\n<\/p>\n
In a week of chaos at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Donald Trump\u2019s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has continued to make questionable medical and health claims \u2013 and has been slammed for them by experts and lawmakers alike.<\/p>\n
In recent days, Kennedy has been facing increasing calls for his resignation following the Trump administration\u2019s firing of the CDC director, Susan Monarez, which in turn prompted four other top officials to quit the agency. The chaos across US health agencies also comes as Kennedy released a slew of controversial and contradictory rules surrounding Covid-19 vaccines.<\/p>\n
On top of all this turmoil, Kennedy has also met with significant backlash for a handful of outlandish remarks and revelations, which have only fueled the controversy surrounding his leadership at the health department.<\/p>\n
After the deadly mass school shooting in Minneapolis this week where two children were killed and 17 others injured, Kennedy suggested that psychiatric drugs may be contributing to the rise in gun violence across the country.<\/p>\n
During an appearance on Fox & Friends, the host Brian Kilmeade asked Kennedy if the health department was investigating whether medications used to treat gender dysphoria might be linked to school shootings.<\/p>\n
According to court documents reviewed by the Guardian, the 23-year-old shooter, Robin Westman, had changed their birth name from Robert to Robin because they identified as a woman.<\/p>\n
In response to Kilmeade\u2019s question, Kennedy, without acknowledging the prevalence and easy accessibility of firearms across the US \u2013 said that his department was \u201claunching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors] drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence\u201d.<\/p>\n
Kennedy\u2019s comments triggered criticism from the Minnesota senator Tina Smith, who took to X and wrote: \u201cI dare you to go to Annunciation School and tell our grieving community, in effect, guns don\u2019t kill kids, antidepressants do. Just shut up. Stop peddling bullshit. You should be fired.\u201d<\/p>\n
This week, Kennedy also suggested that he could identify \u201cmitochondrial challenges\u201d in children at airports just by looking at them.<\/p>\n
Speaking at an event in Texas alongside the state\u2019s governor, Greg Abbott, Kennedy claimed: \u201cI\u2019m looking at kids as I walk through the airports today, as I walk down the street, and I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation. You can tell from their faces, from their body movements, and from their lack of social connection. And I know that that\u2019s not how our children are supposed to look.\u201d<\/p>\n
In response, Ashish Jha, former White House Covid-19 response coordinator under the Biden administration, said: \u201cI\u2019m sorry but what?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is wacky, flat-earth, voodoo stuff, people. This is not normal,\u201d Jha added on X.<\/p>\n
Then, in a revelation on Thursday, Demetre Daskalakis \u2013 who recently resigned as director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases in protest of Monarez\u2019s firing \u2013 revealed that Kennedy had never been briefed by CDC experts before making major public health decisions.<\/p>\n
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Sign up to This Week in Trumpland<\/span><\/p>\n A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Speaking to CNN, Daskalakis said: \u201cI think that another important thing to ask the secretary is, has he been briefed by a CDC expert on anything, specifically measles, Covid-19, flu? I think that people should ask him that in that hearing,\u201d referring to Kennedy\u2019s upcoming hearing before the Senate finance committee.<\/p>\n Upon being asked what Kennedy\u2019s answer would be, Daskalakis said: \u201cThe answer is \u2018no\u2019. No one from my center has ever briefed him on any of those topics \u2026 He\u2019s getting information from somewhere, but that information is not coming from CDC experts.\u201d<\/p>\n In a separate statement to the Daily Beast, Daskalakis said: \u201cIt\u2019s not just that he hasn\u2019t asked us. I asked for us to be able to do briefings, and I was told by his office of the secretary officials, some of whom are now fired, that they would be happy to have us do briefings, that they would reach out to be able to set them up. They\u2019ve never done so.\u201d<\/p>\n Since he assumed leadership over the health department, Kennedy \u2013 a longtime anti-vaccine advocate \u2013 has fired health agency workers and entertained conspiracy theories. Last week, more than 750 current and former employees at US health agencies signed a letter in which they criticized Kennedy as an \u201cexistential threat to public health\u201d.<\/p>\n The health agency workers went on to accuse Kennedy of being \u201ccomplicit in dismantling America\u2019s public health infrastructure and endangering the nation\u2019s health by repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information\u201d.<\/p>\n The letter comes after a deadly shooting at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta earlier this month, when a 30-year-old gunman fired more than 180 rounds into the buildings, killing a police officer before dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. According to the gunman\u2019s father, the shooter had been struggling with mental health issues and was influenced by misinformation that led him to believe the Covid-19 vaccine was making him sick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a week of chaos at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Donald Trump\u2019s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has continued to make questionable medical and health claims \u2013 and has been slammed for them by experts and lawmakers alike. In recent days, Kennedy has been facing increasing calls for his resignation following<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18262,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[2132,1891,9877,37,4818,2378,11121,789,2324,11122],"class_list":{"0":"post-18261","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-cdc","9":"tag-claims","10":"tag-dubious","11":"tag-health","12":"tag-kennedy","13":"tag-leadership","14":"tag-peddles","15":"tag-rfk","16":"tag-robert","17":"tag-roils"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18261\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}