RFK Jr. threatens America’s health

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy is reportedly helping Trump choose who will be in charge of health in the next administration. Recently, when asked what he would do if he had a magic wand, Kennedy said, “We need to act fast, and we want to have those people in place on Jan. 20 so that on Jan. 21, 600 people are going to walk into offices at NIH [the National Institutes of Health], and 600 people are going to leave.”

In other words, Kennedy is prepared to gut the National Institutes of Health, which is the largest funder of health research in the world, by immediately replacing experienced and qualified workers with his own people.

There was a time when advances in health were seen as optional. In 1969, the philosopher Hans Jonas argued that society did not need research on many health conditions. Jonas felt that if research stopped on “cancer, heart disease, and other organic, noncontagious ills, especially those tending to strike the old more than the young ... society can go on flourishing in every way.” Kennedy seems to want to return to an era when health research was not a high priority.

This kind of thinking ignores the fact that NIH has fostered countless technological advances in health. Based in no small part on research funded by the NIH, advances in cancer treatment have prevented 3.8 million deaths since 1991. For anyone who has had a cancer diagnosis, lost someone they love to cancer or, increasingly, for those who are grateful to see a loved one survive a diagnosis that once meant certain death, it is clear we cannot afford to turn back the clock.

NIH has proven to be a good investment from an economic perspective as well. The money it used to fund research generated over $95 billion in economic growth in 2022. New treatments for addiction that NIH has helped move into the real world saved lives, and have potential returns of $58 for every dollar spent.

The NIH employees Kennedy would terminate have a wealth of knowledge about how to support valuable research. Why would the next administration would simply toss this value to the curb?

Kennedy has also said that he wants to defund work on infectious diseases to free up more money for chronic diseases. While the COVID-19 pandemic fostered deep political divisions, it is beyond dispute that more than 1 million people have died from the disease in the U.S. Remarkably, an estimated 140,000 American lives were saved by the vaccines that the Trump administration invested in and brought to the public in record time.

Pandemics are an increasing threat in our modern, globalized world, and bird flu remains a concern. Kennedy’s views are even more old-fashioned than Jonas’s were in 1968 — in the same piece quoted above, the philosopher recognized that society cannot afford to “let an epidemic rage unchecked.”

When considering who should make the most important decisions about health in America, the status of the U.S. as a world leader in health research and American lives are both at stake. As long as Kennedy holds these outdated views, he is not the right man for the job.

The NIH, one of the best places for supporting health research in the world, should not be dismantled but rather supported to help Americans face future threats and to ultimately flourish.

Seema K. Shah, JD, is a professor of Medical Ethics at Ethics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. She was previously an employee at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center and serves as an expert advisor to the National Advisory Allergy and Infectious Diseases Council.