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RFK Jr., Anti-Vaccine Rhetoric, MAHA, and the New Eugenics
How Kennedy’s naturalism reframes health as virtue while dismantling protections that once raised life expectancy and safeguarded the vulnerable.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” promises wellness through nature, but its creed dismantles the very foundations — vaccination, scientific governance, and medical research — that stretched American lives by decades. Aligned with Trump’s politics of refusal, it transforms neglect into doctrine: preventable deaths repackaged as personal failure while the state retreats behind the language of freedom.
The promise of “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) sounds wholesome, even patriotic.
Yet under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s leadership, the movement has become synonymous with vaccine resistance and mistrust of science.
What presents itself as a return to natural health is, in practice, a dismantling of the very systems — sanitation, immunization, and research — that lifted American life expectancy from under fifty years in 1900 to nearly eighty by the turn of the millennium.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine rhetoric draws power from a broader cultural script. It casts illness as the outcome of personal choices, resilience as proof of virtue, and intervention as corruption of the natural order.
This naturalism, while appealing in its simplicity, masks a harsh arithmetic: those without strong immune defenses, reliable income, or access to care are left behind. It echoes the logic of eugenics and social Darwinism, where survival is a filter rather than a collective responsibility.
The stakes of this rhetoric extend beyond words. As head of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has acted on these beliefs by purging expert advisory bodies and cutting vaccine research.
His decisions converge with a Trump-era politics of refusal—policies that transformed crises into preventable mass death.
Together, they represent not isolated misjudgments but a governing ethos where ideology takes precedence over evidence, and where preventable deaths are normalized as private misfortune rather than failures of policy.
Building a Brand of ‘Natural Health’
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did not enter the public arena as a crank.
He carried the prestige of his family name, the credibility of his environmental law career, and the charisma of a populist outsider.
When he pivoted into health politics, that pedigree gave weight to ideas long circulating on the margins.
MAHA — Make America Healthy Again — was packaged as a revival of common sense. Its imagery emphasized wholesome food, exercise, and personal discipline. Kennedy himself became the movement’s avatar: muscled, outdoorsy, and vocal about his distrust of mainstream medicine.
In his telling, strength came from rejecting vaccines and embracing “natural immunity.”
The rhetoric resonated because it offered a moral framework. Health was recast as evidence of virtue; illness suggested weakness or corruption.
This framing downplayed collective responsibility and turned medicine into a test of individual fortitude.
It is a seductive story, but one that ignores the foundations of modern life expectancy: sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccines.
Critics argue that MAHA is less about health than about optics.
It borrows the cadence of political populism but hollows out the substance of public health. By romanticizing resilience and denigrating intervention, it creates a façade—attractive in branding, dangerous in consequence.
What Kennedy calls naturalism looks, under scrutiny, like a revival of ideas long linked to eugenics and social Darwinism.
Fact Box — Kennedy’s ‘Naturalism’ and Public Health
Branding: MAHA markets natural living as superior to science-based medicine.
Persona: Kennedy presents himself as proof of “natural immunity.”
Criticism: Public health experts stress naturalism cannot replace vaccination.
Risk: Reframing illness as weakness abandons the vulnerable.
Consequences of Anti-Vaccine Policy and Rhetoric
Words alone do not shift the course of public health. Policy does. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., once elevated to Secretary of Health and Human Services, began to align his rhetoric with structural change.
He dismissed the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the expert body that for decades shaped national vaccine guidance. Seventeen members — scientists with deep expertise in immunology and epidemiology — were replaced with skeptics sympathetic to Kennedy’s views.
He then fired the CDC director, sparking resignations across the agency. These moves destabilized the very institutions designed to guard against epidemic collapse.
The damage extended to research. In 2025, his department halted more than half a billion dollars in mRNA vaccine projects, a portfolio that included experimental cancer vaccines and next-generation flu protection. The cuts were framed as restoring trust but carried the effect of stalling innovation at the frontier of medicine.
