there. And the cycle continues, until Trump and the Republican Party are finally dismantled.
But I don't see that happening for quite a few years yet. The economy hasn't crashed hard enough for that to happen.
cosmicgadget
Yeah, probably next in line is someone from pharma so it's a choice of frying pan or fire.
hypeatei
I don't know why this is downvoted but you're absolutely right. Elect a clown, get a circus.
Loyalty is the only test with Trump and his sychophants in Congress will confirm whoever he nominates.
postflopclarity
if only anybody had seen this coming.
markhahn
is he any less competent than, say, Hegseth?
mingus88
It doesn’t matter because the metric is loyalty now.
If one thing was learned last term, it was that it’s impossible to staff your administration with competent people if you also expect them to blindly follow the whims and urges of a demented reality show host.
To think we went from Mattis to this guy…
blurbleblurble
They're both competent at misanthropy.
hobs
No, but you can believe they are both incompetent and bad for the USA at the same time, and if you listed out the incompetent people dangerous for their people in Trump's inner circle they'd never get anything done.
Antifa4HN
[dead]
notmyjob
[flagged]
Jordan-117
What a strange question.
He's hated because he's an anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist, and systematically dismantling America's medical science and research infrastructure.
notmyjob
Don’t forget gym-bro! People objectively hate gym-bros even if they are also environmental activists and critics of big businesses with track records of public harm like Monsanto and big pharma. I can see how one might think that placing him in his current role was another bit of the 4d chess supporters of the current administration credit to the commander in chief. I don’t think that, but I’m sure certain people view it that way. I do think Monsanto and other big corporations need to be held to account, but not by gym-bros.
maxerickson
It's not hatred, he is a anti science crank and grifter and has no business overseeing HHS.
notmyjob
I’m prone to agreement however I would also point out publication bias is a thing, and incentives at the HHS are similar to the “publish or parish” dynamic that drives publication bias. Given that, one can imagine how a skeptical orientation could in fact be useful on occasion to insect a sort of reform that’s analogous to what happened in psychology in the midst of the so called replication crisis. Again, with respect to circumcision I’m probably biased, but certainly not an outlier.
OutOfHere
Anyone who performs child circumcision is not only biased and a source of irreversible physical child abuse, but also belongs in prison.
notmyjob
Even if they don’t act on that view? Sounds a lot like “thoughtcrime” to me and antagonistic to freedom of religion and therefore also antagonistic to our constitution. While I support your constitutional right to free speech, calling for violence against people because of their religion is imo a shameful and self destructive stance.
yakz
I don't think it's a huge stretch to consider supporting circumcision of children as being a call to violence against children, though. Just because it's being done for religious reasons and it has been done by a large population for a long time really doesn't change what it is: involuntary body modification of children.
OutOfHere
> Sounds a lot like “thoughtcrime” to me and antagonistic to freedom of religion
There is no thought crime, and I do not call for violence. I call for legal punishment against those who cause permanent physical harm to children. Religion is not a satisfactory excuse for any form of violence, and circumcision qualifies as such violence.
sys32768
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hungryhobbit
So they actually know what they're talking about?
Fear and hatred of experts is how we got into this mess. If pharmaceutical executives aren't all cartoon mustache-twirling villains (and they're not: many actually want to help sick people), then maybe not every employee is either?
gjsman-1000
Well, if tobacco executives aren't all cartoon mustache-twirling villains, then maybe not every employee is either?
(But seriously - corruption is an equal opportunity employer, assuming any industry is exempt is dangerous. Take Pfizer - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer#Legal_issues)
jghn
> corruption is an equal opportunity employer
Of course it is. Anecdotally however, in my career I've spent a lot of time among people like the author of the article. I've yet to meet a single one who did not present as genuine in their desire to help people. Might it be the case that they are aware of market dynamics within the process? Yes of course. But tropes like Big Pharma intentionally not providing cures or only looking at treatments that require constant application are bollocks. At least to the extent of my hands on experience in the industry.
jghn
It doesn't make them wrong. At least they were required to have some knowledge in the domain to get to their roles, as opposed to RFK.
gruez
Can we get actual arguments rather than making vague implications that the author must be wrong because of his affiliations?
brendoelfrendo
Does he? I see that he's a researcher and works as a professor at Harvard. I didn't see that he's actually employed by a pharma company. His wife is, however. Regardless, what I'm hearing is that he's a physician and researcher who knows more about human health than RFK?
mikeyouse
He was formerly the Dean of Faculty at Harvard Medical School.. he and his wife are both accomplished physicians. She happens to have a clinical director role at a pharma company but is also a professor at Harvard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Flier
He's not some lefty opposed to RFK out of spite for the Trump admin either.. he's written about how ineffective DEI is, against 'cancel culture', and he's writing this essay in Quillete, which is a very right-of-center publication. You'll find that the vast majority of people involved in research, medicine, or public health oppose RFK.
brightball
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baerrie
We have life-saving allergy treatments that also can target digestive issues that we did not 5 years ago. We have vastly expanded research into chronic illnesses thanks to long covid putting viral fatigue syndrome on the map. Autism diagnosis has risen because research has expanded drastically. There have been major improvements because of existing systems, they do not require entire dismantling
jghn
Until he learns that a rise in tracked cases does not necessarily an imply a rise in actual incidence, anything he says is suspect.
