1,000+ HHS Staffers Send Letter To Congress, RFK Jr. Demanding His Resignation
from the mutiny dept
Well, the RFK Jr. congressional hearing is now over. And, to the shock of very few thinking persons, it was a complete and total shitshow. I’m sure I will be writing something up on the hearing soon, but the short version is that Congress members on both sides of the aisle went in fairly directly and hard on Kennedy, who attempted to play word games and/or lie in response, when he wasn’t delving into industry-based conspiracy theories.
Preceeding the hearing, however, was a letter signed by over a thousand staffers at HHS, sent both directly to RFK Jr. and to Congress, which demanded his resignation as Secretary of HHS.
More than 1,000 current and former employees of the US Department of Health and Human Services wrote a letter to Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday, arguing that his leadership has “put the health of all Americans at risk” and demanding his resignation.
“Secretary Kennedy continues to endanger the nation’s health,” the employees wrote in Wednesday’s letter, citing actions including the facilitation of Monarez’s firing, the resignations of key, longtime CDC leaders, the appointment of what they called “political ideologues” to influential roles in vaccine policy, and the rescinding of emergency use authorizations for Covid-19 vaccines without, they said, “providing the data or methods used to reach such a decision.”
Now, as he was in the congressional hearing, Kennedy is mostly a one-trick pony when it comes to anyone criticizing his policies on medicine, health, or really anything else. If you disagree with him, you’re paid off by whatever industry he claims to be attacking. Think he’s an anti-vaxx nutbar? You’re paid off by big pharma. Don’t think chemtrails are a thing? You’re part of the conspiracy to control Americans’ thoughts. Sign a letter with a bunch of HHS colleagues asking him to resign because he’s a conspiracy-mongering travesty of an HHS Secretary?
Well, that’s just because these people are all completely broken, you see.
In a statement Wednesday, HHS Communications Director Andrew Nixon told CNN, “Secretary Kennedy has been clear: the CDC has been broken for a long time. Restoring it as the world’s most trusted guardian of public health will take sustained reform and more personnel changes.
“From his first day in office, he pledged to check his assumptions at the door—and he asked every HHS colleague to do the same,” Nixon continued. “That commitment to evidence-based science is why, in just seven months, he and the HHS team have accomplished more than any health secretary in history in the fight to end the chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.”
Kennedy is in a leadership position. He can do very little without the team that rolls up to him. And that very team is in complete disagreement with Kennedy’s self-assessment of how amazing he is.
Kennedy is now being pressured from within his own agencies, from Congress, from health-focused NGOs, and from several other places too. I know Donald Trump doesn’t like to admit a single mistake… but is Kennedy really worth all of this trouble?
Comments on “1,000+ HHS Staffers Send Letter To Congress, RFK Jr. Demanding His Resignation”
Nixon doesn’t have a commitment to evidence-based claims. This Trump-style brag is always the earmark of bullshit. You know your base will eat it up and you don’t worry about the people smart enough to know it’s bullshit because they’re either grifters on your side or people who you were never going to convince anyway.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
How Dare You Question The Orthodoxy
Techdirt has rightfully pointed out that regulatory capture has embedded itself within lawmakers and executives. But now that RFK Jr. asks questions about how health care outcomes have regressed over the past 4 years, Techdirt goes to bat for the lobbyists and NGOs that pay off the politicians. Quite the reversal.
“Senator, you’ve sat in that chair for how long? 20… 25 years, while the chronic disease in our children went up to 76%. And you said NOTHING. You never asked the question why it’s happening. Today for the first time in 20 years, infant mortality has increased in our country. And it’s not because I suddenly came in here. It’s because of the Biden administration, and we’re going to end it.”
Re:
You’re right Koby, Biden has been President for 20 years, and Trump only 7 month. It’s time to tell the truth now.
Re:
Hey Koby.
Why do republicans allow for corn syrup?
Why have republicans gone so far to protect the shitty meat industry going so far as to criminalize recording their literally shitty conditions?
Isn’t it fucking funny that the same fucking idiots that have ensured that us food quality is worse then the rest of the world to the point they won’t accept our exports or that ingredients that are banned everywhere else are used, suddenly give a shit?
Oh right, they don’t, because every single one of you is instead masturbating with your gun after every school shooting.
So when all of you dumb fucks either blow your own brains out or give more shits about dead kids then you do your guns, I’ll believe you actually care about “health”.
“Today for the first time in 20 years, infant mortality has increased in our country. ”
In every red state. Funny that. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that you would rather kill a raped woman then let a failed birth be treated.
Re: Re:
I’m guessing grape Fanta and Hot Tamales don’t count as food, then. That’ll be an interesting argument to try the next time I go to Australia.
Re:
That’s a funny way of saying “replaces scientific healthcare with braindead conspiracy theories.” Dumbass baby fucker.
Re:
We already know Dobbs v Jackson increased infant mortality.
Dumbass baby fucker.
Re:
“Inbreds wow medical laws and it killed people. The only solution is to let the inbreds tear down medical science and kill more people.”