Misinformation filled the gaps.
Kennedy repeated under oath that only one vaccine had ever been tested with a placebo, a claim long debunked. He cast doubt on U.S. COVID-19 mortality counts despite clear convergence across data sets. These statements, flagged as false or misleading by fact-checkers, echoed widely across media ecosystems already primed to distrust health authorities.
The cost of such narratives is not theoretical.
In Samoa, where Kennedy’s allies amplified anti-vaccine messaging, vaccination rates cratered. The result was a 2019 measles outbreak that killed 83 children in a matter of weeks. Fragile systems buckle quickly when expertise is replaced with conspiracy.
This pattern recalls what political scientist R. J. Rummel defined as democide: death caused by government policy or neglect.
Trump’s presidency can be understood through three refusals: the refusal to warn, the refusal to relieve, and the refusal to sustain. Each of these choices turned emergencies into preventable deaths by denying citizens the protections of timely information, adequate aid, and long-term support. Kennedy’s approach to public health reflects a continuation of this same ethos.
In both cases, preventable death is presented as private misfortune rather than a failure of governance, while state responsibility recedes behind rhetoric of freedom and resilience.
Fact Box — Policy Consequences at a Glance
Advisory experts removed: ACIP purged, replaced with vaccine skeptics.
Research cut: $500M+ in mRNA projects halted in 2025.
Misinformation spread: False claims under oath amplified across media.
Global warning: Samoa’s 2019 measles outbreak killed 83 children.
RFK Jr.'s 'Utter Insanity' | Stuart Stevens LIVE | ||||||
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RFK Jr. is a public health disaster waiting to happen — and the GOP just handed him the keys. | ||||||
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Historical Parallels: From Social Darwinism to the New Eugenics
The rhetoric of “natural health” is not new. It carries echoes of Social Darwinism, which in the late nineteenth century argued that competition and survival of the fittest were natural laws that should govern human society. Poverty was reframed as weakness, disease as failure, and inequality as nature’s verdict.
From these ideas grew the American eugenics movement, which sterilized tens of thousands of people deemed “unfit” and restricted immigration on pseudoscientific grounds. American statutes and court cases were cited by Nazi lawyers when constructing Germany’s racial hygiene program.
The intellectual traffic ran one way: U.S. policy as precedent, German policy as escalation.
The throughline is disturbing.
Where Social Darwinism taught that the weak should be left behind, and where eugenics built institutions to enforce that lesson, Kennedy’s MAHA reintroduces the same logic under the banner of wellness.
By valorizing “natural immunity” and dismissing scientific intervention, it implicitly accepts that those with weaker immune systems, chronic conditions, or limited resources will simply die.
This is why public health experts call MAHA not just bad policy but dangerous continuity. It repeats the moral arithmetic of the past: survival as virtue, vulnerability as guilt, collective duty erased. It is a cycle that appears whenever political movements fuse health with ideology — normalizing preventable deaths as inevitable, even natural.
The Trump years provide the bridge.
His second term continues a trajectory already visible in his first: preventable deaths as the foreseeable result of neglect elevated to governance. Kennedy’s naturalist crusade extends that trajectory, shifting the burden from crises to everyday health.
Both men transform abandonment into policy, their rhetoric different but their consequences aligned.
Toward a Reckoning with Health and Responsibility
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again campaign does not merely question vaccines. It reframes the meaning of health itself.
In his vision, survival is proof of natural resilience, while illness is recast as weakness or corruption. That logic echoes the harsh arithmetic of social Darwinism and the institutional cruelty of eugenics.
The policies that follow — purging expert advisors, halting mRNA research, amplifying misinformation — are not small course corrections. They are structural choices that leave populations exposed.
They carry the same consequence as Trump’s “three refusals”: preventable deaths normalized as collateral, the state retreating from its duty to warn, to relieve, to sustain.
The danger is not theoretical.