There are nuggets of truth to what he says but he completely ignores for instance that a lot of the increase in autism numbers is simply due to a better understanding of how to flag someone as being on the spectrum. 50 years ago, a lot of these people would have just been seen as odd. Same with chronic illness & allergies. I do believe there's a true increase here. But it is also the case that we're measuring & tracking things now that we didn't use to measure.
giantg2
Then anything anyone says is suspected because nobody knows if it's real incidence or observation. Frankly, I evaluate claims by the medical community with the same skepticism as I do RFK - show me the data, reproducibility, etc.
It would make sense to investigate from both angles to see if there is anything worth looking into. Eg. Tylenol may not increase autism rates, or maybe it does, or maybe it's specific illnesses/conditions that precipitated its use.
softwaredoug
If he had stuck to these topics instead of crackpot notions pinpointing tylenol as the singular cause of autism, he might have a lot more support.
(Yes I know there are studies, but more likely cause is genetic due to _older fathers_)
brightball
This is a good example though. If you watch the press conference, he doesn't say that Tylenol is the singular cause of autism. He talks about numerous contributors and he is very careful to say that there's enough correlation to warrant an official warning. He also acknowledges that there's no other solution safe for pregnant mothers in pain so doctors are advised to use their discretion, but recommended to not prescribe more than is necessary.
Here's the official write up, it's all very balanced and reasonable.
https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/hhs-trump-kennedy-autism-init...
> Second, HHS will act on acetaminophen. Today, the FDA will issue a physician notice and begin the process to initiate a safety label change for acetaminophen (Tylenol and similar products). HHS will launch a nationwide public service campaign to inform families and protect public health.
> The FDA is responding to prior clinical and laboratory studies that suggest a potential association between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes. FDA also recognizes that there are contrary studies showing no association and that there can be risks for untreated fever in pregnancy, both for the mother and fetus.
> Given the conflicting literature and lack of clear causal evidence, HHS wants to encourage clinicians to exercise their best judgment in use of acetaminophen for fevers and pain in pregnancy by prescribing the lowest effective dose for the shortest duration when treatment is required. Furthermore, FDA recognizes that acetaminophen is often the only tool for fevers and pain in pregnancy, as other alternatives (e.g., NSAIDs) have well documented adverse effects. FDA is partnering with manufacturers to update labeling and drive new research to safeguard mothers, children, and families.
maxerickson
It might be reasonable if the Sweden sibling study hadn't been published.
chimprich
RFK is a crackpot, and just because he's got someone to write it to sound plausible, it doesn't mean it is plausible. It's incredibly irresponsible to promote his pet theories over scientific orthodoxy.
Here's a commentary from someone who does know what he's talking about. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/acetaminophen-and-...
softwaredoug
Why announce you have “found the cause of autism”, do a big press conference, then focus on one cause, when many more are statistically plausibe?
dehrmann
How about this: he's good at pointing out problems, but not good at proposing effective solutions?
OutOfHere
The article is a hit-piece. Of course pharmaceutical/additive/vaccine companies and their academic associates such as the author are concerned of mounting losses. FDA before RKF Jr. had been approving pharmaceuticals/additives/vaccines recklessly without regard to how well they work, whether they're even mechanistically sound, and what the consequences are. We don't need an industry shill at the helm, which is what the author would want.
cosmicgadget
Do you know the author or are you just saying this because the article criticizes RFK?
You realize the FDA has been gutted of personnel and expertise so we're either going to see no regulation or, more likely, rubber stamp regulation.
OutOfHere
In truth, rubber stamp regulation is what we had seen with the FDA all this time until RFK Jr came along. As per my understanding, many of the personnel who have been gutted are the ones who engaged in this behavior, never rejecting applications.
cosmicgadget
Was there like a glut of treatments removed from the market due to FDA oversights or something?
catigula
Misinformation about medical science is infinitely tempting even to credible thinkers partially because certain elements of that world have worked overtime to discredit themselves (think opiate safety fraud as a primary example), but also partially because science is messy and cumbersome.
