Opinion: The Unusual Confirmation of RFK Jr.

By John F Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, former Democrat activist and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Thursday, February 13 by a vote of 52-48.

He was arguably the most controversial of the cabinet nominees in the second Trump administration, having spent his career as not just an anti-government gadfly, but specifically, as one who challenged the conventional wisdom in an area that – before the Covid-19 pandemic at least – was rarely challenged in mainstream debate: the medical sciences.

This was not the only case for RFK Jr.’s nomination, but his longtime vocal activism in this area struck a chord with a significant percentage of the American people, in ways that cross party lines and ideological movements. His positions seemed downright “fringe” decades ago, but in the wake of thirty years of fear-mongering about carbon dioxide, and now five years of lies about Covid-19 responses and protocols, this pattern of unconventional dissent seems well-founded, at least well worth debate, today.

RFK Jr. has come to represent, not an opposition to the sciences at all, of course, but rather, a belief that America needs to stop blindly trusting the respected elites on everything – in the medical arena, the pharmaceutical arena, and the bureaucratic arena. It is a belief that we should stop blindly funding them, blindly obeying them. It is a belief that we should start questioning them and their pronouncements a bit more than we used to.

Why?

Well, we keep encountering people suffering from illnesses of various kinds, either being born with awful illnesses, or having them appear in childhood, in adolescence, in young adulthood, and on into middle age.

It seems like we encounter these problems – from autism to mental illness, from potentially fatal allergies to heart disease and beyond – more often than we used to, generations ago. If we’re right – if these maladies are increasing, then, why might that be? Is it just bad luck or is there something we’re doing differently that might be contributing to it?

Over the past four years, since the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant stack of so-called “vaccines” hit, we think we see cases reported of people who “died suddenly” – seemingly healthy people beforehand, much too young for heart attacks and strokes to be expected. This has always happened a bit, but does this happen more frequently today than it used to, or does it just feel like it does, perhaps because of news coverage and the sheer numbers of people who are famous today? Are these unusual numbers of unusual deaths to be expected, because our population has grown so fast?

It may not really be suspicious, but it feels suspicious, doesn’t it?

Everybody knows someone today who is deathly allergic to something. Wine, milk, peanuts, gluten. Why?

A personal note from the author: I had no food allergies at all until I was thirty, when I suddenly became severely allergic to wine and most raw fruits and vegetables. Perhaps that would’ve happened to me five centuries ago, but I would have likely died in battle before I reached 30, so no one would ever have known. That’s certainly possible. But perhaps it is new. And if it is new, then we should be asking Why?

What’s striking is that these apparent changes – these apparently new or newly rampant health issues across the country – have occurred during a time in which America really ought to be healthier, not sicker.

We have refrigeration now. We have food safety standards, we have ovens and thermometers that allow you to precisely set the temperature when you cook. We have more available nutrition, more available vitamin and mineral supplements, more and better hospitals and clinics, with a greater variety of custom-tailored pharmaceuticals and well-educated medical professionals, then ever before, and certainly, more than any other country on earth.

And why should we be less healthy, at a time when we have mandated not two, not five, not even ten, but over seventy different vaccinations over the course of a modern American schoolchild’s childhood?

The question isn’t just, “Why do we still have these problems,” but “Why on earth do they appear to be increasing?”

We do not pose these questions to say that we necessarily agree with conspiracy theories that the establishment is the reason for all these problems.

It is entirely possible that we just know about these things because there is more reporting today than before. Or because more people used to die of starvation or war, or illnesses that are now curable, so perhaps these other things existed, but the potential victims died of something else before these things had a chance to surface. All possible. Maybe even likely.

We know that there have been massive changes in the American population in recent generations. We have imported millions of people from countries where the average IQ is a third lower than our average used to be. We have imported millions from countries where they have no vaccinations at all, where people commonly suffer from tropical diseases and other maladies long since conquered in the United States, diseases that weakened those immigrants, and who knows, those diseases may weaken their progeny as well.

We certainly have a terrible drug addiction problem today – in many ways, far worse than ever before. Fentanyl and other dangerous recreational drugs kill hundreds of thousands of people per year, either through direct overdoses or through weakening people to the point that they more easily fall victim to other things. These drugs don’t just do damage when the user is high; they do lasting damage to the user’s organs and immune system.

Despite availability of all kinds of fresh food year-round, we eat more prepared foods, more mass-produced products that include dozens of additives in them, ranging from weird food dyes to extreme preservatives and all kinds of peculiar additions from lab-grown meat to actual farmed insects. Is all of this healthy? Is all of it harmful? Is it somewhere in between? And when the government evaluates and approves these things, do they have the same goals in mind that we would?

Essentially, what many in the electorate wonder today is this: Is our government wondering the same things that we are wondering? Does our government ever properly question its own experts, its own assumptions, its own record?

We have studied individual vaccines. But have we studied the cumulative effect of 70 of them?

We have studied the various elements of the COVID-19 vaccines, though those studies were rushed. But had we studied their effect on people with major risk factors like old age, obesity, heart disease, or the propensity to the above? Had we sufficiently studied the safety of COVID-19 vaccines before we mandated them across the federal workforce, and before we even encouraged the private sector to mandate it across their workforces? And on what basis did we mandate the COVID-19 vaccines on small children, even infants?

And shouldn’t the government ask these kinds of questions before spending money on things, before approving things, and in particular, before imagining an unconstitutional right to mandate these things?

More and more Americans are asking the question, might we be doing something wrong, and is our government asking the right questions, where health and disease, mortality and survivability are concerned?

More and more of us are asking, why have we put people who believe in zero population growth – people who advocate abortion and euthanasia, people who proudly announce that they believe that mankind itself is the earth’s scourge – in charge of our nation’s policy, regulation, and research funding on human health? Was this really an issue to put in the hands of people who sincerely believe there should be far fewer of us humans on this earth?

The movement that supported the RFK Jr. nomination does not necessarily believe that he is right about any or all of these individual issues. And we are certainly grateful to the medical and pharmaceutical industries for their multitude of inventions and discoveries, and for their ability to now diagnose and cure so many things that would have killed us years ago.

However, we can’t help but wonder if all the right questions that prompted these discoveries 50 and 100 years ago are still being asked. We can’t help but wonder if our government, and especially the research that government agencies fund, and the regulations that they promulgate, are still following the scientific method: exploring the right questions and being willing to reconsider its own precedent.

Those who supported the RFK Jr. nomination support him, not because we believe he has all the answers.

We support him because he is the first person to campaign for the role with a commitment to ask the right questions. Possibly for the first time ever in these agencies.

In politics, we tend to support the candidates who convince us most effectively that they already know everything.

But at the Department of Health and Human Services, primarily because of some of the agencies that it runs, it is important to have a leader who admits that we don’t know everything, and who will work to create a culture of open-mindedness in areas where our citizenry’s health is concerned.

Copyright 2025 John F Di Leo