Sanitation and vaccination added nearly three decades to American life expectancy in the twentieth century. Remove them, and society slides backward to a world where half of children died before the age of five. The gains of public health are fragile, earned slowly but lost swiftly.
Trump’s second term continues a trajectory already visible in his first: preventable deaths as a foreseeable consequence of governing by neglect.
Kennedy’s MAHA threatens to extend that same pattern into the architecture of public health, shifting the burden from extraordinary crises to everyday survival.
The true measure of a nation’s health is not the survival of the strong, but the protection of the vulnerable.
Brian Daitzman is the Editor of The Intellectualist. Read the original article here.
References
Journalism
ABC News (2025). “Fact-checking RFK Jr.’s testimony during Thursday’s hearing.” — Substituted Source (live link): https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fact-checking-rfk-jrs-testimony-thursdays-hearing/story?id=125263735 ABC News
Ars Technica (2025). “Kennedy fires all members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee.” — Substituted Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/06/anti-vaccine-advocate-rfk-jr-fires-entire-cdc-panel-of-vaccine-advisors/
Mediaite (2024). “RFK Jr. once called Trump supporters ‘belligerent idiots’ and ‘outright Nazis’ in newly resurfaced audio.” https://www.mediaite.com/politics/trump/rfk-jr-once-called-trump-supporters-belligerent-idiots-and-outright-nazis-in-newly-resurfaced-audio/
People (2024). “Naked RFK Jr. appears in wife Cheryl Hines’ video promoting her beauty line — Including ‘MAHA’ candle.” https://people.com/naked-rfk-jr-makes-appearance-in-wife-cheryl-hines-beauty-line-video-8753540 People.com
Reuters (2025). “CDC director fired amid vaccine policy clash.” — Substituted Source: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/fired-us-cdc-director-susan-monarez-testify-congress-next-week-2025-09-10/ Reuters
STAT News (2025). “HHS cancels $500 million in mRNA vaccine contracts.” — https://www.statnews.com/2025/08/05/mrna-vaccine-development-canceled-by-kennedy-hhs/
The Guardian (2025). “Samoa’s prime minister criticises RFK Jr’s vaccine views after deadly measles outbreak.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/31/samoas-prime-minister-criticises-rfk-jrs-vaccine-views-after-deadly-measles-outbreak
The Washington Post (2025). “HHS shake-up as Kennedy reshapes vaccine policy.” (Existing link was valid) https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/08/29/kennedy-cdc-vaccine-policy-shakeup/ The Washington Post
TIME (2019). “A measles outbreak in Samoa has killed 53 people and infected 2% of the population.” — Substituted source to anchor 2019 Samoa outbreak: https://time.com/5742417/samoa-measles-outbreak/
AP News (2023). “RFK Jr. spent years stoking fear and mistrust of vaccines. These people were hurt by his work.”
https://apnews.com/article/2ccde2df146f57b5e8c26e8494f0a16a AP News
Books
Offit, Paul (2010). Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All. Basic Books. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/paul-a-offit-md/deadly-choices/9780465023561/?lens=basic-books
Rummel, R. J. (1994). Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900. Transaction Publishers. https://www.routledge.com/Death-by-Government-Genocide-and-Mass-Murder-Since-1900/Rummel/p/book/9781560009276/
Kinch, Michael (2019). Between Hope and Fear: A History of Vaccines and Human Immunity. Simon & Schuster. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Between-Hope-and-Fear/Michael-Kinch/9781643132419/
Federal Cases
Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905). Supreme Court of the United States. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/197/11/
Laws & Data
CDC / NCHS (2024). “Mortality in the United States, 2021” (Data Brief No. 456). https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db456.htm
CDC historical life tables (e.g. NVSS life expectancy hub). https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/life-expectancy.htm
Our World in Data (2023). “Child Mortality.” https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality
ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer — Children’s Health Defense: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/260388604
ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer — Informed Consent Action Network: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/814540235
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