In a piece for Last Week Tonight, focused on public health, John Oliver skewers RFK Jr. for the damage he has wrought on the nation’s health. RFK Jr. has led a dramatic downsizing of the Department of Health and Human Services, a critical government agency, which is responsible for our collective health–child welfare, Medicare and Medicaid, drugs, food safety and a lot more. The chilling consequence, according to one fired HHS employee: “We’re going to have a lot of people die needlessly.”
Oliver explains that President Trump has let RFK Jr. “go wild on health.” Thousands of jobs have been cut and thousands of HHS employees have retired. Some staff were told to file complaints with an HHS staffperson who died last year.
The wholesale gutting of HHS will endanger the health and well-being of Americans. “People will die because of the mistakes we are making right now.” “Secretary Kennedy is a danger to the public health and should resign or be fired.” He can’t manage this devastation. He is “spreading dangerous nonsense and gutting life-saving research,” says Oliver.
Shouldn’t RFK Jr. figure out what needs cutting, before he cuts whole divisions of HHS? RFK Jr. doesn’t think so. Instead, there has been a radical restructuring of HHS and huge spending cuts. It’s alarming. HHS is critical to the well-being of Americans. It funds and oversees a wide array of invaluable work at the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest funder of biomedical and cancer research; the Food and Drug Administration; the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which supports Medicare and Medicaid, and much more. It accounts for 28 percent of federal spending.
But, RFK Jr. has made dangerous cuts to all these vital agencies. Here is a sampling of HHS’s “shitshow,” which Oliver calls an understatement.
- Wholesale cuts to NIH, which has stopped funding important medical research across the country, even though every dollar of research by NIH returns $2.56 in economic activity. Some studies can’t be restarted.
- FDA cuts to staff that are responsible for urgent safety recalls and specialists investigating bird flu transmission. For example, we won’t know if there’s bird flu in milk.
- Cuts to the CDC, which among other things can no longer study Alzheimer’s disease awareness and prevention, tracking STIs or respond to lead poisoning.
- $12 billion in cuts to states for health research.
- Cuts to nearly half of the Meals on Wheels staff.
- Cuts have led to the first pediatric measles death in 22 years because vaccinations have been cancelled; whooping cough cases are also spreading; the bird flu virus is spreading. If there’s an ebola outbreak, we will not have the staff or expertise to end it.
RFK says that HHS will remedy any “mistakes” it makes. But, HHS has not done so as of yet. RFK also fabricates his data.
“We need to stop [RFK Jr.] before he makes us all f#$%king sick,” concludes Oliver. He “needs to go, and by impeachment, if necessary.”
Here’s more from Just Care:
