RFK Jr. Appears Disengaged on Many Health Department Matters Beyond Vaccines

the thing that gets me is that "disengaged on many health department matters" is being reported like a scandal when the actual scandal is what he IS engaged on, which is dismantling vaccine confidence during what has been a genuinely rough stretch for measles containment and whatever is happening with the food additive situation, and I keep trying to explain to people that a disengaged RFK Jr. is arguably better for public health outcomes than an engaged one, which is a sentence I cannot believe I am typing about the sitting Secretary of Health and Human Services of the United States of America

and his colleagues are saying this. his colleagues. the people who work for him and with him are leaking to the Times that he zones out in meetings about the actual department he runs and everyone is treating this as a management problem when it is more accurately described as a mercy

I went through the whole confirmation fight, watched people argue about whether his views on vaccines disqualified him, and the counterargument was always "he'll grow into the role, he'll be surrounded by professionals, the institution will constrain him" and what the institution apparently produced is a man who wanders through his own department occasionally pausing to worry about seed oils

I am not even being flip. I genuinely do not know what the correct response is to an HHS secretary who is checked out on everything except the two or three things he could do the most damage with. that is not a rhetorical question. I have been paying attention for years and I cannot tell you whether to root for him to stay distracted.

lmaoo da NYT mad cuz RFK aint playin by da swamp rules n actually focusin on da stuff dat MATTERS like wat we puttin in our bodies n da poison they been shootin in r kids!! da whole department prob ran itself on autopilot 4 decades anyway n nobody complained den

The New York Times writing a hit piece on RFK Jr. for not being bureaucratic enough is genuinely rich. This is the same paper that spent years celebrating the FDA rubber-stamping everything Big Pharma put in front of them. A health secretary who is not obsessed with managing his "sprawling department" might actually be a feature, not a bug. The department is too sprawling. That is the problem. You do not fix a bloated agency by being more captured by it.

And "according to colleagues" means they found some career bureaucrats who are mad their little fiefdoms are not getting enough attention. Good. Let them be mad. The people running HHS before RFK Jr. gave us the COVID response and the opioid epidemic and approved every experimental shot that came down the pipeline. Their judgment is not exactly a gold standard here.

Clean up the food supply. Fix the vaccine schedule. If that is what he focuses on and nothing else, that is still more than his predecessors did in decades.

A Secretary of Health and Human Services is supposed to steward the whole department, not pick two pet crusades and ignore the rest. If RFK Jr. cannot manage the ordinary duties of the office, then the public is not getting reform, just another vanity appointment with a microphone.

THE RESULTS ARE IN and RFK Jr. just walked onto the Maury stage with a jar of raw milk and a pamphlet about vaccines and Maury goes "So you're telling me... you run the entire Health and Human Services department" and RFK goes "I'm focused on the REAL issues" and Maury turns to the audience and goes "He has a department of SEVENTY THOUSAND PEOPLE" and the audience loses it and RFK is standing there explaining that he can't be expected to manage a sprawling federal agency AND debunk childhood immunization schedules at the same time, that's too much for one guy, and Maury just looks at the camera and goes "We'll be right back."

Delegating huge portions of HHS while fixating on vaccines and food additives isn't a management style, it's a hobby masquerading as governance. The department handles Medicaid, opioid response, CDC operations, NIH grant pipelines; none of that runs itself. What you get when a cabinet secretary checks out on most of the job is career staff making consequential decisions with no political accountability, which is exactly what the people who voted for "disruption" thought they were ending.