Dumbass baby fucker.
Re:
“The plane was having problems even before I ripped the wings off midair.”
Dumbass baby fucker.
Re:
How have they regressed? What data proves that they have regressed?
Also: RFK Jr. was an avowed anti-vaxxer before he became part of the Trump administration, and other than hedging his bets to get his role in the administration, I haven’t seen any evidence that he has given up his anti-vax beliefs. And that’s on top of the eugenics-laced rhetoric he uses to talk about people with autism. If anyone is in a position to help the American people become healthy again, it isn’t a guy who talks about autistic people like they have to be locked up in asylums and believes a medieval understanding of disease is better than all modern understanding of diseases and how they work. Fuck RFK Jr.; like the rest of the Trump administration, he is a death cultist who doesn’t care if people die from preventable diseases so long as he gets his way.
Re: Re:
He doesn’t. He does not talk to the experts in his department. That is a huge part of the problem. Instead of consulting with the best of scientists readily available to him, he huddles with conspiracy theorists and leafs through debunked junk science.
While his firings of top-notch scientists as such is an idiocy, it is not like they were able to provide input to him anyway since he does not consult with them.
He is a moron out of his depth and tries hiding it from the world and himself by not talking to actual experts.
Re:
You stupid fuck. Infant mortality is up in Red States as the direct result of the new abortion laws and have always been higher in Republican States because you all are arrogant fuckwits that despise science, expertise and competence. You don’t give a fuck about infants, you’re happy to let them die to achieve your political goals. Fucking ghoul.
Isn’t “doing very little” basically Kennedy’s goal?
Trump does, however, love a good firing. Just don’t expect it to come with any admission of a mistake.
Well, that’ll be 1000 people to fire first thing tomorrow.
Covid is spreading only children and maybe old people can get a vaccine you need to go to a doctor for a covid prescription .we will have covid around for a 100 years, kennedy has appointed ant vaxx weirdos to the panel that approves vaccines
at this point he will be soon responsible for 1000,s of covid deaths at a time when millions of citizens have lost acess to basic healthcare and hospitals in rural area,s are close to closing .https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spread-map/
There is a crisis coming as covid spreads due to the lack of acess to vaccines and the complex rules and doubt that is being spread due to kennedys negative policys on allowing public acess to the covid vaccine
It doesn’t really matter. That petition could be signed by 100,000 people and it would mean just as much.
This administration doesn’t care.
Not just that they don’t care about RFK doing a terrible job, y’know, their own guy. Not just that they don’t care about the people suffering from a headless DHHS, y’know, their constituents. Not even that they just don’t care about what everyone working at the DHHS, y’know, their employees. Hell, they don’t even care what their own base thinks. It doesn’t matter. MTG or Laura Boebert or whoever is left commentating on Fox News these days could scream at the top of their lungs about how messed up things are (they could, on this issue they won’t, but they could. They do it for Epstein stuff all the time) but it wouldn’t make a difference.
A good government is supposed to be for all Americans, even if they don’t want it (that’s why we fight about it so much). A bad government, might be for only half the people: its supporters. Certainly, that’s the type of government that the Trump Administration wants to appear to be. They want to make the appearance of being a brutal weapon for 170 million people to be used on the other 170 million.
But that’s not what we have here. The Trump Administration is not a bad government, it is a catastrophically terrible government by, for, and of only one person. It is a brutal weapon for 1 person to be used on the other 340 million.
You can't be 'evidence-based' if you hate the evidence
“That commitment to evidence-based science is why, in just seven months, he and the HHS team have accomplished more than any health secretary in history in the fight to end the chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.”
That must be why measles is slated to go from ‘eradicated’ to ‘active’ in the US thanks to anti-vax/pro-plager nutbaggery pushed in large part by RFK Jr.
The only way to read their actions so far as ‘end[ing] the chronic disease epidemic’ is that corpses are remarkably resistant to catching diseases, and they’re working overtime to ensure there’s as many of those as possible.
Someone’s been mainlining the Slate Star Codex.
This is a gambit from self-proclaimed Rationalists (the same tech bro mofos who are overrepresented in building out AI). This community does PhD dissertation cosplay, and they fancy themselves as smart by believing everything is up for debate, right down to the first principles of modes of knowledge like philosophies and sciences.
Nixon’s making a special plea for Kennedy, saying that it’s only reasonable and fair for both sides to rebuild established theories of medicine by starting from a blank slate.
This is nuts because RFK Jr. is a believer in miasma theory and he believes germ theory, by being proved in the real world through research and treatment that have actually made populations healthier, has an unfair advantage in debate. It’s a grown-up way of saying the schoolyard taunt of, “If you’re so smart, prove it.”
Re:
Fuck this “standing on the shoulders of giants” bullshit– in America we start on the ground floor every time, like the good Lord intended!
…Why’s the rest of the world looking down on us…?
Re: Re:
Really? I thought that was the first floor for you guys.
Re: Re:
Usually, the rest of the world aren’t digging down in the belief they are building something tall and grand.