Why is RFK Jr. under attack for questioning a broken system?

If you are a heavy consumer of legacy media, you probably believe that President-elect Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve as secretary of Health and Human Services was as shocking as it was dangerous. The legacy media, Big Pharma and some in the medical establishment have moved quickly to stop RFK Jr.’s nomination through a coordinated smear campaign.

Martha Raddatz, on ABC’s Sunday morning talk show “This Week,” brought on former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Richard Besser, who served as acting director of the CDC from January to June of 2009, to criticize Kennedy. Besser called Kennedy’s questions about the efficacy and risks of certain vaccinations “cruel” and claimed that Kennedy’s confirmation would “cost lives.” 

Not mentioned by Raddatz during her entire interview, of course, is that Besser is the CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Johnson is the same individual who founded the now $370 billion pharmaceutical powerhouse Johnson & Johnson. 

It’s not just ABC News neglecting to mention obvious conflicts of interest. Dr. Kavita Patel, a former Obama appointee, penned a scathing opinion piece for MSNBC, claiming that “Kennedy’s appointment could undermine decades of progress in public health and put Americans at unnecessary risk.”

While the MSNBC piece notes that she is a former Obama appointee, a Stanford professor and an NBC News contributor, it fails to mention that she is a partner in New Enterprise Associates, a $25 billion venture capital firm that is heavily invested in pharmaceutical and healthcare companies.

I am certain that Drs. Besser and Patel are outstanding professionals, but the question remains: In an age when the ethical standards for practicing physicians discourages us from accepting so much as a pen from a pharmaceutical company, do we feel comfortable that our leaders and regulators should have such complex, potentially adulterating, financial influences?

Many of these attacks are coming from a media that has been, at best, inaccurate and inconsistent in its ability to report medical information. Almost all of these attacks are entirely false. Every one of these attacks claims that Kennedy is a “vaccine-denier” or a “vaccine conspiracy theorist.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

I believed the propaganda arrayed against Kennedy until I spoke with him myself. Now I know Bobby Kennedy — I’ve had him on my show — and I have talked at length with him about these issues. Kennedy isn’t a vaccine-denier or a vaccine conspiracy theorist; he and his family are fully vaccinated. Do he and I agree on everything all the time? Absolutely not. But inherent in disagreement and dialectical discourse is how we ascend to an approximation of the truth.

Kennedy isn’t attempting to deny access to vaccines to anyone. He is, however, an ardent supporter of informed consent. Kennedy wants patients and consumers to be fully informed about the risks and the benefits of all vaccines and how they are administered.

Deborah Birx, who served as a top coronavirus adviser to Donald Trump, admitted the following on “Face the Nation”: “I think what has confused people is we weren't clear about what COVID vaccines do and don't. And so now people are questioning, well, what do my child vaccines do and don’t. … And we're just not explaining all of this correctly.”

This is an explicit admission of something many of us, including RFK Jr., have been concerned with. Physicians have not been providing fully informed consent to their patients, not simply because we were not doing an adequate job, but because we were prevented from getting the information necessary to provide the consent to our patients. Even worse, we are condemned if we dare to ask for that information.

An important part of being fully informed, and thereby being able to provide consent, is being able to trust the information that is being disseminated by scientific journals and scientific organizations. And yet during the COVID outbreak, we witnessed medical journals showing willingness to publish important research that could have helped us more fully understand the risks and benefits of the vaccines, which we could share with our patients. “Safe and effective,” and any other slogan for that matter, is an empty shibboleth and not informed consent.

This is why Kennedy has promised one of his first actions as secretary of HHS will be to bring a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act action against major medical publications and organizations demanding that they reveal the amount of money they receive from pharmaceutical and healthcare companies.

The idea that medical professionals, medical publications and medical organizations should reveal financial conflict of interests certainly shouldn’t be considered revolutionary. Indeed, it simply should be a basic ethical standard.

Asking tough questions and demanding answers is absolutely fundamental to good science — and to the practice of good medicine. And that is exactly what RFK Jr. is promising to do.

The sad truth is that until Kennedy’s nomination, it was dangerous to ask questions about the very serious healthcare challenges we face. We risked destruction of our professional standing for engaging in clinical science.

We should be asking why autism rates are up, why obesity is up, why cancer rates are up, why so many chronic diseases have sky-rocketed over the last few decades. We should be open to any and all explanations. Questioning is at the core of the scientific project. We should be questioning the role that the foods we eat and the chemicals we ingest play in these healthcare challenges.

In addition to raising questions, we should be examining the forces that seem aligned to prevent such questioning. We should be questioning why so many of the same lobbyists who lobbied for big tobacco are now lobbying on behalf of Big Food and Big Pharma. We should strive to understand the implications of this. We should be questioning the role that money from pharmaceutical companies plays in influencing healthcare policy and in shaping medical consensus.

The goal is to improve science. The goal is to improve our food supply. The goal is to make America healthy. RKF Jr. will not only ask the tough questions, he will demand the answers. That is why they fear him so much, and that is why they are going to such extremes to block his nomination and smear his reputation. This is also exactly why the nation needs Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve as secretary of HHS — and exactly why the Senate should move swiftly to confirm him.

Dr. Drew Pinsky, who currently serves as the chief patient officer for The Wellness Company, has practiced medicine for almost 40 years and has been a ubiquitous fixture on both television and radio.