Can the country’s healthcare system survive RFK Jr?

Last year, when I was in nursing school, I was shadowing an RN at a local hospital during my clinical rotations. The RN was taking care of a patient who had just come out of surgery. The doctor was worried because recent labs had shown a shockingly low hemoglobin count — “almost half of the minimum he needs,” the RN told me, showing me the patient’s chart.

The RN had set up a transfusion but the process was suddenly halted by the patient, who demanded to know if the blood had come from a donor who had been vaccinated against COVID.

The doctor was shocked. She told the patient that the blood had not been screened to see if the donor had been vaccinated. The patient was adamant about not receiving donated blood. “I’m not gonna get vaccinated blood,” he stated through paper-white lips. “I know what those vaccines do to you!”

My clinical rotation ended before I found out if the patient ended up agreeing to the transfusion. I don’t know if he relented. I only know that he desperately needed it.

Last week, President-elect Donald Trump stated he would be appointing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has made many outlandish claims, including that Wi-Fi causes cancer, antidepressants cause school shootings, and vaccines trigger autism in children.

I am now a registered nurse. I have already been concerned about the growth of misinformation on social media platforms such as TikTok and X. Now that misinformation has made its way into the highest levels of our government.

Short-form social media content like TikTok does not allow space for nuance. A video that states COVID vaccines don’t work because vaccinated people still get COVID can get hundreds of thousands of views, while videos laying out the nuances of vaccination cutting down on the severity of symptoms are lost in the sauce. Consequently, social media platforms cause more polarization of opinions, as creators do not have enough time to squeeze in all the facts in their videos.

Disinformation spreads like wildfire in this environment. People refuse vaccines and consequently end up in the ICU through COVID complications. ICU nursing is a grinding field in an already exhausting profession, because ICU patients need constant monitoring. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone.

Another field suffering from disinformation is behavioral health nursing. There is a mental health crisis in this country and people are waiting weeks in the ER for an open bed in behavioral health units. Meanwhile, RFK Jr is spreading conspiracies about antidepressants.

I have seen a patient experience a mental health decompensation when she abruptly stopped taking her medication after being discharged from a behavioral health facility. She went from a happy, vibrant human being to a frightening, staring patient. I remember not even recognizing her after she had been readmitted to the same facility.

Throughout the last two years I was training as an RN, many of my instructors had war stories about the first months of the 2020 pandemic. One gave us a tour of the mortuary refrigerators in the hospital basement. “These were stacked floor to ceiling back in 2020,” she told us. “We ran out of space.”

I looked at the small bassinets in the corner of the mortuary refrigerator where nurses placed the remains of deceased neonates. I remembered a labor and delivery nurse talking about how many parents were refusing vaccines for their newborns every week. Parents were even refusing vitamin K shots for their newborns. Vitamin K, which is slower to make its way through the placenta while a baby is in utero, is necessary for forming blood clots. Neonates need these shots to prevent Vitamin K deficiency bleeding, a form of hemorrhage neonates are vulnerable to within the first 48 hours after birth.

Tragically, Kennedy's influence in spreading vaccine skepticism in Samoa was linked to a measles outbreak, which ended up claiming the lives of 83 children.

Kennedy is about to make me and other healthcare professionals very busy if he is confirmed to lead HHS. And we are already exhausted.

Phoebe Cohen is a registered nurse, paramedic, writer and cartoonist.