For example, credible thinkers, including many people reading this, likely believe psilocybin and ketamine are credible treatments for mental illness when the evidence is incredibly thin and low quality and these are clearly dangerous substances in many regards.
The temptation to think there are suppressed secrets in the world (there are, in fact, suppressed secrets) is near infinite.
archerx
>likely believe psilocybin and ketamine are credible treatments for mental illness
That’s so vague and disingenuous. Should you take psychedelics if you have schizophrenia or something similar? Absolutely not but there is hard science research proving that they do help with depression and other issues.
I lost all my faith in the medical industry when I went through it. I entered with a minor problem and left with a much worse chronic pain. The doctor who did it to me had the gall to say it was in my head. Fortunately I went to another doctor and the CT scan proved it was in fact not in my head but in my intestines. I’m dealing with this drama, but I learned a lot of doctors are actually really bad and just want to prescribe you stuff and get you out of the door. Ironically the stuff this so called specialist was only making me feel worse and when I told her that she didn’t believe me.
Thankfully I have found some good doctors after much efforts and many references but I lost a lot of respect for the medical industry and came to understand that it’s a business and they just want to see you as many medications as possible and don’t really care about solving your problem.
catigula
>That’s so vague and disingenuous. Should you take psychedelics if you have schizophrenia or something similar? Absolutely not but there is hard science research proving that they do help with depression and other issues.
Again, the research exists but is thin and low quality. I'm sorry you went through issues, I know this is common, which is why I addressed readers looking to self-diagnose but thumb their noses at people doing exactly what they're doing.
archerx
I don't I feel like the people who have benefitted from those treatments find it low quality.
My mother was also bullshitted by a doctor until she got angry and told him what specific test to do and a week later when the test came back surprise surprise, she was right.
My best friend had an intense pain on her side, she went to a doctor and he said it was in her head, she went to another doctor and surprise surprise she had a hernia.
Another friend had constant intestinal pain and digestive issues, the doctor refused to do a colonoscopy and just gave her medication for IBS, she went to another doctor and finally got a colonoscopy and surprise surprise she had a tumor, thankfully they were able to cut it out but it would have been better if they had found it sooner.
Also when I was young I broke my arm and the doctor set it wrong and now my angle of mobility in it is offset.
I have way more stories like this and barely any positive medical stories. If I could go back in time I would have never gone to the doctor and let my body deal with the issue itself. I would be in a lot less pain right now. I hate how righteously arrogant and head up the ass most of the medical industry seems to be.
The entire medical industry has problems, needs to be revamped and the incentives have to be changed.
thinkingtoilet
>but also partially because science is messy
It's because human beings are messy! If you feed a person a peanut, they might think it's tasty. If you feed a different person a peanut that person may die, quickly. If a god damn peanut can illicit that range of responses in a healthy human being, imagine literally anything else. Of course there is corruption because so much money is on the line and humans in aggregate are a selfish bunch. One thing I always like to point out is that people who try to follow the science and the latest guidance aren't the ones speaking in absolutes. I'm aware the CDC or FDA have gotten things wrong in the past and will get things wrong in the future, but it's the best system we have. It's the anti-science people who speak in absolutes but then the second the cancer diagnosis comes in they come running back begging big pharma for treatment, they'll even bankrupt their entire family trying to get that treatment. It can't be both ways. This is why it's hard to take skeptics seriously. Not only do they throw a thousand things out there, and maybe one or two is right, they conveniently ignore the other 998 things they got way wrong, but when push comes to shove, they love big pharma and beg for it's treatments.
brightball
I always take skeptics seriously, because what is the alternative? We stop asking questions?
It doesn't mean I believe every skeptic over science, but it does mean that I'm willing to ask questions. In so many cases on the topics RFK Jr goes after, there are significant gaps in the questions that science has answered. People want those gaps filled and have for many, many years.
The answer is always more questions and therefore, more science.
Right now, there's an information vacuum and until that vacuum is filled people will continue to speculate. It's human nature, especially when somebody you care about has been affected and nobody can give you answers other than "this is life now".
alphabettsy
You’re correct, but what we’re not doing is more science to answer the questions and fill in the gaps. We’re using anecdotes and conjecture, sometimes conspiracy, in place of science.
catigula
I'm inherently sympathetic to skeptics only because I know people that experienced the following: opiate prescription -> addiction -> death.
I think this goes for many Americans.
He does, but before that happens, the legitimate medical community needs to look in the mirror, reflect on how he happened, why they lost some amount of trust, and look to remedying that. Someone else in this thread pointed out their role in the opioid epidemic. The replication crisis is a growing concern. I'm sure there are more out there.