Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Urges ‘Make America Healthy Again’

Despite dropping out of the race for president in August, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is turning up the volume on reforming national health care and drug policy and attracting attention to what role he might play in an administration depending on the outcome of the November election.

Kennedy has endorsed former president Donald Trump, and Trump has hinted that there could be a role in his second Trump administration.

Kennedy, who founded the safety advocacy group Children’s Health Defense, recently revealed the scope of his health care recommendations through his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. Trump named Kennedy to his transition team and pledged to establish a panel of experts to work with Kennedy to investigate the increase of chronic health problems and childhood diseases in the United States (see related articles, pages 8,9).

In a September 5 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Kennedy laid out his 12-point Make America Healthy Again plan. Some of the ideas include reducing conflicts of interest at federal health agencies, implementing drug price caps, setting chemical and pesticide standards, requiring nutrition classes in medical school, redirecting money toward preventative care, rereleasing a presidential fitness standard, and expanding health savings accounts.

Boundary Crossing

Over the years, Kennedy has not hesitated to express his opinions, many of which have challenged long-held positions of the public health establishment on issues from vaccines and childhood obesity to the role of big pharmaceutical companies.

Kennedy’s stances cross ideological boundaries. His support of a single-payer national health care system conflicts with free-market opinions on the right, and his criticism of big-government bullying alienates the left. The nation’s painful experience with the measures taken to stem the spread of COVID-19 has attracted attention to Kennedy’s health care opinions in the wake of his forceful criticisms of those policies.

In a wide-ranging interview with Preferred Health magazine in June, Kennedy lambasted the lockdowns and the people he says profited from them.

“The people who came into the pandemic with a billion dollars, the Bill Gates, the Mark Zuckerbergs, the Bloombergs, the Jeffery Bezos, increased their wealth on average by 30 percent,” Kennedy told the publication.

“The lockdowns were a gift to them, the super-rich,” said Kennedy. “Jeffery Bezos, the richest or second-richest man in the world, was able to close down all of his competitors, 3.3 million businesses, and then give us a two-year training course about how to never use a retail outlet again in our lives. Forty-one percent of the black-owned businesses will never reopen. And he was instrumental because he was censoring the books that were critical of the lockdowns, including one that I wrote.”

Insider Advantage

Kennedy’s criticisms appeal to Craig Rucker, president of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).

“Kennedy, by virtue of his family name, is an insider, but his unorthodox views make him a provocative outsider,” said Rucker. “The public-health establishment, against which he has railed for years, failed miserably during the coronavirus pandemic. The ties between HHS and Big Pharma are far too cozy, and we have good reason to believe public health suffers as a consequence. A free spirit like his could be just what the doctor ordered.”

NIH Reform Call

Echoing his criticisms of the pandemic response, Kennedy says he wants to overhaul federal health care agencies, beginning with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The NIH suppressed the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine during the early stages of the pandemic, in favor of, first, remdesivir and later the COVID vaccines through emergency use authorization, Kennedy argues. Saying the NIH “has been transformed into an incubator for the pharmaceutical industry,” Kennedy recommends removing much of the NIH’s funding for virology.

“It has stepped away from rigorous, evidence-based science, evidence-based medicine, into kind of a magical world,” Kennedy told Preferred Health. “It needs to have scientific discipline reimposed on the entire field of virology. We ought to be funding the study of the etiology of chronic diseases in our universities.”

Focus Shift

Kennedy has also spoken widely on chronic childhood diseases, some of which he has attributed to vaccines. Kennedy has called for public health authorities to shift their focus from infectious diseases such as COVID and influenza to devote more attention to diabetes, obesity, environmental toxins, and other longer-term concerns.

Kennedy has also cited large-scale factory farming and processed food as contributing to the nation’s health problems.

Peter Pitts, president and co-founder of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, says Kennedy brings a fresh perspective to public health debates.

“RFK Jr.’s penchant for not taking things at face value could go a long way toward forcing government public-health agencies to argue on behalf of their beliefs rather than simply relying on a ‘because I said so’ defense,” said Pitts.

