As the dust settles on his White House bid, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is focusing on his initiative Make America Healthy Again (MAHA). His goal is to reverse what he calls a chronic disease epidemic in the United States.
Kennedy suspended his independent presidential campaign on Aug. 23 and threw his support behind former President Donald Trump, the GOP nominee. Trump has promised to appoint Kennedy to a health-related role in a potential second term.
Kennedy told The Epoch Times in September that ending his presidential campaign was a difficult decision, but that it was a “necessary step” to achieving his mission.
“I prayed to God every day for the past 19 years that America’s health crisis would be solved for the next generation,“ he said. ”That is a major reason why I ran for president.”
Kennedy’s campaign platform focused on fighting “corporate capture of government agencies” and ending the chronic disease epidemic. An environmental lawyer and founder of Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy said he believes one issue affects the other.
U.S. corporations, Kennedy said, have made America the sickest country in the world.
“We enriched these corporations and their captive agencies,” Kennedy said on Sept. 30. “And now they want to go and commoditize all of the things we value in our lives.” Kennedy delivered these remarks at Rescue the Republic, a day-long rally that brought 6,500 supporters of the MAHA movement to the National Mall in Washington.
He said that little will change until giant or private corporations stop controlling government agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“Their function is no longer to improve and protect the health of Americans,” he told the rallygoers. “Their function is to advance the mercantile and commercial interests of the pharmaceutical industry that has transformed them and the food industry that has transformed them into sock puppets.”
At an earlier address in Washington, Kennedy said that the state of health care should be measured by patient outcomes, including chronic illness, childhood obesity, and life expectancy. He pointed out that the United States is significantly behind other countries with smaller economies, such as Italy, which has a higher life expectancy and spends less on health care.
“Today, we are an average of six years behind our European neighbors,” Kennedy said. “Are we lazier and more suicidal than Italians or is there a problem with our system? Are there problems with our incentives? Are there problems with our food?”
He said that the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, has contributed to the nation’s health care crisis by driving up insurance premiums and “making health care the largest driver of inflation while American life expectancy plummets.”
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy has been an outspoken critic of how elected officials and public health leaders managed the crisis.
The United States had one of the worst coronavirus outcomes in the world with deaths, he said.
“Our health leaders said that COVID was a pharmaceutical deficiency,” he said. “This was a lie. We have the highest chronic disease rate on earth.”
Two-thirds of U.S. adults suffer from chronic health issues, Kennedy noted, and 74 percent are overweight or obese.
“When my uncle was president [1961–63], about 1 percent of the children in this country had a chronic disease,” he said. “That number may be as high as 60 percent in America today.”
According to Kennedy, the chronic disease epidemic among American children is a form of abuse.
“Children are the most precious assets that we have in this country,” he said. “How can we let this happen to them? How can we call ourselves a moral nation, the most exemplary democracy in the world, if we are treating our children like this?”
He said diseases that once mostly affected the elderly are now increasingly common among children.
“About 18 percent of American teens now have fatty liver disease,” Kennedy stated. “When I was a boy, this only affected late-stage alcoholics who were elderly. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and old. Young adult cancers are up 79 percent, and one in four American women is on antidepressant medication. Forty percent of teens have a mental health diagnosis; 15 percent of high schoolers are on Adderall. No other country has anything like this.”
He said he thinks that ultra-processed foods are a primary culprit in the medical crisis among the young.
“Seventy percent of American children’s diet is now ultra-processed,” he said, “which means industrial, manufactured in a factory.”
He said these ultra-processed foods have chemicals that didn’t exist a century ago, and that they are partly responsible for the rise in disease. Though many of these chemicals are banned in Europe, he noted, they are ubiquitous in American foods.
“We are literally poisoning our children systematically for profit,” he said. “Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell in our bodies.”
At a Trump rally in Glendale, Arizona, on Aug. 23, Kennedy joined the former president onstage. Trump announced that should he be reelected, he'd appoint Kennedy to a panel investigating the rise in chronic disease in children.
Trump said he would “establish a panel of top experts working with Bobby to investigate what is causing the decades-long increase in chronic health problems and childhood diseases, including autoimmune disorders, autism, obesity, infertility, and many more.”
“If I’m given the chance to fix the chronic disease crisis and reform our food production,” Kennedy said, “I promise that within two years, we will watch the chronic disease burden lift dramatically.”
As part of the MAHA campaign, Kennedy is traveling around the country to deliver addresses and appear on podcasts and online forums.
On Oct. 8, he will join Trump, former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, and multiple physicians for a MAHA town hall.
Some have speculated that if Trump wins, he might make Kennedy the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) or the head of one of its sub-agencies.
The HHS oversees 13 agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.
Kennedy has vowed that, if given the chance, he will dismiss the officials who lead those agencies and appoint replacements who will “turn them back into healing and public health agencies.”
