This is an adapted excerpt from the April 17 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
America has long been a country that is both very rich and shockingly unhealthy. Traditionally, Democrats have been the party trying to use government policy to improve health coverage and outcomes, while Republicans have mostly fought tooth and nail against them. Right now, for instance, Republicans in Congress are contemplating $880 billion in cuts to programs like Medicaid.
But back during the presidential campaign, Team MAGA spun up a new sales pitch on health for the American people, promising voters they would “Make America Healthy Again” with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services. The MAGA spinoff brand, MAHA, has come to be associated with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, with New Age healing and homeopathic “cures” and with suspicion of settled science and proven vaccines.
During the presidential campaign, Team MAGA spun up a new sales pitch for the American people, promising voters they would “Make America Healthy Again.”
Now, a lot of people across the political spectrum were willing to give Kennedy the benefit of the doubt as HHS secretary, because he is right that America’s got some serious health problems: higher rates of obesity, heart problems and chronic diseases. Kennedy said he was very intent on investigating the factors, especially in the food we eat, that contribute to those health problems.
That’s reasonable, and it’s pretty uncontroversial. People on the left have been saying it for decades. Michelle Obama said that when she was first lady. (Do you remember how that went for her?)
Investigating nutritional health is, in fact, a huge part of what HHS does. If Kennedy was going to scrutinize processed foods and how they hurt Americans’ health, he was inheriting the perfect team to do so. The HHS has a government super-team full of brilliant researchers, like Dr. Kevin Hall, a nutrition scientist at the National Institutes of Health, specializing in how the body adapts to different diets, with a focus on ultra-processed foods.
If you want to investigate ultra-processed foods, Hall is your guy. In 2019, he published a study uncovering how processed foods worked on people’s brains and guts to make them eat more and gain weight, even compared with less-processed foods that had a similar nutritional makeup. That was an important finding, one professor of nutrition at Harvard University told The New York Times, it was “transformational.”
Hall’s team led the world in this research, and he was encouraged that the new HHS leadership was interested in investigating this possible hazard to people’s health. Instead, the reality of “Make America Healthy Again” under Kennedy has been a full-spectrum assault on the American health infrastructure.
Under the Trump administration, a quarter of the agency’s workforce has been cut. That includes people who monitor diseases, people who do biomedical research and people who do research into treatments for Alzheimer’s and pediatric cancer.
This week, NPR reported that an investigation into active hepatitis outbreaks in multiple states across the nation was halted earlier this month after all 27 scientists in the lab received emails informing them they were losing their jobs.
On Wednesday, we learned from an internal budget document, first obtained by The Washington Post, that the Trump administration wants to cut the United States health budget by a third, slashing $40 billion from Health and Human Services.
On Thursday, Reuters reported that, according to an internal email obtained by the outlet, the Food and Drug Administration is planning to stop regular inspections of its own food safety labs due to federal cuts. As Reuters reports, these checks are “designed to ensure consistency and accuracy across the agency’s network of about 170 labs that test food for pathogens and contaminants to prevent food-borne illness.”
This, of course, comes amid the largest measles outbreak in the U.S. in decades. Three people have already died, including two children, and Kennedy has responded by feeding into vaccine skepticism.
But that’s not all. During a press conference Wednesday, Kennedy spoke about what he called the “autism epidemic” and announced the HHS will be looking into “environmental factors” as a possible cause. During that announcement, he also said just some really awful — and untrue — things about people with autism.
“Autism destroys families,” Kennedy said. “More importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which are children. These are children who should not be, who should not be suffering like this.” Hall made it very clear why he chose to step away from his “dream job” and accused the man pushing for “freedom of science” of censorship. “These are kids who, many of them were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they’re 2 years old,” Kennedy continued. “And these are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. Never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.” That’s all incredibly ignorant, reductive and cruel. But according to Kennedy, this is all about “freedom of science.” “We’re going to remove the taboo,” Kennedy told the crowd. “People will know they can research. They can follow the science, no matter what it says, without any kind of fear that they’re going to be censored, that they’re going to be gaslighted, that they’re going to be silenced.” Kennedy’s pledge to follow the science without fear of being censored, well, that would seem to be the “gaslighting” here — at least, if you listen to one senior researcher at the National Institutes of Health: Kevin Hall. On Wednesday, Hall announced that he is leaving the agency, stepping away from decades of work and taking the early retirement offer. In a lengthy statement on X, Hall made it very clear why he chose to step away from his “dream job” and accused the man pushing for “freedom of science” of … censorship. “Unfortunately, recent events have made me question whether NIH continues to be a place where I can freely conduct unbiased research,” Hall wrote. “Specifically, I experienced censorship in the reporting of our research because of agency concerns that it did not appear to fully support preconceived narratives of my agency’s leadership about ultra-processed food addiction.”
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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