Surprising Endorsements

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, a Republican, praised Kennedy’s efforts in a September 26 op-ed for Fox News.

“The role of Big Food, much like Big Pharma, is to prioritize their profits over our health,” wrote Miller. “I enthusiastically support RFK Jr.’s campaign to hold these industries accountable by reforming our food and medicine approval and patenting systems. In this he is uniquely qualified: the $1.7 trillion pharmaceutical industry has unfairly maligned him for decades, and he’s still standing strong.”

In a move that raised eyebrows, Robert Redfield, who headed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under Trump from 2018 to 2021, endorsed Kennedy’s reform efforts in a Newsweek op-ed in September.

“If the next president prioritizes the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to identify which exposures are contributing to the spike in chronic disease in children, we will finally find out and end what is slowly destroying our children,” wrote Redfield.

Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph.D., ([email protected]) is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research.

Related Topics:#AnneMarieSchieber #Children'sHealthDefense #HeartlandDailyNews #RobertFKennedyJr RFKJrMakeAmericaHealthAgain

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Canada must make public order a priority again

Published on October 2, 2025

Todayville

A Toronto park

Public disorder has cities crying out for help. The solution cannot simply be to expand our public institutions’ crisis services

[This editorial was originally published by Canadian Affairs and has been republished with permission]

This week, Canada’s largest public transit system, the Toronto Transit Commission, announced it would be stationing crisis worker teams directly on subway platforms to improve public safety.

Last week, Canada’s largest library, the Toronto Public Library, announced it would be increasing the number of branches that offer crisis and social support services. This builds on a 2023 pilot project between the library and Toronto’s Gerstein Crisis Centre to service people experiencing mental health, substance abuse and other issues.

The move “only made sense,” Amanda French, the manager of social development at Toronto Public Library, told CBC.

Does it, though?

Over the past decade, public institutions — our libraries, parks, transit systems, hospitals and city centres — have steadily increased the resources they devote to servicing the homeless, mentally ill and drug addicted. In many cases, this has come at the expense of serving the groups these spaces were intended to serve.

For some communities, it is all becoming too much.

Recently, some cities have taken the extraordinary step of calling states of emergency over the public disorder in their communities. This September, both Barrie, Ont. and Smithers, B.C. did so, citing the public disorder caused by open drug use, encampments, theft and violence.

In June, Williams Lake, B.C., did the same. It was planning to “bring in an 11 p.m. curfew and was exploring involuntary detention when the province directed an expert task force to enter the city,” The Globe and Mail reported last week.

These cries for help — which Canadian Affairs has also reported on in Toronto, Ottawa and Nanaimo — must be taken seriously. The solution cannot simply be more of the same — to further expand public institutions’ crisis services while neglecting their core purposes and clientele.

Canada must make public order a priority again.

Without public order, Canadians will increasingly cease to patronize the public institutions that make communities welcoming and vibrant. Businesses will increasingly close up shop in city centres. This will accelerate community decline, creating a vicious downward spiral.

We do not pretend to have the answers for how best to restore public order while also addressing the very real needs of individuals struggling with homelessness, mental illness and addiction.

But we can offer a few observations.

First, Canadians must be willing to critically examine our policies.

Harm-reduction policies — which correlate with the rise of public disorder — should be at the top of the list.

The aim of these policies is to reduce the harms associated with drug use, such as overdose or infection. They were intended to be introduced alongside investments in other social supports, such as recovery.

But unlike Portugal, which prioritized treatment alongside harm reduction, Canada failed to make these investments. For this and other reasons, many experts now say our harm-reduction policies are not working.

“Many of my addiction medicine colleagues have stopped prescribing ‘safe supply’ hydromorphone to their patients because of the high rates of diversion … and lack of efficacy in stabilizing the substance use disorder (sometimes worsening it),” Dr. Launette Rieb, a clinical associate professor at the University of British Columbia and addiction medicine specialist recently told Canadian Affairs.

