The New York Times ran a fretful story headlined, “Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Foe of Drug Makers and Regulators, Is Poised to Wield New Power.”
Robert Kennedy is enjoying a singular moment. Against all odds, turning the tables on all expectations, after a lifetime of languishing in the wilderness, mocked as a looney conspiracy theorist, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is poised to occupy the position he’s trained for all his life, cleaning out the stomach-turning stables of America’s long-neglected federal health agencies. In his own words:
CLIP: Robert F. Kennedy describes the three goals Trump gave him (1:03).
Kennedy said Trump told him to achieve quantifiable results in two years, by measurably reducing childhood chronic disease. Kennedy is going to need a chainsaw for that, and Trump will give it to him. (Maybe they can use Javier Milei’s chainsaw, if he’s not using it right now.)
Trump gave Kennedy three simple but mountain-sized goals:
- Clean up corruption and conflicts of interest in our government health agencies.
- Return the agencies to their rich tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science.
- End the chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.
As he often points out, Kennedy is a litigator who for over twenty years has been suing the agencies and big pharma. When lawyers prosecute one of these lawsuits, we must read hundreds or thousands of emails, study dense and arcane internal reports, interview friendly witnesses, depose hostile witnesses and agency experts, and then boil all those petabytes of information down into a form that a judge or lay jury can easily understand.
In other words, to win a lawsuit against a government agency or giant pharmaceutical company, the lead lawyer must become a subject matter expert himself. How else can we hope to spar with the professional experts we call to the stand?
This means that Robert Kennedy has, through the requirements of his job, become a subject matter expert in our dysfunctional agencies and their too-cozy relationships with big pharma and the big food industry giants that have captured them.
Kennedy is corrupt officials’ worst nightmare. He knows right where the bodies are buried. At the same time, Kennedy is the great hope for captive rank-and-file CDC scientists and administrators who go into work every day trying to do the right thing in a stressful and stifling climate of fear and political persecution.
This could be an epic victory-snatched-from-the-jaws-of-defeat for the ages.
And the pandemic made it possible.
