RFK Jr.’s impact on HHS so far has some worried
RFK Jr. reluctance to endorse the measles vaccine amid a deadly outbreak raised red flags.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is doubling down on his view that infectious diseases capture public attention at the expense of chronic conditions and chronic diseases.
“Every kid who has got a diabetes diagnosis, that should be a headline,” Kennedy said during an April 28 interview with Dr. Phil McGraw on Merittv.com. “Every kid who gets an autism diagnosis, that should be a headline. But you never read about them, and the media is obsessed with infectious disease.”
The nation is currently dealing with a measles outbreak. As of April 24, a total of 884 confirmed measles cases were reported by 30 jurisdictions, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Kennedy said the CDC was doing a good job of containing the outbreak compared to other countries, which killed two unvaccinated children in Texas. The CDC said the deaths were the first from measles in the U.S. since 2015. The case of an unvaccinated New Mexico man who tested positive for measles after he died in March is under investigation, according to state health officials.
“I would say that we’re doing well,” he told Dr. Phil. “If you look at Canada, they have roughly the same number of measles cases, but they’ve one eighth of our population. Europe has 10 times the amount of measles cases that we have.”
Canada’s population, estimated at 40.1 million is roughly one-eighth of the U.S. population, which stands at 335 million. In 2025, 916 confirmed measles cases were reported in Canada, compared to 884 in the US.
Kennedy has focused much of his health care crusade on his contention that the United States mostly prioritizes treating chronic illnesses over preventing them.
Medical professionals and scientists agree with Kennedy that more attention should be paid to chronic disease, but many take issue with his misinformation surrounding vaccines and other health matters. Ninety percent of the nation’s $4.5 trillion in annual health care expenditures go to people with chronic and mental health conditions, according the CDC.
For years, Kennedy has blamed Big Food and Big Pharma for the nation’s “chronic disease epidemic” on additives and junk food, including during his campaign for president in the 2024 Democratic primaries and then as an independent.
In February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission.
The commission, chaired by Kennedy, is tasked with investigating and addressing the “root causes of America’s escalating health crisis, with an initial focus on childhood chronic diseases.”
“When I was a a kid, the typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes during his entire career,” Kennedy told Dr. Phil. “Today, 38% of teens are pre-diabetic or diabetic.”
Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic who has linked vaccines to autism, has characterized the increase in autism rates as an “epidemic running rampant.”
Earlier this month, the Health and Human Services announced that it was planning to phase out eight petroleum-based synthetic dyes in the nation’s food supply. Kennedy in the past has linked food dyes and additives to ADHD and chronic diseases, such as obesity.
In 2022, one in 31 children were diagnosed with autism by age 8 in the U.S., an uptick from one in 36 children in 2020, according to a report released by the CDC on April 15. After the study was released, Kennedy set a September deadline for the U.S. National Institutes of Health to determine the cause behind the rise in autism rates. His announcement has been met with mixed reactions within the autism community, with some welcoming Kennedy’s rhetoric and commitment to focusing on the disorder.
Asked by Dr. Phil why he was committing $50 million to a research effort to understand the causes and treatments of autism, Kennedy replied, “It’s an epidemic that is thousand times more costly than COVID.”