Yet, despite such damning claims, some Canadians remain closed to the possibility that these policies may need to change. Worse, some foster a climate that penalizes dissent.

“Many doctors who initially supported ‘safe supply’ no longer provide it but do not wish to talk about it publicly for fear of reprisals,” Rieb said.

Second, Canadians must look abroad — well beyond the United States — for policy alternatives.

As The Globe and Mail reported in August, Canada and the U.S. have been far harder hit by the drug crisis than European countries.

The article points to a host of potential factors, spanning everything from doctors’ prescribing practices to drug trade flows to drug laws and enforcement.

For example, unlike Canada, most of Europe has not legalized cannabis, the article says. European countries also enforce their drug laws more rigorously.

“According to the UN, Europe arrests, prosecutes and convicts people for drug-related offences at a much higher rate than that of the Americas,” it says.

Addiction treatment rates also vary.

“According to the latest data from the UN, 28 per cent of people with drug use disorders in Europe received treatment. In contrast, only 9 per cent of those with drug use disorders in the Americas received treatment.”

And then there is harm reduction. No other country went “whole hog” on harm reduction the way Canada did, one professor told The Globe.

If we want public order, we should look to the countries that are orderly and identify what makes them different — in a good way.

There is no shame in copying good policies. There should be shame in sticking with failed ones due to ideology.

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Canada’s health-care system is not ‘free’—and we’re not getting good value for our money

Published on October 2, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Nadeem Esmail and Mackenzie Moir

In 2025, many Canadians still talk about our “free” health-care system. But in reality, through taxes, we pay a lot for health care. In fact, according to the latest data, a typical Canadian family will pay $19,060 (or about 24 per cent of their total tax bill) for health care this year.

Given the size of that bill, it’s worth asking—do Canadians get good value for all those tax dollars? Not even close.

First, Canadians endure some of the longest wait times for medical care—including primary care, specialist consultations and non-emergency surgery—among developed countries with universal health care. In fact, the wait in Canada for non-emergency care is now more than seven months from referral to treatment, which is more than three times longer than in 1993 when wait times were first measured nationally.

Why the delays?

Part of the reason is the limited number of medical resources available to Canadians. Compared to our universal health-care peers, Canada had some of the fewest physicians, hospital beds and medical technologies such as MRI machines and CT scanners.

And before you wonder if $19,000 per year isn’t enough money for world-class universal coverage, remember that Canada has one of the most expensive universal health-care systems in the developed world, which means Canadians are among the highest spenders on universal health care yet have some of the worst access to health-care services.

Fortunately, countries such as Switzerland and Australia, which both provide far more timely access to high-quality universal care for similar or even lower cost than Canada, offer lessons for reform. Compared to Canada, both countries allow a larger degree of private-sector involvement and, perhaps more importantly, competition in their universal health-care systems.

In Switzerland, for instance, health insurance coverage is mandatory and provided by independent insurers that compete in a regulated market. Swiss citizens freely choose between insurers (which must accept all applicants) and can even personalize some aspects of their universal insurance policy. Patients also have a choice of hospitals, more than half of which are operated privately and for-profit.

In Australia, citizens can purchase private insurance, which covers the cost of treatment in private hospitals. Higher income Australians are actively encouraged to purchase private health insurance and even have to pay additional taxes if they do not. Some 39 per cent of hospitals in Australia are private and for-profit, providing care to both privately and publicly insured patients.

Vitally, competition between private health-care businesses and entrepreneurs in both countries (and many others including Germany and the Netherlands) has helped create a more cost-effective and accessible universal health-care system. Back here in Canada, the lack of private-sector efficiency, innovation and patient-focus has led to the opposite—namely, long waits and poor access.

Health care in Canada is not free. It comes with a substantial price tag through our tax system. And the size of that bill leaves less money for savings and other things families need.

Getting better value for our health-care tax dollars, and solving the longstanding access problems patients face, requires policy reform with a more contemporary understanding of how to structure a truly world-class universal health-care system. Until that reform happens, Canadians will continue to be stuck with a big bill for lousy access to health care.